Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon Read online

  He lost no time in presenting his credentials, and he was received with the greatest distinction. The Sultan was greatly pleased with the presents he had brought him from His Majesty King George III — they included twelve 3-pounder field pieces so constructed that they could be dismantled and carried on camels, a perfect model of the Royal George and a series of paintings of famous sea battles. It was a favourable opportunity to ask for the French prisoners. Immediately after the audience he went in person to the dungeon with an order for their release. When their chains had been knocked off, and they had been clothed and fed, he embarked them in a coasting vessel which he chartered for them; he sent them to France with a guard of British seamen under Midshipman Beecroft, and he provided them with a safe conduct to protect them from corsairs.

  On 5th January, 1799, the royal salute was fired from The Tigre and answered by the Tophkana Battery to announce to the world that the first Treaty of Friendship that had ever existed between Great Britain and Turkey had been signed. The text was shown on the following day to the Russian Ambassador at the Porte who signified his approval: it guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, which implied the restoration of Egypt to the rule of the Sultan, and it stipulated that the high contracting powers should concert their plan of operations. Discussions began at once for this purpose between the Smith brothers and the Turkish government. The Sultan began by asking for as much naval support as possible; he wanted a British squadron that would not only inspire the respect of his subjects but be strong enough to enforce obedience over the insubordinate commanders of his fleet and army. The British Ministers, however, were bound by their secret instructions to promise no more than two ships of the line and three frigates, and with this he had to be content.

  The arrangement, that Sir Sidney who was to contract the obligations under the Treaty was also to carry them out, had great advantages. The Sultan appointed him a member of his council, the Dewan, and put under his command not only the Turkish fleet, but the army also that was being mobilised to act against the common enemy; he ordered his brother-in-law, Vice-admiral Hassan Bey, known as the Captain Pasha, to hand over the naval arsenal to him: he obeyed without demur. Mr Spuring and his shipwrights were put to work there to build gunboats as quickly as possible, and long-boats for landing troops from transports.

  The Turkish forces were vast, but chaotic. Only the Sultan’s personal guards, the Chiftlicks, were trained on modern lines. Sir Sidney decided that these were the only men in the whole army who might be able to face the disciplined French soldiers, but they numbered only a thousand against Bonaparte’s 30,000 veterans. The rest of the Sultan’s army consisted of untrained irregulars obeying local chieftains of doubtful allegiance, useless against regular troops. It was idle to suppose, therefore, that the Turks could defeat the French in the field or drive them out of Egypt. The only hope lay in irregular warfare by means of which, Sir Sidney thought, the lives of the French could be made so unpleasant that, with the aid of a little psychological warfare, they might be induced to abandon their conquest. He tried to persuade the Turkish leaders that instead of ill-treating prisoners they should treat them well in order to encourage others to surrender. He wrote out a proclamation in the name of the Sultan, to be distributed by all possible means to the French troops, stating that an innumerable army was on the march to free Egypt and that any soldier, whatever his rank, who wished to save himself from the peril to come, had only to apply to the commanders of the Allied Naval or Military Forces and he would be guaranteed a safe passage to wherever he wanted to go. This was the policy officially agreed and concerted under the terms of the Treaty by the Turkish Ministers in the name of the Sultan, and by the Smith brothers in the name of His Majesty King George III.

  Before leaving London, Sir Sidney had obtained an authorisation to engage 1,000 Albanian mercenaries, hardy mountaineers, to man the new gunboats. He intended them to operate as an amphibious force in the Nile Delta in support of any local demonstration against the French, particularly while their garrisons were isolated from each other by the annual floods.

  His Royalist friends were enrolled in the Turkish army. Phélippeaux accepted a colonel’s commission. De Tromelin preferred to conceal his identity under the name that Sir Sidney had given him on the spur of the moment at Havre de Grace; he became Major Bromley, and Charles Frotté became Major Frotté. Le Grand and Viscovitch also received commissions, Viscovitch assuming the name of Captain Durroi. This little group of Royalists became Sir Sidney’s personal aides-de-camp. He even remembered Boisgirard, dancer at the Paris Opera, who had impersonated ‘Staff Captain Auger’ so brilliantly in the escape from the Temple. He had him appointed Colonel, and arranged for his pay, 800 piastres a month, to be secretly transmitted to him in Paris.

