The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (57 page)

The war might have gone on a good deal longer than it did but for the death, on 9 July 1746, of Philip V of Spain. Philip himself had been anything but bellicose, spending much of his time either at his devotions or listening to the music he loved. From the moment of their marriage, however, he had been utterly dominated by his wife, whose Italian ambitions had done much to exacerbate the current hostilities, and in his last years his increasingly frequent bouts of insanity had strengthened her hold on him still further. The new king, Ferdinand VI–the sole survivor of Philip’s four children by his first wife, Maria Louisa of Savoy–had inherited all his father’s indolence and readiness to be guided by his consort; on the other hand, his Portuguese queen, Maria Barbara of Braganza, possessed none of her predecessor’s fire. For the moment, the war continued, but close ties had existed between Britain and Portugal since the days of John of Gaunt in the fourteenth century, and negotiations quietly began between the courts of Lisbon and London to bring about a peaceful settlement. One of Ferdinand’s first actions on ascending the throne was to dismiss his Foreign Minister, the openly pro-French Marquis of Villarias, and to replace him with an Anglophile descendant of Gaunt’s, Don José de Carvajal y Lancaster.

At last, thanks largely to the Queen and Carvajal, the Treaty of Aixla-Chapelle was signed in 1748 and the war came to an end. The only true victor was Frederick of Prussia, who had started it in the first place. Charles Emmanuel kept Savoy and Nice, together with a strip of Lombardy which brought his eastern frontier to the river Ticino. Don Philip secured Parma and Piacenza. The Pragmatic Sanction was given renewed guarantees, and Maria Theresa’s husband was duly recognised as the Emperor Francis I. True, Anglo-Spanish relations were now friendlier than they had been for half a century and more; to many people, nevertheless, the War of the Austrian Succession must have seemed to have been hardly worth the fighting.

As we know, the British had had their eye on the island of Minorca since the beginning of the century. They had successfully insisted upon it at Utrecht and had confidently believed that it would be a permanent addition to their empire. In fact, this first period of British rule was to last less than fifty years; on the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, one of the first actions of Louis XV was to despatch an expedition under the famously libertine Duc de Richelieu to capture the island. With his garrison of barely 3,000 men, the eighty-four-year-old Irish Lieutenant-Governor, William Blakeney, put up a splendid resistance, but he knew that without substantial reinforcements he could not hold out for long. Fortunately, such reinforcements were available: a squadron of ten ships of the line was lying at Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Sir John Byng, who had clear instructions that in the event of any attack on Minorca ‘he was to use all possible means in his power for its relief’.

Although the Governor of Gibraltar had at the last moment refused to part with the battalion of infantry which he had been ordered to send–a decision which was subsequently to lead to his court-martial and disgrace–Byng sailed on 8 May and reached Port Mahon eleven days later. On the afternoon of the following day, 20 May, he bore down on the French fleet. In point of numbers the two were equal, but the French vessels were considerably larger, carrying heavier armament and more men. Such a superiority should not by itself have proved decisive, but Byng, almost at the start of the engagement, made a disastrous tactical error, leaving his line dangerously exposed to the enemy guns. The French took full advantage and left the British fleet effectively disabled. They made no attempt to follow up their victory; nevertheless, after holding a council of war, Byng decided to head back to Gibraltar, abandoning Minorca to its fate.

Still Blakeney refused to surrender, though his garrison in Fort St Philip was now under constant fire. By this time the besiegers too were beginning to suffer, both from dysentery–always a danger in siege conditions–and from the unremitting heat. They were well aware that another British fleet, greatly superior to Byng’s, was on its way to the island under the command of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, and Richelieu was anxious to conclude matters before its arrival. He accordingly ordered a night attack, and at a council of war held by Blakeney the morning after, 29 June, all its members but three agreed that–given reasonable terms–the only sensible course was surrender. Approaching Mahon a few days later, Hawke passed a French convoy carrying the surviving members of the garrison back to Gibraltar; only then did he realise that he was too late.

When the news reached London, there was a surge of enthusiasm for Blakeney–who, it was revealed, had never once removed his clothes during the seventy days of the siege. King George II appropriately made him a Knight of the Bath, honorary colonel of the Enniskillen Regiment and finally Lord Blakeney of Mount Blakeney in the peerage of Ireland. Admiral Byng was less lucky. On 27 January 1757 a court-martial at Portsmouth found him guilty of dereliction of duty and sentenced him to death. The court added a strong recommendation to mercy, on the grounds that it did not believe that the admiral’s action was prompted by cowardice or disaffection, but the King refused to commute the sentence. On 14 March 1757 Byng was shot on the quarterdeck of HMS
Monarque
in Portsmouth harbour.

After Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus, the island of Corsica is the fourth largest in the Mediterranean. Its early history was very much what might have been expected: after a fairly active prehistory, successive occupations by Greeks, Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Lombards and Arabs. In the eighth century, rather more surprisingly, it passed into the hands of the Papacy, who in 1077 entrusted it to the Bishop of Pisa. Under the Pisans, Corsica knew efficient and enlightened government for the first time. The island’s economy developed, the arts began to flourish: those two magnificent flowers of early Romanesque, the cathedral of Nebbio and the church of La Canonica, date from the beginning of the twelfth century. Inevitably, however, such a pearl in Pisa’s crown aroused the cupidity of her implacable rival, Genoa, and during the bitter struggles between the two sea republics throughout the later Middle Ages–in which they were sometimes joined by the Kingdom of Aragon–anarchy returned. Eventually, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Genoa established firm control over the island, which it was to maintain, with a few wobbles, for some three hundred years.

There then appeared on the Corsican scene the heroic figure of Pasquale Paoli. His father, Giaquinto, had led an uprising against Genoa in 1735, but after four years’ fighting had been ultimately unsuccessful; he and Pasquale had been lucky to escape a worse fate than exile to Naples. There Pasquale had studied at the military academy, preparing himself to carry on the struggle for independence, and in 1755 he was ready. He returned to Corsica, overcame the Genoese–who, however, refused to renounce their claim–declared an independent state and was elected to power under a constitution as liberal and democratic as any in Europe. Over the next nine years he pacified the hitherto turbulent island. He encouraged industries, built a fleet and instituted a system of national education, complete with university. Throughout this period he kept up a defensive and initially inconclusive war against Genoa, but Genoa sought the assistance of France and, in 1768, sold to the French her rights. France strengthened the Corsican garrisons to six full regiments, and in 1769, after twelve months of guerrilla warfare, Paoli was obliged to flee to England.

On 15 August of that same year, a baby boy was born in a house on the Rue Saint-Charles in Ajaccio. His name–in the Italian which was then Corsica’s national language–was Napoleone Buonaparte.

Almost exactly ten years before Napoleon’s birth, in August 1759, the Spanish King Ferdinand VI died at the age of forty-six. His mental powers had never been strong, and the death of his beloved wife in the previous year had had a disastrous effect upon him. He had become more and more reclusive, refused to speak and eventually lapsed into complete insanity. Strangely enough, he had been a remarkably good king. With the help of Queen Barbara he had restored the national finances, built up a formidable fleet, enthusiastically encouraged the arts and sciences and clamped down on the Inquisition, putting an end to the public
autos-da-fé
that so shocked eighteenth-century Europe. Many a monarch has done worse.

His kingdom now passed to his half-brother Charles III of Naples, the Queen Dowager Elizabeth Farnese becoming regent pending Charles’s arrival in Spain. The new king’s eldest son being an imbecile, as part of this royal reshuffle Charles designated his second son–also called Charles–to be Prince of Asturias and heir to the Spanish throne, abdicating the crown of Naples and the Two Sicilies in favour of his third son Ferdinand, then a child of eight. These dispensations completed, he and his wife, Amalia of Saxony, set sail for Barcelona with their family. On 9 December they reached Madrid, where the King was reunited with his mother for the first time since his departure twenty-eight years before. The two embraced affectionately, but Charles soon made it clear that he was his own man and had no intention of allowing Elizabeth any influence in state affairs. She soon retired to her palace at San Ildefonso, and never–even after the death of Queen Amalia only three months later–returned to Madrid.

Although Charles may not have been exceptionally intelligent, he was industrious, conscientious, deeply pious and utterly honest, and could call on over a quarter of a century’s experience as a ruler. At the same time he was a Bourbon through and through, and he had neither forgiven nor forgotten the British threat to bombard Naples seventeen years before. Now, with the Seven Years’ War half-way through its course, he hated to see British arms almost everywhere triumphant over French. As a Spaniard, he was well aware of his country’s continuing grievances against England over smuggling, contraband and the searching by the British of Spanish ships, to say nothing of various other disputes ranging from claims to the coast of Honduras to fishing rights off Newfoundland. When, therefore, the French Foreign Minister, the Duc de Choiseul, suggested to him that an English victory might prove calamitous to the Spanish dominions in the Americas, he found a ready listener.

