The Years of Endurance (41 page)

For the next few days the Fleet presented a curious spectacle to watchers from the shore as red, blue and white flags fluttered up and down the mastheads while the ships' companies contended whether they should return unconditionally to their allegiance, make new attempts to parley with a stony-hearted Admiralty or sail for American or Ireland. But all the while the sands of mutiny were running out. The Admiralty refused to consider any proposition short of unqualified submission, and the men knew they had no alternative but to submit. By the 12th only two out of the twenty-two ships still at the Nore flew the red flag of defiance. Every day more of them slipped their cables and made their way up river to surrender to the authorities.

On the 15 th the crew of the
Sandwich
repudiated Parker's authority and sailed under the guns of Sheerness. The mutiny was over. A few of the ringleaders made their escape to Calais. Parker, handed over to the military by his comrades, was taken to Maidstone jail under an escort of the West Yorks Militia. Here he was tried by court-martial and spent the remaining hours of his life writing an apologia for his actions and a long tirade against the men he had helped to mislead.
¹
He was hanged on the last day of June from the yardarm of the
Sandwich.
Fifty-eight others were

¹
"
May heaven grant that I may be the last victim offered up in the cause of a treacherous and debased commonalty. . . . Remember, never to make yourself the busybody of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful; the least trifle will intimidate them, and him whom they
have exalted one moment as their Demagogue, the next they will not scruple to exalt upon the gallows."—
The Dying Declaration of Richard Parker, P.R.O.
(Ad. 1/5339) cit.
Manwaring and Dobree,
274-5.

condemned to death, of whom twenty-eight were executed. Others were flogged or sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Of the 412 ringleaders found guilty, 300 were pardoned.

No other end to the affair was possible, for any other would have spelt the loss of naval discipline at a moment when its preservation was vital to the country and the future of human liberty. When Parker demanded the submission of the Admiralty to a seamen's council and held the nation's trade up to ransom, he threatened to smash the edge of a sharp and delicate instrument which in Nelson's hand was to establish the Pax Britannica and keep free the sea routes of the world for a century. Only undeviating firmness on the part of Admiralty and Parliament and an undivided endorsement by the nation could have saved the Navy from the fate of that of Republican France. Mutiny at the Nore had arisen from the same causes as at Spithead and Plymouth. But with Howe's redress of wellnigh insupportable grievances, naval rebellion in the Thames lost its justification. Its continuance exposed the country to dangers greater than any in her history. In acting as they did, the Government and Country showed the soundness of their instincts. So did the seamen in repudiating their leaders.

Yet the mutinies, terrible as they had seemed at the time, had served a purpose. They had brought home to the Government and country the abuses which were impairing the discipline and spirit of the Fleet and which, persisted in, must have proved fatal. Though at first they shook, they helped in the end to restore confidence between ruler and ruled: to re-establish the conditions in which alone officers like Nelson could operate. They began a slow but steady improvement in seagoing conditions: a kind of practical English revolution based not on abstract theories but on concrete needs. Before the Spithead mutiny the men of the Royal Navy, though
praised and fe
ted, were not treated as human beings but as automata: after it their right to decent living and feeding conditions and proper care in sickness, disablement and retirement became gradually recognised. It was something for Englishmen to have initiated such a revolution in time of war and national crisis, and to have done so without disaster.

CHAPTER
TEN

The Firmness of Ancient Rome

1797-8

" Torn as we are by faction, without an Army, without trusting entirely to. a Navy whom we may not be able to pay, and on whose reliance no firm loyalty can be placed, how are we to get out of this cursed war without a revolution ? "

Lord Cornwalli
s.

" Fifteen sail were the Dutchmen bold, Duncan he had but two ;

But he anchored them fast where the Texel shoaled,

And his colours aloft he flew.

' I've taken the depths to a fathom,' he cried,

' And I'll sink with a right good will :

For I know when we're all of us under the tide,

My flag will be fluttering still.' "
Newbolt.

During
these events the Government had shown superb courage. By its neglect, lack of foresight and subservience to vested interest, it had been largely responsible for the country's agonising peril. Yet it had gone far to atone for all its faults. For, faced by stark disaster, it had known what to do and had not hesitated to do it.

How catastrophic the situation had been is illustrated by a simple entry in Windham's diary recording a council meeting to discuss an imminent mutiny of
the
Guards: " There does not seem anything to prevent their being masters of the Tower, the Mint, the Palace and the Cabinet." At that mome
nt the entire reserve armament o
f the country was in the Tower and both the Spithead and Nore Fleets were in revolt. Under the universal foreboding of disaster three per cent Consols fell to 48, the lowest in their history. Even the revolution-hardened hero of Poland, General Kosciusko, could not conceal his agitation, and spoke of leaving London for America.

But Pitt showed no sign of perturbation. The First Lord, having reported to him at midnight that the marines were marching on

London from the Nore, found him on his return a few hours later sound asleep. Whatever Ministers lacked, they did not want healthy nerves and strong wills. Prince Hardenberg, the Prussian statesman, noted with wonder that during the mutinies England did not withdraw a single ship from the blockade of Brest and Cadiz; it seemed to him like the firmness of ancient Rome. In the House on June 2nd, Pitt in a magnificent appeal for national unity asked the Commons to show the world that there was no difficulty they would not meet with firmness and resolution as " the representatives of a great, a brave, a powerful and a free people."
¹
For national unanimity, he declared, he would sacrifice everything. Even the tiny Opposition, shamed by the patriotism of Sheridan, voted in the Government lobby.

