The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (14 page)

BOOK: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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Between 1778 and 1783 the British empire faced a crisis which remained without equal in seriousness until the summer of 1940. Britain had no allies in Europe; her main line of defence, the navy, was outnumbered; and no outstanding statesman or commander came forward to match the time. Fortunately, as it turned out, there was a similar lack of imaginative leadership among Britain’s enemies and, while the French navy had been physically transformed, it had yet to produce a breed of aggressive commanders prepared to adopt bold, if risky, tactics. Time and time again, when presented with a tactical advantage, French admirals allowed it to slip from their grasp.

At the beginning of the war, France had three major strategic objectives. The first was to transfer troops to North America and assist the rebels there; the second was to attack and occupy British sugar islands in the West Indies, and the third, and most ambitious, was an invasion of the southern coast of England.

The early phases of each campaign were disappointing. The Comte d’Estaing’s North American squadron disembarked troops on the shores of Delaware Bay, but discovered that a smaller British squadron had escaped. Unable to establish local superiority in North American waters, d’Estaing sailed southwards to begin the conquest of the British West Indies. This required complete dominance of the Caribbean, which eluded him after he allowed a badly mauled British force to withdraw after an engagement off Grenada in July 1779.

The French record in home waters looked more promising and, by August 1779, Britain faced the ominous prospect of losing control of the Channel. The combined Franco-Spanish fleet mustered 63 battleships and 16 frigates, more than enough to escort the 500 transports which had assembled to carry the 30,000-strong invasion army to the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth. Against this force, the Channel squadron could raise 42 ships of the line. Not surprisingly, when Lord North hurriedly proposed a massive increase in militia numbers, he was faced with charges of having neglected the navy.

French preparations were meticulously monitored by Admiralty spies, one of whom reported the presence of Irish dissidents in Paris, which raised fears that the attack on the south coast might be combined with an insurrection in Ireland. There was, however, consolation in the knowledge that the Franco- Spanish armada was bedevilled by vacillating leadership, half-hearted commitment by the Spanish, rough weather, delays in the deliveries of rations and a savage epidemic of scurvy which put over 8,000 sailors out of action. In mid-September, as the equinoctial gales were approaching, Admiralty agents reported that the invasion had been postponed. At the same time, intelligence from Cadiz suggested that enormous efforts were in hand to step up the siege of Gibraltar, which had begun in June.
19

Having shelved the invasion plan, and with it the chance of a quick end to the war, France shifted her resources to the siege of Gibraltar and the North American and West Indian theatres. She now faced what she was least able to sustain, a war of attrition against a power with a longer purse. Moreover, released from the threat of invasion, the British were able to divert more ships to other fronts.

Admiral Sir George Rodney had been appointed to take command in the West Indies in October 1779. He was a gallant, resolute officer who wrote, ‘
Persist and Conquer
is a maxim that I hold good in a War, even against the elements.’ And yet for all his tenacity, he was short-tempered, dogged by ill-health and quarrelsome. His prickliness contributed considerably to the lack of coordination between senior commanders in the West Indies and North America, and helped prevent the evolution of a grand strategy for the entire area. Nevertheless, his men were in good heart when they set sail from Spithead in the spring of 1780. William Home, a young marine officer aboard HMS
Intrepid,
wrote enthusiastically to his parents how he was bound ‘on an expedition to Puerto Rico or some place on the Spanish Main, which I hope will enable us to come home with our pockets full of Dollars’.
20

His tour of duty during the summer of 1780 brought him no rewards, nor did his commander obtain the decisive victory needed to re-establish British dominance of the Caribbean. Instead, Rodney discovered that his subordinate commanders were disobedient, slack and cautious to the point of cowardice. After a desultory engagement off Martinique in May 1780, he complained that ‘the British Flag was not properly supported’ since several captains had refused to commit their ships to the action. His remedy was sharp; henceforward all refractory officers were promised dismissal and possibly the fate of Byng. ‘My eye on them had more dread than the enemy’s fire,’ he told his wife, and they knew it would be fatal. No regard was paid to rank: admirals as well as captains, if out of their station, were instantly reprimanded by signals, or messages sent by frigates: and, ‘in spite of themselves, I taught them to be, what they had never been before –
officers.
’ The key to this transformation was, according to Rodney, acceptance of his principle, ‘Yours to obey. The painful task of
thinking
is mine.’
21

