In May 1803, the whale went to war with the elephant.
Possessed of the most powerful navy in the world, Britain stood supreme at sea,
but on land she was a comparative weakling capable of fielding only puny
expeditionary forces of a few thousand men, drawn from an army that had in the
1790s been notorious for the poverty of its human and material resources. With
France, however, the picture was completely reversed. Though by no means the
invincible force of legend, the French army was an impressive military machine
with many victories to its credit, whereas the French navy was in a truly pitiable
condition and virtually incapable of putting to sea. How the two belligerents
were to strike at one another was therefore most unclear. Particularly outside
Europe, ways were naturally found of doing so, but in the end the resolution of
the struggle would necessarily revolve around one issue and one issue alone. To
overcome France, Britain had to put together a continental coalition that could
overthrow Napoleon or, at the very least, bring him to the peace table, while
to defeat Britain Napoleon had to frustrate these aims and mobilize a
substantial part of Europe against London. Even then victory was not guaranteed
for either side. As the events of 1805 would show, for example, such were
France’s advantages on land that even the most powerful coalition was not
necessarily proof against her, but in the short term the international
relations of the war could be said to boil down to a contest for the support of
Austria, Russia and Prussia. Meanwhile, the fact that there was such a contest
is significant. With hindsight, it is possible to argue that it was a struggle
that the French were always likely to lose, but the key issue here was not some
irreconcilable fracture in European diplomacy but rather the tensions
encapsulated by the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Europe was not divided
ipso facto between the ancien régime and some new and deadly ideological rival.
On the contrary, traditional foreign policy interests had survived unchanged,
while overtly political considerations were very much in abeyance, and all the
more so as Napoleon initially appeared as just one more player of the
diplomatic game and, secondly, very much in retreat from the Revolution.
The general view of Napoleon in the capitals of Europe has
already been examined. However, the absence of any real ideological hostility
towards him was not the only reason why the French seemed to have some chance
of winning the race to build an overwhelming coalition. Setting aside the fact
that Spain, the Batavian Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Helvetic
Confederation and the south German states were all highly vulnerable to French
pressure, if not actually pro-French, the British were hampered in their search
for allies by a whole range of factors. Not the least of these was the
influence of French propaganda. Even before hostilities had resumed, it had
been a standard line in France that the chief culprit for Europe’s misfortunes
was British greed and ambition, and this message now became one of the central
rallying cries of the French war effort. Hardly had Napoleon marched against
Austria in September 1805 than he was denouncing the Third Coalition as ‘this
new league woven by the hatred and gold of England’, and threatening the
destruction of ‘the Russian army which the gold of England has transported from
the extremities of the universe’. As Madame de Staël recalled, ‘The official
gazettes were ordered to insult the English nation and its government. Every
day absurd descriptions, such as “perfidious islanders” and “greedy merchants”,
were repeated in the papers without cease . . . In some articles the authors
went back to William the Conqueror and described the battle of Hastings as a
revolt.’ In taking this line Napoleon was helped by the simple fact that there
was no love lost for Britain on the Continent. One of the chief difficulties
faced by London in 1803 was its distinctly unimpressive war record: on land the
British army had hardly a victory to its credit, while at sea its ships had won
only four major victories – victories, what is more, that seemed to have more
to do with enshrining Britain’s commercial monopoly than they did with
defeating the French. As late as the Waterloo campaign of 1815, bitter distrust
of Britain continued to be rampant, and this despite all Wellington’s victories
in Spain and Portugal. In 1803, however, there was no Salamanca or Vittoria to
draw upon. Indeed, the British army was at that point a force of little or no
account in terms of continental warfare. There had been some minor successes in
the campaign of 1793-5 in the Low Countries, and then again in the invasion of
Holland in 1799, but the British had never put sufficient troops into the field
to have a major impact, and in both 1793 and 1799 operations had concluded in
retreat and evacuation. However, what stuck most in the craw of foreign
observers was not so much that the British army had failed to distinguish
itself in the European campaigns in which it had served, but rather that
Britain’s commitment to the fighting beyond the frontiers of Europe had the
appearance of being of an entirely different order. In the fighting in Holland,
Belgium and Flanders, there was nothing to equal, say, the triumphant battle of
Alexandria, nor, still less, the energy and enterprise which was displayed in
seizing colony after colony in the West Indies. Equally, British troops were
always in short supply in Europe, but always seemed to be available in
abundance when it came to dispatching expeditions to the colonies: in the whole
of 1793 less than 4,000 redcoats appeared in the Low Countries, whereas in
September 1795 alone 33,000 men set off for the Caribbean. If there was a
general feeling that London was completely unreliable as an ally, that it was
in fact quite willing to let everybody else do all the fighting, it was
therefore hardly surprising.
