 Right, welcome everybody. Welcome to King's Maritime History Seminars, organized as always by the British Commission for Maritime History, hosted here in the Department of War Studies by the Department of Law and Naval History Unit. And Sir Michael Harvard sent it for the history of war, organized with the support of the Society for Nonical Research and Register. I'm very pleased to introduce tonight's speaker, Rachel Blackman, who's a familiar face, supporter of the seminar of law and standing usually sits there, but it's now standing here, which is good news for all of us. Rachel's interests are varied. I know that they go back to Alford and King Alford, and they go all the way to and beyond, no doubt the Napoleonic Wars, but it's those very wars that Rachel is going to speak to us about appropriately here in the War Studies Department, and there's no need for further ado from me. So I will hand over with gratitude to you, Rachel, anybody who wants to ask a question, raise their hand, and that's probably the best way to do it. So many thanks Rachel and Alford. So hello everyone, I'm Rachel Blackman Rogers and I'm a PhD candidate at King's College, and today I'm going to be presenting my thesis, which looks at the British response to unlimited war with France during the Revolutionary Wars. And although these wars lasted for nine years, I'm going to be looking at this particular period because this was when Britain realised that it was engaged in an unlimited war, and that meant the necessary expansion of executive power to extract the resources needed to power Britain's fiscal naval machinery. And for that to happen, relationships between Britain's institutions needed to be renegotiated and redefined. To do this, Britain embarked upon two key processes, one was a strategic evolution, and the other a cultural transformation. And these two processes were symbiotic, they depended upon each other for their success. And their aims were to secure the nation from the unlimited threat of invasion and deliver national consensus. Historiographically, this period isn't really seen this way. Cultural and social historians tend to see repression and government tyranny, and military and strategic historians see failure and paralysis in the face of French aggression. And what this thesis is offering is a different perspective. Now I've chosen this image here to illustrate my entire thesis, and some of you may recognise it as the blowing up of the friendship laurion at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. And I didn't choose it just because it's part of the period I'm looking at, but because the intensity of that explosion to me is really representative of the shockwaves these were wars sent across Europe. And so I thought I'd begin by talking about how I'm going to structure my argument. I'm going to first talk about the revolution controversy, which sets the scene for how Britain interpreted the revolution and therefore how they entered the war at the beginning. We then reached the point at which everything changed. The French navy were defeated in the middle of 1794 and unlimited war was revealed. So Britain began to embark on a process in order to secure itself from the unlimited threat of invasion, and delivering that would be his Majesty's navy and the Bank of England. In order to deliver that, cultural transformation within the navy was required. And in addition to deliver national consensus, opposition to the war needed to be contained. So that in the end, there was consensus behind a strategy of overthrow by the end of 1798. And I think this quote from Julian Corbett really eloquently states how that relationship between people's beliefs about war and strategy were so intimately connected. And Britain didn't enter this war united in either its beliefs about it or in what it thought it might achieve. And that would have consequences. And some of that originated in the revolution controversy. When people are looking at contemporary events that they don't really quite difficult to understand something that's really new. And so it's quite common to use something familiar to understand it. And in this case, factions within Britain claimed the revolution as the direct descendant of the glorious revolution of 1688. They therefore saw it as the peaceful containment of a tyrannical monarch and the distribution of executive power into the states and assembly. And that was quite appealing. And this, the chubby gentleman on the right, Charles James Fox, the leader of the Wig opposition, believed he had been witnessing the abuse of executive power for over a decade from George III and William Pitt. And at the onset of war, there was a slight expansion of executive power in order to gear up Britain's military establishment. And to his horror, Charles Fox believed that the 1688 settlement had been thrown out the window with the baby in the bathwater. He believed the only way to retrieve those constitutional rights was through peace and a change of ministry. And if he was really lucky, the revolution might cross the channel and George III could be gone too. The only man offering an alternative to this was Edmund Burke, the other gentleman seen there, and he was an Irish Wig politician and philosopher. And what he believed he was witnessing was a state sanctioned bonfire of French culture and identity reconstructed on the radical ideologies of the Enlightenment and the revolution. And that therefore any neural with France would be necessarily belligerent, expansive and unrestrained. And this narrative not only divided the Wig opposition within parliament, it divided the nation as intellectuals and commercial circles try to understand what was happening. And that meant Britain was unable to deal intellectually with the revolution. They found it difficult to decipher French aims or to analyse the nihilistic rhetoric that was emerging from France directed explicitly at Britain. Wars with France in the recent past have been limited economic wars. And Britain was also aware that the revolution had decimated the French economy and political stability didn't look likely that France could sustain any war effort for any period of time. Britain therefore made a critical mistake. It believed itself engaged in a limited economic war and that dictated its strategy. It believed it could push France's broken economy over a precipice quite quickly and easily and it could just be left to implode quietly within its borders. But that wasn't the war that France was engaged in. Republican France was fighting for its legitimacy within Europe and on the world stage and it would do so till it was exhausted. So Britain began embarking on a limited maritime strategy that had both naval and economic objectives. Firstly, it was aimed at the key European French fleets at Brest and Toulon. There was an expedition to the West Indies with both economic and naval objectives. It was designed to deny France access to its colonial wealth, pushing its economy further towards the edge. But it would also deny France access to its naval resources