Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (31 page)

From this central position he could strike northwards to the Channel or southwards to the Mediterranean.

Till he could be removed England's sea communications were paralysed. And on these depended not only her trade but the fortunes of Europe. At that moment transports were waiting to sail for Odessa to bring a Russian army into the Mediterranean to co-operate with Craig's expedition in the liberation of Italy. At Cork
5000
British troops, formerly destined for India, were waiting to sail under Sir David Baird on a still more momentous mission. During the summer they had been hastily allocated to the West Indies until Nelson's dramatic voyage had saved those islands. They were now embarked under secret orders to re-capture the Cape of Good Hope, the half-way house to India. Ever since its restoration to the puppet Batavian Republic the Government and City had been haunted by the fear of its occupation by the French. During the past year Napoleon's renewed intrigues in the Levant and the presence of his cruisers in the South Atlantic, combined with bad news from India, had intensified the fears of Leadenhall Street; all the summer Castlereagh had been urging Pitt to safeguard his communications with the East by repeating his coup of
1795
before it was too late. And events were now so critical that even a few days' delay might prove fatal.
¹

To free the seas Pitt and Barham ordered their Admiral to attack. As soon as the news of Nelson's arrival reached London Cornwallis was instructed to detach part of his force to the southward either to seal the Combined Fleet in Ferrol or, if it had already sailed, to cripple it so that it could do no further harm. "The Western Squadron," he was reminded, "is the mainspring from which all offensive operations must spring."

But Cornwallis needed no reminding. On August 16th, three days before Barham's orders were written and the morning after Nelson's fleet came into Ushant, he had already detached eighteen sail of the line, including five three-deckers, under his senior flag-officer, Calder, to blockade Villeneuve in Ferrol. With his remaining eighteen battleships, including ten three-deckers, he remained off Brest to pin down Ganteaume and protect the entrance to the Channel.

The British concentration in the Western Approaches was thus held for less than twenty-four hours. With the Grand Army at Boulogne, and Villeneuve and Allemand at large with thirty-four sail of the line and Ganteaume with another twenty-one in Brest, Cornwallis did not err on the side of caution in dividing his fleet.

¹
Corbe
tt,
246-7, 251-3, 259-60;
Pitt and the Great War,
532;
Barham, III,
278.

For this he was subsequently censured by Napoleon, who built up an elaborate case against Villeneuve for his failure to take advantage of it. But old Billy-go-tight, like the Admiralty whose orders he anticipated, knew his business. He was aware from Calder's accounts of the unseaworthiness of Villeneuve's ships and crews and of the superb fighting trim of his own. Above all he understood the issues for which his country was fighting. Pitted against the swiftest mind in Europe, this seaman of sixty-one acted with a speed worthy of Napoleon. Like skilled footballers he and his brother Admirals had gathered the initiative from the enemy at the end of his run and were now racing with it towards his touchline.

While Calder, eager to wipe out the stigma of his earlier caution, pressed southwards across the Bay, Cornwallis showed his colours off Brest. On the morning of August
21st
his frigates in the Goulet signalled that Ganteaume, in obedience to Napoleon's orders, was coming out of port. At once the British Admiral stood in with his entire force. That night the two fleets faced one another, the French in Bertheaume roads, the British anchored off the Black Rocks. Next morning Ganteaume withdrew under the eyes of watching thousands to the cover of his shore batteries, while Cornwallis fiercely endeavoured to cut off his rear. During the engagement the tough old Commander-in-Chief was struck by a shell splinter from the shore batteries—a circumstance, however, which he did not think worth mentioning in his laconic report.
¹

Encouraged by the strength of Cornwallis's blockade, the Government pressed on its offensive measures. Barham's efforts to reinforce the Fleet were at last bearing fruit: sixty-three battleships including fifteen three-deckers were either at sea or ready for sea between Cadiz and the Texel. To secure men for them Cornwallis was instructed to detach a division to meet the homecoming convoys three hundred miles to the west of the Scillies. On the last day of the month Rear-Admiral Stirling sailed with five battleships from Ushant, while at the same time the Cape expedition, braving Villeneuve and Allemand, left Cork under a light escort commanded by Captain Sir Home Popham.

Risks were being taken which only the greatness of the stakes could justify. During the last week of August it became known in London that Villeneuve had left Ferrol with thirty sail of the line. No one could say for certain where he had gone or what was happening to Calder. But Nelson, whose advice was sought by Ministers—as though, he told Captain Keats, he were a conjurer—hazarded the

¹
" Damme," he was said to have remarked, " but I will
have some of you out for this
"—Lord Coleridge,
113.
See Corbe
tt,
260-1;
Cornwallis-West,
485-6.

opinion that, if Calder once got fairly alongside the enemy, they would do no harm for months even though they beat him. His confidence, strengthened by the knowledge that eight of his own Mediterranean ships had sailed under Calder's flag, was infectious. England had become herself again.

But for all his eagerness to engage, Calder never saw the Combined Fleet. The honour was all Collingwood's. Since Nelson had left him he had been blockading Cadiz and its half-dozen Spanish three-deckers with three seventy-fours. He fully expected to have
"a
rattling day of it" soon.
"A
dull superiority," he told a friend, "creates languor; it is a state like this that rouses the spirits and makes us feel as if the welfare of all England depended on us alone." Yet even Collingwood, whose officers would have been astonished to hear such sentiments from their taciturn, prosy-looking commander, had scarcely bargained for the ordeal before him. For on August 20th—the day that Nelson reached London—there appeared out of the north twenty-nine French and Spanish battleships. It was the great Fleet on whose movements all the world was speculating, from Napoleon pacing his watchtower at Boulogne to Pitt in his map-lined room and Cornwallis in his cabin off Ushant.