Let us examine this problem in more detail. Barely a single
one of the powers who had fought alongside Britain in the 1790s had much reason
to applaud her conduct. As a case in point, we may first turn to Spain. At war
with France between 1793 and 1795, in 1796 she had changed sides. In doing so
she was in one sense only reverting to the anti-British stance that had
characterized her foreign policy throughout the eighteenth century. Yet it was
also connected with a more recent series of complaints. For example, the Jay
Treaty with the United States of 19 September 1794 had seriously jeopardized
Spain’s interests in Louisiana, while the British had failed to send Spain
financial help and could be accused of having abandoned the Spanish forces that
had been sent to assist in the defence of Toulon in 1793. At the same time the
British had seized goods bound for Spain in neutral ships – they did not even
draw the line at naval stores paid for by the Spanish government – and plied a
lively smuggling trade on the coasts of both Spain and her American colonies.
In the words of the royal favourite, Manuel de Godoy, British policy was all
too easy to interpret: ‘Britain first, Britain second, Britain third and
Britain always. As for everybody else, they could have the crumbs and the
left-overs.’
Austria, meanwhile, had even more to complain of. Throughout
the Wars of the First and Second Coalition Britain had in effect expected
Austria to fight for British interests in the Low Countries for nothing. No
subsidies were ever forthcoming for Vienna, nor any guarantees respecting
Prussian and Russian gains in the east, and Francis’s attempts to rid himself
of the troublesome Austrian Netherlands by means of the so-called Bavarian
exchange were consistently blocked. Indeed, far from getting anything herself,
Austria found herself constantly being badgered to put still more into the
allied cause in an attempt to get unreliable partners to fight harder, while at
the same time being forced to watch Prussia being given a free hand in Poland
and being paid large sums of money in exchange for doing almost nothing. Not
until May 1795 was Austria finally offered a formal deal. In exchange for a
loan of £4 6 million, whose terms, incidentally, were extremely demanding, she
was to keep 170,000 men deployed against France. A second loan of £1 62 million
was forthcoming in 1797, but this was still less than generous when set beside
the terms that had been offered Prussia, which amounted to a subsidy of £1 6 million
a year, with an additional £2 million in results-based bonuses, in exchange for
an army of a mere 62,000 men. In addition, Vienna still could not get London to
recognize its interests in Eastern Europe where the British were now chiefly
interested in a deal with Russia, while insult was added to injury when in 1796
Pitt opened peace overtures with France without even consulting the Austrians.