in the region, manpower and shipping. And it would also reassure British merchants back at home and hopefully stimulate the circulation of credit. There was an expedition into Flanders as usual for the purposes of national security and a reasonably vigorous diplomatic strategy designed to guide allies that we were that Britain was funding and also prevent neutral nations from becoming hostile because the longer the war went on and the navy disrupted neutral trade, the more likely those neutral nations were to become hostile. And at the same time, the government was reinforcing its influence in parliament and the judiciary. It courted the Portland Whigs who were a fraction of the opposition who supported the idea of war and rejected that interpretation by Fox. They replaced key positions within the judiciary with those who would support the war and would more vigorously prosecute revolutionary sympathizers. They tried to close down French influence and interference. And they did this through legislation. So the Aliens Act and the suspension of habeas corpus meant they could deport the immigrants without trial. And they also and directed some of this at the London corresponding and revolutionary societies who were in direct contact with the French governing body and assembly through the libel acts and the suspension of habeas corpus. The ministry also sought to increase the reliability and secrecy of some of its funding and strategy. And they did this by slipping clauses into the regular loan and exchequer bill acts of 1793 and 1794. And these did two things. One, they allowed the bank to provide funds to government without parliamentary consent and therefore without parliamentary debate, which would be reported in the newspapers. And secondly, they forced the bank to honour treasury bills issued by the government on its own security. And this was a form of arbitrary credit. And when the opposition and bank discovered this, they were incensed at this aren't abuse of power. They also sought to protect the economy. They issued a five pound note, which would insulate the economy to an extent from any invasion threat and also ease the circulation crisis that naturally started at the onset of the war. And they obviously banned all commerce with France. And for consensus, they were reinforcing a sense of a maritime identity, reinforcing the idea of naval superiority and that the war was in safe hands. And this little cartoon by James Gilray came out in 1793. And I'm guessing he was a bit anti-war and seems to be saying that the glamour of war would quickly change to horror. And then everything changed at the glorious first of June in 1794. The two long fleet had already been dealt with in December 1793 by the Mediterranean fleet who had burnt a third of it as it withdrew from a brief occupation. They then occupied Corsica to prevent its it being rebuilt. So there was a lot of pressure on the channel fleet to deal with the premier French fleet at Brest. And I think that pressure is really captured by that excerpt from the times as it began to build. And Admiral Howe who was commanding the channel fleet had spent this time devising new tactics that would increase the decisiveness of any naval engagement. He was looking to create a decisive melee exploiting the advantages of superior British gunnery, seamanship and a naval culture of mutually supporting squadrons. Intelligence was received of a grain convoy crossing the Atlantic that was presumed to be vital to support the committee of public safety, the French governing body. And Howe was ordered to detach a strong squadron and pursue that convoy and to sail with the channel fleet in support, which he did. When the Brest fleet then sailed they lured him out to the East Atlantic and he followed because this was a golden and rare opportunity to deal with that French fleet. The battles took place over a series of five days and although they were fairly evenly matched in numbers, they weren't matched in experience. For the revolution had decimated the French navy, especially the officer corps. And in fact, the French Admiral Villere-Joyers had complained that out of his fleet he had only a handful of experienced gunners. By the last day, Howe had managed to cut the line in seven places and create that decisive melee. And the results are telling a battle of this level of decisiveness hadn't been seen in over a hundred years. Historiographically, this battle is often seen as a tactical success but a strategic failure because the grain convoy 16 days later arrived in Brest. But actually its arrival made no difference. It didn't save the Committee of Public Safety and it soon imploded and became a directory and it just was pausing to execute Robespierre and his cronies on the way. Howe's job was done. He defeated the French navy, he brushed his hands off and went ashore for the last time. And everyone expected France to sue for peace but they didn't. And instead they tried to construct a maritime federation. They wanted to escalate the threat to Britain. Britain took a deep breath and the ministry consolidated its parliamentary majority by assimilating the Portland wigs, not only into the cabinet but into their back benches. This was not just a ministerial war. This was a national war. This was an unlimited war and at stake was Britain's political survival. There were also changes immediately instigated within the navy. The transport board was created relieving the navy of the burdens of providing army transport in order to improve dockyard efficiency. And by the end of the year, Lord Chatham, William Pitt's brother who was leading the Admiralty, was replaced with the young wig, Earl Spencer. Chatham had become a target for the opposition and the city were petitioning for his removal, unwilling to sustain the commercial losses. And there was also cries of nepotism and that Pitt was ignoring the incompetency of Chatham because he was his brother. Strategically France began 1795 by taking the Dutch navy and reinvigorating their war effort into the Pyrenees, knocking Spain out of the war by the middle of the year. Although they became neutral, it was only a matter of time before they became an enemy. And this cartoon by James Gilray really summarizes the fact that Britain was now on a precipice and the real danger was the opposition. On her knees in the front is Britannia having thrown down her sword and shield and crown before the monster of the French Republic. And behind her stand the radical wigs Charles James Fox, Richard Sheridan and the Earl of Stanhope and they're holding out the keys of Britain's security quite clearly labelled Bank of England, Surrender of the Navy and the destruction of Parliament. And the opposition was growing. The membership to the London Corresponding Society was growing. The bank refused to fund the loan to Austria. The King was attacked. Grain was short because there'd been failed harvests and due to the war hungry people were angry people and there was rioting and the government had to intervene in grain markets which was really