First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [100]
Because Rodney had been heard to boast that he could deal with the French fleet if free to go back to England, and because English newspapers were implying that the French were keeping Rodney from the front because of his military talent, it has been suggested that Biron’s generosity may have been moved as much by national pique as by chivalry. Whatever his motive, the sense of warmth and esteem it offered Rodney after the neglect by his own compatriots, and the prospect of release from Paris, came at a critical moment, for, as he writes, his passport had expired and the creditors had grown so “clamorous” that he risked being sued or worse, for they were only held back by the police and by the visits of “those great families whose attentions kept my creditors from being so troublesome as they otherwise would have been.” “For more than a month past,” he wrote to his wife on May 6, he had not had a letter from anyone “but Mr. Hotham and yourself.” Such astonishing neglect by his friends at home seems to suggest that Rodney was not very popular in his own circle in England, which makes all the more striking the puzzling contrast with the remarkable kindness and generosity of the Duc de Biron’s offer and the hospitable attentions of the “great families” of Paris—unless the explanation may be that the French derived a perverse pleasure in finding themselves aiding an enemy in distress, especially an English enemy.
On the same May 6 on which he acknowledged the absence of any message from England, Rodney, understandably depressed, dropped his scruples and accepted Biron’s offer to advance him 1,000 louis, satisfying all creditors. On his return to England in May, 1778, money to repay the loan was raised by Drummond’s Bank, whose director Henry Drummond was a relative of Rodney’s first wife. When this gentleman learned the circumstances, he arranged to cancel the debt. Rodney’s more pressing need of active employment was left hanging for yet another year, on the ground that the major commands in America and the West Indies and of the Grand Fleet had been filled. In fact, this was not true. At a time when Spain’s belligerency was anticipated and the combined Bourbon enemies were preparing for assault, Rodney was passed over as successor to Keppel for command of the Grand Fleet in favor of Sir Charles Hardy, one of the superannuated admirals whom Sandwich was scraping from the bottom of the barrel like last season’s dried apples when more active flag officers would not accept appointments, fearing to be made scapegoat if anything went wrong. Taken out of comfortable retirement at Greenwich Hospital, Hardy had not been at sea for twenty years. “Does the people at home think the nation in no danger?” wrote a senior captain of the Grand Fleet to a colleague while under Sir Charles Hardy’s limp command. “I must inform you the confused conduct here is such that I tremble for the event. There is no forethought … we are every day from morning to night plagued and puzzled in minutiae while essentials are totally neglected.… My God, what have you great people done by such an appointment?” Political division in the navy, besides setting comrades against each other, had injured the service by narrowing the choice of flag officers, and even of the Navy Board, to old and tired veterans, weak in health and spirit, the relics of better days.
Nature took care of the problem, when in May, 1780, after a year of the too heavy responsibility, Sir Charles