Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (24 page)

As Napoleon accompanied this plan with a vast expenditure on military roads to the coast, it seems that he intended it seriously. Yet, by any - seaman's reckoning, the odds against it were overwhelming. It postulated two simultaneous escapes from ports blockaded by superior forces, the raising of two other blockades without a fleet action, a junction six thousand miles away in an area to which attention had already been drawn by Missiessy's depredations and—most unlikely of all—the weakening of England's western defences at the very moment when the French and Spanish fleets were known to be at sea. The Emperor's assumption that the British would disperse in an eleventh-hour attempt to save their trade and colonies ran so contrary to all that was known of their naval strategy that it is hard to avoid the conclusion, either that like a spoilt child he was resolved not to admit his own error, or that he was deliberately trying to shift the responsibility for its failure on to his Admirals. For so long as the Royal Navy remained true to its unfailing rule of concentration at the mouth of the Channel in time of danger, it was certain, even if none of the preliminaries of the scheme miscarried, that Ganteaume would have to fight a fleet action before he reached Boulogne. If he lost it, the blame for his master's inability to invade would be his; if he won it, the Grand Army could cross to Kent without risk to its leader's reputation.
¹

As it was, Gante
aume never got to sea at all.. On March 22nd Napoleon sent urgent instructions to both his Admirals to sail by the 26th.

¹
Corbe
tt,
48-31;
Desriere
, V,
371.

But when two days lat
er Ganteaume, finding the block
aders in the Iroise passage only fifteen to his own twenty-one, asked leave over the manual telegraph to engage, he was peremptorily refused. The Emperor had not forgotten what had happened at the Nile and Copenhagen.
"A
naval victory in existing circumstances," he replied, "can lead to nothing. Keep
but one end in view—to fulfil y
our mission. Get to sea without an action."

And this was precisely what his Admiral could not do. "Nine sail of the line and four frigates are in Brest going to the West Indies full of troops," little Bernard Coleridge had written a few weeks before, "but they will only go if we let them!" Storm-tossed and sickened by a diet of salt meat, stinking water and maggoty biscuits, the British seamen offered the enemy only two alternatives: battle or port. They took an over-share of winter that others who came after might have theirs of summer. And faced by their unyielding tenacity, the man who boasted that his will was law again saw his designs frustrated.

CHAPTER
FIVE

The Admiral's Mirror

"It was a belief of the old Spaniards that Drake had a magic mirror in which he could see all the movements of his enemies and count their numbers. In a sense it was true, and in that sense he had handed it on to his successors. That mirror was the tradition he had founded, and they had polished it by rich experience till it became a living instinct for naval war to which every man could turn for guidance."

Sir Julian Corbett.

Y

et
, as it happened, in the spring of 1805 Napoleon came near to unhorsing Pitt. Though his larger plans had miscarried, he had drawn blood. In the closing days of March news reached England that Missiessy had attacked Dominica and taken its capital. It was also rumoured that St. Lucia had been recaptured. The City was in a fever. So was Parliament.
¹

At that moment the Government was already facing a grave crisis. It had arisen out of St. Vincent's honourable but ill-starred passion for economy. On February 13th the Royal Commission on Naval Expenditure had published its Tenth Report, surveying the finances of the Navy Treasurer's office during its tenure by Harry Dundas—now Lord Melville and First Lord of the Admiralty. Angered by his predecessor's penny wise economies, Melville, when called as witness, had treated the Commission with scant respect.
²
It avenged itself by exposing certain malpractices committed under his rule ten years before. These included the temporary appropriation of £20,000 by his former Paymaster for speculative purposes in flat defiance of a recent Act of Parliament.-

At once the fat was in the fire. By striking at Melville the Whigs struck at more than a crafty old Tory politician. .They struck at Pitt himself. The First Lord was his oldest political friend and the one lieutenant in his Cabinet upon whom he could rely. To impugn his honesty was to reflect on Pitt's. And this, as his enemies knew, was the Prime Minister's chief political capital. Like his father, the Great Commoner, his strength lay
not in territorial or parliamen
tary influence but in the country'
s belief in his incorruptibility.

¹
Granville, II,
46;
Two Duchesses,
210.

²
"Had he on his first examination been civil to the Commissioners instead of treating them loftily, they would not have meddled with him."—Mrs. Nugent to Admir
al Corn
wallis. Cornwallis-We
st,
510.

A poor man, he presented the rare spectacle of a politician who despised the financial by-products of power. His contempt for pensions and sinecures was almost an insult to the rich Whig patricians whom he had kept so long from office. That his old familiar should be exposed as little better than a public cheat delighted them.

They gave full cry. And all in Forum or City who had old grudges against the First Lord, hated Scottish placeholders or loved to censure evil-doing in high place, joined in the hunt. "By Gad, sir," declared Alderman Curtis on 'Change, "we felt him in our market!"
¹
Melville's closest friends dared not excuse him. Even Wilberforce—the last man in the world to yield to Party virulence —condemned him. And Wilberforce was the living embodiment of England's conscience. " It is not only Lord Melville," he wrote, " but ourselves that are on trial." Pitt was on the horns of a dilemma. He had either to abandon his chief supporter or condone his guilt. When he defended him in the House, he seemed for the first time in his life nervous and at a loss.

The news of a French squadron in the West Indies increased the outcry against Melville. It was his Department that was to blame. The debate that was to decide his fate was fixed for April 8th. But by then a still graver disaster threatened the government. The cold dry wind out of the east that set London tempers on edge was blowing a French fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar on to England's lifelines.