In terms of results, Rodney’s lessons in discipline took time to bear fruit. He returned to the Caribbean in 1781 when his fleet attacked and took the Dutch island of St Eustatius, which yielded £3.5 million in prize money.
Intrepid
was not present, and so Lieutenant Home had to be satisfied with twenty-three guineas – ‘no small sum for a subaltern’ – his share from the attack on another Dutch island. Gratifying as such windfalls may have been, their obtainment did not do much material harm to the French fleet, which still sailed unchallenged in West Indian and North American waters.

While matters hung in the balance in the Caribbean, the tide of war swung irreversibly against Britain in North America after the surrender of Major-General Sir Charles Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown in October 1781. France and Spain gained nothing from this victory and, after three years of fighting, both powers were feeling the pinch. In what turned out to be a final attempt to secure a substantial return for their outlay, the French and Spanish decided to launch a seaborne attack on Jamaica in the spring of 1782.

Rodney was again ordered to the West Indies, warned by Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, that, ‘The fate of the empire is in your hands.’ His captains now responsive to his commands, Rodney, with thirty-six ships of the line, encountered Admiral de Grasse’s slightly smaller squadron off Les Saintes in the channel between Guadeloupe and Dominica in April. What followed was described by Rodney as ‘the most important victory I believe ever gained against our perfidious enemies, the French.’ The battle was long, bloody, and decisive, obstinately fought as if the fate of both nations depended upon the event. Success attended the British flag, and the French admiral with the
Ville de Paris
and four other ships remained as trophies of our victory.’
22

The battle of the Saintes not only saved the British West Indies, it demonstrated the awesome firepower of the carronade, a short-barrelled cannon nicknamed the ‘smasher’ from the ability of its 32- and 68-pound shot to tear into ships’ hulls. Introduced to the navy in 1779, the new guns were manufactured by the Carron ironworks at Falkirk in sufficiently large numbers to be widely distributed throughout the fleet by 1782. At the Saintes, the effect was devastating; for the first time in this war, French gunners flinched and ran from their pieces, terrified by British broadsides. Another recent innovation, copper sheafing for the lower hulls of ships, improved the speed and manoeuvrability of British men-o’-war. After his five-week, stormy crossing of the Atlantic before the battle, Rodney had remarked, ‘None but an English squadron and copper-bottomed could have forced their way to the West Indies.’ The new technology of the Industrial Revolution had rescued the empire.

Checkmated in the Caribbean, the Franco-Spanish war effort wilted. Soon after the Saintes. a small Spanish squadron turned tail and withdrew from the West Indies rather than face Rodney. In October 1782, the combined fleet blockading Gibraltar failed to intercept a relief squadron under Admiral Sir Richard Howe, and the siege was ended.

The exhaustion of France and Spain and their failure to exploit their early advantages at sea were reflected in the Peace of Versailles, which was signed in 1783. The North American colonies apart, Britain’s losses were confined to Minorca and Florida, which were delivered to Spain; Senegal, St Lucia and Tobago. which were returned to France, and Ceylon, which was handed over to the Netherlands. Considering what had been taken from her adversaries during the past hundred years, Britain had come out of the war remarkably well. She had survived largely thanks to her wealth; the government had borrowed £94.5 million during the war and some of this money had been spent on laying down thirty-two additional battleships. Maritime supremacy had been preserved, but only just.

Even so, the British had suffered a psychological shock. A limit appeared to have been set on national greatness and the vulnerability of the empire exposed. Those who had cheered so loudly in 1759 were in a soberer mood in 1783, and one of them, Cowper, struck a pessimistic note when he surveyed Britain’s future in his poem ‘The Task’ (1785):

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!