Nor did matters improve with the coming of the Second Coalition: Austria once
again received no subsidy. She was expected to commit all her forces to the
war, abandon all say in the Allies’ war aims and conduct of operations, and see
both Russia and, still more annoyingly, Prussia offered the most generous of
terms. At this, even observers connected to the British government expressed
embarrassment. As William Windham confided to his diary on 8 November 1799,
‘Messenger from Vienna. Long report of a conversation with Thugut in which
Thugut presses against us some facts in our conduct . . . which it does not
seem easy to answer. One sees . . . that much of their conduct arises from the
suspicion, not very ill founded, of our attempting with the aid of Russia to forcer
la main à l’empereur.’4 To make matters worse, the British approach rested on a
fundamental miscalculation of the assistance likely to be derived from the
eastern powers. In the end, Prussian help could not be obtained at all nor
Russian help retained, and in it finally looked as if Britain would have no
option but to back Vienna to the hilt. The Austrian defeat at Marengo
notwithstanding, on 23 June the British ambassador to Vienna, Lord Minto,
signed a pact whereby Britain promised to pay Austria a subsidy of £2 million.
Even then, however, only the first instalment – one third of the money – was
authorized for payment immediately, the remainder being kept back for payment
in two further tranches in September and December. No wonder, then, that Thugut
responded to the news of the subsidy with ‘the greatest possible coldness in
language and manner’.
Underlying all this is a point that is well worth making
when one considers Britain’s reputation in Europe in 1803. French propaganda,
as we have seen, attributed all Europe’s travails since 1972 to ‘Pitt’s gold’.
In reality, British foreign policy in the 1790s had not revolved around
subsidies. They had been paid, certainly: between 1793 and 1802 £9 200,989 had
gone in subsidies to eleven different states. But this was as nothing to the
sums that were later disbursed: in 1812 the total was £4,441,963; in 1813,
£5,308,679; and in 1814, £10,016,597. The fact is that in the Revolutionary War
the British only used subsidies relatively sparingly, if only because, until
Pitt’s reforms began to take effect from 1799 onwards, the British government
simply could not afford to pay the massive bribes of legend. As the war was
initially paid for in large part by increasing the national debt, there was a
natural unwillingness to spend more money than was absolutely necessary, while
the Bank of England was convinced that paper bills could not be issued unless
their sum total was covered by the country’s reserves of bullion. Indeed, even
as it was, London sometimes experienced considerable difficulty in meeting its
commitments, as in 1800 when a financial crisis in Germany caused a sudden fall
in the value of British bills of exchange. Had several major powers ever needed
paying at the same time, it is probable that the money would simply have run
out. By the time that the Napoleonic Wars had broken out, of course, things
were very different. The great increase in taxation overseen by Pitt and the
abolition of the rule laying down that all paper money should be redeemable in
gold had ended many of the constraints under which the governments had been
operating. This allowed for a massive change in British policy that would see
money offered to anyone who would fight the French. But in May 1803 this change
had yet to be vouchsafed to Britain’s potential partners, and such was the
distrust of London that, as we shall see, even when the new largesse began to
be revealed, continental attitudes were slow to change.
In financial as much as military terms, then, there was
considerable reason to question British commitment to the war. Further strength
was lent to France’s propaganda claims by the impact of Britain’s activities in
the colonies and on the high seas. For statesmen such as Dundas, every sugar
island that was filched, every merchantman that was seized and every port that
was blockaded was a blow against France’s power, and, in particular, her
ability to finance her war effort. But for inhabitants of the Continent with
interests in the colonial trade – and this numbered not just Frenchmen, but
also Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutchmen, Germans, Danes and Swedes – there was a different
side to the story. Overseas trade did not cease altogether: neutral ships
continued to ply the waves and a degree of indirect contact with the colonies
was maintained through a variety of shifts and subterfuges. Yet the French
Revolutionary Wars had none the less wrought considerable havoc. The Batavian
Republic offers a good example. Here distress was very great. Between 1785 and
1789 an average of 324 ships were entering the river Maas every year, whereas
in 1799 only ninety-five vessels appeared. The ports, then, were very quiet,