unpopular with many capitalists who saw this as an unnecessary intervention in free markets. And they also passed a series of legislation, the Seditious Meetings Act and meetings of more than 50 people. The Treason Act made inflammatory speech, treasonable and Harrius Corpus remains suspended but in reality not many people were prosecuted and even fewer imprisoned it was more a symbolic line in the sand of what was a tolerable level of opposition. And so by 1796 with the bank not funding allies the war in the continent was beginning to collapse on land and his Majesty's Navy was beginning to face both French land power and a maritime federation that was being constructed. And Bonaparte launched his Italian campaign and part of this was to separate Austria from the alchemy of the British fleet in the Mediterranean and eventually drive the fleet entirely out of the sea where it could influence southern Europe. And there were definitely maritime objectives to this campaign because Bonaparte systematically worked his way down the east and west coasts of Italy taking Vardo, Genoa, Spezia, Leghorn, Civitavetia, Ancona, Ravenna, Pescara and the mouth of the Po River at Giorgia, Venice and Trieste. And then when Spain declared war in October the British were forced to leave and the center of gravity for British maritime power shifted north of Cape Finasterre. The naval war had to be stepped up. Britain and France remembered that a maritime federation had defeated Britain during the American War of Independence. And these orders represent that escalation not only were they being ordered to destroy the enemy they were being told to create the opportunities to take risks and if those risks didn't pay off they were being promised immunity from prosecution. For some admirals this was in complete contradiction to what they believed was expected of them and for others such as Nelson this was a welcome release from a limited scope of action. And His Majesty's navy set up and delivered. As you can see from the quote from Admiral Mora de Gal by the middle of 1797 it was already beginning to become clear that no maritime federation was going to bend Britain to French political will. The first battle was the Battle of St Vincent and this was a battle with 15 British ships against 27 Spanish a considerable risk but the Spanish war machine hadn't fully mobilized and so actually it was about six Spanish ships against the entire British fleet that didn't matter because it was a decisive victory and in fact Nelson had elevated it by taking two ships with one boarding and created and made a statement about the levels of British aggression and enabled Britain to blockade Cadiz afterwards and lock the rest of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean. Following this was the Battle of Campadan on the 11th of October 1797 and this was a fairly even match. There were 13 British ships against 16 Dutch and it was British quality offset by Dutch quantity and the Dutch were formidable enemies. Admiral Duncan sought to overwhelm the Dutch rear and then he had to break the line in order to avoid the dangers of being lured onto the shoals with the Dutch having such a shallow draft and prevent them from escaping and you can see from the sheer attrition of ships and manpower how devastating that was and the French Federation had now been destroyed and defeated. The French began dismantling their naval resources for a year to course which was a statement of British superiority in the seas. This actually came to a juddering thought shortly after by December coincidentally or not with the arrival of Bonaparte in Paris and where he began to consider how to defeat Britain and he came up with three options. One was invade Northern Germany which the Battle of Campadan had always stopped. One was to invade but the navy had already secured Britain from the threat of invasion and the bank would as well which we'll see in a minute and to invade Egypt and so that led to the culmination of this process at the Battle of the Nile. As many of you know the French anchored very close to the shore in Abercote Bay and probably only Nelson would have arrived at sunset and snuck in between the shore and the ships and doubled the line and completed that annihilation. I've included the Battle of Tory Island of October 1798 simply because I think it continues to demonstrate the British attempts to clear the seas of all enemy naval power. This was a small squadron that had deposited a small body of troops in Ireland to try and reinvigorate the rebellion and as they left they were pursued by John Ballet's Warren and his squadron who pursued them over a number of days and took seven of the nine ships and three thousand seamen. So by 1798 Britain was able to extend its strategy right onto the enemy coasts. They were blockading Cadiz, Brest, La Havre and Texoff and this the black line on the northern and Atlantic coasts demonstrates where small aggressive squadrons were patrolling and preventing naval supplies from entering those ports and in some cases economic supplies as well. For Cadiz Admiral John Jervis was trying to create local economic pressure to force out the remains of the Spanish fleet and so he could destroy it and at La Havre there were attacks going right down the mouth of the Seine towards Paris putting even greater pressure on Paris whilst Nelson was hunting for Bonaparte in the Mediterranean and the success of that battle would turn the Mediterranean into a British theatre. It was as much as British seapower could possibly do and this quote from the morning conical at the top tells us that the nation was well aware that they were rescued from the threat of invasion but France could then maintain the war and that would just put us to extraordinary expense. So at the same time the bank was also being resistant to the war and that would have to be overcome throughout 1795 under the governorship of Daniel Giles they began to resist funding the war. This forced the minister into the markets to fund it and at the same time the bank restricted paper circulation and this made it very difficult for him to secure credit so they were trying to bend the ministry to their will in order to push Britain to peace. Eventually private investors under the consortium led by Boyd and Benfield contracted the loan at the end of 1795 under an open process of competition but because the bank had made it so difficult to secure credit they then contracted the 1796 loans under a closed process and that allowed the opposition to accuse the ministry of corruption. By September 1796 the private investors were struggling to pay for the loan and so William Pitt and Henry Dundas the secretary of war gave them a temporary bridging loan of 40,000 pounds from the Navy's money because Dundas was the treasurer of the Navy and had access and that was why he was impeached in 1805. It was clear that this couldn't go on and the bank needed to be reconciled. Pitt began quite gently he's used peace negotiations to lift the markets and stimulate some sort of credit and to dispel opposition