Time was when it was praise and boast enough

In every clime, and travel where we might,

That we were born her children. Praise enough

To fill the ambition of a private man,

That Chatham’s language was his mother-tongue,

And Wolfe’s great name compatriot with his own.

Farewell these honours, and farewell with them

The hope of such hereafter!

3

The Empire of America: Settlement and War, 1689–1775

Hail
Pennsylvania!
hail! thou happy land,

Where Plenty scatters with a lavish Hand:

Amidst the Woods we view the Friendly Vine,

With Purple Pride, spontaneously entwine;

Where various Cates arise without the Toil

Of labouring Hind, to cleave the stubborn Soil.

This picture of a fecund Eden, set down by an anonymous poet and published in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
in January 1729, owed more to the author’s acquaintance with Virgil and Milton than experience of everyday frontier life. Nevertheless, these lines reflected a commonplace, if unrealistic view of the fertility of a region which was gradually being penetrated by pioneers. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century they moved inland along the banks of the Hudson, Delaware and Potomac rivers and their tributaries. Woodlands were razed, land ploughed, and small settlements appeared in the wilderness. Between 1710 and 1730 the population of Pennsylvania alone grew from 24,500 to 85,700, an increase largely made up of incomers, mostly Scots-Irish from Northern Ireland.

A new phase in the development of the North American colonies was underway, with expansion westwards across the Appalachians and northwards towards the St Lawrence basin. The new migration aroused misgivings among the Indian tribes, whose lands lay in its path, and alarm among the French, whose underpopulated colony of New France seemed in danger of being overwhelmed. Both reacted with defensive measures, but neither the Indians nor the French possessed resources adequate for the task. They could temporarily deflect, but never stem the advance of the colonists who, when the going got tough, could summon up assistance from Britain.

The Indian tribes were sadly ill-equipped to understand, let alone take action to prevent what was happening to them. They could never wholly grasp the alien, European principle of land-ownership and all the legal paraphernalia of deeds of sale and titles that went with it. Nor could Europeans appreciate the Indian concept of the land, which was simply expressed many years later by a Sauk chieftain: ‘The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they cultivate it, they have a right to the soil.’
1

It was therefore possible for a tribe to sell large tracts of land in the belief that they retained the right to cultivate it or hunt its game. When they discovered that this was not so, and were excluded by settlers from what they still considered their property, Indians were puzzled and angry. Often tribes were unclear as to what they had relinquished since they knew nothing of European measurements, delineating boundaries by reference to natural features rather than lines drawn on maps.

The agents of the land speculators, who were the forerunners of the colonists, commonly used every form of chicanery to dupe a people only dimly aware of what was being asked of them. One negotiator was identified by an Oneida
sachem
(supreme chief) during a meeting between representatives of the Iroquois Confederation and the colonies at Albany in 1754. He fingered the man and described his methods:

That man is a Devil and has stole our lands, he takes Indians slyly by the Blanket one at a time, and when they are drunk, puts some money in their Bosoms, and persuades them to sign deeds for our lands upon the Susquehana which we will not suffer to be settled by other means.
2

Alcohol was the lubricant which eased many Indians off their lands. Ever since the arrival of the first settlers, Indians had been tempted and undermined by spirits, which were made freely available by unscrupulous traders. ‘Rum ruins us,’ an Oneida
sachem
complained to officials in Pennsylvania in 1753. He pleaded with them to ban the ‘Wicked Whiskey Traders’, who bartered alcohol for beaver pelts and furs, and took all the money which the Indians had saved to pay their debts for cloth and utensils bought from ‘Fair Traders’. This appeal ended on a bathetic note, which underlined how strongly the Indians had become addicted. Requesting a ritual exchange of presents, the chief concluded, ‘Our Women and Young People present you with this bundle of skins, desiring some Spirits to make them cheerful in their own Country; not to drink here.’
3

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