The War of Wars (60 page)

Uniforms were all the rage. Lady Hester Stanhope, Pitt’s high-spirited niece, inspected the colonel of the Berkshire militia.

Somebody asked me . . . what I thought of them and I said they looked like so many tinned harlequins. One day, soon after, I was riding through Walmer village when who should pop out upon me but the colonel, dressed entirely in new regimentals . . . ‘Pray, pardon me, Lady Hester,’ said the colonel, ‘but I wish to know if you approve of our new uniform.’ Of course I made him turn about, till I inspected him round and round – pointed with my whip, as I sat on horseback, first here and then there – told him the waist was too short and wanted half a button more – the collar was a little too high – and so on; and, in a short time, the whole regiment turned out with new clothes.

George Cruikshank, later to become the famous caricaturist, wrote graphically:

In one place you might hear the ‘tattoo’ of some youth learning to beat the drum, at another place some march, or national air being practised upon the fife and, every morning at five o’clock, the bugle horn was sounded through the streets to call the Volunteers to a two hours’ drill, from six to eight, and the same again in the evening and then you heard the pop, pop, pop of the single musket, or the heavy sound of the volley, the distant thunder of the artillery and then sometimes you heard the Park and the Tower guns firing to celebrate some advantage gained over the enemy.

Robert Harvey, later to be one of Wellington’s commanders in the Peninsular War, mustered the Norfolk Volunteer Regiment, one of no fewer than sixty in the county. Professional men would rise at four and do three hours’ drill before going to work, some returning for more in the evening. Walter Scott found the drilling ‘a very poignant and pleasing sensation’.

The commander-in-chief was needless to say, the Duke of York, a plump caricaturable figure who was an able administrator although a hopeless military commander. He concentrated his forces in the southeast, the strongpoints being Chelmsford, north of the Thames, and Chatham to the south. If these were overrun, a second line of defences was envisaged running from Blackheath to Battersea and Wandsworth, extending to the Sussex Downs in the south. Admiral Lord Keith believed the most vulnerable points to be Weymouth Bay, the stretches between Brighton and Folkestone, Dungeness and East Anglia. Oddly, he dismissed the threats to the Downs and Kent – which were in fact Napoleon’s favoured targets.

Along the coast, Deal, Walmer and Dover had strong fortifications and guns, but Dungeness was exposed, so defences were hurriedly constructed. A network of Martello towers – edifices with guns on top and thirteen-foot-thick walls – were built in Sussex, Kent, Suffolk and Essex. A huge military camp was built at Weedon in Northampton-shire on the Grand Union Canal which included a small palace for the King and houses for the government in the event of London being captured. A popular ditty called ‘The Bellman and little Boney’ reflected the confused feelings of the time:

This little Boney says he’ll come

     At merry Christmas time,

But that I say is all a hum

     Or I no more will rhyme.

Some say in wooden house he’ll glide

     Some say in air balloon,

E’en those who airy schemes deride

     Agree his coming soon.

Now honest people list to me,

     Though income is but small,

I’ll bet my wig to one Pen-ney

     He does not come at all.

A system of beacons covered the coastline: there were frequent alarms when the beacons were set ablaze by sparks. Grenville and other opponents of the government grew increasingly derisory about the government’s defensive tactics. When blockhouses were proposed to defend the Thames, Canning wrote caustically:

If blocks can a nation deliver,
Two places are safe from the French:
The one is the mouth of the river,
The other the Treasury Bench!

Pitt on coming to office had proposed at once to go on the offensive. As he made his preparations and another glorious summer descended, the prospect of invasion seemed unreal.

Pitt embarked on a two-pronged offensive: the government courted allies, most notably the Russians; and decided to stage an attack on the French coastal defences. He even toyed with the ideas of a remarkable American inventor, Robert Fulton, who had imaginatively tried to pioneer steam-driven paddleships for Napoleon, as well as a crude submarine and torpedoes,
Nautilus
, with a 21-foot long hull and hand-driven propeller worked by its crew of three, which could descend some 25 feet below the surface and stay submerged for three-quarters of an hour.