to the war by revealing the necessity and levels of French aggression. He used the king's speech to fuse together the economy and the Navy to show to them to demonstrate what the foundation of British security was to the bank. By November fortune suggested that something more desperate might be possible. There was nothing like a good invasion threat to create a run on the banks and there was intelligence that an invasion force was gathering in breast. They would also need silver in order to try and break the cash circulation from its dependency on gold and they proposed to send 150,000 pounds to China in order to get some silver back but actually the Navy delivered and HMS Emerald took a prize in the Tagus that was loaded with four million Spanish silver dollars all very convenient. The force from Brest tried to land in Ireland in December and then from January in February the government took several steps. Firstly it insulated the Navy from the coming crisis by reforming the payment of naval bills. Secondly Pitt proposed to the bank that they reduced their paper circulation further and what this chart shows is the point of the financial crisis on the 26th of February and that sharp drop in the paper circulation. At the same time the government were accumulating cash so the economy was effectively being stalled and then they worked on the invasion threat to drive it into crisis and contemporaries looking on were very upset and believed that the government were deliberately fanning that invasion threat and when you analyze that through opposition and government newspapers it's pretty clear that something was definitely going on and the government was doing its best. By the 24th of February the bank was really concerned and they asked Pitt to intervene and sources suggest he was prepared. He suggested a secret parliamentary committee to examine the bank's resources and that meant their resources would be laid before parliament and published in the newspapers everyone would know that Britain could afford the war. It was planned to attach Bank of England notes to the security of parliament and this would give credit greater strength and allow borrowing at lower rates of interest and he suggested a meeting with all the key merchants in the city to ask them to pledge their support and in fact he met with the top bankers the day before the crisis. On the 26th the order of council was issued suspending cash payments and the economy was insulated from the threat of invasion because you could only change notes but other notes and as this other Gilray cartoon clearly makes clear and this buddy-faced gentleman in the brown coat it doesn't really matter if you invade because I've got my paper money and you can take my gold. A couple of days later pledges of support began to emerge from guilds corporations banks however it's notable that the mansion house pledge of support was missing a third of the bank's directors including the governor. The bank had no choice and they issued one and two pound notes and they also had to restam Spanish dollars as legal tender. The result was a permanent shift towards a more public role for the bank and the increased liquidity in the financial system remained and the economy boomed. This also enabled unfunded borrowing which was needed in order to pay the unpredictable and very large naval bills. By 1798 income tax was introduced to complement the reforms providing a sustained budget and ruling out hyperinflation and what this cartoon shows is that forceful courtship that Pitt went into with the Bank of England forcing them to open their coffers no matter how reluctant and so Britain's fiscal naval machinery was funded oh I'm going to be missing a slide um but it hadn't been manned nowhere that's gone um so the parliament had voted for an additional one additional 100 000 seamen in 1795 the bank was blocking paying them but there was also the difficulty of finding them and so the bank invested considerable resources in how they recruited and they established a new system called the quota acts and this was because of problems with local judicially accepting the impress and what Admiral Pringle described when he was sent to Scotland to recruitment for the North Sea's fleet was that there were at least 3000 skilled seamen in the region there was only a handful coming through the impress because local magistrates refused to support the impress warrants they saw the impress as the expansion of executive power eroding their own local authority and what the quota acts did was they enabled local uh judicially to raise the money for bounties and that alleviated some of the friction historians see these acts as a limited success they drove about five percent of recruitment during this period but it was there it was a demonstration of that determination to alleviate the friction there were other acts to increase volunteers and about 80 percent of the navy was driven by volunteers marriage men could allocate wages to their family ships companies could allocate certain men or number of men to go in the navy rather than have them unpredictably lifted out of ships and the Admiralty were also changing technology and reducing the number of men needed there's a lot of interchange between the Admiralty and captains and commanders where they're told to stop whining about the lack of men because they actually don't need that many anymore the Admiralty's changed the numbers required and they just needed to get on with it and there was also a drive to create a home defense force and over this period about 80 000 men were recruited for home defense and this released naval resources for offensive operations out of home waters and so we come to the cultural transformation that was within the navy to deliver this strategy and this was done under the leadership of Earl Spencer who you can see on this slide and under his leadership the navy was systematically and culturally professionalised they introduced how's system of tactics and signals they introduced Admiral John Gervis's system of discipline they also instituted Admiral Middleton's administrative reforms in 1796 designed to maintain powerful fleets and remove a lot of the bureaucracy from administration and corruption they made some efforts to place patronage with merit as the basis of career advancement so that more able officers would be placed where they were needed and they broke up naval factionalism by controlling the authority of commanders and chief and that's what Admiral Rydford is particularly cranky about in this quote after waiting all that time to be promoted to the most important person in the navy he found that it wasn't quite what he thought it was going to be and how he had a lot more power critically the ministry were exterminating anything that the opposition could use against them any form of factionalism and there was seen to be a crown party and a pit faction within the navy that needed to be exterminated and the navy was notoriously resistant to change and there were critics the historian John Morrow suggests that these