Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (47 page)
1
Forte
scue, VI,
118-20.
Welle
sley was not enthusiastic, but, as usual, did his best to conform to his orders. "I always had a horror," he remarked afterwards, "of revolutionising a country for a political object. I always said, if they rise of themselves, Well and good, but do not stir them up; it is a fearful responsibility.'" Stanhope,
Conversations,
69.
districts. On May 24th—the day the Asturians rose and seized Oviedo—thousands of starving weavers, ruined by the stoppage of American cotton, poured into Manchester and became so threatening that the 4th Dragoons and the local yeomanry had to charge to disperse them. Pitt's old disciple, George Rose, appealing to the House to fix a national minimum wage, produced figures to show that skilled Lancashire operatives were having to work a six-day week of fifteen hours a day in order to earn a pittance of eight shillings.
1
Three days after the Manchester riots young George Jackson, kept night after night from his bed by a continuous whirl of balls, routs and concerts, came home from Lady Buckingham's masquerade at six in the morning, walking through the London streets in his domino to the "no small amusement of the milk women and the butchers and greengrocers going to market." Yet, as befitted the nephew of an ex-ambassador, he was at heart a serious young man, and his real interests were not so much in quizzing and dancing as in diplomacy and the state of Europe. " Our Legislature," he wrote in his diary, "is squabbling about the difference of nine or thirteen thousand pounds in a parliamentary grant, about so many quarters of hog wash in the consumption of a few hogsheads of sugar more or less in the course of a year, whilst Bonaparte is stepping or rather striding on to universal empire. We really seem to be in a sort of lethargic dream from which we can onl)' be awakened by a tremendous shock."
2
It was impending. During the last week of May General Sir Hew Dalrymple, the Governor of Gibraltar, received a request from the revolutionary Junta at Seville for money and arms. Having for many months been in secret correspondence with Spanish military and naval officers opposed to Godoy and the French alliance, he was naturally sympathetic. He promised to forward the request to England and used his official position to negotiate an interest-free loan from local British merchants. In their new excitement and anger the Spanish people appeared to have wholly forgotten they were at war with the island State that had stopped their trade, sunk their treasure ships, and blockaded their ports; their only thought of England was as a common enemy of the hated oppressor. Moved
1
Fremantle
, II,
231;
Jackson, II,
238;
An. Reg.,
1808
(Chron.),
48, 51, 54, 64.
One M.P., voicing the new
laissez-faire
economics, argued that " the distress arose, not from the wages being too low but through their having been at one time too high, which had caused a great influx of labour, thus overstocking the market." Sir Robert Peel, the famous mill-owner, pointed out "that the great cause of the distress was not the oppression of the masters but the shutting-up of the foreign market." Ashton,
141-2.
The problem seemed insoluble to legislators, who thereupon ceased to consider it.
2
Jackson, II,
147.
by the same impulse as their brethren in Seville, the country gentry and clergy of the remote Asturian valleys, gathered in defiant conclave at Oviedo, decided on May 30th to appeal to London. That, night, armed with formal powers by the Provincial Council of Asturias, the historian Toreno and five other emissaries set out and, after an adventurous voyage, arrived at Falmouth on June 6th. The opportunity for which Pitt had sought so long, and of which his successors had grown to despair, had come at last.
CHAPTER
NINE
The Spanish Rising
"What are these fleets that cross the sea From British ports and bays To coasts that glister southwardly Behind the dog-day haze?
"They are the shipped battalions sent To bar the bold Belligerent
Who stalks the Dancers' Land. Within these hulls, like sheep a-pen, Arc packed in thousands fighting-men And colonels in command."
Hardy,
The Dynasts, Part II. Act II. Scene V.
T
he
British people received the Asturian delegates with enthusiasm. They forgot the long war with Spain. They remembered only that the Spanish patriots had risen against the French and defied Napoleon. For a moment the whole nation was united. The Tories saw romantic visions of grave nobles and venerable prelates mustering their tenantry around the standards of national independence; the Whigs of high-minded Spanish revolutionaries succeeding where the French had failed and establishing an enlightened constitutional monarchy based on English precedent. "We shall hear in the language of Cervantes," wrote Tom Campbell the poet, "all the great principles of British liberty;- they will become a free people and have, like us, their Sidneys and Chathams. Oh, sweet and romantic Spain! If the Spanish plume and beaver succeed I shall die of joy—if not, of grief."