Napoleon's orders had reached Villeneuve on March 26th. Four days later that unhappy officer had stolen out of Toulon at dead of night with eleven battleships and eight cruisers. He was speeded by two fears—of his master behind and of Nelson lurking beyond his watching frigates on the horizon. The fiery Admiral, as the French called him, had been reported off Barcelona on March 17th, and Villeneuve, instead of hugging the Catalan coast, steered south to avoid him, intending to pass to the east of the Balearics before shaping course for Cartagena and Cadiz. Without knowing it he was running straight into Nelson's arms.

For that long-thwarted seaman after his weary return from Egypt had baited a trap. Unable to cover both the Straits and Sicily save by lying close off Toulon—an untenable position in the March gales—he adopted an ingenious expedient. He chose his usual rendezvous in the Gulf of Palmas on the south-west coast of Sardinia to forestall any move towards Sicily and the Levant. But in order

¹
Horner, I,
291.

to deter Villeneuve from using the one exit he could not block and tempt him—were his destination the Atlantic—to follow an easterly-course, he made a demonstration off the Spanish coast. Then, aware that his quarry was embarking troops, he hurried back to Palmas to await him.

Here the French Admiral would have met his fate had not a chance encounter with a Ragusan merch
antman on the morning of April 1
st put him wise. Learning that Nelson was no longer off Catalonia but almost straight in his course, he turned west and ran for Spain along the north side of the Balearics. He had managed to shake off the shadowing British frigates during the night, and the sudden change of direction prevented them from rediscovering him. And he was by now too far to the south to meet the cruiser which his adversary had left off Cape St. Sebastian in case his ruse should fail. Thus at the very moment for which Nelson had so long waited the French fleet vanished.

On April
7th
Villeneuve anchored off Cartagena and signalled to the warships in the harbour to join him. But the Spaniards, with the gracious dilatoriness of their race, had omitted to load their ammunition and asked for time. Still haunted by the thought of Nelson, Villeneuve refused to wait and sailed with the wind that night. Next morning Lord Mark Kerr, refitting the
Fisgard
frigate in Gibraltar, was startled to see a line of ghostly warships scudding through the Straits before an easterly gale. Later, while Pitt was rising stiffly in a hostile, silent House to defend Melville, Sir Richard Strachan in the
Renown,
returning towards Cape Tarifa after escorting a Levant convoy past Algeciras, was just in time to put about and give warning to Vice-Admiral Orde and his five blockading battleships off Cadiz. As Villeneuve's nineteen ships rose over the eastern horizon, Orde, who had been taking in stores, hastily cast off his transports and retired towards Lagos Bay.

Villeneuve made no attempt to molest him. He was thinking only of Nelson. Anchoring outside Cadiz Bay at eight o'clock on the morning of April
9th,
he signalled to the single French and as many of the fifteen Spanish battleships as were ready for sea to join him at once. Soon after noon he gave the order to weigh and by nightfall was receding into the west with six belated Spaniards straggling after him. When Orde's cruisers reappeared off Cadiz next day the Combined Fleet had disappeared, no one knew where.
¹

While these events were taking place, the Opposition enjoyed its "famo
us sport" with Melville. The vo
te of censure was carried

¹
Corbett,
57, 61-3, 73;
Mahan, II,
151.

in a breathless House by the Speaker's casting vote, and Pitt, cramming his Court-hat over his face to hide his tears, was led out.by his friends while the baser kind of Whig shouted " View Halloos" and crowded on to the benches to see "how Billy looked." Next day, as Villeneuve signalled impatiently off Cadiz and Orde.took counsel with Strachan in Lagos Bay, Melville resigned and the Admiralty became vacant. It was generally supposed that the Premiership would shortly be so too.

But Pitt, though his foes thought they had done with him, was of sterner stuff. It was not only the fate of his Ministry that was in the balance. Ailing and more alone than he had ever been in his life, he treated suggestions that he should resign with scorn. Like a stag at bay he turned to fight. For he still planned to give Bonaparte a fall.

Throughout the winter the Prime Minister had been struggling to form his Continental Coalition in the face of repeated difficulties —greed of potential allies for subsidies, fear of France, icebound roads that held up couriers for weeks, wildly unrealistic Russian hopes "of Spanish collaboration and fantastic Russian inability to understand the nature and limitations of British sea power.
¹
In the last resort, however, the goodwill of St. Petersburg had turned on a single point: England's readiness to send troops to the Mediterranean. The difficulties of doing so had proved far greater than Pitt had supposed. The demands of a wasting world war on his military resources were incessant." Disasters in India had brought unexpected calls for reinforcements, and yellow fever had decimated the garrison of Gibraltar at the very moment Spain entered the war. And the Recruiting Act from which Pitt had hoped so much had proved as big a failure as its predecessor. The pallid spectres of the thousands who had perished in malarial islands still haunted the memory of the English labouring classes, and the Parish authorities, on whom the onus of raising recruits was cast, found it easier to pay the statutory fines than to produce soldiers.

The Prime Minister had faced his difficulties with courage. He had run the gauntlet of the Opposition wits with a new bill to draft militiamen into the Army, aiming thereby to secure 17,000 Regulars, already partially trained, by the end of the summer. Meanwhile he had scraped together every man who could be sent out of England. By March 5000 had assembled under Sir Eyre Coote at Cork ready to sail for India. A larger and more important force was concentrated at Portsmouth under Lieutenant-General Sir James Craig. Nominated to proceed with
"a
foreign expedition, going no one

¹
Third Coalition,
108-23;
Colchester, I,
543.
Il6