three admirals were forced to resign because of a personality clash with Spencer and a clash of wills but actually it looks much more likely that it's because they voiced public criticism of the management of the navy first to go was Admiral Lord Hood and he had returned from the Mediterranean to try and get reinforcements for his theatre he was also a visible symbol of the pit faction within the navy and would often use Pitt's authority to get his own way he was promptly dumped from the board of Admiralty in March and in May he was ordered to strike his flag after he publicly criticized Spencer's management second was Charles Middleton and he was an obstruction to most of the changes that Spencer wanted to put in place he particularly liked to use the king's authority to push through any changes and Pitt couldn't really afford to have accusations that the expanding executive power were held by the king so that made him a target and he found himself increasingly isolated from Spencer's inner cabinet he criticized Spencer publicly and his resignation was accepted last of all was William Cornwallis and as part of this whole renegotiation and of relationships between institutions the army and the navy had come in to come into a clash and the admirals had revolted as the army tried to usurp the navy's seniority Cornwallis was seen as the figurehead of that and when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the West Indies he believed it was a punishment and refused to go he thought it was just the place you went to die basically but they persuaded him it was his duty he set off his ship got damaged in a storm he returned to England and then he refused to go out in a frigate he said it was beneath his station as a commander-in-chief and would undermine his authority Spencer seems to have felt that could have been negotiated but it was taken out of his hands the opposition accused Spencer of mismanagement in the House of Lords and it was the talk of London Cornwallis was promptly court-martialed by the board because it was important to demonstrate that the problem was Cornwallis and not Spencer every flag officer in Portsmouth turned out to support Cornwallis and he was acquitted but struck his flag anyway the loss of these three admirals was significant they had significant strategic and administrative skills to provide but what was more important at the time was the credibility of the ministry to manage the navy and in fact they would all go on to be promoted and Cornwallis and Middleton would return to the fleet the war later and it wasn't just the officers the men as well I think you all know about the spithead and Norr and Plymouth mutinies of spring of 1797 mutiny was a normal process in which the terms and conditions of service were negotiated but this united action was a the largest public attack on trust in the government there were also indications that there was more at work the vocabulary the eloquence of the petitions alerted the government that perhaps there was more to this and if you've read any of the petitions from earlier they were of a completely different quality and caliber and one of the petitions was addressed directly to Charles Fox didn't really matter that all the others weren't because that is the one that would have alerted the government to possible external influence many commanding officers reported external influence and in May as the mutiny began to radicalize at the Norr Charles Fox took his opportunity and in a private conversation with the king suggested he change the ministry he knew the king would never accept himself so he ruled himself out quite obligingly um his words were echoed a few days later by the crew of the Pompeii who were mutinying and by June the crews themselves were suggesting some external influence whether it was there or not the government believed it eventually the mutinies were brought to an end as the city support dissolved when they believed their own interests were being threatened by the mutinies the mutinies tried to stop commercial ships entering port of London but what was important was to re-establish that trust and that visible trust in the in the ministry and in the war and eventually they were all back at war and the battle of Campedown quickly followed oh there it is that was my manpower slide and finally they had to contain the opposition and create deliver consensus and they began by looking at parallel groups that had emerged due to the opposition's powerful arguments within the city the Lord Mayor Brooke Watson called for peace and a replacement of the ministry and this was a fairly significant figure to be doing this in 1797 there was suggestions that the bank and the navy were agreeing with the opposition's arguments at various points merchants and bankers set up a parallel group and a group of 35-week MPs set themselves as a parallel secret committee looking at the bank so these needed to be contained and part of this was done to propaganda George Canning had lured the caricaturist James Gilray into the government fold with a 200 pounds a year secret pension in 1796 and he was tasked with not mocking the government or the king and vilifying the opposition and George Canning would feed him stories they set up publications and used those for pro-war pro-ministry propaganda they also sought to contain the authority of the king in order to diffuse some of their arguments that France and Britain were experienced the same thing and there was a tyrannical monarch and they did this by a whole range of means one of them was that they didn't provide him with much intelligence because he complained that his only source of news was the newspapers and they also refused to confirm any of his sons and the positions they wanted at the head of the army and the navy and in Ireland and then there was also the naval strategy that was able to contain some of the opposition it was actually very difficult when victory culture flooded a newspaper and the news environment to try and make an argument that the navy were being mismanaged and the war was going badly and what this graph is trying to show is the purple line shows the point at which the news of these battles broke within Britain and this is looking at just the morning chronicle the opposition's propaganda newspaper and I'm looking at the content they published about anti-ministry agenda anti-war and the volume of it over the two weeks before the news of the battles broke and the one week after and you can see that from the Battle of Camperdown and the Battle of the Nile it had quite a deflecting impact and you can also see that between 1797 the Battle of Sub-Vincent and 1798 it had been reduced by about 75 percent so the opposition's argument was just becoming quieter and quieter and then finally the government invested considerable resources in creating unity and consensus and victory culture certainly powered some of this they supported loyalist groups they also there was they made more and more of each victory there were greater rewards illuminations fireworks but it also permeated