In the Channel, Howe, who continued to hold the command though his health never recovered from the strain of the campaign of 1794, cruised from September till the end of the year.[2] But he continued to prefer his own system of watching the French from an English channel port by means of a lookout maintained by frigates. His infirmities and age were in fact disqualifying him for active service. He would willingly have retired, and indeed was never at sea after the spring of 1795, though he was compelled, by the unwillingness of the Government to allow him to resign, to retain the nominal command. Lord Bridport, brother of Lord Hood, who first acted for him at sea and then succeeded him in the Channel command, held the same views as to the best way of using the fleet, and applied them with far less energy and faculty.
The Admiralty did not as yet impose a more vigorous line of action on its admirals. Between the growing weakness of Howe, the natural want of energy of Bridport, and the lack of intelligent direction from Whitehall, the movements of the Channel fleet went somewhat by fits and starts. In November, the Canada, 74, Captain Hamilton, came into Torbay, where Howe was at anchor, with the news that he had barely escaped from a French squadron which had taken his colleague, the Alexander, 74, commanded by Captain R. R. Bligh, a different man from the officer whose name is for ever associated with the mutiny of the Bounty. Howe went at once to cruise off Ushant, believing that the main French fleet was at sea. But it was only a small squadron commanded by Nielly, which had taken the Alexander as she and the Canada came back from convoy duty. Howe’s fleet, which included four Portuguese liners, was much blown about and damaged by rough weather.
If the English ships, and to a greater extent our Portuguese friends, suffered from the rough weather of the Channel in autumn and winter, the French fleet at Brest was all but finally ruined. Villaret-Joyeuse was hounded out to sea on the 24th December with thirty-five sail of the line. Six of these were to form a detached squadron under Renaudin, who had been promoted to Rear-Admiral for his gallant defence of the Vengeur. He was to take his command round to Toulon. So great was the distress of all France, and particularly of its poorest province (Brittany) for food, that it had not been found possible to provision any of these thirty-five ships except the six of Renaudin’s command for more than three weeks. The hostility of all Europe and the penury of their Government combined to deprive the French of naval stores. Their ships were patched up by makeshift devices and with inferior material. Half a century after 1795, the Prince de Joinville noted that as the French maritime population was very poor and ill fed, the men drawn from it for service in the fleet were inferior in size and strength to the seamen of the north of Europe—including, of course, Great Britain. He found that these men did not gain strength till they had been well fed and well looked after in the navy for some months. In 1795 the French seacoast population was even poorer than about 1840, and the men drawn from it were not sufficiently clad, and were fed on almost starvation rations in the fleet. We must remember that our successes were gained against overstrained and patched-up ships, with inferior spars fished with bad material and sails of poor cloth; manned by crews not only raw from want of practice, but weak from downright want of food, and depressed by a sense of inferiority in knowledge and force. Our ancestors rejoiced in looking at caricatures of the starving French reduced to mere scarecrows by hunger, and in comparing them with the typical Englishman, a mass of fat and brawn. The French had made themselves hateful by their aggressions and plunderings, and we resented their arrogant claim to impose regeneration and freedom on their neighbours while they were themselves in a squalid welter of bloodstained anarchy. Yet they were gallant men who faced storm and battle in such destitution—and we shall not again have to meet enemies enfeebled as they were.
Villaret-Joyeuse had to face a December gale with such a fleet when he obeyed his orders on the 24th of December in 1794. It drove the Républicain on the rocks, and his fleet had to anchor in Camaret Bay. He sailed on the 30th, only to suffer a month of misery. The Neuf Thermidor (the Jacobin of the 1st of June renamed), the Scipion, and the Superbe sank. The Neptune was driven on shore. By the 2nd February the weakened fleet was back at Brest. The news that the French were at sea brought Howe out for his last cruise, to intercept them if possible, and to cover the trade. The stormy weather disposed of Villaret-Joyeuse, who, however, captured a hundred of our merchant-ships, and the Daphne, a 20-gun ship, and Howe returned to Spithead after looking into Brest to be sure that the French fleet was not at sea. If he had been outside Brest on the 24th of December, the French might have been spared a disaster. Yet the weakness of his method of watching from afar off and starting to pursue from a distance was clearly demonstrated immediately after his return to Spithead. Renaudin sailed with his six line-of-battle ships on the 22nd of February, and reached Toulon unmolested by us, on the 2nd April, but having suffered much from the weather, and with a long sick list.