Fulton’s ideas were referred to a secret committee, which described the submarine as impractical, but further investigated torpedoes, which were dubbed ‘hogsheads’ or ‘carcasses’. These were primitive in the extreme:

made of copper and . . . spherical in form; hollow to receive their charge of powder, which, by means of machinery that worked interiorly, and so secured to be perfectly watertight, exploded at the precise moment that you chose to set it to. The mode of managing them was in this wise: two, attached together by means of a line coiled carefully clear, were placed in the boat ready to be roped overboard. The line was buoyed by corks, like the topping of a sein [net], so as to allow the carcasses to sink to a certain depth and no further.

When you had approached near enough to the vessel against which you meant to direct the carcass and saw clearly that you were in a position that the line could not fail to strike her cable, one carcass was dropped overboard and, when that had extended the full length of the line from the boat, then the other, both having been carefully primed and set to the time, which would allow of their floating to their destined object before they exploded. Of course, it is presumed that wind and tide set in the direction, so as to ensure their not deviating from their course . . .

That was the biggest catch of all – and in this they more resembled mines than submarines. The project was quietly shelved.

Spurred by Pitt, Lord Keith had decided to stage a morale-boosting attack on Boulogne at the end of the summer of 1804. In October a serious assault was staged with four ‘explosion vessels’ packed with gunpowder as well as Fulton’s torpedoes. The attack resulted only in the destruction of a French pinnace with around thirty men. Still the British tried: there were two more attacks in November. Other plans included a joint torpedo-rocket attack – the latter were supposed to divert French attentions from the approaching torpedoes – and a catamaran joined by a platform with a ramp which could be used for landing a field gun and fifty soldiers to stage commando raids. The truth was that ‘the coast of iron and bronze’ built by Napoleon, comprising batteries and stone defences, while not impregnable, was very strong. ‘One field gun to every league of coast is the least allowance’, Napoleon had ordered, and the British could make little impression. Their raids at least demonstrated that the government was no longer passively defensive, as Addington’s had been.

Still, though, Napoleon made no move. This was largely because of the delays involved in constructing his invasion fleet and bringing it to anchorage. Napoleon also began to understand that his huge force – which he fondly imagined could cross on a cloudy night under cover of fog (but what about collisions?) would need a covering fleet. ‘Eight hours of night in favourable weather will decide the fate of the universe,’ he declared. But the practicalities were that the armada might be overwhelmed by an unexpected squall, or suddenly
becalmed, and would anyway take at least three tides to float. He had to postpone the attempt. But he did not give up, claiming that ’nearly 120,000 men and 3,000 boats . . . only await a favourable wind to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London’.

With characteristic ruthlessness he declared that it did not matter if 20,000 men were drowned on the way. ‘One loses that in battle every day.’ On 20 June he insisted on holding a naval review in appalling weather. Several ships were wrecked and 20,000 men lost. But the greater danger was losing his entire invasion force.

At last, by January 1805 he had accepted that the crossing was impossible without the French fleet either protecting the huge flotilla or diverting the British fleet. Armed with this brilliant new intuition, there followed three extraordinary attempts to use France’s fleets in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to achieve just this, in elaborate and intricate battle plans that sought to imitate at sea the precise movements of bodies of men Napoleon so successfully commanded on land. It seemed that Napoleon had at last discovered the formula for success.

In the summer of 1805, with the British guard at home now lowered, although more men had received training in arms than ever before, it seemed likely that at last the years of French preparation would pay off and a huge landing would be staged on the English coast, which would probably force the British back at least to their second lines of defence around London and possibly even result in the loss of the capital. It was the most desperate moment of the war for Britain. Pitt, now seriously ill, presided over a faltering government. At last the reckoning had arrived. Britain was at the mercy of the largest invasion force ever used against her; and with Britain subdued, Napoleon and France would be the unchallenged masters of ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Rhine, from the Netherlands to Naples, the greatest empire in the continent’s history since Roman times, Charlemagne included’.