British culture women would change their fashions after the Battle of Camperdown they took to wearing tartan because Admiral Duncan was Scottish they would wear oak leaves and laurel leaves songs were written battle scenes were recreated and tagged onto the end of pantomimes and plays the National Gallery of Maritime Art was proposed in 1795 and at the same time the rotunda in Leicester Square opened its doors to the panorama and that's what this diagram shows and this was a huge a huge painting in 3D it was going to be an immersive experience and it was particularly used to display naval battles and people would pay a shilling and go inside go up the platforms and then they'd be immersed in what was the sea battle connecting it directly to the nation in fact it was supposed to be so realistic that the queen was apparently seasick when she visited and a dog jumped off the platform to save a drowning man in December 1797 the French Maritime Federation had been defeated and there was a celebratory mass in St Paul's it was a recreation of an Elizabethan style celebration after the armada that had been used frequently throughout the 18th century particularly by Queen Anne and it fused together the ideology of a Protestant sea power supported by monarch, bank, parliament, government and the city and it was celebrating the victories of the glorious 1st of June the Battle of St Vincent and the Battle of Camperdown and so by the end of 1798 Britain was secure from the unlimited threat of invasion and and consensus had been delivered behind a strategy of overthrow executive power had expanded the fiscal and naval machinery of British war had been fully mobilized and Britain was sufficiently united the French Maritime Federation had been defeated Well that was a convincing account of British success over Napoleon in France because it's easy to forget you know the transformational effect of war on that kind of scale and all the requirements that are needed all the different fronts for victory um I'll open it up for questions from um anywhere um look for raise your hands electronically or physically yes thank you Rachel um there's a few things like to be interesting this um when it looks like you said uh Admiral Brandt de Gaulle in May 1997 yes and he apparently said of which for though it does not recognize French yes yes now there's this one into I was it the case at the time the French were probably really self-taught to have no other enemy I think I don't know whether I think what motivated his quote was in fact two things firstly he felt that France weren't using their navy properly he'd actually commanded the invasion force to Ireland in 1796 it was such a disaster and he felt that the French Republic simply wasn't using it's French it wasn't funding its navy it wasn't using it properly so part of it was that he felt there was no way they were going to be taken on but he also could see the aggression levels coming from from Britain and that quote comes from a letter that he had written privately and was captured by the British in Tenerife so in that really just the frustrations that the frustrated officer who's not getting his opportunity that he wants to serve I think it well the whole letter actually goes on to describe how how Britain is dominating the seas and it was a bit it was a bit of both there was a little bit of he wasn't very happy with what was happening with the French Navy but he also just couldn't see that there was going to be anything they could do about it. I thought they got quite a few enemies on that. Yeah I don't think he was thinking that way. I think you're a trope so in terms of in wars of the 17th and the rest of the 18th centuries the concept was to maintain the balance of power. Would we say what we're talking about is the turning point whereby the concept of war becomes the victory rather than the balance. No no in fact I think it says almost the opposite because Britain has secured its own safety and from the threat of France imposing its political will and now what it's writing for is that balance of power in Europe. It's not like a distraction. Well yes but the point of it is to ensure that France don't dominate Europe. Yeah it's not the elimination of France either is it? Yeah I mean no. Britain saved itself by her exertions and she'll say Europe by her example. I'm sorry. Wasn't it one didn't she actually say something about Britain saving herself by her exertions? It's saved Europe by her example. I don't know I haven't seen that. I'm not sure maybe it was a random happening. He did. Yeah it certainly said that I think it was later. I think what's revealing to me all of this is when we get to the end of the revolution, many of the same people are still in the office of prime minister and it's been hit and driven. He's been wiped through this experience. He hasn't been there in the last few years but that's a great policy. What he's doing is he's in many ways unraveling all that creation and all that statement which has been a key part of his experience with the answer. That's why likewise he's been in government for years and years. So we're seeing the outcome of this and what the British do in 2014 is they re-literate France. Well they're fighting obviously France is what the French have been doing. So it's more against the French revolution being exported to other countries, particularly Britain but the rest of Europe is a problem and then it's a war against French imperials on the public, the exported to other countries, in particular what we've done to Belgium. The whole purpose of the war in Europe is to get France out of Belgium and store something that can look like that. It's done long. We want to grow up not in the cities. We want to go back to where they've been born to a very rapid development. So the key moment in the revolution is the front and back of it. It's no accident that we're sent an army to help them fill the outpost. So it's a war in which ultimately the prestige of French regimes means that in order to survive domestically they have to fight the war. If Britain won't give them peace they're not going to get the credibility of the war from there. It's not only a war. It's ultimately a total war not because it weighs the total methods but because at the end of this one regime or other the regime change. You need to make a respiration balance with you or that balance with yours or yours. As long as it's not what it's all about, we're quite happy with it. So the religion happy with the war is very effective because that's not what it's all about. But that's what it's all about and it's like keeping you as you expect and keeping you in church and constitution and making big changes. I think that's exactly what it's all about. I think if you assume it's the way we look at the religions, you can't above the kingdom of rational and actual where they've been here very well, quite often, even in the olden times. The ability of the religion to allow the picture, this is a creation before their state. It's a cultured process. It's not accidental for a random