Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [200]
The British stood firm, which is hardly surprising. Though they were very different from one another and, in the end, bitter rivals, the chief figures in the Portland administration, Canning and the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Castlereagh, were absolutely committed both to the struggle against Napoleon, and to a Eurocentric strategy based on the aid of strong continental allies. There were differences between them in terms of approach and personality: whereas Canning was fiery, emotional, enthusiastic and a brilliant orator, Castlereagh was a poor public speaker and in general much more cautious. But in their perception of the war they were as one. Importantly, the issue was not the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; indeed, it did not matter that much whether France was a republic, a monarchy or an empire. This is not to say that ideological considerations did not matter: Canning and Castlereagh were opponents of political reform at home, and acted throughout under the assumption that Napoleon was a ‘crowned Jacobin’. But in their eyes the danger lay not in French ideas, but in French bayonets. What mattered was that France should respect international law. As no treaty, frontier or regime was safe under Napoleon, Britain must fight France to the end, or at least until such a time as a peace settlement could be imposed on her that would strip even the emperor of his ability to disturb the peace. Mixed in with this, of course, were views that mirrored traditional British interests - to both Canning and Castlereagh, it was axiomatic that Belgium and Holland should be kept out of French hands and, by the same token, that Britain should rule the waves. More than that, the coming of the Continental Blockade had in their eyes elevated the war into something new: one of national survival. Yet there was, too, a genuine sense of a wider commitment to the Continent as a whole that imbued the conduct of the war with a strong sense of mission that was reinforced by a sincere horror of the suffering that was being inflicted on the peoples of Europe.
Canning and Castlereagh - and beyond them their colleagues and political allies - were determined to fight Napoleon. In practical terms, however, the odds were very much stacked against them. In the first place, their only allies were Sweden and Sicily, neither of whom possessed the capacity to conduct the large-scale military campaigns that Britain needed from coalition partners. On the contrary, both needed defending. Yet troops were exactly what the British were short of. Although the number of men they had under arms had soared, far too many of them were serving in forces that could not be required to serve abroad. Still worse, neither Britain nor her colonies could be entirely stripped of regular troops. Strive though the British did to employ local auxiliaries and foreign manpower, the result was that they did not have sufficient men to do very much themselves. Nor was raising a respectable field army the only problem: setting aside the dangers of storm and shipwreck, transporting even the most modest expeditionary force required large numbers of specialized ships, while simply getting the forces on and off ship was a most complex undertaking. These difficulties were doubly unfortunate for they forced Britain back on methods of war - above all, blockade and colonial aggrandizement - that both antagonized potential partners on the Continent and confirmed suspicions that the British were avoiding the sort of commitment they themselves required of their allies. Nor were the methods of warfare on which they relied particularly cost-effective. Colonial offensives were notoriously wasteful in terms of lives, while blockading Europe’s coasts inflicted immense wear and tear on the Royal Navy. Some amelioration in the demands on Britain’s resources was at hand