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First published by Allen Lane 2013
Published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © Roger Knight, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover: Cavalry Embarking at Blackwall, 24 April 1793, by William Anderson (photograph © Yale Centre for British Art, New Haren, USA). The substantial figure in the brown coat bottom right is probably John Perry, the owner of the dock.
All rights reserved
Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-0-141-97702-7
Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Lists of Maps and Their Sources
A Note on Names
Foreword
Introduction: A Hard-Working Generation
PART ONE
The Ever-Present Threat
1 The Arms Race and Intelligence 1783–1793
2 Pitt’s Investment 1783–1793
PART TWO
Holding the Line
3 The First Crisis 1795–1798
4 Whitehall at War 1793–1802
5 Intelligence and Communications 1793–1801
6 Feeding the Armed Forces and the Nation 1795–1812
7 Transporting the Army by Sea 1793–1811
PART THREE
Defending the Realm
8 Political Instability and the Conduct of the War 1802–1812
9 The Invasion Threat 1803–1812
10 Intelligence, Security and Communications 1803–1811
11 Government Scandal and Reform 1803–1812
12 The Defence Industries 1800–1814
13 Blockade, Taxes and the City of London 1806–1812
PART FOUR
The Tables Turned
14 Russia and the Peninsula 1812–1813
15 The Manpower Emergency 1812–1814
16 Final Victory
Aftermath
Appendices
1 Officials in Government Departments Involved in the War 1793–1815
2 Reports of Parliamentary Commissions and Enquiries Relating to the Army and Navy 1780–1812
Illustrations
Bibliography
Notes
Chronology
Glossary
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For Jane
| BL | British Library |
| Commission on Fees | ‘appointed … to enquire into the Fees, Gratuities, Perquisites, and Emoluments, which are or have been lately received into the several Public Offices’, Reports 1786–8 |
| Commission of Military Enquiry | ‘appointed … to enquire and examine into Public Expenditure and the Conduct of Public Business in the Military Departments’ Reports 1806–12 |
| Commission of Naval Enquiry | ‘appointed … to enquire and examine into any Irregularities, Frauds or Abuses, which are or have been practised by Persons employed in the several Naval Departments’ Reports 1803–6 |
| Commission of Naval Revision | ‘appointed … for Revising and Digesting the Civil Affairs of the Navy’ Reports 1806–9 |
| Committee on Public Accounts | ‘appointed to examine, take and state, the Public Accounts of the Kingdom’ Reports 1780–87 |
| Select Committee on Finance | Reports 1797–8 |
| DHC | Devon Heritage Centre, Exeter |
| HL | Huntington Library, San Marino, California |
| HRC | Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin |
| NMM | National Maritime Museum, Greenwich |
| ODNB | The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) |
| SCC | Sim Comfort Private Collection |
| TNA | National Archives, Kew, London |
| TNA, POST | Post Office Archive, Mount Pleasant, London |
| WLC | William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan |
PENGUIN BOOKS
‘He examines not the military heroics that brought Napoleon to his knees but the way in which Britain prepared for the final onslaught against him ... Knight’s work is truly ground-breaking in showing how Britain, a country that had prided itself on the encouragement of individualism, made a collective effort for victory that was not seen again in such intensity until 1940’ Simon Heffer, New Statesman
‘A fascinating and exhaustively researched book ... Roger Knight collects and arranges a thousand incremental instances of reform, the renewal of practises and institutions, with an enthusiasm which I found quite irresistible. But he never loses sight of the wood for the trees. The story he tells is of the entry of the civil and armed services, in little more than ten years, into a world more recognisably modern than before’ John Barrell, Guardian
‘This is a story of false dawns and miserable debacles, of gradual innovation and reform ... Above all this book is about the forging of modern Britain’ Ben Wilson, Sunday Telegraph