whilst a similar fate befell the many industries that in one way or another
served maritime interests. For example, West Zaandam had seven shipyards and
ninety sawmills, whereas in 1800 it had just one of the former and seven of the
latter. Fishing, too, suffered terribly: between 1793 and 1795 the villages of
Middelharnis, Vlaardingen and Maasluis lost two-thirds of their vessels. As a
result poverty soared: by October 1800 one third of the population of Amsterdam
were in receipt of poor relief while in Vlaardingen the proportion was one
half. The problems of the Batavian Republic were particularly severe: the Dutch
economy was disrupted not just by the decline in shipping, but also
difficulties with the import of such items as Belgian coal and German
pipe-clay. However, even neutral states were not immune to the difficulties
that beset Europe’s coasts. As the British envoy to Prussia reported to Lord
Grenville, for example, ‘The towns want maritime trade and manufacturers.’ All
this was particularly unfortunate for Britain. It laid her wide open, of
course, to France’s charges that she was only fighting the war to beggar her
commercial rivals, and all the more so as her own ports were clearly booming –
between 1785 and 1800 the value of the West Indian trade rose by 150 per cent,
whilst the war years had seen the number of British merchantmen rise from
15,000 to 18,000 . And, despite the retreat at Amiens, the fact was that the
British Empire had seen significant gains thanks to the wars of the 1790s, most
notably Spanish Trinidad and Dutch Ceylon. If French propagandists who argued
that all that interested the British was the enslavement of the rest of the
world gained a certain audience in Europe, it was not to be wondered at.
In this struggle for public opinion, it has to be said that
the British were in many respects their own worst enemies. Unlike most states in
Europe, Britain – or, more specifically, England – had already developed a
strong national consciousness with a vibrant popular content. Inherent to this
national consciousness was a sense of superiority that can at best be described
as being intolerably smug. Buttressed by Protestantism and a variety of
historical events that had achieved a mythic status in the public consciousness
– the Reformation, the defeat of the Spanish armada, the English Civil War, the
Glorious Revolution and, most recently, the final overthrow of the Jacobite
cause – the British felt that they were more prosperous, more advanced and more
free than any other people in Europe. Mixed in with this was a racism that
shines forth very clearly from, say, Gillray’s cartoons depicting a bluff and
hearty John Bull defying a weedy and pasty-faced Napoleon. Frenchmen, Germans
and other continentals did not find Britain a comfortable environment, and the
Englishman abroad was no more popular than he is today. Here are the words of
Joseph Sherer, an officer who served in the Peninsular War under Wellington and
was markedly more reflective than many of his comrades:
The English . . . cannot make themselves beloved. They
are not content with being great; they must be thought so and told so. They
will not bend with good humour to the customs of other nations, nor will they
condescend to soothe (flatter they never do) the harmless self-love of friendly
foreigners. No: wherever they march or travel, they bear with them a haughty
air of conscious superiority, and expect that their customs, habits and
opinions should supersede, or at least suspend, those of all the countries
through which they pass.
Sherer’s remarks are reflected all too clearly in the
primary sources. Memoir after memoir makes it quite clear that there was
tremendous prejudice towards all foreigners and in particular Catholic foreigners.
To cite an anonymous officer of the Guards’ recollections of the Spaniards:
When roused to energy, they may be induced to act, but,
with pompous promises and grandiloquent phrases, postponement and the fear of
troubling, their lazy intellects predominated. It was always mañana, but never
today with them. To put off everything seemed looked upon as the acme of all
that was clever, and never to do that which another could do for them was the
perfection of dexterity. Their whole mind, in short, seemed bent upon doing
nothing and – they did it.
The same theme surfaces again and again in other contexts.
It is particularly prevalent in accounts of the campaign of Waterloo, one
British soldier writing, ‘Had the number of troops which Wellington commanded all
been British, the contest would not have lasted so long, nor would the French
have left the field with so large a fragment as did escape the army. But he had
to trust to the Belgians and others in places where they very early in the day
showed the seam of their stocking to the enemy.’ So marked was this sense of
superiority, that there is a tendency almost towards messianism, a common
belief that poor, benighted foreigners of one description or another would make
excellent soldiers if only they were given British officers.