person. It's the gene of the portion of the religion. And when George Fleming recruits the Ill-Ready, the stompland crew in the kingdom of government puts a set about the opposition. That's a master's point. Yes. There will be people to get here where his character is. In that case, in every window, down to that branch, and all the way through the mile, you just carry it on and on or like that. So it's a huge point of the text for religions and the way it's the victory in its transformation period. The new thing actually, except for the vassal, is what I'm hearing. It's never fully got a grip on what's going on here. It's a great deal more pro-heroes and it explains and outruns much of that which might be for, that's certainly not the point for the other's rather far-off promises to study. It's a one-point deal that's rather particular. It's openly a burden and very commonly threatened with the story of the system because the Parliamentary Government might be going to protect Parliament that. So we haven't seen that since the day of the very last 14th Trans-European. And if you want to beautify a room behind the door, that's the way to do it. In fact, I don't think you have it always used like this behind the door. It's just a little bit old. So there's continuity then in the ultimate aim of war, security and its balance, security through balance on the continent. But there is never the less of that transformation. In the way, and I guess maybe this is which you're getting at in the way that the war was approached and it's approached on all these different levels. And I suppose all wars are, but this is a particular war. And I think, well, I don't know. It's a question. There is a transformational element in the way that war is depicted, I would have thought. The questions in the room are inaudible, so we'll repeat them from now on. Yes. Okay, thank you. One question that I have, which we'll be able to hear is, and it's a simple question, but everybody seems to have a different answer to it in whichever period they're in. But it's about these invasion scares. And it's about uniting and the political effect in Britain of an invasion scare from France. So how real, how serious, and what effect? So I don't think the invasion, for example, of 1796 was necessarily particularly serious. I mean, why would you launch an invasion in the middle of winter in December? And actually, I suspect that the Irish in France, Warf Tone and the like, had been trying to get the directory to back this sort of launching of force and we're convincing them the island could be turned. And actually, for them, there wasn't much lost because they let Hosh go. And if he didn't come back, that wouldn't be the end of the world. And as it was, they couldn't land. And it was all sort of, there was no real rebellious feeling within Ireland at the time. It just doesn't look very credible that this would have worked. Britain had a much quite a tight control. I mean, it just, it just doesn't look credible. And Lazar Carnot actually says that he uses invasion threat in order to manipulate peace negotiations, which were going on at the time. And it's simply a tool of war. You might even see that today, I guess, with Russia and Ukraine, but it's simply a tool of war that he was using. And even the little landing in Fishguard was in 1797 was really nonsensical. I mean, what were 1500 X convicts going to really do? And some Welsh women beat them up. I mean, it was just, you know, wasn't, and even in London, all the paper coverage was laughing. I mean, there was no serious alarm. People just were like, oh my God, what were they really going to do? I can't believe you sent your trash over here. Can't you keep them over in France? And then in 1798, when they sent that body of troops, the rebellion in Ireland was well over. And again, for 2000 French troops were going to do. So, you know, I don't think they were ever serious. I mean, it was just a mechanism of war and used to create pressure and generate alarm and potentially damage British economy, which was why the bank was insulated, being forced to insulate it. Well, yes. Sorry about that. I wanted to go back in time a little bit. Is there a sense, really, that, I mean, obviously, looking at these wars from, shall we say, this side of the channel, slightly the other way around, in the sense that they are French wars. It's the French Revolution, which is kind of released forces in France, which the French politicians who are here today and gone tomorrow are not really quite aware of how to provide that particular time that they've unleashed. And then it becomes an aggressive state itself in a rather shambolic way. And of course, when we're looking to the problems of British happy currency, but there's nothing to the problems of French happy currency. Yes, it's why they embarked on a campaign of plunder and trying to take everyone else when they went into when they reinvigorated their war into planters. It wasn't just about acquiring the Dutch fleet. The Bank of Amsterdam was sitting there like a big golden apple. Unfortunately, Britain has already helped empty it. All those resources were not there. But to a certain extent, what they were doing on this side of the chapter was adopting, shall we say, not only dissimilar methods of government. It's my job now to summarize your question, right? So for people at home, right? So I think what was proposed from the floor was that the real transformational energy came from France and that what you were describing were the responses to it. And in fact, you're looking at these boards from the wrong side because it was in France that we see the really serious financial changes and the real cultural transformations and strategic transformations and so forth. And it was much, much lighter than that. You put it much less aggressively. I mean, I think there was certainly some mirror imaging and that was felt within Britain as well that some of the changes that we're putting through, there was a fear that they were copying what the French had done, particularly with paper money, given the fact that the Assignats had completely collapsed, but they were secured on land and property. And that's why they collapsed because it had no real security. Whereas British notes had much greater security through parliament, you couldn't get anything stronger. And that's why Britain had better credit. But these were just all ideas that were around at the time. And in fact, in many ways, the revolution in some ways continued some of pre-revolution French aims. There'd been a smothered war going on around the globe between the French and British empires since the American War of Independence. And so some of these trends were just drawn into the revolution and into those changes. But yes, Britain definitely certainly hadn't escalated its war in quite this way, but it had fought an unlimited war with France before during the nine years war and the war of the Spanish succession hundred years earlier. Those also were unlimited wars. So Britain was used to this kind of gearing up