Rodney

by David Hannay

I must now take the liberty to point out to Your Grace a measure which I am sure will infallibly secure the election, and which I most earnestly entreat may take place immediately, as it will convince the people in general (whose minds have been poisoned with different notions) that I have the honour to be nominated by Your Grace as candidate.

Captain Peard of the Savage sloop of war, a Freeman of this Town, whose friends have great influence, has been offer’d by the adversaries a bond of one thousand pounds, and that they will procure him a Post Ship; he has resisted the temptation, and continues firm.

If Your Grace will make it a Point that it may appear here before the election that Captain Peard has post, I am sure all difficulties will be removed. My ship, the Marlborough, has no captain appointed as yet.

From Your Grace’s firm friendship to me I cannot doubt but you will grant me this further mark of your favours, as I shall always continue to be with the utmost gratitude and respect Your Graces most obedient and most humble Servant,

G. B. Rodney.

Thus did they consult the voice of the people in 1761. Whether Charles Robbins was dismissed, and Captain Peard had post, I do not know, and it does not greatly matter. Probably they were respectively punished and preferred, for Rodney was duly elected and returned to Parliament once more as one of the trusty band of gentlemen who enabled the “noodle of Newcastle” first to impose himself on the great Pitt and then to trip up his heels.

It is to be wished that some more heroic tale had to be told of Rodney as a Parliament man, but even from a biographer a decent measure of respect for fact is required, and the honest truth is that Rodney was one of the “items” which made up the sum of political strength in the hand of His Grace of Newcastle. There was in his case no shadow of that comely pretence of a regard for the principles of a party which was exacted from the nominee to a pocket borough in the last years of the old system. He did not profess to take a seat in order to fight for his principles. He struggled for one in order to push his fortunes, and in order to get the seat he made himself the humble servant to command of the silliest and basest of the politicians of the eighteenth century. Whatever amount of stain this may be supposed to inflict on his character must, it is to be feared, remain there.

On the other hand, there is something to be said about the extent and nature of that stain. A man is to be judged by the morality of his time, and beyond all doubt that morality permitted Rodney to do what he did. To attach yourself to the Duke of Newcastle or any other patron was not thought to be an act deserving praise, but it was permissible without too much loss of character. It was only one of the many compromises which are necessary in life. If his patron had been other than Newcastle, who could not be served except by those who were prepared to subordinate in things Parliamentary all principle and patriotism to the interest of their patron, there would to a humane judge be no stain on his character at all. As it was, he followed many others to do a thing made disgraceful by the character of his leader, and I greatly fear that he never woke up to the real nature of his course, but remained to the end of his life convinced that a gentleman might, without loss of character, profess himself the “man” of such a one as His Grace of Newcastle in order to earn place by that act of homage. Here, again, a consideration on the other side suggests itself. It is this, that Rodney’s conduct differed rather in certain superficial matters of form, than in kind, from that of gentlemen of mark in the political world of to-day. There are many who would now make to a caucus that promise of unconditional obedience which he made to Newcastle, and would never be called contemptuous names for so doing except in the criticism of the other side, which is a matter of course, and, by the way, did not spare the led captains of the electioneering duke. Which of the two forms of slavery is the more ignoble is a question to be settled rather by the taste than the reason. There are who would think it more shameful to be horsewhipped by a gentleman single-handed than to be dragged through a horse-pond by a mob. To the fastidious either experience is unpleasant. For the rest it was true in 1761, as it had been before and has been since, that “The rising unto Place is laborious; and by Pains men come to greater Pains; and it is sometimes base; and by Indignities men come to Dignities.” A man, too, ranks rather by what he does with his dignity when it has been won, than by what he does to win it. Now, it cannot be denied that if Rodney stooped somewhat to pick up command, he exercised it for the good of his country and the confusion of her enemies.

His electioneering adventures have been allowed to slightly overlap his services at sea. Between his election for Okehampton and his return—as Clive’s fellow-member, by the way—for Penryn he did a good stroke of service in the Channel. The French were busy in 1759 in preparing a great invasion of England. Flat-bottomed boats, such as were afterwards to reappear on a much more imposing scale in the Napoleonic wars, were being built all along the Channel. A powerful fleet was getting ready at Brest, and a smaller force at Rochefort. On our side Sir Edward Hawke had been told off to watch Brest, and Commodore Duff to pen in the Rochefort squadron. Rodney, now Rear-Admiral of the Blue, was despatched with one sixty-gun ship, the Achilles, and half a score of fifty-gun ships, frigates, and sloops, aided by six-bomb ketches, to answer for the flat-bottomed boats in the Channel ports. The work was smartly and thoroughly done in the month of July. Some of the flat-bottomed boats which, under convoy of a galley, endeavoured to escape from the Seine, and creep along the coast to Brest, were cut off at Cape Bassin and driven on shore. Havre was bombarded with success, and numbers of flat-bottomed boats were destroyed, together with great quantities of the stores collected for the proposed invasion. The destruction can hardly have been complete, and was probably not even so extensive as the English supposed. It was enough, however, to deal the French a shrewd blow. When Rodney returned to port he had greatly relieved the fears of his countrymen, and had raised his own reputation considerably. Before the close of the year Hawke’s victory over Conflans near Quiberon had broken the back of any possible scheme of invasion as effectually as Trafalgar was to do half a century or so later. It is not without interest to note that during these operations Rodney had under his command Captain Samuel Hood of the Vestal frigate, who was to be his second in the battle off Dominica. When he wished to direct the inshore operations in shallower water than could be safely navigated by the Achilles, Rodney hoisted his flag in the Vestal. The two men now began a friendship which, if it was not quite proof against the strain of rivalry in the future—in the heart of one if not of both—was never openly broken. Rodney must have learned the undoubted capacity of Hood.

The remainder of 1759, the whole of 1760, and the early part of 1761 were passed either in watch and ward in the Channel, or in circumventing the “adversary” at Penryn. In the last-named year Rodney sailed with a considerable squadron as Admiral on the Barbadoes and Leeward station. Here he remained until the Peace of Fontainebleau in 1763. His services in these two years were divided between co-operating with General Moncton in the conquest of the French Caribbean Islands, and preparing the way for the great expedition of Pocock and Albemarle to the Havannah. Neither part of this service need be repeated here at any length. The French were in these wars so completely beaten from the sea that an English admiral engaged on such work as Rodney’s had little more to do than to superintend the transport of troops, to see them safely landed, and to organise naval brigades to co-operate with them when on shore. The work was thoroughly done. Navy and army helped one another in the proper way, and Martinique, which had repelled an attack in 1759, soon fell. Other islands followed, and the French were driven from all their possessions in the West Indies except Hayti. That they were able to use them against us in the American War which lay ahead was not the fault of the fighting men, naval or military. The islands were restored by the diplomatists as a set-off for Canada, which we retained, thereby removing that fear of French aggression which had hitherto been the main ingredient in the loyalty of the plantations to the mother-country.