While Civic corporations, Society ladies and the populace lionised the Spaniards, Parliament met to consider the situation. On June 15th Canning officially stated that he and his colleagues could not regard themselves as at war with any nation resisting the common enemy of mankind. Money, arms and ammunition were to be immediately placed at the patriots' disposal; if more substantial help could be afforded, it would be given. From the Opposition benches Sheridan proclaimed that it was the greatest chance England had ever had of championing human freedom. " Let Spain see," he urged, " that our directions are to be solely directed to the grand and general
era, the emancipation of the world. . . . Hitherto Bonaparte has had to contend against princes without dignity and ministers without wisdom. He has fought against countries in which people have been indifferent to his success; he has yet to learn what it is to fight against a country in which the people are animated with one spirit to resist
him....
Never was anything so brave, so generous, so noble as the conduct of the Asturians."
1
The Government, whose mainspring was Canning, acted quickly. Reluctance to strike was never one of the Foreign Secretary's faults. At his side was his friend, Hookham Frere, who four years before on his recall from Madrid had predicted that a Spanish national rising, aided by 20,000 British troops, might expel every vestige of French influence from the Peninsula.
2
By the beginning of July peace between the two countries had been proclaimed and preliminaries entered into for a formal alliance. Castlereagh at the War Office was equally prompt. Waiting at Cork under his favourite soldier, Sir Arthur Wellesley, were 9500 troops destined for Venezuela. Another 5000 under Major-General Spencer were in transports at Gibraltar, 3000 more with Major-General Beresford in Madeira, and 10,000 under Sir John Moore kicking their heels off the Swedish coast. Whitelocke's evacuation of South America, so deplored at the time, had given England a striking force when she most needed it; the markets of South and Central America would now presumably be opened by the Spaniards themselves. That the latter would fight bravely for their native soil nobody doubted. Britons had recently learnt in the River Plate how desperately they could defend their homes.
Already the naval and military commanders on the spot were anticipating the Government's orders. At Cadiz, whither Spencer had sailed at once from Gibraltar, a squadron from Collingwood's Fleet helped the populace to seize the French battleships which had been lying in the Arsenal since Trafalgar. In the Mediterranean young Lord Cochrane of the
Imperieuse
frigate, dispatched on a roving commission along- the eastern shores of Spain and France, made a triumphant progress up the Valencian ports, exhorting the patriots and harrying French communications. Other British cruisers escorted Spanish troops from the Balearics to Tarragona for operations against Barcelona or landed officers with money and secret plans in Biscayan harbours. Even in the Baltic Spain felt the far-outstretched hand of England; by August the
Marquis
de
La Romana's army, serving reluctantly as part of Napoleon's garrison
1
Ann. Reg.,
1808, 124-5.
2
Malmesbury, IV,
330.
of north Germany, was joyously embarking at Gottenburg under the guns of a battle fleet commanded by Nelson's old friend, Admiral Keats.
Before the end of June the Government learnt that the insurrection had spread to Portugal. Here, by arrogance, by unconcealed contempt for religious and national feelings and by shameless plunder, the French had aroused the whole population. Rebellion first broke out in the north at Oporto, where the Bishop led the peasantry against the pro-French Governor; it quickly spread to the Algarve south of the Tagus. By June 25th Junot's hold on the country had shrunk to the vicinity of Lisbon and the principal fortresses.
On June 30th, 1808, therefore, the Cabinet decided to employ Sir Arthur Wellesley and the troops from Cork in a Portuguese diversion to help the Spanish patriots. Spencer's corps from Gibraltar was added to his command. The Horse Guards felt some scruples at the appointment of s
o young a Lieutenant-General; We
llesley was only thirty-nine, and his experience of service had been mainly Indian. But he was a member of the Government, brother to one of its principal supporters and knew how to work with politicians without making trouble; Pitt in his last months had declared that he had never met a military officer with whom it was so easy to converse.
1
And beneath his pleasant, calm, well-bred exterior the Sepoy general impressed those who knew him with being a thorough master of himself and his profession. A few days before leaving London he entertained an official named Croker who was to take over some of the work of his Irish department. After dinner the two men sat together over their wine, looking out of the tall windows on Harley Street. .As Sir Arthur was silent, Croker asked him what he was thinking about. "Why, to say the truth," Wellesley replied,
"I
am thinking of the French that I am going to fight. I have not seen them since the campaign in Flanders when they were capital soldiers, and a dozen years of victory under Bonaparte must have made them better still. They have a new system of tactics which has outmanoeuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe. It's enough to make one thoughtful; but no matter. My die is cast; they may overwhelm me, but I don't think they will outmanoeuvre me. First, because I am not afraid of them, as everybody else seems to be; secondly, because, if what I hear of their system of manoeuvres be true, I think it a fal
se one against steady troops.
