Abstract
Historians often regard Nelson’s death and victory at Trafalgar in 1805 as the effective end of the naval war against Napoleon. The emperor’s eventual defeat, first in 1814, then at Waterloo after his brief comeback in 1815, is generally attributed to the powerful land forces ranged against him, which even Napoleon’s prodigious military skills could not overcome. James Davey’s new book accepts that the alliance system constructed against Napoleon produced the armies that finally vanquished him, but puts the case for the Royal Navy’s playing an important part in the ending of French domination of the Continent. In doing so, he argues for a more ‘subtle appreciation not just of the role of the Royal Navy, but of the nature of sea power itself’ (pp. 312–313).
Davey maintains that the navy was not just a defensive force. True, its primary responsibility was to protect the home islands from invasion. By successfully achieving that fundamental objective, the navy enabled Britain to stay in the war against Napoleon, while France’s continental enemies were vanquished one by one. Britain’s consistent opposition to Napoleon provided the basis for his eventual defeat; for it was British money and British diplomacy that underpinned the alliance system that finally brought victory. The analogy with the Second World War is obvious: Britain survived in 1940, with the air force rather than the navy preventing a threatened invasion; survival kept Britain in the conflict, for a time as Germany’s only enemy, and provided the basis for eventual victory, as more powerful enemies – namely the Soviet Union and the United States – were able to join the war and eventually overwhelm Hitler’s regime.
But Davey’s argument is that the navy did much more than keep Britain in the war against Napoleon. He points out that too much emphasis on major battles such as Trafalgar leads to a natural tendency to understate the navy’s contribution. Pre-emptive raids on European fleets that might have added to France’s naval capacity, though of doubtful legality, appear in Davey’s account as an important way in which the Royal Navy maintained the superiority it had secured at Trafalgar. The same approach had been employed by the British against Bourbon France in 1755, when a coordinated attack on French shipping before war was declared denied Louis XV’s navy the trained manpower it required. It was to be employed again in 1940, when the French fleet in North Africa was attacked in harbour shortly after the signing of the French surrender to the Germans.
Less spectacular, but scarcely less important, were the Royal Navy’s sustained operations on land. It ferried supplies to the British and allied armies in Spain and Portugal, and landed munitions to help arm and equip the Spanish rebels who undermined the French occupying forces. The navy also landed British expeditionary forces in the Low Countries, opening up new fronts against Napoleon, diverting French forces, and so aiding the allies fighting his armies elsewhere on the Continent.
The navy’s greatest contribution, however, probably came in the unglamorous way in which it kept the sea lanes open for British overseas trade. Convoy duties did not make naval reputations, but they protected inward and outward bound merchant shipping and therefore British economic strength. Through the long war, the wealth generated by external commerce steadily grew. That wealth provided a major source of revenue for the British state, giving it the wherewithal to mobilize the largest army it had ever put into the field, and, perhaps more importantly, to afford subsidies to keep the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies in the final campaigns against Napoleon.
Davey’s approach owes more than a little, surely, to the example of his PhD supervisor and mentor, Roger Knight, whose recent study of Britain against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793–1815 (2013) similarly sought to divert our attention from great men and battles to the unspectacular contributions made by a mass of unsung heroes. The comparison is apt in another respect. Davey writes with the same crisp and economical elegance as Knight. Knight, of course, is a seasoned author, who can draw on many decades of experience; when one recognizes that Davey is an early career historian, his achievement appears all the greater.
Students of maritime history will surely profit from reading this impressive book. For those coming fresh to the period, a timeline summarizes important events. Helpful appendices list government ministers and officials in the civil branches of the navy, as well as the principal stations and their commanders. Excellent maps enable the reader to envisage key spatial relationships; the colour plates, taken from the National Maritime Museum’s rich collections, add to the volume’s attractiveness. But what will strike readers most of all is the substantial research on which Davey’s arguments are based. His notes, identifying sources for information or quotations, run to more than fifty pages of small type. The bibliography is similarly awe-inspiring.
Davey’s deep knowledge of the secondary literature, and great familiarity with a wide range of primary sources, both printed and in manuscript, is put to good use. His arguments open up new perspectives on the navy and its role as an offensive force in a war fought mainly on land. His case is all the stronger for the avoidance of overstatement. His ready acknowledgement of the part played in French defeat by allied armies, and guerrillas in Spain and other parts of Napoleon’s empire, strikes me as right and proper. The Austrian and Prussian armies may have stayed in the field thanks to British money, but they entered the fray largely because the Russian army had punctured Napoleon’s aura of invincibility in 1812; without the Russian campaign, no amount of British subsidies could have sustained a successful coalition. Davey accepts that the Royal Navy was just one amongst many contributors to Napoleon’s eventual fall. He states his case modestly: his purpose, he writes in his ‘Conclusion’ has been ‘merely to suggest that the war on the oceans must be included in any balanced analysis of the outcome’ (p. 312). With the publication of In Nelson’s Wake, that more balanced analysis is now possible.