With this misfortune all our superiority of position and numbers vanished away. Rodney was thoroughly savage, and hinted pretty intelligibly that Hood had manœuvred so as to fulfil his own prophecy—a monstrous charge, which he did not venture to press. It is to be hoped for his honour that his conscience pricked him. Whether he or Hood was right as to the best way of meeting Grasse, there can, I should imagine, be only one opinion on the question whether his conduct during these months was worthy of his renown or of his actions before and afterwards. At a time when a great hostile force was approaching the station committed to his care, the proper place for an English admiral was at sea and at the head of his fleet. He should not have remained on shore with the auctioneer’s hammer in his hand superintending the sale of his booty amid surroundings redolent of the redoubted Sir Henry Morgan. His health was indeed bad, but it did not prevent him from putting to sea when informed of the arrival of Grasse. Besides, if it had been so shaken as to make him incapable of command, he was all the more bound not to interfere with the officer whom he left in the post of danger and honour. On the whole, one has to come back to the view that Rodney’s eyes had been dazzled and his better nature corrupted for the time by the fairy gold poured out before him at St. Eustatius.
During the two and a half months which remained before the return of the hurricane season everything went wrong. The English admirals met on May 9th between Montserrat and Antigua. It was necessary to take Hood’s battered ships into harbour in the latter island to refit. While they were so occupied the French were busy. Grasse was, no doubt, a less wary and skilful tactician than Guichen. He had faults of character which proved his ruin—faults which may be all collected under that untranslatable French word suffisance; but he was a clever officer. In Bouillé he had an ally of extraordinary energy. The two combined to carry out an aggressive campaign against our islands. While Rodney was refitting at Antigua, a double expedition sailed from Fort Royal. The larger part, under Grasse and Bouillé, was to attempt the recapture of Santa Lucia; the smaller, under a M. de Blanchelande, was to go south to Tobago. The attack on Santa Lucia failed, thanks, in part, to Rodney’s foresight in fortifying Pigeon Island; thanks also to the accidental arrival of several English frigates, whose captains landed their men to reinforce the garrison. Bouillé disembarked his soldiers and attacked in his usual fiery style, but our fortifications round Gros Islet Bay were too strong, and the guns on Pigeon Island kept the French fleet off. Finding that the island could not be mastered so soon as they expected, Grasse and Bouillé re-embarked their men, and followed Blanchelande to Tobago.
In the meantime Rodney was hurrying south from Antigua. He was met at sea by news of the retreat of the French from Santa Lucia, but did not learn their course. Concluding that they would probably steer for Barbadoes, which had not yet recovered the effects of the great hurricane, he hastened there at once. On his arrival he was greeted by a despatch from Captain Fergusson, the Governor of Tobago, reporting the appearance of Blanchelande with the smaller French expedition. Rear-Admiral Drake was at once sent off with six sail to help defend the island. Soon after he had gone came news that the whole French fleet was on its way to Tobago. For a time there was great fear for Drake, but he discovered his danger in time and avoided it by speedy retreat. When he had rejoined the Admiral, the whole English force sailed for Tobago, and arrived in time to be too late. After a gallant resistance, Fergusson, who was well supported by the planters, had been compelled to surrender.
Rodney found the French at sea, standing to the north along the string of little islands called the Grenadines, between Grenada and St. Vincent. They were somewhat superior in force, but he expressed his readiness to fight. No battle, however, took place. According to Rodney the French manœuvred to draw him to leeward of St. Vincent, with the intention of getting between him and Barbadoes. According to Grasse, the English admiral, who being to eastward had the wind, made use of his advantage to avoid a battle. The French showed no eagerness to fight for their part. During the night they went back to Tobago. When Rodney discovered that they had vanished his fears for Barbadoes revived, and he returned there at once. Grasse after a short stay at Tobago returned to Fort Royal, and so ended that campaign.
The ill health of which Rodney had complained all through the year had now increased on him. He had applied for leave to come home during the hurricane months, and it had been reluctantly granted him. As it was now June, and therefore close on the dangerous season, he began to make ready. Hood was to be despatched with the bulk of the squadron to Sandy Hook. Rodney himself decided to make an attempt to go there also, and only to sail for Europe if he found himself unable to stand a northern latitude. His old flag-ship the Sandwich was so battered as to be unfit to stand the voyage. He therefore shifted his flag to the Gibraltar, which had been the Fenix, Don Juan de Langara’s flag-ship. On August 1st he sailed, and after going as far north as the latitude of the Bahamas found himself so ill as to be compelled to renounce all intention of going on to America. He therefore steered directly for England, and after touching at Cork, arrived at Plymouth on September 19th.
