The Years of Endurance (46 page)

By heaven, the sacrilegious dog

Shall fuel be to boil it."
¹

In England the song of
the
hour was " The Snug Little Island " from Thomas Dibdin's patriotic play,
The British Raft.
First sung at Sadler's Wells on Easter Monday, 1797, it had quickly acquired an immense popularity:

" Since Freedom and Neptune have hitherto kept tune,

In each saying, ' this shall be my land ';

Should the army of
England,
or all they could bring land,

We'd show 'em some play for the island.

We'll fight for our right to the island,

We'll give them enough of the island,

Invaders should just bite at the dust,

But not a bit more of the island! "

The organisation of the Volunteer forces remained haphazard. The Prince of Wales enrolled his servants
en masse
in a corps attached to the parish of St. James's; the Duke of Northumberland provided clothing and equipment and service pay at a shilling a day for all his tenants and labourers; the Phoenix Insurance Office turned its firemen into gunners; and the Bank of England raised eight companies from its clerks to defend its buildings. Every type of uniform and headgear was worn, for every corps chose its own: bearskins, helmets with feathers or hair cockades, facings of red, blue, black, yellow or white.
²
The only feature common to all was a small breastplate bearing the regimental name or initial. Some places even formed juvenile corps for training boys in " military manners." Every morning the King was up before dawn signing commissions for all these martial bodies: he indeed was in the heyday of glory. Gillray portrayed him—"
medio tutissimus ibis
"—grinning happily

¹
Burns's
last
days
were
troubled
by
a
bill
for
£7 4s.
for
his
volunteer uniform.
His
comrades
of
the
Dumfries
Volunteers—"
the
awkward
squad
" —gave
him
a
soldier's
burial,
little
guessing
whom
they
were
honouring.

²
"
The
first
Company
of
the
Bath
Volunteers
met
this
day
and
elected for
their
Captain,
Mr.
Bossier
;
First
Lieutenant,
Captain
Young
;
Second Lieutenant,
Mr.
Redwood.
They
likewise
chose
at
the
same
time
for
their uniform,
a
scarlet
jacket
with
black
collar
and
lappels,
white
waistcoat,
and blue
pantaloons
edged
with
red."—
Bath Chronicle,
3rd
May,
1798,
cit. Wheeler
and
Broadley,
I,
132.

in the midst of a crowd of his devoted people, stout, curtseying matrons, adoring damsels and cadaverous, pigtailed army officers.

" I did not enjoy much of poor Mr. Hoare's company," wrote Hannah More after a visit to town, " so occupied was he in arming and exercising. He rises at half-
past four at M
itcham, trots off to town to be ready to meet at six the Fleet Street Corps, performing their evolutions in the area of Bridewell, the only place where they can find sufficient space; then comes back to a late dinner, and as soon as it is over, goes to his committees, after which he has a sergeant to drill himself and his three sons on the lawn till it is dark."
¹
For the country in its sober way never doubted that the French ruffians would attempt to land any more than it doubted— provided every Briton did his utmost—that they would meet a bloody end. The venture might be a desperate one, but after five years of war every one knew that the French Jacobins were ruthless monsters who would stop at nothing. Pitt himself, writing in January, felt sure that an invasion would be attempted before the end of the year. The print shops were full of drawings of French rafts and of blood-curdling invasion posters for display on town walls and church doors predicting murders, rapes and robberies. Bonaparte's name had at last begun to circulate among a people notoriously late in their apprehension of Continental events;
²
not as the romantic young genius of patriotic French imagination but as a perverted
little
monster, slighdy comic and wholly horrible, who ground soldiers' bones beneath his carriage wheels, doted on the groans of the dying and perpetuated ghastly massacres, not for policy but for pleasure.

Assured of such a satanic visitation, even the clergy could hardly be restrained from flying to arms. In April, 1798, the Archbishops were forced to issue a circular enjoining them not to abandon their sacred calling for a soldier's, in which their service could be but very limited and might not even be wanted at all. " But," it added, " if the danger should be realised and the enemy set foot upon our

¹
7th
May,
1798,
Hannah More,
II,
12.
It
was,
however,
much
the
same in
her
Somerset
home.
"
Our
quiet
village
begins
to
wear
a
very
military aspect.
.
.
.
Our
most
respectable
neighbours
were
forming
Volunteer corps
at
their
own
expense
;
and
the
coast
just
below
being
one
of
the places
which
lie
most
open
to
invasion,
gun-boats
are
stationed
and
fortifications
erected."

