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.
Rodney was now to have an opportunity of vindicating himself in another
and far more effectual way. Early in December he was summoned by the
King to consult on the measures to be taken to check the victorious
progress of the French in America. On what from this year forward it is
strictly accurate to call the coast of the United States, the war had
gone steadily against England for months. At the close of the campaign
season in the West Indies, Grasse had sailed for America at the same
time as Hood. There he in combination with Washington and Rochambeau
carried out the operations which culminated in the surrender of
Cornwallis at Yorktown. It is just possible that if Hood had commanded
for us at sea, the army under Cornwallis might have been saved, but our
admiral was Graves, a thoroughly commonplace and pedantic officer. He
was out-manœuvred by Grasse, and his retreat from the Chesapeake
after a miserably feeble fight with the Frenchman, which was bitterly
criticised by Rodney, left Cornwallis helpless in the midst of an enemy
four times as numerous as his own army. The surrender of Yorktown
followed on October 17th, 1781.
The news reached England in the following month. It convinced all men,
even the King, that the independence of the colonies must be recognised
at last, but it also showed that the war had entered on a new phase.
Freed by the success of their allies from the necessity of helping the
Americans, the French would now be at liberty to devote themselves to
that attack on our West Indian possessions which had always been the
ultimate object of their war policy. It was a matter of course that
Grasse, the hurricane season being over in the West Indies, and his work
on the mainland done, would hurry back to Martinique. It was known that
a great armament was preparing at Brest to sail under Guichen, Rodney’s
old antagonist, which was to reinforce Grasse. Then the whole force in
combination with the Spaniards from Havannah was to attack Jamaica. A
determined effort must be made to defeat this plan, or the war would end
in disaster at sea as it had done on land.
Throughout November the Admiralty was at work preparing reinforcements
for Hood, who was already outnumbered, and would be mewed up in port by
an overwhelming force if Guichen reached the Antilles before our own
ships. Early in December the danger had become so pressing that it was
decided not to wait till all our reinforcements were ready, but to send
part on as soon as they could be made ready. The King summoned Rodney to
an audience and received from him the assurance that he would not waste
a day in getting to sea. From the King’s cabinet the Admiral hastened to
Portsmouth to hoist his flag on the _Formidable_ and again take up the
reins.
Until the January of the following year Rodney was at work, first at
Portsmouth and then at Plymouth (which in a moment of exasperation he
most unjustly called a “horrid port”), superintending the fitting out of
the squadron, collecting men, driving on the laggard dockyard officials,
beating down the ill-will of port admirals who were sulky at real or
imaginary intrusions on their authority. With this kind of opposition
Rodney, well supported as he was now by the Admiralty, kept no measure.
It was instantly crushed; and as for the dockyard officials, what orders
could not do was effected by the crack of the whip. The Admiral could
declare with pardonable pride that he had forced more work out of the
yard in a month than it had done in a year before. All this drive was of
course augmented by the usual torrent of applications for places or
promotion from candidates and their friends. Some of these could be
neglected or refused, but to others attention must be paid. One of these
came from Sandwich on behalf of a Lord Cranstoun who “is greatly
patronised by the Lord Advocate.” It is highly probable that if Sandwich
had been divinely informed that the end of the world would occur in an
hour, the ruins of the universe would have fallen on him placidly
penning a request to somebody to find a place for somebody who was
protected by somebody of importance. Nothing could be done for Cranstoun
for the moment, but Rodney was not quite satisfied with Symonds the
captain of the _Formidable_, and he decided to take the Scotch _protégé_
of the Lord Advocate with him as a volunteer, and to give him the
command of the flag-ship as soon as a place could be found for the other
officer.
