The War of Wars (32 page)

On going on deck, Bowen, in answer to my asking if I had done wrong in firing without any immediate orders, said, ‘I could have kissed you for it!’ Bowen explained, ‘In going through, the helm was hard up, and we were thinking we should not clear her, and we quite forgot to send you any orders.’

Some 300 Frenchmen were killed on the
Montagne
and a gaping hole made in the stern through which large numbers of people were seen to fall from the admiral’s cabin. Bowen sharply turned the ship’s helm about, and with a brilliant manoeuvre the
Queen Charlotte
slipped in between the
Montagne
and the
Jacobin
, its guns blazing on both sides – which in theory exposed it to a combined firepower of 200 guns. But the
Jacobin
, after two broadsides, had had enough and veered away. The
Montagne
was crippled, barely replying as the British thundered broadside after broadside into her, and eventually it drifted out of action. But two more French ships, the
Juste
and the
Republicain
, came up to attack, and the former was put out of action. The
Queen Charlotte
was by now also virtually inoperative.

Just behind the
Queen Charlotte
the 74-gun
Brunswick
under the command of Captain Eliab Harvey had similarly sought to break the French line. The
Vengeur
, of similar proportions but a much taller ship, aimed to cut him off: to attack the French ship, Harvey brought his helm up hard, and the two ships collided with a sickening grinding of timbers which threw most of the two ships’ companies to the decks. ‘We got her and we’ll keep her,’ declared Harvey.

The French, however, now used their 36-pound carronades in their towering poop to rake the deck of the
Brunswick
with withering fire, while down below, the British guns, whose portholes were actually locked into place by the proximity of the French ships, simply fired
through the wood into the French hull. Through the jagged holes on both ships, the gunners could actually see one another as they reached to reload. An officer described one incident: ‘Our men, by shouting and gestures, endeavoured to scare the Frenchmen from their object, but without effect, for a man was on the point of putting the cartridge into the gun, when the second captain of our gun, who had been worming the gun, suddenly reversed his rammer, reached over, and twisting the worm into the Frenchman’s clothes, hauled him overboard; this decided the business in our favour!’

With a heavy swell rolling, the two ships fired alternately upwards and downwards into each other for three hours before the French gunners abandoned their posts. Another French ship, the 80-gun
Achille
came to the
Vengeur
’s assistance, but fire from the
Brunswick
’s rear guns succeeded in dismasting it, and it surrendered, though the
Brunswick
had no boats to board her with. Meanwhile, the
Vengeur
’s crew attempted to board the devastated upper decks of the
Brunswick
below it, but men swarmed up from the lower decks and drove the assailants back. When the hat of the
Brunswick
’s wooden figurehead was shot off, Harvey lent his own which the carpenter nailed solemnly on as shot poured from all sides. Harvey soon afterwards had his right arm completely shattered but refused assistance. Another British ship also tried to help, but dared not fire for fear of doing damage to the
Brunswick
, so closely was it locked together with the French.

At last, after five appalling hours, it became clear that the
Vengeur
was sinking: it struck its colours and called for help. As the
Brunswick
had no boats, two other British ships came up and took off 400 men, including the captain; many others, some of whom had broken into the spirit room and got drunk, went down with her. The
Brunswick
had lost a third of its men and guns and was dismasted, but limped back into Portsmouth.

These two engagements were the most celebrated in a furious battle all along the line: the overall result was six prizes taken by the English and another six French ships dismasted, which the French admiral skilfully rescued. Howe’s timid flag captain advised the admiral, who wanted to attack again, not to do so for fear ‘they will turn the tables upon us’. The crippled French fleet limped back to Brest. The
exhausted sixty-nine-year-old was helped from his chair on the quarterdeck. ‘We all got round him,’ said Codrington; ‘he was so weak that from a roll of the ship he was nearly falling into the waist.’ ‘Why, you hold me as if I were a child,’ observed Howe. Meanwhile the huge merchant convoy sailed right across the scene of the battle through the wreckage. Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse blustered: ‘What did I care, for half-a-dozen rotten old hulks which you took? While your admiral amused himself with refitting these, I saved my convoy, and I saved my own head!’

