Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (15 page)

With the approach of autumn accounts of tremendous invasion preparations brought by Americans and other neutral travellers grew hourly. In the French dockyards artificers were working day and night; everything was ready. A quarter of a million men, it was said, were to sail in five divisions, three against England and the other two against Scotland and Ireland: the landing was to be followed by a general massacre.
¹
In the face of these reports the King's annual visit to Weymouth was cancelled, and officers were forbidden to leave their stations for more than two hours. "The approaching invasion," wrote Francis Horner, "has driven every other topic from conversation; questions are mooted and possibilities supposed that make one shudder for the fate of the world." All sorts of rumours circulated: that Bonaparte was building a bridge from Calais to Dover, that he was going to transport his army in balloons, even that he was making a Channel tunnel. On August 7th, Mrs. Fremantle walking on the walls of Portsmouth saw a great concourse of people on the beaches, the yeomanry out and the telegraphs at work; guns were firing and many sails visible. On inquiring the cause she was told that the flotilla had been sighted. Next day it turned out that the invaders were only a fleet of coasters becalmed off the Isle of Wight. For weeks such alarms were of almost daily occurrence.

¹
Farington, II,
115-16;
Granville, I,
434.

It was Bonaparte's intention to cross either on a foggy night or in the sudden calm after a gale. While the British frigates, driven from the Channel by the storm, were lying becalmed, the great flotilla would slip out of its ports and row swiftly to England. Fifteen hundred barges packed with soldiers were to start
from Boulogne, Wissant, Amblete
use and Etaples, three hundred from Dunkirk, Calais and Gravelines, three hundred from Nieuport and Ostend and three hundred more with a Dutch army from Flushing. The boats designed were of three kinds: large sailing vessels called
prames
more than a hundred feet long, armed with 24-pounders and each carrying 150 men; escorting
chaloupes can
nonieres
with howitzers; gunboats for transporting horses, ammunition and artillery; and— by far the most numerous—sixty-foot pinnaces armed with small howitzers and each capable of accommodating 55 soldiers. All were equipped with specially designed landing bridges. If attacked the flotilla was to defend itself; with the issue nothing less than the mastery of the world, it would matter little if ten or even twenty thousand troops were sunk on the way. " One loses that number in battle every day," Napoleon remarked, "and what battle ever promised such results as a landing in England?" Together with artillery, supplies and 6000 horses, he planned to transport nearly 120,000 veterans.

To frustrate them the British decided to withdraw their main forces to fortified positions covering the naval dockyard at Chatham, while delaying the enemy's advance with isolated defence points. The initial landing was to be made as costly as possible. Floating batteries were moored off the more vulnerable beaches and round, flat-roofed, bomb-proof martello towers—named after the Corsican fort captured in 1794 in Mortella Bay—laid out at likely points along the cliffs to hamper the disembarkation of supplies and artillery. At Shorncliffe Major-General John Moore—the "prodigy" of the Army —was stationed with a specially picked Light Brigade which under his direction was practising a new method of warfare designed to defeat the revolutionary shock tactics of the French. For the present it was to fight a delaying action and gradually fall back on the main regular forces at Chatham under Sir David Dundas, the tall, crabbed, austere Scottish Commander-in-Chief whom his fellow soldiers called Old Pivot from his life-long addiction to the drill-book. Meanwhile the country was to be roused by a chain of furze and pitch beacons which, as in- the days of the Armada, w
^r
ere to flash the news from the southern counties to the Pentlands.
¹

¹
If the invaders came by day, the beacon watchers—graphically described in Hardy's
Dynasts
—were to set light to stacks of damp hay and raise columns of smoke. Wheeler and Broadley, II,
134.

'As the French might land either to the north or south of the Thames—or on both sides simultaneously—two separate defences of the capital had to be organised. As the counterpart to Chatham an immense fortified camp was constructed at Chelmsford—an enterprise severely criticised by Colonel Robin Craufurd, who warned the House that the enemy would not bother to attack it at all but would simply ignore it, pressing straight on to London. A chain of detached works or hedgehogs arranged in depth, he claimed, was the only way to check the pace of the French advance. Fieldworks were also thrown up on the principal roads to the capital, around which it was proposed to build a continuous line of trenches and batteries along the Surrey and Middlesex heights. Here the final battle of London was to be fought, while rustic volunteers harried the enemy's lines of communications from every farm and hedgerow, and the Regular Army, striking at his flank, launched its counter-attack from Chatham or Chelmsford.
¹

It had been the Government's original plan to " drive" the country in the enemy's path, laying waste southern England. This desperate counsel was subsequently abandoned on the ground that England was too rich a country to denude sufficiently to starve an enterprising enemy and that in any case there was unlikely to be enough warning to do so. To these arguments Moore added a third; that such a method of warfare would promote confusion and despondency and encourage the French. No foot of ground, he contended, should be ceded that was not marked with the enemy's blood. It was the distinction of this brilliant soldier, now in his forty-second year, to foresee in 1803 the tactics that a decade later were both to defeat the French in the field and shatter their communications. The imaginative insight which prompted him to train the Light Brigade in an individual manoeuvre and fire-power superior to that of the French column, enabled him also to anticipate the guerrilla campaigns of the Peninsula. He saw how the enemy's habit of living on the country might be turned against him by a people resolved as one man to resist him. "Nothing," he wrote, "would damp his spirit more."
²

For more clearly than anyone Moore understood how the Volunteer forces which the Government had so unthinkingly created might be used. In open battle their untrained enthusiasm could achieve

¹
Pitt was an enthusiastic advocate for fortifying the capital and scouted the notion
that, since London had never been fortified in the past, it was useless to fortify it now,

"If by the erection of such works you can delay the progress of the enemy for three days, these may be the difference between the safety and the destruction of the capital." Wheeler and Broadley, II,
118.
See also
129-30;
Fortescue, V,
232;
Farington, II,
117;
Colchester, I,
433;
Frcmantle, II,
93;
Bunbury,
117-8.