Two appointments were made at Rodney’s own request which must not be
passed over. Gilbert Blane was named Physician to the Fleet. This was
not only an excellent administrative measure, but a well-deserved reward
for past services. Since the end of 1779 Blane had sailed with Rodney,
and had used his influence to introduce a number of sanitary reforms by
which many hundreds of stout and well-trained seamen were preserved from
fever and scurvy for the day when England’s need for stout and
well-trained men was great indeed. Cleanliness and good food had been
his favourite prescriptions, and to them was due the excellent general
health of our squadrons in the West Indies. The second appointment was
that of Sir Charles Douglas as Captain of the Fleet--an officer who was
occasionally appointed to help an admiral in command of a very large
force. He corresponded to the chief of the staff in an army. Douglas
would be entitled to especial notice in a life of Rodney if only because
of the claim made on his behalf by his son Sir Howard, the gunner--that
he inspired his admiral at the great and critical moment of the battle
of April 12th. But Sir Charles Douglas would be a notable man if no such
claim had ever been made. It may be said of him that he did for the
gunnery of the fleet what Blane did for its health. To him is due the
use of the lock for firing cannon in place of the old port fire and
powder horn--a change which diminished the risk of explosions and
increased the accuracy of our practice. He also improved the
construction of gun carriages so as to enable the cannon to be trained
farther fore and aft, whereby the range of fire was materially
increased. These reforms, be it noted, were made on his own initiative,
and frequently at his own expense. They were adopted by other captains
on his example. These two Scotchmen were admirable types of those
officers who, on blue water and in the presence of the enemy, by their
own efforts perfected the old sailing navy. It is not the least of
Rodney’s services that he saw the merits of both and used them.
While he was completing his staff and fitting his ships for sea the wind
had settled in the south-west, and had imprisoned him at Plymouth. It
was some consolation in this trial that the wind which kept him in
Cawsand Bay would also keep Guichen in Brest. But before the end of
December the fear that the Frenchman might head him in the race to the
West Indies had been removed by means more glorious to us than the help
of our old allies the storms. Guichen did put to sea with his convoy,
but soon after he was out he fell in with Kempenfelt, who was cruising
off the mouth of the Channel. It was a wild and misty day. By a piece of
mismanagement, which does little credit to his reputation as a
tactician, Guichen was to leeward of his convoy. A sudden lifting of the
mist revealed him to Kempenfelt, who was to windward. The English
admiral swooped on his prize before the transports could run under their
convoy’s lee. Fifteen of them, laden with troops and stores, were
captured. The others scattered in terror and were lost in the mist.
Guichen returned to Brest, and in deep humiliation resigned his command.
When Kempenfelt’s destruction of the reliefs for the West Indies was
known, the Ministry, seeing that there was now no fear of a meeting with
a superior force on the way, urged Rodney to put to sea with the ships
which were actually ready, and leave the rest to follow. In words which
ring like the famous appeal to Radetzky--“Austria is in thy camp,”
Sandwich solemnly reminded him that “the fate of this Empire is in your
hands.” Rodney answered the appeal. The instant that the wind, shifting
a little to the north, ceased to blow directly into Plymouth Sound--then
unprotected by its breakwater--he put to sea with four ships of the
line, and began to fight the winds for a passage out to the ocean. The
week which followed was a better test of the quality of the Admiral’s
nerve, and the seamanship of the little squadron round him, than a
battle with Souffren himself could have been. Rodney was now sixty-four,
an older man then than he would have been at the same years now. His
gout had returned on him so cruelly at Plymouth that he had been
compelled to leave the very signing of his letters to Sir Charles
Douglas. The wind was blowing straight in his teeth with undeviating
fury. But he fought on doggedly, and at last, after a week of struggle,
seamanship prevailed. On January 17th, 1782, the squadron weathered
Ushant in sea which made a clean breach over such mighty three-deckers
as the _Formidable_ and the _Namur_. From the open sea he sent back a
frigate with the news to Sandwich, and then pressed on, accompanied by
storms, to the West. On February 19th he anchored in Carlisle Bay in
Barbadoes. From thence he sailed to join Hood off Antigua, and was again
in command of the West Indies.