1
" He states every difficulty before he undertakes any service but none after he under* takes it."—
Pitt and the Great War,
556.
suspect that all the Continental armies were more than half beaten before the battle was begun. I, at least, will not be frightened beforehand."
1
Welle
sley's confidence in the men he commanded was well placed. Since its tragic experiences in Flanders and the sugar islands the British Army had greatly changed. It was still marred by grave faults; too many of its officers were aristocratic amateurs who had gained promotion by purchase, too many of its men recruited from the alehouse and t
he prison. There was far too mu
ch drinking, too many brutal and degrading punishments, too much time spent in covering dirty breeches with pipeclay and starching dirty hair with powder, too much mechanical, unthinking, unrealistic drill. But the men, though drawn from the poorest an
d worst-educated classes in the
community, were fine fighting material: tenacious, tough, and full of spunk, they were as inherently hard to beat as they were to rule. "They are a strange set," wrote one who served with them, "and so determined and unconquerable that they will have their way if they can. It requires someone who has authority in his face as well as at his back to make them respect and obey him."
2
The unit of this Army was the Regiment, territorial and traditional ; its Colours the ark of the British soldier's covenant. During a hurricane in one of the West Indian islands a private of the 46th, set to guard these sacred emblems, remained at his post while the wind lifted the barrack timbers for more than a mile, and was found next day buried where he had stood. Between the regiments a strong, intimate rivalry was handed down from veteran to recruit. Every corps had its peculiar history and character, the subject both of pride and banter; the 50th were called the Dirty Half Hundred from their black facings, while those of the
33rd,
which matched their coats, were falsely reputed by envious rivals to have been taken from them as a punishment for having lost their Colours. In camp and barracks such regimental legends—the sagas of rude and unlettered men—were sometimes a source of embarrassment: on the battlefield they became a spur to emulous courage and endurance.
The task of keeping the regiments up to strength had continued to tax the ingenuity of the authorities. It was no easy matter in a land that prided itself on its freedom from militarism and regarded
1
Croker, I,
12-13.
For Wellington's later observations on this conversation, see Stanhope,
Conversations
227.
"Harris,
101-2.
service in the ranks as something degrading which any man might honourably evade by fine or substitute.
1
It had been intensified by the loss of Hanover and Napoleon's absorption of the smaller German States, whose subjects could no longer be hired by a parliamentary nation that preferred to do its soldiering by proxy. One expedient had been tried after another. The failure of Addington's Army of Reserve Act had been followed by that of Pitt's Additional Force Act, and that in its turn by Windham's plan to substitute limited for life service. Yet almost imperceptibly—through regimental persistence in recruiting and the absence of any major campaign to drain the depots—the Army had grown. In May, 1803, there were only 105,000 Regulars on the Establishment; two years later there were over 160,000, by 1807 nearly 200,000. That summer, immediately after assuming office, Castlereagh brought in two Bills, the one to draft Militiamen into the Army, the other to bring the Militia up to strength by giving 28 days annual training to 200,000 men between the ages of 18 and 30. With his clear, stark Irish mind the War Minister would have preferred a system of compulsory national service; this was forbidden him by the prejudices of a country which, as one soldier put it, was unwilling to save itself unless it could be done in a constitutional way. Yet thanks to bounties and martial displays by the recruiting-sergeants of the Line, 40,000 embodied Militiamen were induced to transfer to the Regulars between July, 1807, and June, 1808—an increase not in raw recruits but in men already partially trained.
By his very military ascendancy
—as Castlereagh had predicted in a remarkable speech in the House—Napoleon was creating a power to which the world might one day look for deliverance. Through sheer necessity the British Army had begun to climb out of the fifty years' pit of defeat and neglect into which it had fallen after the great days of Minden and Plassey. The officer who bought his promotion like his uniform in Bond Street and commuted by two hours daily bullying on the parade ground for a life of drinking bumpers on— and under—the Messroom table,
2
was gradually being replaced by the ardent lad who had grown up to hate Bonaparte and viewed his profession as an opportunity for glory. The crimping house with its
1
Charles Apperle
y, the celebrated
Nimrod,
in his early hunting days at Hickley recorded how, on his groom telling him that a drawing for the county militia was to take place next day, he subscribed half a guinea to an insurance fund for providing substitutes, the cost of which had risen to forty-six guineas. "It was fortunate that I did so, for before next day passed I was a Leicestershire militiaman, and the certificate given me as serving by substitute exempted me from being drawn again." Apperley,
167.