  In the midst of their feverish preparations Sir Sidney’s attention was drawn to a newspaper paragraph in which it was announced that Lord Elgin had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Sultan of Turkey. He didn’t know what to make of this: it couldn’t have been intended to supersede him because the appointment had evidently been made before he had arrived in Constantinople. His only possible course was to continue to carry out his instructions, and continue to exercise the powers that had been vested in him until they were withdrawn.

  The news at first paralysed their councils. The Turks began to hang back, to make excuses not to co-operate, anxious not to be too closely identified with an ambassador who was about to be replaced, or to do anything that might not be pleasing to his successor. Some of the ministers spoke of the disastrous news from Italy where the King of Naples, encouraged by Nelson, had made a too precipitous advance against the French, an advance that ended in his defeat and ignominious flight to Sicily; they didn’t want to be hustled into making a similar mistake.

  ‘Why,’ asked the Sultan, ‘has the King of England appointed a new ambassador when everything was going so well between us?’

  Sir Sidney replied that Lord Elgin, the only Scottish peer who was at the same time a professional diplomat, represented powerful interests that had to be considered. The Sultan admitted that he had the very same problem himself with the rival beys and pashas he had to conciliate; but still the name of the new ambassador filled him with foreboding. He insisted on pronouncing it ‘El-Jin’ which in his language meant The Devil.

  Meanwhile The Bonne Citoyenne, sloop, came in with dispatches, and a letter from Nelson desiring Sir Sidney to lose no time in proceeding to Alexandria to take over the command of the blockade. It informed him that Captain Miller in the Theseus would be sent to join him there, in accordance with his request to Lord St. Vincent.

  He left Constantinople in The Tigre on 19th February, appointing the Islands of Rhodes as the rendezvous for all Turkish transports and men-o’-war. He carried a firman from the Sultan which would enable him to exercise authority in his name, if necessary, over all his officers excepting only the Grand Vizir, the Chief Minister. He took Colonel Phélippeaux with him, and he left Major Bromley as his chief aide-de-camp and liaison officer to enrol the Albanians and to get the Turkish troops and guns into the transports as quickly as possible.

  He had heard from an officer of The Bonne Citoyenne that Captain Troubridge, senior to him, was with the ships off Alexandria. This made him anxious in case he should lose command of the squadron and not have a free hand to carry out the plans he had concerted with the Turkish leaders. His anxiety was relieved by a letter from Troubridge, received while The Tigre was passing through the Dardanelles, saying that he was impatiently waiting to be relieved in order to return to Naples.

  Nelson, as a rule, was just in his dealings with other men, but he was subject to violent outbursts of temper. Although Sir Sidney was unaware of it he had been deeply hurt by his appointment as one of His Majesty’s representatives in the Levant. That a junior officer whom he hardly knew, except by repute, had been given a high diplomatic post which he would have liked himself as a reward for the Battle of the Nile, he
took as a personal affront. To find that the same officer had apparently been given in addition a part of his own command was too much for him to bear in silence. He wrote to Lord St. Vincent that it was impossible for him to continue to serve in those waters if the squadron was to be under a junior officer:

  Who could have thought it! — and from Earl Spencer! Never, never was I so astonished as your letter made me...The Swedish Knight writes Sir William Hamilton, that he shall go to Egypt, and take Captain Hood and his Squadron under his command. The Knight forgets the respect due to his superior officer. He has no orders from you to take my ships away from my command; but it is all of a piece. Is it to be borne?