for this sort of war. And in fact, the bank was established in 1694 in order to fund unlimited war. And the establishment of the Glorious Revolution, I suspect, and I would disagree with you, but the establishment of the Glorious Revolution essentially set up a political process that enabled the expansion of executive power because it gave parliament the freedom of speech. What that meant was that any faction within parliament could bring that expansion of power back to where it was before, and it would always be temporary, and therefore it could always be tolerated. And if I could respond in a less effective way, we've had years and decades and piles and piles of books about the effect on France of all these transformations and the causes of the revolution and the effects of the wars and so on. And it's really refreshing, I think, you know, to see a study, an integrated study of the responses to, which is a really necessary balance. So it might be the wrong way to look at it in one sense, but it's the necessary viewpoint point of view. Okay, good. Thank you. Apart from income tax, what were the long-standing changes as a result of the war? And of course I'm taking the war up to 14, 15, as well, if that's it. And very quickly, secondly, what changes in the attitude of the government to a so-extensive society when, to the likely duration of intensity, when Spain allowed itself with France? So two questions. Yeah, one was what was the long-term, apart from taxation, what was the long-term effect of all of this? And then the second question was the effect of Spain. Well, I'll do my best to answer that. So the increase, so the suspension of specie carried on until I think about 1827. And so that meant that Britain's economy was freed from its total dependency on gold and its economy was able to expand according to the size of its commerce, which continued to increase. I don't know what other types of change you really mean, do you mean? I don't really know to be honest, I can't really think. Well, I mean, we could set you the question, you know, on all these different, I mean, you can answer culturally or economically or any changes in war. I think one thing I would say is that actually some of the revolutionary principles began to seep over anyway. You know, people were looking at education of the poor. They were considering issues of equality were a massive issue actually, because especially in terms of gender, there were lots of discussions about can we allow women to divorce their husbands? Won't they just lie and take our money? And this sort of discussion about the roles of genders and people. So equality was quite a big issue. And we also see the abolition of the slave trade and eventually slavery. And some of that was carried along with those revolutionary ideas and the fact that the revolution had freed some of those slaves. And I think it powered it further. I mean, it was already happening. And I think that process gained greater momentum and there was pressure to do that even during the war. Certainly, Ireland was then united with Britain in order to create unity and prevent any more billions, which is when we took a pause from the war. So I think many of the changes that took place actually remained. I think it's a question you could spend the rest of your life answering, I think, you know, the effects of all of us. Okay, yeah. Oh, sorry, there was a second question. I think you're pardoning. Yeah, they were really horrified. I mean, it was inevitably coming. And I think there was an awareness from very early at the beginning of 1796, William Pitt says, we're going to be fighting this war alone. And I think we can do it. And I think we should and he's having that debate on how to how he's going to do that. It was inevitable. And in fact, for a period, it was a period where ships in the Mediterranean were unsure when they met Spanish ships where the war had quite yet been declared because the Spanish might arrive and say, well, it hadn't been declared when I was last back at shore. And well, I'm not sure. Should I be should I be firing on you? And they had to kind of wait for that official impact. I don't think they did wait because they declared war in October. And actually, those orders that I showed were in September. So they will by then thinking, let's just let's just decelerate that before it gets going. And could we wrap up with a final comment? I think that that last point about Spain is interesting. You can see the great crisis of the period that's far from what's going on in the world, Spain is arguing that this would be a sign that the British saw an absolute marathon of Germany and Europe together and that this would go in the spirit of the old history and the end of the world attempt to free him to be not the Spanish army will fail very quickly. So I think I've got this discussion of what changed, well, everything changed in the industrialization phase. The step change when Nelson goes for victory in 2005, September, and goes in for what was called the watch is rigging what's being made by intending the art. That's the first production of a complex. So you can see that the arc of this period, even if you stop going to the continent and painting in Italian and French cities, they start to paint in this city. And the career of that is all about making you see the wonderful at home, rather than seeing it at home. This translation from being an artist of an idealized European world, being the artist in the very real system, again, trust the lecture. And it's no accident that you see the paint for the photo of the river scenes in battle pictures. And the playing up of the enormous level of that in the war, 800 million, which was 200% of GDP expanded from the 1815, not when exactly three times. They spent the whole 1915. So the consequences of this war are not just the obvious that we chose the 1815. Nelson is still worried about this, in the 1890s, the debt did not start down until the early 1890s, down to the last 600 million, where then the population of people, the economy, had massively increased. I mean, it was around 20% of GDP. So the government is taking a huge risk on success. Playing massive levels of debt. So if they lose, they're never going to be able to do that. And investing in that debt is a tremendous demonstration of faith and its ability to come through in the government. And so all of that worth with the lay life, bringing things together, make it more rewardly to stay under one new function, absolutely incredible, unprecedented levels of debt. Okay, let me just summarize that comments for everyone at home. I think what Professor Lambert did was demonstrate very effectively that, yeah, and as he said it himself, everything changed. So this question about what changed could go on and on and on because everything changed. So thank goodness we have this study to base that lifetime of research, but we don't have a lifetime of time now because we need to thank our speaker, we need to have a glass of wine. So if you would please all join me. Thank you to everyone at home.