Abstract
This is a curious book, written by a well-established army historian who is a retired naval officer. It sets out to fuse the different strands of the army and naval narratives in the British expeditions of 1801 and 1807 against Copenhagen, and to examine how they related to each other. He also adds, successfully, the Danish perspective using some good recent books by Danish historians written in English.
However, the central concept of the book is flawed. The two expeditions were only superficially similar, and came about under completely different strategic circumstances. The book argues that the second expedition succeeded where the first one failed. Glover claims that the 1801 expedition failed to destroy the Danish fleet, yet there was never such a draconian objective to the first expedition. Addington’s administration, governing an exhausted country which was looking for peace, had been unable to provide any army units for the expedition, but nevertheless needed to confront the anti-British Tsar of Russia, of who Denmark was a reluctant ally. It was imperative that supplies of hemp, timber, and wheat could pass freely out of the Baltic: the 1801 expedition was thus diplomacy with force. By 1807 the situation had changed completely. Britain was fighting for its independent existence against France which was dominant in Europe. It was now essential that the Danish fleet did not fall into Napoleon’s hands. The 1807 expedition succeeded in capturing the Danish fleet, which ‘Parker and Nelson had signally failed to remove or destroy six years previously’ (p.107). A by-product of this judgement is naïve criticism of Nelson (pp. 26, 61, 68) which might have carried more weight had the author’s bibliography listed a book on Nelson published later than 1972.
Such a fundamental misunderstanding is unsurprising, given the author’s failure to consult any modern work on Napoleonic naval and maritime warfare. Tim Voelcker’s biography of Admiral Saumarez (2008), Bob Sutcliffe on expeditionary warfare (2016) but principally James Davey on the Baltic (2012) and his broad treatment of the Napoleonic War at sea (2015) should have been the means by which Glover could and should have avoided some very deep pitfalls. Glover, however, clearly has eccentric views on the need for references, since he reproduces transcripts of documents and lists in 34 appendices, over 75 pages, without providing a single reference for any of them. Some of these are in print, some of them have come from the National Archives, but there is no means of identifying any of the sources.
By contrast, his account of the role of the army, and the handling of many and varied sources is assured and well-founded, and one achievement of the book is to demonstrate to naval historians that the success of the 1807 expedition was not merely due to the naval bombardment of the city. However, neither Glover nor his editor has taken any account of the writing of naval and maritime history. In addition, the book bears clear signs of being finished in a hurry. Two pages of bullet points (pp.181–2) should have no place in a serious academic work. Its breezy, unpolished style grates, clichés abound. At one point (p.54) the author refers to ships being ‘parked’, rather than ‘anchored’ or ‘moored’. This casual slang might or might not be appropriate in the modern Royal Navy, but it is not acceptable when writing about the sailing navy or the merchant fleet in a book which has pretensions to scholarship.