The result was the signature, in August 1761, of two treaties together known as the Family Compact, whereby France agreed to make any conclusion of peace conditional on the settlement of Spanish grievances, while Spain undertook in return to enter the war at once if these terms were rejected. At this point–and before there was any question of peace between Britain and France–the British government demanded an explanation of Spain’s obvious military preparations. Spain refused to reply, expelled the British ambassador Lord Bristol and imposed an embargo on all British shipping in Spanish ports. The Seven Years’ War had now entered a new, Mediterranean phase. This proved, however, to be of remarkably short duration, and to have repercussions as far afield as the Caribbean and the Pacific. In August 1762 one British fleet captured Havana, and little more than a month later another one accepted the surrender of Manila. No wonder that by the year’s end France and Spain were ready for peace.

The treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War was signed in Paris on 20 February 1763. It contained only one clause of direct relevance to the Mediterranean: the restitution of Minorca to Britain. The Americas, on the other hand, were largely transformed. Britain acquired Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and a number of islands in the Caribbean from France, which also surrendered Senegal; in return France regained Martinique and Guadeloupe, and was guaranteed fishing rights off Newfoundland.
¹⁸¹
Her former settlements in India were also restored to her, with the proviso that they might not be fortified. Spain for her part recovered Havana from Britain, but had to cede Florida in exchange; she also recovered Manila and the Philippines. Her most important new acquisition, however, was the formerly French territory of Louisiana. This was presumably some compensation for the loss of Florida, but to Charles III it must have been all too clear that he had made his first major mistake as King of Spain: to have listened to Choiseul. His predecessor’s policy of strict neutrality had been the right one. The Seven Years’ War would have been more wisely followed from the sidelines.

CHAPTER XX

The Siege of Gibraltar

On 4 July 1776, as all the world knows, the British colonies of North America declared their independence. The conflict that had begun as a dispute over British colonial affairs had developed in just two years into a crisis after which the world would never be the same. In March 1778 France joined the fray on America’s side, Louis XVI–who had succeeded his grandfather four years before–doing everything he could to persuade Charles III of Spain to follow his example. Charles was initially doubtful. His last-minute participation in the Seven Years’ War had proved catastrophic; more recently, an expedition against the Algerian pirates in 1774 had been less of a disaster than a disgrace. He desperately needed a few military successes. Moreover, he himself possessed vast colonies in the New World–did he really want to encourage revolution among them? Finally, he was angry with Louis. By the terms of the Family Compact the French King should have consulted him before entering into his American alliance; now he was calling on Spain to join him in the name of that very same pact. Charles therefore offered his services as mediator between the two sides. Britain, he proposed, should suspend hostilities for a year; during that time the American colonies were to be treated as independent and there would be a peace conference in Madrid, in which the American representatives would be on an equal footing with those of Britain. The price of this mediation would, it need hardly be said, be Gibraltar.

The British government, not altogether surprisingly, turned him down flat. His proposal, it declared, ‘seemed to proceed on every principle which had been disclaimed, and to contain every term which had been rejected’. Faced with this, in June 1779 Charles too declared war. For the future of Britain’s American colonies he cared not a jot, but Gibraltar and Minorca were prizes worth the winning. The question was, how could they best be won? He considered no less than sixty-nine separate suggestions. One of the first–and perhaps one of the best–was an invasion of England. He and the French together could easily have mustered both a fleet large enough to overwhelm the Royal Navy in the Channel and an army capable of dealing with the relatively few British forces who were not fighting in America. But the idea did not ultimately appeal: Charles preferred something more direct. He decided to put Gibraltar under siege.

That siege began on 11 July 1779, when the newly-arrived Spanish commander, Martín Alvarez de Sotomayor, fired a single shot from Fort St Barbara across the border. The British general Sir William Green replied–it was the first time that his guns had been fired in anger for over half a century–and kept up the barrage for some twenty-four hours. Over the next two months the besiegers dug themselves in, built gun emplacements and provided themselves with shelter for the coming winter, while their forces steadily gathered in strength: by the end of October they numbered well over 14,000. The British garrison, by contrast, amounted to some 4,000 officers and men, plus 1,300 Hanoverians; the Governor, General George Augustus Eliott, also had to reckon with some 1,500 soldiers’ wives and children and a local population of another 2,000. Food, he saw, would be a serious problem. Since the Spanish blockade was not yet total, he encouraged all who felt like it to leave the Rock as soon as possible. A number of Jews and Genoese agreed to do so, and made their way in small boats to Portugal or the Barbary Coast; the remainder were obliged to stay until the arrival of a convoy from Britain–if one got through.