‘It offers a whole new perspective on Britain’s involvement in the Napoleonic Wars ... The action in Knight’s book takes place not at Trafalgar or Talavera but in London, at the Victualling Department, at the Admiralty and at the Navy Board. It is a heroic tale, but one made by heroes of an unusual kind. What could have been a dry tome, heavy on process, is rich in humanity’ Paul Lay, History Today
‘Gripping reading ... a wonderfully disorienting read ... a rare gift ... there is scarcely a wasted sentence here, not a duff page’ David Crane, Spectator
Endpapers: Board Room of the Admiralty, by Augustus Pugin, with figures added by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808, coloured aquatint, from Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (London, 1808–10), Vol. I, p. 16 (Bridgeman Art Library)
Shutter telegraph cabin on the Admiralty roof, with shutter codes, print, after 1796 (British Museum)
British Offensive Strategy against Europe 1793–1814 (Mallinson, Send It by Semaphore, p. 157)
Central London: Government Offices c. 1804–1812 (‘Plans of all the Houses and Grounds within the Cities of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark held under leases from the Crown and also Public Offices and other buildings under the direction of John Fordyce, Esq., Surveyor-General of HM Land Revenue, by John Marquand and Thomas Leverton, finished in the year 1804’, TNA, MPZ/10; Richard Horwood, ‘Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster and parts adjoining showing every house, 1797’, NMM, MID/6/11 & 12; Commission of Military Enquiry, First Report, p. 26; Crook and Port, King’s Works, Vol. VI, pp. 537–71; Cole, Arming the Navy, p. 31; Philips, East India Company, p. 19)
Somerset House Government Offices c. 1800 (Feilden and Mawson (Alan Robson), ‘Conservation Plan for Somerset House Trust’ (2008))
Shutter Telegraph and Coastal Signal Stations 1796–1814 (Kitchen, ‘Signal Stations’, 337–43; Mallinson, Send It by Semaphore, pp. 83, 225–6)
South-East England: Defensive Measures 1803–1810 (Clements, Martello Towers, pp. 20–30; Douet, Barracks, pp. 70, 75; Goodwin, Military Defence of West Sussex, pp. 70–71; Vine, Royal Military Canal, p. 53; Saunders, Fortress Britain, p. 131)
East Coast: Defensive Measures 1803–1812 (Clements, Martello Towers, pp. 210–11; Douet, Barracks, pp. 70, 75; Kitchen, ‘Signal Stations’, pp. 341–2; Mallinson, Send It by Semaphore, pp. 83, 226; Saunders, Fortress Britain, p. 143)
Post and Packet Services 1803–1814 (Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, p. 76; Trinder, Harwich Packets, p. xii)
Warship Building 1803–1815 (compiled by the author)
The Service of the West Essex Militia 1803–1816 (Digest of Services, West Essex Militia, TNA, WO 68/257)
As this book is concerned with over two decades of British history, and as many of the main politicians came from an aristocratic background or were promoted to the peerage, there were frequent changes of name. The following are the most important:
Henry Addington became Viscount Sidmouth on 12 January 1805.
Henry Dundas became Lord Melville in 1802 and was made first lord of the Admiralty in 1804. On his death in 1811, his son Robert Saunders Dundas became the second Lord Melville. In 1812 he was also appointed first lord of the Admiralty.
Charles Grey became Lord Howick in 1806 when his father was raised to the peerage as the first Earl Grey. On the death of his father on 14 November 1807 Charles became the second Earl Grey.
Robert Hobart was styled Lord Hobart in 1793, and on his father’s death on 14 November 1804 became the fourth earl of Buckinghamshire.
Robert Banks Jenkinson became Lord Hawkesbury in June 1796 when his father was created the first earl of Liverpool. On the death of his father in December 1808 he became Lord Liverpool, and was appointed prime minister in 1812.
Admiral Sir John Jervis was raised to the peerage as Earl St Vincent after the battle of that name on 14 February 1797.
Charles Middleton, comptroller of the Navy Board between 1778 and 1790 and on the Admiralty Board from 1794 to 1795, was created Lord Barham on 1 May 1805, from which point he was first lord of the Admiralty for ten months.
Dudley Ryder became Baron Harrowby on 20 June 1803 and the earl of Harrowby on 19 July 1809.
Robert Stewart became Viscount Castlereagh in 1796 and on the death of his father in 1821 became Lord Londonderry. As he was an Irish peer, he was a member of the House of Commons.