The French took advantage of the absence of a blockading fleet off Brest to send out squadrons to protect their own coast trade and attack our commerce. In May an English watching squadron of five sail of the line under Cornwallis was off Ushant. It saw and pursued a French force of three liners under Rear-Admiral Vence, then engaged on convoy duty. Vence fled to the Penmarchs, pursued by Cornwallis, who took part of his convoy on the 8th and 9th of June. The danger of Vence brought Villaret-Joyeuse out from Brest with nine sail. Cornwallis was pursued and overtaken on the 16th, but so poor was the gunnery of the French that though they attacked his rearmost ships on both sides, they did little harm, and suffered not a little themselves. Cornwallis got safe to Plymouth with his prizes, and his retreat was highly praised for its steadiness and good management. Bad weather forced the French back to Belleisle, and when they turned again to Brest on the 19th June they fell in with another and a stronger opponent.
The Vendéens were still fighting for the royal cause in France, and were calling for help to the Royalist exiles and for the presence of a prince to lead them. An expedition had been prepared in England, which was to have been commanded by the Count d’Artois—in after times King Charles X. It included 200 exiled officers of the old French Navy, and sailed on the 11th June from Spithead under the protection of Sir John Borlase Warren, who had his flag in a frigate, but had three line-of-battle ships and fifty transports. Lord Bridport accompanied the expedition with fourteen sail of the line to protect it from the Brest fleet. Warren’s mission was to land the Royalists at Quiberon. On the 19th June Bridport dispatched him to Quiberon, and steered himself for Brest. Immediately after Warren had parted from Bridport on his way south-east to Quiberon, he sighted Villaret-Joyeuse on his way back from Belleisle to Brest. He retreated, warned Bridport, and the two rejoined on the 20th. Bridport took the three liners of Warren’s squadron, and pursued Villaret-Joyeuse. On the 23rd June there was a confused encounter about the island of Groix, which lies north-west of Belleisle. The French admiral was ill obeyed by his overtaxed subordinates, who disregarded signals, and fled to L’Orient, on the mainland opposite Groix. Three of his ships were overtaken and captured after a gallant resistance. The dangers of the coast and a fog added to the disorders of the fight. The French admiral complained bitterly of the conduct of his captains. Bridport, who had three prizes to show, the Alexandre (the English Alexander taken by Nielly on the 7th November of the previous year through her bad sailing, and now retaken for the same reason), the Tigre, and the Formidable, renamed by us the Belleisle, was praised for his victory. But the opinion of his fleet and the verdict of history was adequately expressed by Codrington, then captain of the Babet frigate in his fleet. “It is greatly to be regretted that His Lordship called the ships out of action, as they could of course go where the large French three-decker did. He might have captured or destroyed all the ships of the enemy.” Warren remained on the coast till September a helpless eye-witness of the dreadful fate of the French Royalists at Quiberon. Nearly all the 200 naval officers among them perished in the water, in action, or before the Republican firing parties. Frenchmen who were prepared to assert that Perfidious Albion had contrived the whole disaster in order to secure the destruction of the dreaded royal corps, have not been wanting. The French ships at L’Orient remained till the close of the year, unmanned partly by desertion, partly by the disbanding of crews which could not be fed. During the last days of 1795 and the first of 1796 they were remanned after a fashion, and slipped away to Brest and Rochefort.
In the meantime the French armies had overrun Holland at the close of 1794, had driven out the army of the Duke of York, and had set up a subject republic. Our ally became our enemy, and a squadron had to be told off to watch the Texel under Duncan, in company with a dozen very ill-found Russian warships. But from the date of Lord Bridport’s victory till the close of 1796 there was little for the fleet to do in the Channel and North Sea but to watch. Want of funds compelled the Republican Government to follow the example given by Louis XIV. after 1693—to lay up its main fleets and take to commerce destroying.
The operations in the Mediterranean from December 1793, when Hood was forced to retreat from Toulon, till Jervis evacuated the Mediterranean in December of 1796, correspond with the campaigns in the Channel—with the exception that they include no 1st of June.