Since leaving the Bay on the 15th Villeneuve had never paused. Hurrying down the coasts of Galicia and Portugal, glimpsed momentarily by excited British frigates, he stopped only to capture and burn a solitary merchantman. Collingwood's "three poor things with a frigate and a bomb" off Cadiz seemed utterly at his mercy. But, though sixteen capital ships were detached to destroy him, Collingwood evaded them. Resolved not to be driven through the Straits without dragging his pursuers after him and keeping just out of gunshot, he tacked whenever they tacked and finally, when their patience tired, followed them back to Cadiz. There, with French and Spanish masts clustering in the harbour " as thick as a wood," he calmly resumed the blockade, signalling like Duncan before him to an imaginary fleet over the horizon. It was an uncomfortable position—"a squeeze," as he called it in a letter to his wife:—but it failed to perturb this formidable Northumbrian. "I hope I shall have somebody come to me soon," he wrote, "and in the meantime I must take the best care of myself I can."
¹
.

He did not have long to wait. Bickerton, watching Cartagena three hundred miles to the east with four of the line, abandoned the blockade on hearing the news and hurried to his aid. Calder, learning from a frigate that Villeneuve had left Ferrol with thirty battleships, gave chase to the southward. "It is a noble and most animating

¹
Collingwood,

scene," wrote Captain Codrington of the
Orion
to his wife, " which I wish you could witness: eighteen sail of the line and but two frigates under every sail they can possibly set." By the 29th they, too, were off Cadiz.

After seven months Napoleon's Grand Design had ended in humiliation and frustration. Only the prudence or timidity of his Admiral had saved his Fleet from a fate as awful as that of the Spanish Armada. His Army, like Parma's before it, was marooned on the shores of the Channel with all hope of a crossing gone. The blockade had been resumed. The Cadiz squadron was back in its port and the Toulon and Ferrol squadrons blockaded with it. Only Allemand's squadron was left at large—its original purpose defeated. The initiative was again beyond all dispute in British hands.

On the evening of September 2nd the
Euryalus
frigate brought the news from Cadiz. As she heaved to off the Needles Captain Blackwood went ashore to hire a chase and four in Lymington. At five in the morning he stopped for a few minutes at Merton to see the most famous man in England. He found him already up and dressed. Like all the rest of the world Nelson had been eager
ly awaiting
the tidings he brought. "Depend on it, Blackwood," he said, " I shall yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing." A few hours later he was receiving his charge at the Admiralty. At his first return Barham, who, scarcely knowing him, had distrusted his brightly-coloured reputation, had sent for his journals. But a few hours' perusal had resolved the old man's doubts. Nelson might be a junior Admiral and unorthodox, but he was complete master of his calling. His right to return to his command—now of such
supreme significance
—was indisputable.

Nelson received the summons with quiet gladness. " I hold myself ready to go forth whenever I am desired," he wrote to George Rose, " although God knows Iwant rest. But self is entirely out of the question." His friends had never seen him so cheerful. In those last quiet days at Merton and in London, taking farewell of all he loved, he radiated hope and inspiration.

The sun had come out that autumn after the long cold winds of the summer; there was a sense almost of holiday relaxation in the air. Minto, staying at Gregories in the Chiltern beechwoods with Edmund Burke's widow, took out Spenser's
Faerie Queen
and lay reading it all day on the grass; at Stowe, where the Marquis of Buckingham entertained the Prince of Wales, the gardens were

¹
Nicolas,
VII,
22
-3
,
26;
Corbett,
278, 281, 288;
"Clarke and M'Arthur,
n,
116;
Mahan,
Nelson,
n,
328;
Minto,
268-9.

bright with illuminations, and groups of morris dancers and maskers lined the banks of the grotto. And the news that poured into England with that mellow September sunshine matched its splendour. "Thank God! thank God a thousand times!" wrote old Admiral Lord Rad
stock, " that these Jack O'Lante
rns are once more safely housed without having done the mischief which was most justly dreaded." Not only was the Combined Fleet held in Cadiz, but the home-coming convoys, and with them the City's wealth and credit, were saved. And on the
5th
came still more glorious tidings. For six days before, it was learnt from a captured schooner, Napoleon's troops at Boulogne had broken camp and marched off in haste "because of a new war with Russia." After more than two years of suspense England was no longer in danger. Pitt's plans for raising the siege of his country had triumphed.

All that Napoleon had thought impossible had come to pass. Pitt had forced him from the Channel by setting Europe at his back. "Have caricatures made," he angrily ordered Fouche, "-of an Englishman purse in hand entreating
the various Powers to
take his money. This is the real direction to give to the whole business."
¹
Yet it had been his own ambition and arrogance, not Pitt's gold, that had roused the Continent against him. The news of his seizure of the Italian crown and annexation of Genoa. had come at the very moment when a Russian plenipotentiary was starting for Paris to offer him a mediated peace that, by vesting Malta in the Czar, would have removed the chief barrier to a Frenc
h drive to the East. Cobenzl, th
e Austrian Chancellor, whose fear of war with France had paralysed his .country's
policy since the Peace of Lunev
ille, was being driven into war by a still more compelling fear. Even the greedy Prussians, the Russian envoy reported from Berlin on July 18th, were waking up to reality. "They see more clearly," he wrote, "Bonaparte is no more a guardian angel but an out-and-out devil, and they are persuaded that this devil will gobble Germany if they persist any longer in their inaction."
²

To the British public the change on the Continent came as a complete surprise. At midsummer Lady Bessborough had written to her lover" that Russian affairs were scarcely mentioned in London. As late as the third week in August nothing had been heard in Downing Street of the Czar's ratification of the Anglo-Russian treaty. At that time the war between Britain and France seemed likely to drag on for ever; Minto thought no change could be expected in the