What impact did this mixture of jeers, smears and
condescension have on inter-allied relations? It is difficult to believe that
the scorn and contempt in which many British generals and diplomats held the
rulers, statesmen and commanders whom they encountered was not perceived in at
least some of the corridors of power. Here, for example, is the opinion to
which Lord Minto gave voice on the subject of General Suvorov in a private
letter to his wife written in Prague on 3 January 1800:
I am here to see Suvorov on business, and am not sorry
for the opportunity of seeing one of whom one has heard so much and such
extraordinary things. Indeed, it is impossible to say how extraordinary he is.
There is but one word that can really express it. I must not on any account be
quoted, but he is the most perfect Bedlamite that ever was allowed to be at
large. I never saw anything so stark mad and, as it appears to me, so
contemptible in every respect. To give you some little notion of his manners, I
went by appointment to pay my first visit . . . After waiting a good while in
an ante-chamber with some aides de camp, a door opened and a little old shrivelled
creature in a pair of red breeches and his shirt for all clothing, bustled up
to me, took me in his arms, and . . . made me a string of high-flown flummery
compliments which he concluded by kissing me on both cheeks, and I am told that
I was in luck that my mouth escaped. His shirt . . . was made of materials, and
of a fashion, and was about as clean and white, as you may have seen on some
labourers at home.
And, to cite a second instance, we have a private letter
written on 16 November of the same year by William Windham:
The aspect of affairs is not good . . . one emperor mad,
another weak and pusillanimous; the King of Prussia governed by narrow, selfish
and shortsighted counsels; no vigour, no energy, no greatness of plan but in
the French, and they accordingly govern everything. Nothing is so clear to me
as that a small portion of the soul of Mr Burke . . . would have rescued the
world from this fate long ago.
Britain’s representatives abroad were men of culture and
breeding who were not generally in the habit of behaving with overt discourtesy
(though if the admittedly hostile Lord Holland is to be believed, William
Windham opened his career as British envoy to Tuscany ‘by horse-whipping in the
public drive . . . M. Carletti, the chamberlain and favourite of the Grand
Duke’). None the less it is clear that their prejudice towards the products of
the ‘decayed’ absolutism of the eighteenth century could not be hidden. With
the British throne currently in the hands of the increasingly erratic George
III and all too soon set to pass into the hands of his drunken eldest son,
however, such arrogance was hard to accept. As Charles James Fox remarked of
the constant abuse of Bonaparte, ‘They should not throw stones whose houses are
made of glass. The “crazy king, old mad George” would be just as polite, and,
as wicked persons would say, rather better founded.’ The British officer who
wrote of ‘the sovereigns of Russia, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and
a host of petty German powers’ becoming ‘wonderfully courageous and
enthusiastically devoted to England a few hours after the battle of Waterloo’
was exaggerating. Yet it is clear that forging a great international coalition
was always going to be an uphill struggle for the British. And if Britain
frequently had as much to complain of in the conduct of Austria and her other
allies as they did in the actions of the court of St James, it can only be
observed that this misses the point: as matters stood in 1803, it really seemed
that Britain needed Austria, Russia and Prussia far more than they needed her.
In addition, when war broke out again it is important to remember that it was
the British who had in the end provoked the crisis and Napoleon who could
present himself as the injured party. Reinforced by the immediate publication
by Paris of copious documentation which stressed the importance of Malta as
Britain’s casus belli to the exclusion of everything else, there was therefore
a belief that the mainspring of everything was British imperialism. Typical
enough are the views of the Neapolitan commander, Roger de Damas:
England’s one desire . . . is to drag the whole continent
into the fray. It is her great hope that the French conquests may rouse all the
chief powers, and the temporary ruin of Naples is nothing to her if a general
conflagration be the result of it. In war and politics, moreover, everything is
a matter of compensation. If the French invade the kingdom of Naples, the
English compensate themselves with Sicily, which their superior navy enables
them to occupy more easily. Consequently, though the English may prefer Naples
to be an independent monarchy when the war is over, it does not matter to them
at all whether it be more or less in disorder while the war is going on, nor,
at the end, whether one dynasty or another be reigning over it.