  The Cabinet’s intentions had not been made clear. It may be that they had thought of the Levant Squadron as an independent command, and they may have given Sir Sidney this impression. Earl Spencer in his letter had assumed, naturally, that he would be under St. Vincent’s command, ‘perfectly under your guidance’, and ‘to be employed on any hazardous or difficult service’, but had not specifically stated that he should be put under Nelson’s sub-command. St. Vincent could certainly have done so, had he wished to avoid friction. He had known, of course, exactly what Nelson’s reaction would be. He replied to him on 17th January, adding fuel to the fire, ‘I am not surprised at your feelings being outraged, at the bold attempt Sir Sidney Smith is making to wrest a part of your Squadron from you...’ and without further reference to London he ordered Nelson to take him immediately under his command.

  The ascendance of this gentleman, [he continued] over all His Majesty’s Ministers is to me astonishing, and that they should have sent him out after the strong objection I made to him, in a private letter to Mr. Neapean [Secretary to the Admiralty] passes my understanding...

  He told him to employ Sir Sidney Smith in any manner he thought proper, mortifying him as little as possible, ‘consistently with what is due to the great characters senior to him on the List, and his superiors in every sense of the word.’

  He reported these transactions to Lord Spencer as follows:

  My Lord, an arrogant letter, written by Sir Sidney Smith to Sir William Hamilton, when he joined the squadron forming the blockade of Malta, has wounded Rear-Admiral Nelson to the quick, as per enclosed, who besides feels himself affronted by his embassy and separate command, which compels me to put this strange man immediately under his Lordship’s orders, or the King may be deprived of his important services, and those of many valuable officers, as superior to Sidney Smith, in all points, as he is to the most ordinary of men. I experienced a trace of the presumptuous character of this young man during his stay in Gibraltar, which I passed over, that it might not appear to your Lordship I was governed by prejudice in my conduct towards him.

  Sir Sidney had not in fact written an arrogant letter to Sir William, but a courteous one, informing him of his mission and of the Cabinet’s instructions; but in that letter also he had stated that he would be taking command of the Levant Squadron, all the captains there being junior to him, and mentioning Captain Hood. It was not Sir William, who had tried to act as a peacemaker, but Nelson who found the letter arrogant.

  On receipt of the budget of complaint, Lord Spencer replied to Lord St. Vincent that nothing could possibly give him more concern than that Lord Nelson should think him capable of taking any measure which he thought could in the most distant manner convey any mortification to him, or be construed into a want of respect and regard for him both as an officer and as a man, or any other but the warmest and most lively sense of his very extraordinary and brilliant services...and he could not help thinking that Lord Nelson was not correctly informed of what his intention was if he could suppose that he had sent a junior captain to supersede either him or the other brave and distinguished officers who were serving under him and were Sir Sidney’s seniors, in any part of their operations. This matter would, however, be cleared up by St. Vincent’s having put Sir Sidney under Lord Nelson’s command, which Earl Spencer always understood and supposed he would be of course. As to the presumptuous conduct of Sir Sidney when he was with St. Vincent at Gibraltar, he could only regret that he should have so conducted himself, but not being apprised of the particulars of it, he could say no more about it.

  Nelson was mollified. He thanked St. Vincent profusely, calling him ‘everything that was great and good’. He told Captain Ball that Sir Sidney had given great offence to the Earl of St. Vincent, but that his Lordship had taken him down very handsomely and ordered him ‘to put himself immediately under my command, which I suppose the great Plenipo will not like’. He continued to abuse in his correspondence, calling him the Turkish Admiral, the Great Sir Sidney, or simply S.S.S. ‘If Sir Sidney,’ he wrote to St. Vincent, ‘was an object of anger I would not serve unless he was taken away; but I despise such frippery and nonsense as he is composed of.’ His work as Minister Plenipotentiary Nelson constantly represented as impertinent. ‘He should recollect how I feel,’ he wrote to Lord Spencer, ‘in seeing him placed in the situation which I thought naturally would fall to me.’