Arthur Wellesley was made Viscount Wellington after the Battle of Talavera on 4 September 1809, earl of Wellington on 28 February 1812 and the marquess of Wellington on 3 October 1812 after the Battle of Salamanca. He became the duke of Wellington on 11 May 1814.
Richard Wellesley, Arthur’s elder brother, became earl of Mornington in 1781 on the death of his father. He was created Marquess Wellesley in December 1799.
This story of the war effort against France begins in the 1780s, for the British government was preparing for conflict long before hostilities started in 1793. It continues for over twenty years, through the early 1800s when the First Consul and later emperor Napoleon, leading the French people and the many nations he subjugated, attempted to invade and conquer Britain. It ends in 1815, when the nations of Europe united for the last time to defeat him at Waterloo.
This is not a book about wholesale suffering and slaughter, starvation and devastation, which was the experience of large parts of the populations of central Germany, Russia, Spain and Portugal. Such was not the fate of British citizens; but they did experience more than twenty years of hard naval and military conflict, and, in consequence, significant casualties. Civilian Britain faced high taxation, social change and domestic unrest as well as long periods of intense political and public anxiety because of the threat of invasion when the emperor’s dominance was at its height. The war against Napoleon was more extensive and expensive than that against Revolutionary France: in the words of John Cookson, ‘a police action against a revolutionary regime had become a war of national survival.’1
I was brought up on the tradition of spectacular British naval victories in the French Revolutionary War, and the assumption that, although the war against Napoleon was protracted, final victory was inevitable. These images and memories are still very much with us. Most people (excepting a very few scholars) who read and think about the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars today do not realize how vulnerable Britain was at this time; nor are they aware of how many years its soldiers and seamen had to fight, and of how much its civilians had to endure, to secure the survival of the country. It was a world war in all but name, enveloping Europe but also stretching as far as America and India, with ferocious fighting right to the finish, between two systems of government, each using every possible resource to overcome the other. A British victory was finally achieved but only through radical efficiencies in the nation’s economic and political life: major reforms in the civil service, enormous growth in the quality and quantity of output by industrialists and farmers; and an acceptance of oppressive taxes by the rich and of military service by the less well off. Much of this is now forgotten. It may be that the horror of the Western Front in the First World War and the sheer size of the conflict in the Second World War have overshadowed the memory of the early-nineteenth-century French threat.2 Perhaps this is not surprising, even though the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars lasted a generation, nearly four times as long as either of the two terrible twentieth-century wars. But the experience of the misery of what has been called total war, the changes that accompany it and the lessons to be learnt from it extend much further back than the conflicts of the twentieth century.3 To the students of both, parallels between the Napoleonic War and the Second World War abound – in military and naval patterns of warfare, in stress among political and military leaders, in internal opposition and in distrust in relations with Continental allies. The most disturbing similarity is the plight of civilians on the Continent, displaced, ruined and starved by the campaigns of large armies.
There is much in the political world of Britain during the last fifteen years, too, that can be recognized in the period between 1793 and 1815. The danger to the state 200 years ago was more obvious and long-lasting, but unaccountable secret service dealings, the difficulties of judging incomplete intelligence and military operations of doubtful legality have a familiar ring. Echoes can be heard in some of the less benign consequences – of prolonged, unassailable parliamentary majorities, overconfidence, unminuted meetings, bitterly violent cabinet splits – though, as far as we know, no duels have been fought in recent times. The difficulties and compromises of coalition politics have lately been much in evidence, but 200 years ago similar political debates took place about the number of civil servants required and their cost, about the respective roles of the state and the private sector, and about the national debt and lax government accounting.