²
Despite
his
astonishing
Italian
victories,
there
is
no
mention
of
him
in the
Annual Register
for
1797.

shores, our hand with that of every man must in every way be against those who come for purposes of rapine and desolation, the vowed champions of anarchy and irreligion, defying the living God." A month later the Bishop of London was forced to suspend his Pastoral journey, his Essex diocesans being too full of the prospect of an invasion to pay any attention to ecclesiastical orders.

In spite of all this martial activity and the complete confidence of the average Briton in his power to deal with an invader, there were some misgivings. For one thing there was so grave a shortage of arms that in many districts balls had to be issued for use with fowling pieces. Even from first-line positions like the Isle of Wight came complaints that, though the Militia had been instructed in the use of cannon, these had never arrived.
¹
" Associations are forming rapidly and of a real useful kind," a local enthusiast wrote to Whitehall, " but we shall be able to do nothing without arms. . . . We must have the number required from some quarter. We must not suffer again this spirit to cool." In a commercial country much given to individual self-help and little to national planning, there was an inevitable tendency to leave such matters to chance and the laws of supply and demand. An advertisement in the
Bath Chronicle
shows how much:

" The Members
of the
Bath Armed Association
may be supplied with
Warranted Firelocks
at £2 each at
Stothert & Co.'s
warehouse, No. 15 Northgate Street.

" Likewise
Pistols
and
Swords
from the first manufactory.
Belts
and
Cartouch Boxes."

It was not only the Volunteers who raised misgivings in the few
people in England who knew something of the new continental
warfare and the technique of the Revolutionary armies. That fine
old soldier, Lord Cornwallis, wrote on February 23rd to a brother
of the future Duke of Wellington: "
I
have no doubt of the courage
and fidelity of our Milit
ia, but the system of David Dun
das and the
total want of light infantry sit heavy on my mind."
²
The new
Regular Army had had too little training in European fields to cope
on equal terms in enclosed country with a supremely active enemy
fresh from triumphs over the most powerful and warlike nations
in Europe. Even a politician like Windham was full of apprehen
sion
-
¹
Wheeler and Broadley,
I,
112.

²
Cornwallis,
II,
333
-4.

at the deficiency in equipment, the endless muddle and delays, the vague indecisiveness of the dispositions which the Cabinet was perpetually discussing and amending.
¹

Not that the Cabinet was without a plan. It had many. " I hope," Pitt wrote in January, 1798, " we shall have to make the option between burning their ships before they set out, or sinking them either on their passage or before their troops can land, or destroying them as soon as they have landed, or starving them and taking them prisoners afterwards." Innumerable suggestions were canvassed, ranging from an antiquarian's report on the measures used against the Armada to an ingenious Pimlico machinist's new war chariot, " in which two persons, advancing or retreating, can manage two pieces of ordnance (three-pounders) with alacrity and in safety, so as to do execution at the distance of two furlongs."
²
Directors were appointed to evacuate cattle and vehicles and waste the countryside in the enemy's path and elaborate instructions issued to the public for the house to house defence of London. Blockhouses were to be built in every square, barricades erected in the principal streets with bells to summon the inhabitants to their stations, hand-grenades served out to corner-houses, night cellars searched for aliens, underground tunnels blocked, fire engines mobilised, guards posted at water works and on bridges, and all boats moved to the north bank of the Thames.

But these preparations would probably have availed
little
had the country's first line of defence not been the sea. The Channel Fleet with its advance division of great ships off Brest, the light squadrons of frigates and gunboats in the Downs, St. Helens, Portland Road, Cawsand Bay and the Western Approaches, were the real bulwark against the invader. The Admiralty was full of vigour and new-found confidence that spring. It even abandoned its professional conservatism to enrol from the hardy smugglers and fishermen of the south coast an amateur force of Sea Fencibles, to serve in flotillas, gather intelligence and guard the lesser creeks and coves. Gillray came out in February with a cartoon, " The Storm Rising," portraying Fox and his traitor crew vainly hauling over the embattled raft of" Liberty " with its bloody banners of Slavery, Murder, Atheism, Plunder, Blasphemy, while Pitt to repel it blew

¹
The Diary of the Rt. Hon. William Windham
(ed.
Baring)
395.

²
Wheeler
and
Broadley,
I,
119.