When he had withdrawn his ships filled with French refugees from Toulon, Hood paused for a time at Hyères. The refugees had to be provided for at Leghorn, from whence most of them returned home after the fall of the Terrorists. The remnant of the French fleet at Toulon could not move for months. An opportunity for dealing a severe blow to France was presented by the state of the island of Corsica. The Corsicans had not wholly renounced the hope of achieving independence of the French, who had conquered them some thirty years earlier. One party among them was deeply offended by the irreligion of the French Republicans. It had for chief the famous Pasqual Paoli, who had fought against the French conquest, and had for years been a pensioner in England. He had returned to Corsica by favour of the Revolution, and was now in the possession of great influence over his countrymen. Paoli, who hoped to secure the independence of Corsica under English protection,—which meant to govern the country himself with our support,—offered his co-operation. Hood sailed from Hyères on the 24th of January 1794, bringing with him the British troops under Sir David Dundas. A storm forced the fleet to Elba and caused delay. But the occupation of the island with the help of Paoli was an easy undertaking. The few French troops took refuge in the coast towns of Bastia and Calvi. Dundas declined to co-operate at Bastia on the ground that he had no adequate force. But Bastia was taken between the 4th of April and the 21st of May by the seamen, the marines, and the soldiers appointed to serve as marines, who were under Hood’s orders. Calvi was besieged on the 19th June, and surrendered on the 10th of August. The fact that Nelson, the only one of our admirals whose personality has stamped itself on the memory and imagination of the English people, was concerned in these sieges and lost his right eye at Calvi, has given them an undeserved prominence. The garrisons were cut off from supplies by sea and land, and must have surrendered when they did, if no shot had been fired against them. On the 14th June Corsica was declared a kingdom, with George III. for its sovereign, and coins were struck in his name. But our hold on the island was weak. It depended in reality on the continued support of Paoli and on his retention of influence over his countrymen. Sir Gilbert Elliot, our Commissioner first at Toulon and then in Corsica, ruined the whole foundation of our position. Sir Gilbert was a high-minded and able man, a conspicuous member of that portion of the Whig Opposition which was shocked by the French Revolution into allying itself with Pitt. He would not consent to govern by the advice of Paoli, and would endeavour to introduce clean-handed methods of administration, impartial justice, and the British jury among a people divided by irreconcilable family feuds. With the best intentions in the world, he mortally offended our only possible friends, the Paolists, who hoped for a self-governing Corsica administered by them, and he entirely failed to placate our enemies. The calm and perfectly right-minded manifestation of the innate and comprehensive superiority of Englishmen on the part of our officers, did not fail to produce its unfailing effect. It exasperated the Corsicans beyond endurance. We were soon universally hated, and our tenure of Corsica was certain to end whenever a serious attack could be made on us from outside. A very few months of English virtue converted the population into partisans of the French. A far larger army than we could spare, frequently reinforced, would have been required to hold the island.
The attack came by the end of 1796. Until then we were employed in beating back successive feeble sorties of the French from Toulon, and in co-operating with the Austrian armies in Northern Italy. The efforts of the French to maintain their hold on Corsica by expeditions from a ruined dockyard were begun with a promptitude highly honourable to their energy. As early as the 5th June, just over six months after the expulsion of the allies, Admiral Martin sailed with seven ships of the line. He met with a slight measure of success, for he retook the Alceste, a frigate carried away in December, and assigned to Sardinia as her share of the prizes. But when Hood, warned by his frigates, took up the pursuit of the French squadron, it could but retire and seek refuge in the Golfe Juan, commonly called by English sailors Gourjean. Hood, who had an old experience of attacks on fleets at anchor, laid a plan to fall on the French two upon one. But it was delayed by unfavourable weather till Martin had fortified his ships by batteries on shore. A scheme for using fireships was given up as impracticable. Martin was blockaded by a combined English and Spanish squadron under Hotham till a storm drove the watchers off, and he escaped to Toulon on the 2nd of November. It would seem that the allies might as well have been off Toulon in May. But the method of watching from afar, which in the Mediterranean meant from San Fiorenzo or Leghorn, was as much a favourite with Hood as with Howe. In November, Hood went home on leave, and on the understanding that he was to return. But he could not agree with ministers, and did not go to sea again.