Yet these resemblances are not the reason why I wrote this book. Since my research student days I have been intrigued by the mechanics of eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British government; and here I attempt to show these at work, in relation to the armed forces and to society as a whole, at a time when extraordinary pressures were placed upon them. My academic curiosity was further whetted by my career as an administrator in the National Maritime Museum, which, as an institution partly publicly and partly privately or commercially funded, was subject to fluctuating financial resources and shifting political expectations. Exercising the art of the possible was a day-to-day necessity. I thus identify with Professor Bruce Collins, who reflected on his career in academic administration in the acknowledgements for his recent book on these wars, War and Empire. His career, he writes, was ‘an experience which has led me to be less ready to write loftily of military blundering and poor decision-making among those faced with uncertainty and confusion’.4
Since the scope of the book is very wide, and space is limited, I have omitted any explicit mention of debates among historians, and differing shades of interpretation, of which there have been many in the writing of the political, social and military histories of Britain in these years. Disagreeing with colleagues takes up too much space. For the same reason I have avoided the mention of recent concepts and code words used by the historical profession. The phrases ‘fiscal-military state’, ‘contractor state’ or ‘network theory’, for instance, cannot be found outside this Foreword: nor, indeed, the word ‘trope’. Specialists in the period will be able to discern where I stand on most of these interpretations, and this book very obviously rests on the shoulders of the work of many scholars.
Though I have been thinking about some of the issues that this book addresses for more than forty years, its genesis came about, almost unconsciously, when I read Philip Harling’s The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’ in the quiet of the Huntington Library in the course of a short fellowship there in 2007. It could have hardly been written, however, without the extensive scholarship and thoughtful writing, over forty years, of Piers Mackesy and the late John Ehrman.5 The work of the present generation of naval historians, Michael Duffy, Roger Morriss and Nicholas Rodger, has been invaluable; so, too, have Rory Muir’s and Christopher Hall’s work on the government, strategy and the army, and John Cookson’s on the militia and volunteers in Britain.6 Dominic Lieven’s recent book includes valuable work on the supply and logistics of the Russian Army between 1812 and 1813.7 In these days of searchable internet databases, I would also like to mention how critically important books of reference have been to me. I have referred constantly to recent comprehensive compilations on the navy by Rif Winfield and on the army by Robert Burnham and Ron McGuigan.8 It would have been impossible to navigate the government of the time without the House of Commons volumes, edited by Roland Thorne (1986), or the Office-Holders in Modern Britain series, compiled with exact scholarship by Sir John Sainty and Michael Collinge in the 1970s and 1980s.9
A word on the book’s structure. Presenting twenty highly complex years of politics and warfare requires more than a simple narrative, particularly as the war grows in size and scope after the end of the Peace of Amiens in May 1803. The book’s chapters become more strongly themed and cross-referenced in order to analyse what was happening on different fronts – intelligence, diplomacy, communications, supply, finance and technology. The first appendix lists ministers and the senior government boards; the second lays out the parliamentary commissions that reformed the administration of the army and navy in the Napoleonic War, and is of special relevance to Chapter 11.
Friends and colleagues who kindly read individual chapters have been enormously helpful. Patricia Crimmin, a source of sage advice for over forty years, cast a shrewd eye over the chapters on administration. Other chapters have also been read by Sarah Palmer, the founding director of the Greenwich Maritime Institute, and my recent partners there in the Leverhulme-funded project on the victualling of the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1815, Martin Wilcox and James Davey. Jonathan Coad, Huw Davies, John Houlding and Stephen Wood also generously gave their time to read various sections. Michael Duffy and Bruce Collins read the complete script in great detail at a late stage. My warmest thanks to them all. Any errors that remain are of course my responsibility.