²
Moore, II,
72-4.

nothing but their own destruction. But if they husbanded their resources and waged guerrilla war while the Regular Forces gathered strength, then the loss of London might not prove fatal, and the French army might find a wasting grave in England while the Continental nations, taking courage from the spectacle, invaded France in its absence. Another soldier, Lord Moira, who had experienced the strength of patriot resistance in the American War, stressed the same point. In a speech at Leicester he told the local Volunteers that they should concentrate on acquiring a ready habit of priming and loading and a quick understanding of the orders of their officers. Their task should be to operate in small bodies in the enemy's flank and rear, availing themselves of every inequality of ground; to retire whenever the foe, stung by such gadfly tactics, moved against them in force, only to advance again when his detachments withdrew to his main body. " You must not," he told them, " think this is unworthy of your courage."
¹

Throughout the tense weeks of late summer, when men never went to bed without peering through the darkness to see if the beacons were lit on the hills, the country preserved its outward aspect of quiet beauty. Farington walking through Chelsea noted the holiday crowds enjoying the fine weather as though invasion had never been thought of. Perhaps it was the unusual sunshine of that memorable autumn that kept men so calm; perhaps merely the instinctive staunchness of a people with so long and happy a history. Among the State muniments professional historians delved busily into the records of forty-five earlier attempts at invasion; but the public did not need historians to tell them that all had been unsuccessful. "My habit," wrote Francis Horner, "is confidence." Even Fox, whose business it was to expose the Government's incapacity and lack of preparedness, confessed himself stout as a lion. "I believe," he added, "Bonaparte will not try, that if he does he will be destroyed or at least driven back at sea, and that, even if he does land, he will frighten more than-hurt us." " When I consider," wrote old General Cornwallis, pessimist though he was, "the number of men that we have in arms and that they are all Britons, I cannot be afraid." It was this instinctive confidence that made Britain in that hour, as Wordsworth said, "a bulwark to the cause of man."

With the approach of October expectancy gathered. On September 29th Tom Campbell reported that the Volunteers were tinder orders

1
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
112-13.
See also Fortescue, V,
265;
H. M. C. Dropmore, VTI,
188.

to march at an hour's notice. "It will be a bloody tussle," he added, "but let us never think of outliving our liberty." "Now is the time to prove your hardiment!" wrote Wordsworth:

"No parleying now! In Britain is one breath;

We are all with you now from shore to shore:

Ye men of Kent, 'tis victory or death!"

Walter Scott at distant Lasswade, struggling, in the intervals of drilling, with
The Lay of the Last Minstrel,
felt a new awareness of his country's greatness:

" Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and-the flood,

Land of my sires! What mortal hand

Can e'er untie the filial band

That knits me to thy rugged strand!"

"We are doing our best to prepare ourselves for the contest," he wrote.
"A
beacon light, communicating with that of Edinburgh Castle, is just erecting, in front of our quiet cottage. My field equipage is ready; Charlotte with the infantry of the household troops is to beat her retreat into Ettrick Forest where, if the Tweed is out in his usual wintry stage of flood, she may weather out a descent from Ostend."
¹
Wordsworth on two successive Sundays tramped over the Westmorland fells with the men of Grasmere to offer his services and don uniform. " I have no other hope," his sister told her friends, " than that they will not be called out of these quiet, far-off places except in the case of the French being
successful
after their landing, and in that case what matter? We may all go together."
²

Every preparation which a tardy Government and a remiss, peace-loving people could make was now made. The magistrates were appointed to sit daily to give orders, regulate ale-houses and arrest suspicious persons, aliens were to register within eighteen days, and a General Fast was appointed for October 19th and "observed with the utmost decorum." On that day every church in the country was packed with Volunteers; at St. Paul's, where the Lord Mayor and Corporation attended in state, thousands of scarlet-coated shopkeepers and apprentices crowded under the dome after the sermon to take the oath of allegiance. On the following Sunday the King, indefatigable in the discharge of his military duties,

¹
Scott, I,
204-5.

2
"We wanted him to wait till the Body of the People should be called." de Selincourt,
Early Letters,
335.

reviewed the London Trained Bands in Hyde Park before a crowd of two hundred thousand. In the southern counties the Volunteers turned out in successive reliefs for permanent duty with the Regulars, despite misgivings that they would die like rotten sheep from sleeping in the fields. On one evening the play at Drury Lane had to be cancelled owing to the number of performers on military duty.
¹
"Oh, what a fagging work this volunteering is!" wrote the author of "Hohenlinden," "eight hours under a musket I"; a law student confessed it a "sad time for the Goddess of Special Pleading," and reflected wistfully that but for the restless ambition of one man he might be climbing the Alps or wandering in the ruins of the Roman capitol.