Nor had the events of 1800 been forgotten. As Lord Holland
remarked of the peace offensive that Napoleon had launched immediately after
Brumaire, ‘That step made him popular in Europe; and if he was insincere in the
offer, our haughty and offensive repulse gave him all the advantage which he
could expect to derive from his insincerity. It removed from his government to
that of England the reproach of continuing the war without necessity.’
Particularly unfortunate was the fact that in 1803 Napoleon was ostensibly
struggling to keep the peace until the very last minute: his last proposals,
indeed, arrived in London on May. Well, then, might Castlereagh lament, ‘It
will be difficult to convince the world that we are not fighting for Malta
alone.’
How these difficulties were resolved in favour of the
British is something that we can postpone for the time being, though it should
be noted that Pitt, at least, seems to have believed that a war between Britain
and France would inevitably tend to the creation of an alliance against the
latter. As Malmesbury wrote in his diary in April , the erstwhile prime
minister hoped ‘that some one of the great continental powers might awake to a
due sense of its honour and interests, and that in a future contest we might
derive . . . that aid and co-operation that it was out of the question to look
for . . . at this moment.’ What cannot be postponed, by contrast, is a
consideration of the balance of forces as they stood in May 1803, especially as
this throws much light on Britain’s overwhelming need for allies. Taking
Napoleon and his allies first of all, France had emerged from the Revolution
immensely strengthened. With over 29 million inhabitants, she was second only
to Russia in terms of population, and by far the most advanced state in
continental Europe. Though political paralysis and widespread unrest had done
much to nullify these advantages under the Directory, Napoleon had put an end
to these disorders and was now in an excellent position to capitalize upon the
very considerable financial and demographic resources at his disposal. Making
full use of the military advances of the ancien régime and Revolution, he was
in the process of building an army that in size and quality had no equals,
consisting of 265 infantry battalions, 322 cavalry squadrons and 202 batteries
of artillery, the whole amounting to perhaps 300,000 men. At the same time – in
contrast to the situation elsewhere – replacements and reinforcements were
little problem, for the entire male population was theoretically eligible for
military service. Even at sea, if France’s immediate position was very weak –
in 1803 Napoleon had only twenty-three ships-of-the-line ready for immediate
service – her shipbuilding potential easily equalled that of Britain, while the
design of her vessels was actually more advanced. In short, having already
embarked upon a large-scale programme of naval construction, Napoleon could in
the long term entertain serious hopes of naval supremacy.
Nor, of course, did France stand on her own. Holland, Genoa
and the Italian Republic were all quickly forced to enter the war against
Britain, and to place their armed forces at France’s disposal. The most
important element here was the Dutch fleet, which in 1801 had fifteen
ships-of-the-line, but in all three states high levels of population meant that
the introduction of conscription could offer major advantages to the French. As
we have seen, this step had been taken in the Italian Republic in August 1802,
and by 1803 that state could field sixteen infantry battalions, eight squadrons
of cavalry and thirteen batteries of artillery. By contrast, conscription
remained a taboo subject in Holland, but even so the Batavian Republic could
field twenty-eight battalions of infantry, twelve squadrons of cavalry and an
unknown number of artillery batteries. As for Genoa, her contribution was
essentially naval: in addition to putting her small fleet at France’s disposal,
the Ligurian Republic had to guarantee the recruitment of 6,000 sailors. Nor
was this an end to France’s demands: Holland had to provide transports for
62,000 men and 4,000 horses; Genoa to find large quantities of naval stores;
and the Italian Republic to pay an annual subvention of million francs. Yet
even this did not exhaust the list of support for France beyond her borders.
