When since the days of William the Conqueror were the shores of Great Britain menaced by such a peril? "There is no difficulty," said Moltke, "in getting an army into England; the trouble would be to get it out again." And, no doubt, Englishmen, fighting on their own soil and for their own hearths, would have given an invader a very rough time of it. But let it be remembered that Napoleon was a military genius of the first order, and that the 130,000 soldiers waiting on the heights above Boulogne to leap on British soil were, to quote Mahan, "the most brilliant soldiery of all time." They were the men who afterwards won Austerlitz, who struck down Prussia with a single blow at Jena, who marched as victors through the streets of Vienna and of Berlin, and fought their way to Moscow. Imagine such an army, with such a leader, landed on the green fields of Kent! In that case there might have been an English Austerlitz or Friedland. London might have shared the fate of Moscow. If Napoleon had succeeded, the fate of the world would have been changed, and Toronto and Cape Town, Melbourne and Sydney and Auckland might have been ruled by French prefects.
Napoleon himself was confident of success. He would reach London, he calculated, within four days of landing, and then he would have issued decrees abolishing the House of Lords, proclaiming a redistribution of property, and declaring England a republic. "You would never have burned your capital," he said to O'Meara at St. Helena; "you are too rich and fond of money." The London mob, he believed, would have joined him, for, as he cynically argued, "the canaille of all nations are nearly alike."
Even Napoleon would probably have failed, however, in subduing Great Britain, and would have remained a prisoner where he came intending to be a conqueror. As he himself said when a prisoner on his way to St. Helena, "I entered into no calculation as to the manner in which I was to return"! But in the battles which must have been fought, how many English cities would have perished in flames, how many English rivers would have run red with the blood of slain men! "At Waterloo," says Alison, "England fought for victory; at Trafalgar for existence."
But "the streak of silver sea" guarded England, and for more than two years Napoleon framed subtle plans and organised vast combinations which might give him that brief six hours' command of the Strait which was all he needed, as he thought, to make himself the master of the world. The flotilla could not so much as get out of the ports, in which the acres of boats lay, in a single tide, and one half of the army of invasion must lie tossing—and, it may be suspected, dreadfully sea-sick—for hours outside these ports, waiting for the other half to get afloat. Then there remained forty miles of sea to cross. And what would happen if, say, Nelson and Collingwood, with a dozen 74-gun ships, got at work amongst the flotilla? It would be a combat between wolves and sheep. It was Nelson's chief aspiration to have the opportunity of "trying Napoleon on a wind," and the attempt to cross the Straits might have given him that chance. All Napoleon's resources and genius were therefore strained to give him for the briefest possible time the command of the Channel; and the skill and energy of the British navy were taxed to the utmost to prevent that consummation.
Now, France, as a matter of fact, had a great fleet, but it was scattered, and lying imprisoned, in fragments, in widely separated ports. There were twelve ships of the line in Toulon, twenty in Brest, five in Rochefort, yet other five in Ferrol; and the problem for Napoleon was, somehow, to set these imprisoned squadrons free, and assemble them for twenty-four hours off Boulogne. The British policy, on the other hand, was to maintain a sleepless blockade of these ports, and keep the French fleet sealed up in scattered and helpless fragments. The battle for the Straits of Dover, the British naval chiefs held, must be fought off Brest and Ferrol and Toulon; and never in the history of the world were blockades so vigilant, and stern, and sleepless maintained.
Nelson spent two years battling with the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, keeping watch over a great French squadron in Toulon, and from May 1803 to August 1805 left his ship only three times, and for less than an hour on each occasion. The watch kept by Cornwallis off Brest, through summer and winter, for nearly three years, Mahan declares, has never, for constancy and vigilance, been excelled, perhaps never equalled, in the history of blockades. The hardship of these long sea-watches was terrible. It was waging an fight with weariness and brain-paralysing monotony, with cold and scurvy and tempest, as well as with human foes. Collingwood was once twenty-two months at sea without dropping anchor. In seventeen years of sea service—between 1793 and 1810—he was only twelve months in England.
The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, or forget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in one letter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for fourteen months! By way of compensation, these long and stern blockades developed such a race of seamen as perhaps the world has never seen before or since; exhaustless of resource, hardy, tireless, familiar with every turn of sea life, of iron frame and an iron courage which neither tempest nor battle could shake. Great Britain, as a matter of fact, won her naval battles, not because she had better ships or heavier guns than her enemies, but only because she trained a finer race of seamen. Says Brenton, himself a gallant sailor of the period, "I have seen Spanish line-of-battle ships twenty-four hours unmooring; as many minutes are sufficient for a well-manned British ship to perform the same operation. When, on any grand ceremony, they found it necessary to cross their top-gallant yards in harbour, they began the day before; we cross ours in one minute from the deck."
But it was these iron blockades that in the long-run thwarted the plans of Napoleon and changed the fate of the world. Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, Nelson before Toulon, fighting the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay and the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, in what Mahan calls "that tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar," really saved England. "Those far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked," says Mahan, "stood between it and the dominion of the world."
An intellect so subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course, strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and the story of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguile the British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the manner in which these plain-minded, business-like British seamen, for whose mental powers Napoleon cherished the deepest contempt, fathomed his plans and shattered his combinations.
Napoleon's first plot was decidedly clever. He gathered in Brest 20,000 troops, ostensibly for a descent upon Ireland. This, he calculated, would preoccupy Cornwallis, and prevent him moving. The Toulon fleet was to run out with the first north-west wind, and, as long as a British look-out ship was in sight, would steer east, as though making for Egypt; but when beyond sight of British eyes the fleet was to swing round, run through the Straits, be joined off Cadiz by the Rochefort squadron, and sweep, a great fleet of at least sixteen sail of the line, past the Scilly Islands to Boulogne. Napoleon calculated that Nelson would be racing in the direction of Egypt, Cornwallis would be redoubling his vigilance before Brest, at the exact moment the great Boulogne flotilla was carrying its 130,000 invading Frenchmen to Dover! Napoleon put the one French admiral as to whose resolve and daring he was sure—Latouche Treville—in command of the Toulon fleet; but before the moment for action came Treville died, and Napoleon had to fall back upon a weaker man, Villeneuve.