From the start, Green set a stern example to his men. To save food–and to augment its supply–he had one of his own horses shot. To calculate minimum food needs, he lived for a week on four ounces of rice a day. And he stood no nonsense: one of his officers, Captain John Spilsbury, wrote in his diary:

October 3. It seems one 58th was overheard saying that if the Spaniards came, damn him that he would not join them: the Governor said he must be mad and ordered his head to be shaved, to be blistered, bled and sent to the Provost on bread and water, wear a tight waistcoat and be prayed for in church.

It was not until 16 January 1780 that the good news finally came. A fleet of twenty-one ships
¹⁸²
under Admiral Sir George Rodney had attacked a squadron of ten Spanish vessels off Cape St Vincent, destroying two, taking four and putting the rest to flight. In a separate engagement he had also captured fifteen merchantmen. The blockade was broken; provisions and supplies were landed, together with 1,000 Highlanders; the wives and children of most of the rank and file were carried away to safety. There was only one cause for distress: the relief had brought no wine or rum. As the Governor pointed out, ‘The want of strong liquor will perhaps be more severely felt by the Soldier than the curtailing of a small part of his provisions, and possibly might affect his health, from the alteration of a habit he is accustomed to.’

Meanwhile, the siege was by no means over. By early spring a savage epidemic of smallpox broke out on the Rock and was soon taking a heavy toll. The Spanish blockade was tightened again, and as the year dragged on provisions once more grew desperately short. The Spaniards meanwhile were quiescent, and the defenders had to contend with another serious threat to their morale: boredom.

The new year of 1781 began badly. On 11 January two Moorish galleys were seen approaching under a flag of truce. They carried the British consul in Tangier and his wife, together with about 130 British subjects, all expelled from Morocco after its Sultan had leased Tangier and Tetouan to Spain. This meant that no more supplies could be expected from Barbary, and that Eliott had another 130 mouths to feed. Yet somehow he managed to struggle on until at last, at daybreak on 12 April, Admiral George Darby brought his fleet into the Bay of Algeciras. At first it was obscured by a mist, but, wrote another eyewitness, Captain John Drinkwater:

As the sun became more powerful the fog gradually rose, like the curtain of a vast theatre, discovering to the anxious garrison one of the most beautiful and pleasing scenes it is possible to conceive. The convoy, consisting of near a hundred vessels, were in a compact body, led by several men-of-war; their sails just enough filled for steerage, whilst the majority of the line-of-battle ships lay-to under the Barbara shore, having orders not to enter the bay lest the enemy should molest them with their fire-ships. The ecstasies of the inhabitants at this grand and exhilarating sight are not to be described. Their expressions of joy far exceeded their former exultations.

It was a quarter to eleven when the first vessel dropped anchor, and at that very moment the Spanish emplacements opened fire. Instantly, rejoicing changed to astonishment, astonishment to panic. The threat of bombardment had existed since the beginning of the siege, but for eighteen months there had been nothing but an occasional desultory shot, and the people had largely forgotten the danger. Now, suddenly, the horror was upon them–a hail of shells and cannonballs, spreading devastation and havoc through the little town. In the early afternoon it slackened, then stopped altogether–even with the future of Gibraltar at stake, the Spaniards were not going to forgo their siesta–but it started again at five o’clock that evening and continued throughout the night.

The next morning revealed a town in ruins–and also, through the crumbling walls of the houses, the storerooms of the traders, many of them bursting with secret provisions of every kind which they had deliberately withheld in order to dole them out item by item for exorbitant prices. Inevitably there was wholesale looting, particularly from the wine merchants. On Sunday morning, 15 April, Captain Spilsbury noted with distaste that ‘such a scene of drunkenness, debauchery and destruction was hardly ever seen before.’ In an attempt to restore order, a group of officers armed with axes made a round of the provision stores, staving in barrels until the streets ran with wine and brandy.

Through it all, the unloading went on at the rate of ten ships a day. Admiral Darby had orders to sail with the first favourable wind, and the victuallers had no wish to be left behind. It was soon discovered, however, that the government in England had forgotten to send one all-important commodity: gunpowder. Eliott had no alternative but to beg as much as possible from Admiral Darby, who was happy to oblige with 2,280 barrels. ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘the noble defence you are preparing to make which has induced me to stretch this supply to the utmost…Happy am I in doing everything in my power for the Service of the Garrison on which are fixed the Eyes of the whole World.’