CHAPTER X
RODNEY’S STAY IN ENGLAND
Rodney’s return home was not what he might have hoped it would be a year before, or what it was destined to be when he returned from his great campaign a year later. His health was wretchedly bad, and after a very brief stay in London he went down to Bath to recruit. His son-in-law Mundy, who edited his correspondence rather in what Carlyle called the rubbish shot here style, says that he was under the necessity of consulting London surgeons for some ailment other than the gout from which he had so long suffered. As a matter of fact it was a stricture. At Bath the Admiral had a short interval of rest with his wife, his daughters, and the faithful Loup. Loup, who was perhaps entitled to an earlier mention, was a French dog whom the Admiral had brought with him from Paris in 1778—a beast obviously of the most meritorious intelligence and devotion. Surrounded by these dearly loved friends the Admiral had two months of rest for his body and mind.
Indeed he needed consolation for the second as well as for the first. The last campaign had on the whole gone against him, and his popularity was not what it had been. Rodney might have dispensed with popular applause, but he could not help seeing that his ministerial friends were disappointed in him. There was no talk of superseding him. It was not the wont of George the Third to throw over a faithful servant who had been unsuccessful, and on such a point the Ministry would not go against the wish of the King. But there were no signs given him of welcome. The war was going against England, making the position of the Ministry harder every day. Lord North and his colleagues could not but feel that Rodney had of late done little to help them. When the news of the capture of St. Eustatius came there had been talk of a peerage for the Admiral. It was so serious that the Duke of Chandos sent him a message through Lady Rodney offering to let him have Rodney Stoke on reasonable terms if he wished to take his title from the ancient possession of the family from which he claimed to descend. The talk ended in talk, however, as later events in the West Indies went against us. The failure at St. Vincent, the loss of Tobago under the very eyes, as the grumblers would say, of Rodney’s fleet, the ease with which Grasse had made his way to Fort Royal, and the impunity with which he had subsequently ranged the West Indies in defiance as it seemed of our fleet, made a great score against us. To this we could only set off, in the way of actual advance, the capture of St. Eustatius and the Dutch post on the mainland. This had seemed a brilliant success at the time, but it did not last. When it was seen that the want of the island had neither weakened the insurgents on the continent, nor stopped the activity of the Yankee privateers, nor made it a whit more difficult for a French admiral to keep the sea,—when finally it was found, as it soon was, that the seizure of the island had made it harder than before for Englishmen to obtain those products of the plantations which had become necessaries to them,—the popular voice turned with its usual versatility from loud applause to loud complaint. The outcry of the planters in St. Kitts, and the traders whose goods had been confiscated, found an echo in England. Their case was taken up in Parliament by the formidable voice of Burke. Rodney therefore found himself the mark for not a little obloquy.
The Admiral did not sit in silence under these attacks. He published a selection of his letters in order to prove that his conduct at St. Eustatius had been unimpeachable, and that he was not to blame for subsequent failures. The person to whom he entrusted the publication of the pamphlet turned out to be an injudicious editor, for he printed Hood’s request to be allowed to cruise to windward of Martinique, which of course was to put a weapon into the hands of the Admiral’s enemies. Rodney was annoyed, but the mischief was done.
In December Rodney had an opportunity of answering his enemies in Parliament. Burke moved for a committee to inquire into the circumstances of the seizure of St. Eustatius in a vehement denunciatory speech such as he only could deliver. The occasion called out both the weakness and the strength of the great orator. He saw a chance of damaging the Administration, and seized on it as a party man, in which character he was neither better nor worse than five hundred other honourable gentlemen. He also thought he saw that the honour of England had been tarnished, and her interests sacrificed, by cruelty and greed. A man must have read Burke to very little purpose who does not know that when he was convinced he had to deal with these sins his anger was perfectly sincere and also perfectly generous. In this case he had been persuaded by the lamentations of the sufferers at St. Eustatius, and he attacked Rodney with asperity. His charges were in many cases exaggerated, and Rodney had no difficulty in disposing of them. There was, however, a substance of truth below the exaggeration, and to that the Admiral’s answer was but lame. It was easy for him to show that he had not knowingly allowed provisions and naval stores to be sold to the French islands in order to fill his own pocket. It was not equally easy for him to prove that he had not gone to undue lengths in his seizures, or that he had not stayed too long at St. Eustatius. In his excuses for subsequent failures he was sadly hampered by the notorious fact that he had differed in opinion from his subordinate, and that the subordinate turned out to be right. There is far too much of the weak man’s plea, “It could not be helped, and how could I know?” for Rodney’s honour. On the whole one is glad to be done with a disagreeable passage in his life. The Ministerial majority being still intact, Burke’s motion was of course rejected.