As his own private secretary, Méneval, remarked: ‘Napoleon expected the overthrow of England to be a mere three months’ business. The first victory would have opened the road to London. Communications established in Ireland and Scotland, and a general uprising against the
privileged classes of the English lords would have done the rest.’ Later Napoleon was famously to declare that: ‘England is naturally meant to be an appendage to France. Nature made her just as much one of her islands as Corsica and Oleron.’ No doubt he had the Norman invasion of 1066 in mind as well.

Part of the reason why Napoleon’s seriousness is doubted in 1804 was because of the experience in 1795, when he was the general in charge of the earlier threatened invasion of England and immediately decided the feat was impossible, remaining on the French Channel coast only to divert attention from the planned invasion of Egypt. During the summer of 1804, a war with Austria in the east was not an immediate prospect and one he believed he could avoid.

If the preparations for invading England were indeed a feint, they were to be among the most expensive in the history of warfare. The establishment of huge army camps, the building of artificial harbours, the colossal costs of constructing landing craft – all of these would have been deliberately wasted if the projected invasion was all along intended to be a bluff. The idea, in retrospect, seems absurd. It seems all the more so in view of the deadly seriousness of Napoleon’s naval preparations, based on his understanding that massed ship protection was necessary for an invasion to be successfully mounted. These were to involve the bulk of his fleet, consisting of some seventy ships, which he summoned back from the West Indies.

In London Earl St Vincent, the First Lord, who had so rashly launched an attack on corruption in naval dockyards during the short year of peace, so that half his ships were left unrepaired, had come to exactly the same conclusion. With the declaration of war his policy was to blockade the French ports closely so that their warships would never obtain even momentary control of the Channel and be able to escort the invasion fleet across. As Nelson put it, ‘Our first line of defence is close to the enemy ports.’

‘Let us,’ declared Napoleon, ‘be master of the Straits [of Dover] for six hours and we shall be masters of the world.’ As usual, this was hyperbole: if the British regained control of the Straits and cut off the cross-Channel supply line to an invading French army, it would have been in desperate trouble. However, it contained a grain of truth. The
British fleet was divided in three – Cornwallis and Collingwood blockading Brest, L’Orient and Rochefort, Keith blockading the Texel and Nelson in the Mediterranean watching Toulon. The returning fleet from the West Indies took shelter in Spanish ports, where they were blockaded, first by Sir Alexander Cochrane and later by Sir Edward Pellew. British frigates acted as watchdogs keeping an eye on the French fleets’ movements.

Blockade duty was grim and thankless as ships sought to maintain their stations. Gales and shifting tides threatened to batter them on to shoals if they came too close to the shore, while if they stood too far off the enemy might give them the slip in bad weather. The log book of the
Impetueux
in the gale of December 1803 gives some idea of the conditions.

At four strong gales, with heavy squalls. At half-past six strong gales, with heavy squalls; carried away the starboard main brace and larboard main topsail sheet; sail blew to pieces; mizzen and fore staysail blew to pieces, and mainsail blew from the yard. At eight obliged to scuttle the lower deck; ship labouring very much, and gained six inches on the pumps. At quarter-past eight the carpenter reported the mizzen mast was sprung, in consequence of the vangs of the gaff giving way. At half-past eight was struck with a sea on the larboard quarter, stove in eleven of the main-deck ports, half-filled the maindeck, and carried away the chain-plate of the foremost main shroud. Bore up under a reefed foresail. Saw a line-of-battle ship lying to, with her head to the southward, and her sails split and blowing from the yards.

In the Mediterranean, weather conditions were a little easier, although violent gales could blow up suddenly, and Nelson was hundreds of miles away from friends, his only bases being Malta and Gibraltar. Nelson’s tactic was not to blockade too closely, but to seek to lure the French out and do battle: he kept just a watching frigate offshore and his main ships out to sea. These were scattered all the way from the Balearic Islands off Spain, to Sardinia and Corsica, each ship patrolling sections of the sea with a frigate accompanying Nelson’s flagship, the
Victory
, to herd all the ships together if the French fleet broke out: ‘Every opportunity,’ said Nelson, must be offered to the enemy to put to sea, for it is there we hope to realize the hopes and expectations of our country.’