First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [145]
His condition did not improve on the voyage as he had hoped, and when he passed the latitude of the Bermudas with no relief, he realized he must make for home. As a result, the two warships he had with him were not present to add to the British naval force which was soon to contest naval superiority with the French fleet in American waters. To Carlisle he describes his distress, when about to proceed to America “with a force sufficient to curb or defeat” His Majesty’s enemies, “to be deprived of that honour by a severe distemper which reduced me so much as to render me incapable of taking charge of the fleet destined for that service.” He returned to England on September 19.
Apart from rejoining his family, his homecoming was not entirely joyous, for sixty-four legal actions had been entered against him by St. Eustatius and St. Kitts merchants, and the political Opposition were prowling on the heels of Burke and Fox in readiness for parliamentary attack in a chorus of condemnation. Hints of a coming peerage receded* under the cloud of disfavor, and when on his arrival he hurried to Windsor Castle to request an audience with George III to present his case, he was put off to another day. Worse was the news that Hotham’s convoy, with the bulk of the produce of St. Eustatius, had been captured by the French, causing a storm of abuse to fall upon the much-abused Sandwich for failure to provide adequate ships to protect the homecoming treasure.
To the public, Rodney still emitted rays of glory for the relief of Gibraltar and the Moonlight Battle. Dockyard workers cheered him at Plymouth and garlands were hung at the door of his house in London. He hastened to Bath to submit to the untender mercies of 18th century surgery for his condition. For the next month (September–October), while he was in surgery and recovery, he was entirely out of affairs while the terminal crisis was reaching its climax in America.
The surgeon, Sir Caesar Hawkins, appears to have had a good result and to have “cured his patient,” according to Rodney’s biographer, although on November 4 Rodney himself writes to Jackson of the Admiralty Board that “my complaint has been and still continues.” His spirit, in spite of the “misery of a surgical operation,” was as ardent as ever. The government, once so neglectful, was now eager for his services. In November he was offered the post of Vice-Admiral of Great Britain, with promise of the 90-gun three-decker Formidable as his flagship. He accepted at once, though his friends found him thin and ill but “determined to serve again.” Sandwich wrote him letters virtually pleading with him to rejoin, insisting, “Our loss will be great if we are deprived of your assistance.”
This raises a question: if he was so invaluable, why did the Admiralty not give him leave to come home for treatment of a “severe stricture … so serious and painful that I must soon return home” when he first asked, on March 2? Treated at that time, he instead of Graves, future loser in the crucial Battle of the Bay, might have been employed in America. Hood later generously acknowledged, referring to Rodney, that if “that Admiral had led His Majesty’s squadron from the West Indies to this coast, the fifth of September [date of the Battle of the Bay] would I think have been a glorious day for Britain.”
Judging by Rodney’s sensational victory over de Grasse a year later, in the Battle of the Saints, Hood was probably right. Rodney would certainly not have made such a muddle out of the Battle of the Bay as to lose its control to the French. If the British