I have long pondered the distance between the two tribes of naval historians and military historians, and my thanks go to those who welcomed me into the history of the British Army in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Tom Bartlett, Hugh Boscawen, René Chartrand, Bruce Collins, Tim Cooke, Andrew Cormack, Michael Crumplin, Kenneth Ferguson, Alan Guy, Yolande Hodson and Stephen Wood, among others, have been helpful at all times. Kevin Linch at Leeds and the community of historians that he has gathered on his website ‘Soldiers and Soldiering 1750–1815’ have both instructed and entertained. The meetings of the ‘Contractor State Group’ at overseas conferences considering the comparative economic history of several nations have been continually stimulating. Among the participants of these meetings, I must thank Huw Bowen, Stephen Conway and Richard Harding, while Rafael Torres Sánchez and Sergio Solbes worked hard in organizing us all and publishing the proceedings. I have also benefited from unpublished work from Dan Benjamin, Bob Sutcliffe, Margrit Schulte Beerbühl and Anais Tissot-Pontabry. For help with references and points of interpretation I am indebted to Will Ashworth, Troy Bickham, Tim Clayton, Gareth Cole, Ken Cozens, Anthony Cross, Jeremiah Dancy, Helen Doe, Stuart Drabble, John Dunne, David Edgerton, John Hattendorf, Margaret Makepeace, Robert Malster, Maria Cristina Moreira, Keith Oliver, Jan Ruger, Tim Walker, Adrian Webb, Clive Wilkinson, Glyn Williams, Richard Woodman and Edward Yescombe. The late Michael Stammers was always willing to proffer help and I shall miss his support in the future.
Old friends have helped too. Jonathan Coad guided me around the fortifications at Dover that used to be in his care when he worked for English Heritage. His tour of the Western Heights, normally closed to the public, gave me a dramatic insight into the anti-invasion measures of the time. Only when you stand on these huge fortifications, looking down at the old port of Dover, is it possible to appreciate their scale and their importance to the defence of Britain, and why governments of the day poured so much money into them. Alan Frost sent me some examples of informal, unminuted government decisions, the bane of eighteenth-century and, no doubt shortly, of contemporary historians. My erstwhile colleagues at the National Maritime Museum have been most supportive, in particular Gillian Hutchinson, Pieter van der Merwe and Richard Ormond. Patricia Lynesmith made papers available at short notice at the Castle and Regimental Museum, Monmouth. Paul Catlow of the Somerset House Trust found invaluable plans of the occupancy of the offices in that great building 200 years ago. Sim Comfort allowed me to see a manuscript from his remarkable collection of eighteenth-century naval artefacts and papers. Robin Gilbert sent me the lively account of an invasion panic from his family papers. Alan Guy and Peter Boyden of the National Army Museum located an important unpublished paper by S. G. P. Ward, a soldier–scholar whose reflective authority is undiminished, even though he wrote more than a generation ago. To all these, I am grateful for their assistance.
I am very much in the debt of Stuart Proffitt, my publisher at Allen Lane/Penguin, who in the beginning helped me to frame the idea of this book, and who maintained steady encouragement and sure judgement throughout the years of its writing. My thanks also to my agent, Peter Robinson, and to Donna Poppy, who has been the most understanding and thorough of editors. Richard Duguid, Ruth Stimson, Stephen Ryan, Chris Shaw and Donald Futers have provided other forms of invaluable support. John Gilkes has very professionally turned my pencil-drawn tracings into attractive and I hope useful maps. Although acknowledgements for illustrations are listed separately, I would especially like to thank the present Lord Liverpool for providing an image of the Hoppner portrait of his great-great-uncle.
Documents and printed sources come from the National Archives, the Institute of Historical Research, the Bank of England Archives, the National Army Museum and the National Maritime Museum, and I am grateful as ever to the hardworking staff members who facilitated my research. I have also used material from earlier research projects over the last decade from the British Library and the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter. During the writing of this book, most of the libraries and archives had long periods of restricted service or were closed for refurbishment; only the library of the Athenaeum soldiered on throughout, and I was willingly assisted there by Kay Walters, Laura Duran and Annette Rockall, particularly when they borrowed books for me from the London Library. Three more distant libraries had valuable manuscript collections, and permission to quote from them has come from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
I have noticed that the authors of history books, in particular, enthusiastically acknowledge the support of their spouses, perhaps because these books take a long time to write and domestic disruption becomes a way of life. My wife, Jane, has accumulated my gratitude in industrial quantities. I have been especially fortunate that she studied history into her twenties before she had to drop the subject to take up another career. For this project she has been research assistant, document transcriber, conference attendee, intelligence expert and much else besides. She has read every word I have written, several times, pencil in hand. Britain Against Napoleon is dedicated to her, with love and thanks.
Charlton, West Sussex
October 2012