On 20 April the Admiral was ready to sail. Whereas on the outward journey the vessels had been loaded to the gunwales with stores, the freight they carried on their return was largely human: most of the officers’ wives and children, and virtually all the remaining Jews and Genoese, many of whom had paid dearly for their places on board. They probably amounted to half the total population of the Rock.

May 7th 1781.

My Lord,

I must not conceal from you the scandalous irregularity of the British Regiments composing this Garrison ever since the Enemy opened his Batteries; except Rapes and Murders, there is no one crime but what they have been repeatedly guilty of and that in the most daring manner…Things are so bad that not a sentinel at his post but will connive at and assist in robbing even The King’s Stores under his charge…

This letter, written by Eliott to Lord Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces, makes it all too clear that the town of Gibraltar, already largely destroyed, was now being systematically sacked by its supposed defenders. The Governor took firm measures against them: the artificers Samuel Whitaker and Simon Pratts were hanged on 30 May, and William Rolls of the 58th Regiment was given a thousand lashes, administered in public on the South Parade. Even without legal retribution, however, the looters were still risking their lives: the bombardment continued without remission. The several diaries and logbooks take a gruesome delight in describing the casualties: ‘Two men killed one of which was in the office easing Nature when a Ball took off his head and left His Body, the only remains to finish Nature’s cause.’ Nor was all the damage done by the shore batteries; there were now quantities of small Spanish gunboats lying off the Rock and keeping up a constant barrage at anything that moved. They were particularly dangerous at night; Mrs Catherine Upton, wife of one of the ensigns, described how ‘a woman, whose tent was a little below mine, was cut in two as she was drawing on her stockings.’ ‘These infernal spit-fires,’ she added, ‘can attack any quarter of the Garrison as they please.’ On 23 May, her diary continued,

at about one o’clock in the morning, our old disturbers the gun-boats began to fire upon us. I wrapped a blanket about myself and the children, and ran to the side of a rock…Mrs Tourale, a handsome and agreeable lady, was blown almost to atoms! Nothing was found of her but one arm. Her brother who sat by her, and his clerk, both shared the same fate.

The good news was that the besiegers had abandoned the blockade. It had not anyway been singularly successful, and now that it had failed to prevent the delivery of enough stores and provisions for the next two years there seemed little point in going on. Communications with the outside world were restored, and food and drink were once again plentiful, but the siege went on regardless.

The summer heat, too–the worst that Captain Spilsbury had experienced in his twelve years in Gibraltar–began to take its toll on both sides. By the end of July the Spaniards were firing only three shots a day, so regularly that the garrison began to refer to them as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. (A major explosion in their powder magazine on 9 June may have been partly responsible.) Among the besieged, tempers grew short. On 22 July a major and the adjutant of the 72nd fought a duel with three pistols each; fortunately they missed with all six. A few days later the garrison watched tight-lipped while a Franco-Spanish invasion fleet sailed eastward through the straits bound for Minorca. There was no doubt that the island’s Lieutenant-Governor, General James Murray, would need all the help he could get.

With the approach of autumn the atmosphere on the Rock, both physical and social, improved. In October, however, the defenders saw to their anxiety that the Spaniards were building two new parallel batteries along the isthmus, uncomfortably close to the boundary and protected by huge banks of sand which were virtually impenetrable by the British guns. It was plain that an all-out assault was intended.

And so, on 27 November at a quarter to three in the morning, over 2,000 men and 100 sailors–about a third of the whole garrison–led by a detachment of Hanoverian grenadiers, filed in silence out of the fortress, through the devastated town and out on to the isthmus. The Governor–he was to turn sixty-five on Christmas Day–was among them. His absence from the garrison was distinctly improper, but he had been unable to resist. There was some counter-fire, but surprisingly little; after a few token shots the Spaniards, taken entirely by surprise, fled before the invaders. One by one the Spanish emplacements were destroyed, their powder magazines ignited. By five o’clock all was over and the force returned, with eighteen prisoners, to the Rock. The operation had been a complete success. Equally important, perhaps, was the effect on the garrison’s morale. The looting stopped as if by magic. The total casualties were five killed, twenty-five wounded; one of the Highlanders, it was reported, had lost his kilt.