He was putting a gloss on what was the first significant French defeat in the whole revolutionary war. ‘Black Dick’ was the first real British hero of the war, revolutionizing naval tactics, breaking with precedent in almost the same way as Napoleon was to do on land. The old man seemed an unlikely figure to have been the most unconventional commander for a century.

It was a desperately needed victory after all the setbacks in continental Europe. When news reached home, ‘Rule Britannia’ and the National Anthem were sung at the opera, bells pealed and London was illuminated. The ‘Glorious First of June’ preceded the King’s own birthday by three days, and the King and Queen in person received the victorious fleet at Portsmouth.

The victory disguised Howe’s failure to intercept the convoy and later the following December to stop the Brest fleet escaping again to rendezvous with the Toulon fleet – although fortunately it was turned back by a gale. Two other squadrons got away, one for the West Indies, thanks to the lax policy of distant blockade. But Howe on the Glorious First of June had won a first, famous victory at sea, a harbinger of things to come.

There were other, smaller triumphs in 1794. ‘Flying squads’ composed of a few ships based in Falmouth were also policing the Channel. The foremost among these was commanded by Sir John Warren, whose captains included Pellew, as well as Richard Goodwin, considered the finest seaman of the age, Sir John Saumarez and Sir Andrew Snape Douglas, a brilliant prize captain. In April Warren’s squadron had spectacularly chased a French squadron off the Breton coast and
captured three prizes, inflicting 120 casualties for losses often killed and twenty-four wounded. In June Saumarez, who had earlier made his name by capturing a French ship, the
Réunion
, without losing a single casualty, attacked a much larger French ship than his own, the
Crescent
, which had 132 guns to his own thirty-six, to allow the rest of his squadron to escape, before running down the strait between Sark and Guernsey, where the French did not dare follow.

Soon afterwards Warren and Pellew destroyed three small French ships just off Brest, under French noses. The same squadron then captured the 48-gun
Revolutionnaire
. But French captains could also prove impressive. Zacharie-Jacques Theodore-Allemand, commander of the 50-gun
Expérience
and a squadron of four other ships, wrought havoc in September along the west coast of Africa, burning down Freetown, Sierra Leone, and other British outposts, taking 210 unarmed ships and merchantmen, as well as a 12-gun schooner.

An expedition under Elphinstone allied with the efficient Major-General Craig had, however, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope to wrest control of this strategically vital staging post to the East Indies from the new Dutch ‘Batavian Republic’, a puppet of France. It was entirely successful, a triumph both at sea and on land. Another force under Admiral Rainier succeeded in conquering Trincomalee in Ceylon from the Dutch, and by the following February it had gained complete control of the island. Two other limited naval actions also took place: Lord Bridport, the new Channel Fleet commander, captured three 74-gun ships, although the main French fleet escaped. Admiral Hotham, the new Mediterranean Fleet commander, captured two French ships of the line and, in another action, blew up another. These were far from decisive engagements; but they helped to boost fraying British morale.

Britain had one glaringly weak point as it faced revolutionary France. This was not across the Channel on its eastern and southern coasts, nor in Scotland and Wales, both bound by acts of union, but in Ireland, a seething hotbed of misgovernment and discontent, with hundreds of years of bitter hatred and vendettas – against the British, between peasants and squirearchy, between Catholics and Protestants.

Ireland was the one part of Britain that contained some of the conditions that had fomented the French Revolution. While the more excitable French revolutionary leaders dreamed about a direct invasion of England, the more sober among them saw a much more realistic possibility of an insurrection that would spread across all Ireland, tie down and then overwhelm tens of thousands of British troops, when successful, and provide a staging point for an invasion of England from the west, as well as a base from which to destroy its naval supremacy and intercept trade to Britain from America and the colonies. To some it seemed that only a spark was needed to ignite an Irish insurrection. The French attempt to take Ireland has been taken much less seriously than it deserves: for no fewer than six such invasions were attempted between the end of 1796 and 1798. Some were the stuff of comic opera; others were far more dangerous.