2
"We had a very genteel Mess and all got very drunk." . . ."Hard living at the Mess; we were literally drunk almost every day. . . ." "Drunk upwards of forty" (bumpers) "and, of course, got a good deal inebriated." Dyott,
T,
11, 23.
sordid tale of mercenary cruelty had yielded to the flashing, devil-may-care recruiting-sergeant, parading in his ribbons and finery before the gaping militiamen and extolling the glories of his corps.
1
By the time Trafalgar had cleared the seas for the free movement of British land forces a new spirit of martial pride was running again through the half-brutalised ranks. The scarlet and gold regiments of England not only looked smart: they felt smart. "If our commanders are well-chosen," wrote Lord Paget "(and there are some very good ones), the British Army is in a state that will astonish friend and foe."
Much of this improvement had been due to the administration of the Duke of York,
2
who since
1795
had reorganised Army training, supervised the appointment of officers and established a Royal Military Academy and a Staff College to promote uniformity of method throughout the Service. Still more was due to bitter experience. The British Army had been driven from the Continent by a revolutionary technique of war. The mechanical models of drill and discipline on which it had formed itself had largely failed in action. It had to adapt itself to new methods or accept permanent exclusion from Europe.
But the mainspring of all reform had been the
corps
d’
elite,
of light infantry which had been formed at Shorncliffe Camp under the first soldier in the Army, Sir John Moore. Born in November,
1761,
the son of a Glasgow doctor, Moore had seen hard fighting in America, Corsica, the West Indies, Ireland, Holland and Egypt, becoming a brigadier at thirty-four, Major-General at thirty-six and Lieutenant-General at forty-three. Handsome and athletic, with broad shoulders and generous, penetrating eyes, there was something in his glance and bearing that warmed the coldest nature. He seemed made to inspire confidence and courage. "Every one," wr
ote the Duke of York's Military
Secretary, "admires and loves him."
This great soldier was at once realist and idealist. So clear was his perception of what was wrong and so passionate his resolve to set it right that he sometimes expressed himself with a vehemence that alarmed the timorous. "My feelings were so strong and my indignation such," he wrote on one occasion, "as at times to bring tears to my eyes and for moments to stop my speech." When his normal good humour and love of friendly banter were in abeyance,
1
"The sergeant-major was quite a beau
....
He had a sling belt to his sword like a field officer, a tremendous green feather in his cap, a flaring sash, his whistle and powder-flask displayed, an officer's pelisc over one shoulder and a double allowance of ribbands in his cap." Harris,
165-6.
2
Hester Stanhope, no ill judge of a man, pronounced him " the best friend a soldier ever had." Hester Stanhope,
82-3.
there was a touch of pedantry in his virtue, not uncharacteristic of his uncompromising northern race. Towards corruption and injustice he was merciless. "Soldiers are flogged for drunkenness," he once observed, " I could not look them in the face if I was not to punish it equally in officers."
1
The chilling contempt with which he turned on those who behaved unworthily was, li
ke the love he inspired, still reme
mbered fifty years after his death.
Yet it was not Moore's frown that made men follow him but his example and inspiration. He expected of others only what he demanded of himself. An ambitious man, he applied to his life, at a time when wire-pulling was the bane of the Service, the unflinching principle that a soldier should not choose his lot but go wherever he was ordered.
2
In the field he shared the lot of the meanest private; at the siege of San Fiorenzo he slept every night in his clothes on a bed of straw. Though a poor man, he on more than one occasion advanced the money to enable a deserving officer to obtain promotion. His simplicity and directness shrivelled up meanness and shabby conduct. Fearless, he shamed fear in others.
3
" I ordered them to leap over it," he wrote in his diary after an engagement, "and upon their hesitating showed them the example of getting over it myself."
When Moore received his first command the Army was at the lowest point of its history. Its discipline was based on mechanical parades and mass firelock exercises, copied in the letter rather than the spirit from Frederick the Great's Prussia and increasingly divorced from the realities of war and human nature. It was enforced regardless of humanity and common sense; soldiers were treated as automata to be bullied and flogged into an unthinking obedience. Moore, faced by a triumph of the natural courage and enthusiasm of the Revolutionary armies, went back to nature to defeat them. He did not discard the traditional discipline of the British Service; he humanised it. Against the
elan
of the armed
sans-culott
es,
so resistless when confronted only by the "stiff solidarity" of the old monarchical armies of the Continent, he opposed an equal enthusiasm based on common-sense discipline and careful training.