Yet courage and resolution could not alter the gravity of the situation. Even with
the
collapse of the mutinies it remained almost as menacing as before. The peace preliminaries at Leoben, which the Austrians attributed to the British withdrawal from the Mediterranean and the consequent domination of the Adriatic by French cruisers, were followed by the announcement of the Emperor's readiness to sign a definite peace. This was accompanied by news of a treacherous attack by Bonaparte on the territories of the Venetian Republic. It began with a carefully engineered anti-French riot in Verona, which gave him the excuse to overturn the constitution in favour of the Jacobin minority who were ready to yield the country and its fleet to France. The young conqueror would take no apology from the abject Senate but, describing the fracas at Verona as the " most atrocious affair of the century," insisted on the suppression of the constitution by a puppet gang of traitors who, guarded by French soldiers, burnt the insignia of the Doge and the golden Book of the Republic in the square of St. Mark.

For Bonaparte was preparing to remodel and militarise Italy as his predecessors had Holland, in order to use her against England. Austria, renouncing all her Italian possessions west of the Oglio, was to be indemnified by the Venetian mainland, while France was to annex the Adriatic possessions of the Republic and the Ionian islands for further operations against British commerce. A sham Jacobin revolution in Genoa simultaneously placed England's other

¹
War Speeches,

principal customer in the peninsula under French rule. The Papal States were carved up to form with Lombardy and the former petty Dukedoms of the north a puppet French " Cisalpine " Republic.
¹
Britain's former supremacy in the Mediterranean was as though it had never been: she had no longer trade or place in that sea.

Meanwhile Spain was preparing to invade Portugal—Britain's only remaining ally. Two thousand British troops evacuated from Elba and some shockingly ill-disciplined French
emigre
regiments were all that the Government could spare to guard Lisbon. On its defence depended the victualling of the fleet blockading Cadiz, where twenty-three crippled Spanish ships of the line were held by fifteen British. Thirty-four French battleships had to be watched at Brest, where a new French army of invasion was gathering. Two more were at Lorient and one at Rochefort, while another eleven were in the Mediterranean. But the gravest menace of all came from the Texel, where 30,000 Dutch troops under General Daendels and a powerful fleet were waiting an opport
unity to sail for England, Scotl
and or Ireland, no man knew which.

Here from June 1
st to the 4th, while an east wind blew fair for an invasion, Duncan with two ships of the line, both presumably on the verge of mutiny, blockaded fifteen Dutch battleships, eight frigates and seventy smaller craft and transports. But the enemy was allowed no inkling of his plight, for the stout Admiral signalled perpetually to an imaginary fleet on the horizon. He told his men that by his reckonings his flag would remain flying at high tide if the Dutch should succeed in sinking him. His ships were still at their station when the wind changed. A few days later they were heartened by the appearance of a small Russian squadron which, through the good offices of Ambassador Vorontzoff, lent its moral support until one after another the defaulting battleships returned to their duty. The Dutch had lost their chance.

¹
Bonaparte, like Mussolini, boasted that he had fostered the growth of a new Ita
lian spirit. " From this moment
' he wrote, " the habits of the Italians were altered. In place of the cassock, which hitherto had been the fashionable dress for young men, came the military tunic. Instead of frittering their lives away at the feet of women, the young Italians sought out the riding-school, the fencing-floor and the parade-ground. Children began to play games of mimic warfare with regiments of tin-soldiers. . . . The national spirit was formed. Italy had its patriotic songs, its military marches. The women repelled with disgust the approaches of men who, to make themselves pleasing, adopted a feminine demeanour."—Frischauer,
46.

Had they taken it, the appearance of General Daendels' army in Ireland might have proved fatal to England. For here in the spring and summer of 1797 a situation developed that threatened the Empire at its heart. A third of the population of the British Isles was ready to repudiate its allegiance to the Crown.

It was the culmination of more than a century of injustice and racial and religious persecution. Ireland was the black page in the English record. Recently there had been a growing desire on the part of English statesmen to make amends. During the American War Ireland had been given her own parliament, and since his rise to power Pitt had striven to place her commerce and constitution on a juster basis.

But to all such attempts there had been three obstacles: religious bigotry, the violence of the Irish character and the selfishness of the Dublin Cas
tl
e bureaucracy. Intolerance towards Papists had been a main inspiration of the great Anglo-Saxon libertarian movement of the seventeenth century: the dispossession of the Catholic peasantry by Protestant landlords and clergy the coping-stone of the Revolution Settlement. And though a century of doctrinal security and rational culture had made the English aristocracy the most tolerant in the world, the common people and middle class still retained the old insensate fear of Rome. Their prejudice was shared by their Sovereign, who held that the retention of the constitutional barriers against Catholic participation in government had been enjoined on him by his coronation oath. When at the outbreak of war Pitt had extended the franchise to Catholic two-pound free holders, the King had vetoed the attempt to admit Catholics to Parliament.

Membership of the Irish parliament was therefore confined to the communicants of a minority creed. The ig
norant Catholic free
holder was given the vote but his educated and wealthier coreligionist was denied any active share in the government of the country. This suited the Dublin
Castle bureaucracy, whose con
ception of rule was of the narrowest and most illiberal kind. It was to govern by dividing: to oppose everything that might make Ireland a nation and foster everything, however unjust, that prolonged her tutelage, ignorance and misery. The Irish Parliament was a mere tool of the Administration: at least two-thirds of its members were pensioners and place-holders, while only a dozen boroughs in all Ireland, enjoyed a free vote. Corruption was universal.