The French Revolution had occurred when resentments in Ireland were running high. The country, with a population of 7 million, consisted, as one contemporary observer, Lord Hutchinson, put it, of ‘a corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted government, a divided people’. Another contemporary remarked: ‘The mass of the
people require no organisation, being perfectly ready to join any force that may land.’ The country had obtained a measure of self-government towards the end of the American War of Independence under the formidable Irish Whig Protestant leader, Sir Henry Grattan, himself an able and moderate man. But, as one later historian wrote:

It would be difficult to find in history a more corrupt and absurd legislature. It was a parliament of eloquent speeches and of shameful jobs. It was itself the symbol of the supremacy of a class. Ireland under Grattan’s parliament, it is customary to say, enjoyed its independence; but its ‘independence’, to quote Green, ‘was a mere name for the unchecked rule of a cluster of great families’; an oligarchy as narrow, and as despotic, as anything Venice ever knew. It had almost every vice a parliament could possess. It was the parliament of a minority and of a class; it represented all the worst ideas of Protestant ‘ascendancy’. No Catholic could sit in it or vote for it. In the short eighteen years of its existence it passed some fifty Coercion Acts and inspired at least one bloody rebellion.

A great Irish leader of the time, the Protestant Wolfe Tone, now became the guiding advocate of outright independence – unusually, though, he sought common cause between Ulster Protestants and the Catholic peasantry, the overwhelming majority: he established in 1791 the Society of United Irishmen, conspiratorially made up of eighteen-man cells grouped together into district and provincial committees, with a select executive Directory of five. It was Tone who was to give the French their main opening.

The British government was by no means insensitive to Irish demands: the decision in the 1760s to give Dublin its own parliament was part of this. Pitt then attempted to give Ireland free trade with Britain – a proposal which to his astonishment the Irish parliament rejected in 1795. In 1792 and 1793 he passed laws giving Catholic peasants limited rights to vote, sit on juries and own property – a policy bitterly resisted by a parliament dominated by Protestant gentry, although the oligarchy’s control was still safeguarded, as Catholics could not be elected to parliament.

The following year Lord Portland, the head of the Whig grandees in England, joined Pitt’s government. The most influential figure in this, apart from Portland, was Earl Fitzwilliam, owner of the largest house in Britain, Wentworth Fitzwilliam. He was another of the Whig grandees, guided by lordly principles of paternalism, in particular towards his extensive estates in Ireland. He was described as lacking in brilliance, but his advocacy was ‘sound and direct, his principles most honourable and his intentions excellent’.

Fitzwilliam was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland – effectively viceroy – and, believing he had Pitt’s agreement to far-reaching reform, landed in January 1795. Less than six weeks later he was recalled. During that short sojourn he ignited the country’s powder keg: for he gave Ireland what had hitherto been lacking – hope. First, he dismissed most of the corrupt officials running Ireland. Then, saying ‘no time is to be lost’, he declared that the Catholic gentry must be eligible to sit in parliament to diminish the tension in the country: ‘Not to grant cheerfully on the part of government all the Catholics wish will not only be exceedingly impolitic, but perhaps dangerous.’ He said he would press ahead with his reforms unless he was issued instructions to the contrary.

His despatch to London was delayed by bad weather, and then pigeonholed for eleven days. When it was read, King George III had the political equivalent of a seizure, declaring it would ‘overturn the fabric’ of the Glorious Revolution. Pitt promptly instructed Fitzwilliam to put the reforms on ice. The latter furiously dared Pitt to recall him: ‘These are not the times for the fate of the empire to be trifled with.’ He was dismissed, and Dublin was draped in mourning. Fitzwilliam Square stands to this day as a tribute to an honourable and enlightened patrician whose reforms might have prevented the ensuing two centuries of strife.

Ardent patriots now made up their minds that political change in Ireland could only come from France or from an appeal to arms. Wolfe Tone, agitating for full independence, travelled to Basle to persuade the French to invade Ireland. Tone insisted that 200,000 Irishmen would rise up in support, three-quarters of them armed, to oppose the 10,000 ill-equipped British troops there. The Directory in France was persuaded,
and in the early winter assembled a formidable force under Lazare Hoche.