  Chapter Seven – The Way of the Conquerors

  On 3rd March, 1799, Sir Sidney, in complete ignorance of the complaints and of the abuse, arrived off Alexandria. Nelson had sent Captain Troubridge there to bombard, and if possible to destroy, all the ships in Alexandria Harbour. He had orders that if he succeeded he was to return to Syracuse leaving Sir Sidney no ship of the line except The Tigre.

  Troubridge was Nelson’s oldest and most devoted friend. When they were both young captains and Nelson had flouted the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, West Indies, Troubridge had supported him. When Nelson at the Battle off Cape St. Vincent had turned out of the line contrary to orders to head off the retreating Spanish ships, Troubridge had followed suit. At the Battle of the Nile his ship, the Culloden, had run on a reef when the fleets were about to engage, and he had impotently watched his brothers-in-arms win immortal renown. His attempts to carry out Nelson’s orders at Alexandria, to destroy the ships in the harbour, had been a complete failure — his mortars had burst, his fireships had driven harmlessly ashore, and his long-concentrated bombardment by five ships of the line had had no visible effect. He was convinced now that Egyptian waters were unlucky for him, and that he would never do any good there.

  Sir Sidney, on the other hand, fresh from his diplomatic triumphs in Constantinople, was full of confidence and enthusiasm. He talked very freely about his plan to harass the enemy by irregular warfare and at the same time to offer them as a pont d’or, or golden bridge, an honourable retreat to France. He thought the moral effect on the army and on Bonaparte himself would be irresistible.

  Troubridge maintained a discreet silence. The idea of offering the enemy a pont d’or was very far from his mind. When forty transports, manned by Italian crews who had been forced to carry French troops to Egypt, had come out of Alexandria and requested safe conduct back to Italy, he had seized and burnt their ships, on Nelson’s orders, and landed the crews in Egypt again, with the result that the foreign crews of the remaining transports, numbering several thousand men, had thenceforth no course open to them but to make common cause with the French. He let no hint escape him that Sir Sidney had already incurred the displeasure of the Commander-in-Chief, and that his reversal of the policy they had so far pursued was not likely to find favour. He left him the Theseus and the Lion, both seventy-four-gun ships of the line, but no frigates because he had none, and handed over to him the command of the blockade.

  Sir Sidney entrusted to him a letter addressed to Lord Spencer in which he notified him of the plan of operations agreed with the Turkish government — no longer to keep the enemy dammed up in Egypt, but to allow him to evacuate the territory by all means except that of permission to retire with arms in their hands, at liberty to use them elsewhere. He also gave him a letter for Lord Grenville in which he said that he was trying to get in touch with Murad Bey, Ibrahim Bey, and other enemies of the French; and that he had sent Lieu
tenant Wright to open up communications with Djezzar, the Pasha of Acre, the old crusader town halfway up the coast of Syria. He spoke of his plan for using the Albanian mercenaries in the gunboats to operate on the coast and up the Nile. It was his belief that without some such force they might cruise off Alexandria to eternity, hauling off to sea for every gale, without ever coming to blows with the enemy.

  I left Sir Sidney [Troubridge wrote to St. Vincent] giving him everything he could want that he may not be able to say the blame lays on Lord Nelson if he should not succeed...Sir Sidney talks so large, as a member of the Divan and plennippo, that he made me sick.

  He sailed on 6th March to rejoin Nelson.

  On the 7th, towards evening, a small Turkish brigantine came down from the eastward bearing a letter for Sir Sidney written by Djezzar’s secretary, Malagamba. It contained the news that while Troubridge had been uselessly bombarding Alexandria, Bonaparte had been advancing with lightning speed through Syria towards Constantinople. The situation was grave indeed. Malagamba wrote:

  After losing the Castle of El Arish, Djezzar’s troops have defended practically nothing. The same troops abandoned Gaza...Among them reigns the greatest disorder and fear of the French, so that at every instant we expect to hear of another reverse, or even to be shut up in Acre which will offer little resistance if the troops have no more courage. Nearly all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood only await the French...I hope that in your generosity you will never abandon a friend and an ally who is ready to do everything in your service.