Permitted to remain neutral, Switzerland was nevertheless in September 1803
forced to maintain the various Swiss units in the French army – some sixteen
infantry battalions and four artillery batteries – at a strength of 16,000 men,
for the duration of the war. Eager to stay out of the conflict, Spain secured
this privilege at a cost of a monthly subsidy of 6 million francs. If she was
forced to enter the war, however, Spain could in theory call upon an army of
130,000 men (153 infantry battalions, ninety-three cavalry squadrons, forty
artillery batteries), a navy of thirty-two ships-of-the-line, and all the
resources of her Latin American empire. And, last but not least, all of these
states were forced to close their ports to British ships, Napoleon’s grand
design for a continental blockade already being well under way. As yet
unaffected by the trade embargo, there were also the middling states of southern
Germany. All these states were for the most part in the process of a programme
of state-building which brought with it a major increase in their efficiency –
a development which also affected France’s formal satellites – and could be
expected to lend France considerable military support in the event of a
continental war. In 1805, for example, Bavaria could field twenty-eight
infantry battalions, twenty-four cavalry squadrons and eleven artillery
batteries, and Baden nine infantry battalions, seven squadrons of cavalry and
two artillery batteries. And mention should also be made here of Denmark. Negligible
as a land power – the Danish army had a mere thirty infantry battalions and
thirty-six cavalry squadrons – even after the defeat of Copenhagen of 1801
Denmark retained a powerful fleet of twenty ships-of-the-line. Though she was
currently neutral, her maritime interests remained such as to suggest that
sooner or later she must come into conflict with the British, and so she too
must, at least potentially, be placed in the French camp.
Of France’s various auxiliaries, few were in any sense ready
to go to war. Of the Dutch, for example, Lord Malmesbury wrote, ‘Their fleet is
left as it was at the peace: no new ships building or old ones fitting out.’ As
for the Spaniards, their navy was in dire straits: with the government’s
finances in a state of collapse, all shipbuilding had come to an end in 1796,
while a terrible epidemic of yellow fever that was currently assailing her
Mediterranean coast was literally wiping out much of the manpower on which she
relied to crew her fleet. Nor was the Spanish army in much better condition:
run down in favour of the navy in the reign of Charles III (1759-88), it had
since 1796 experienced a variety of attempts at reform, but these had come to
nothing. ‘The means of recruiting this army are in general very slender,’ wrote
the French diplomat, Bourgoing. Nor was the officer corps very impressive: ‘The
obscure and monotonous life they lead, without any manoeuvres on a grand scale,
and without any reviews, at length deadens all activity or leads to unworthy
objects.’ But notwithstanding all these deficiencies and supreme at sea though
she was, Britain’s chances of making headway against such an array on her own
were very limited. In Germany, George III was Elector of Hanover, but such
benefit as might have accrued from this was nullified by the latter’s military
weakness – it had only twenty-six infantry battalions, twelve cavalry squadrons
and six artillery batteries – and strategic vulnerability. Though unrivalled in
its training, seamanship and morale, the Royal Navy had been greatly reduced in
size since 1801 (only thirty-four ships-of-the-line were actually in service,
although a further seventy-seven were in reserve). As for the army, at some
130,000 men at full strength (115 battalions, 140 cavalry squadrons, forty batteries)
it had, at the very least, plenty to occupy it. Needless to say, with her
rapidly growing population and immense financial, commercial and industrial
resources, Britain could in theory expect both to raise a much larger army and
to expand the navy enormously. Also encouraging was a series of reforms
currently being introduced to improve the army’s tactical efficiency.
Nevertheless, with most of the German states whose troops had traditionally
been hired to augment her forces now aligned with France, conscription a
political impossibility, home defence a major priority, and transporting large
numbers of troops to the Continent a serious logistical problem, she could not
but look to foreign allies.
