Revolutionaries and Patriots
While Frederick had been in Berlin from May 1791 onwards, he had been able to watch, with the Prussian Court, as events took an even more dramatic turn in France. In June the French king and queen, in disguise, tried to escape to the Austrian border but their coach was stopped just before they reached it and they were forced to return to Paris. His flight had made it obvious that the king was opposed to the constitutional reforms and the demand for a republic grew stronger. At this point Emperor Leopold of Austria, who was the brother of the French queen, Marie Antoinette, together with King Frederick William of Prussia, signed a Declaration that they would invade France if any harm should come to the royal couple, which served only to strengthen the republican cause.
Between October 1791 and August 1792 France was run as a constitutional monarchy but the government proved ineffective and deeply divided and in August 1792 the royal palace in Paris was stormed by a revolutionary mob and the king and queen were imprisoned. The new government of France declared war on Austria in April, and Prussia shortly afterwards declared war on France in support. Prussian armies invaded France but were defeated at the battle of Valmy on 20 September. On the same day the new government of France, calling itself the Convention, abolished the monarchy and established a republic as well as a new revolutionary calendar. French armies were ordered into Flanders and the Rhineland, where they won a series of minor victories, before defeating the Austrian army at Jemappes on 6 November and annexing most of the Austrian Netherlands, also known as the ‘Low Countries’ (roughly present-day Belgium).
The Austrian Netherlands, which had previously belonged to Spain, were ceded to Austria in 1714 after the Duke of Marlborough’s famous victories over the French had resulted in the defeat of France and Spain in the War of the Spanish Succession. It was mainly Britain and the Dutch who wanted an Austrian presence in Flanders to create a buffer state against France, which had made many attempts to conquer the region. But the Austrians were never very enthusiastic about their new acquisition and were very unpopular with their Flemish subjects. From about 1780 onwards one of the main aims of Austrian foreign policy was to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, as we have already seen. In 1789 the Austrians were driven out of the Netherlands after a successful rebellion and eleven of the provinces declared themselves the ‘United States of Belgium’. The following year the Austrians repressed the revolt and recovered control, but this did nothing to add to their popularity and to some extent the arrival of the French invaders was welcomed in Flanders.
On 21 January 1793 Louis XVI’s enemies at last got what they wanted and he was guillotined, to the dismay and disbelief of the crowned heads of Europe. The reaction in England was the expulsion of the French ambassador and on 1 February the Convention declared war on England and the Dutch Republic. The following month they declared war on Spain as well. This provided William Pitt with a challenge for which he had little or no preparation. As prime minister during the last nine, peaceful, years, he had been a great success; during his first few years in power he had given priority to the need for more efficiency in government and administration and he had significantly cut costs as well as reducing the number of sinecures. He followed the economic philosophy of Adam Smith and encouraged free trade wherever possible. His India Act of 1784 reduced the authority of the East India Company in favour of a governor-general appointed by the Crown, while his Canada Act of 1791 retained the loyalty of French Canadians by giving them their own province and safeguarding the French language. Pitt was undoubtedly a master of administrative detail and he had a calm and common-sense approach to peacetime problems. But he had never served in the armed forces and had no experience whatever of conducting a war.
Britain had a fine navy with a great reputation, largely because it was considered vital for the defence of an island nation. For that reason there had been no serious objection to the way the navy had traditionally been manned by ‘press gangs’ who effectively kidnapped young men or got them so drunk they did not know what they were doing when they enrolled. This contrasted strongly with the deep-rooted national hostility to the idea of a standing army, which had been regarded as a potential threat to individual liberty ever since the days when Oliver Cromwell had held the nation in check with a repressive military regime in the 1650s. Conditions in the army were so tough that it was difficult to recruit suitable men on a large scale, though there were part-time militias in all the counties, mainly for self-defence. Since 1715 all three Georges had supplemented their British troops by relying heavily on Hanoverian soldiers for their foreign campaigns as well as mercenaries from other German states, especially Hesse.
So Pitt had a formidable naval force at his disposal, about 600 ships with 100,000 men aboard, but only about 14,000 soldiers in Britain and a further 28,000 in India and the West Indies. These could be augmented by 14,000 men from Hanover and 8,000 from Hesse.1 Hence Pitt’s main strategy was to use diplomacy to support a strong coalition of European powers against France. The new French republic had made this comparatively easy by defiantly declaring war against Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and many smaller Italian and German states for good measure. France was in theory bankrupt and divided by civil tensions, her navy was completely outnumbered and she had possibly 270,000 land troops compared with about 350,000 of the allies.
The French government’s shortage of money made the banking city of Amsterdam a great attraction and they instructed General Dumouriez to invade the Dutch republic. The Dutch were in a state of complete disarray, partly because their leader, William V, Prince of Orange, was a man of ‘almost inhuman dullness, apathy and stupidity’, according to one of Britain’s greatest military historians, Sir John Fortescue.2 Professor Simon Schama, in the book that made his name, goes further:
As Willem V pointed out ruefully on many occasions, he was not the man supplied by Providence to restore the fortunes of his dynasty and his Fatherland. Physically, he was singularly unprepossessing, with pop eyes, fat lips and a weak chin, something less than the incarnation of military virility … He was subject to alternating fits of petulant obstinacy and chronic vacillation and he suffered from the unpleasant malady of spitting bile. No prince of the Ancien Regime can have had a more unanimously damning press and few such an inauspicious upbringing. Bullied by his mother … and finally hectored by the wife who had been foisted on him … his was a classic case of inferiority complex.3
Between 1568 and 1648 the seven Protestant northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands had fought a long war to rid themselves of their Catholic Spanish masters. In 1648 they succeeded in having their federated ‘Dutch Republic’ (often known as Holland after the most important province) internationally recognized at the Treaty of Westphalia, while the southern provinces of Flanders stayed under Spanish control. The success of the Dutch revolt owed a great deal to the Dutch nobleman William, Count of Nassau, the owner of extensive lands in the Netherlands and Germany, who also inherited the title of Prince of Orange – a small semi-independent state, about twelve miles by nine, near Avignon in the south of France. He was appointed ‘Stadholder’ – a sort of Dutch President – in 1572 and when he died in 1584 it became customary, with a few interruptions, for the head of the Orange-Nassau family to be elected to this post. Faced with a French invasion in 1747 the Dutch Estates-General (Parliament) declared that the Stadholderate, then held by William IV of Orange, would henceforth be hereditary.
William IV married Anne, the eldest daughter of George II of Great Britain, and when he died at the age of only forty in 1751 he was succeeded by his three-year-old son, William V. It is ironic that the hereditary principle had been adopted in Holland just at a time when it was entirely unsuitable. There was a regency, lasting fifteen years, during which all the regents, including William’s mother, grandmother and elder sister, were unpopular and incompetent. When he himself was allowed to take control at the age of eighteen in 1766 it was already clear, as we have seen, that he was totally unsuited to a leadership role. In 1767 he married Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, the aunt of York’s Frederica, and their eldest son and heir, William, known as the ‘Hereditary Prince of Orange’ was born in 1772.
In 1780 the Dutch Republic had drifted into four years of naval warfare with Great Britain, largely because Dutch merchants provided arms and supplies to the American rebels, and the result was defeat and disaster for the Dutch, who lost valuable colonies and trading rights. Continued dissatisfaction with William V’s rule led to the formation of a Dutch ‘Patriot’ party which wanted to be rid of the monarchical and aristocratic trappings of the Orange regime and favoured a democratic republic on the lines of the recently recognized USA. In 1785 William was forced to move his court from the hostile Hague to remote Guelders and eventually Wilhelmina called upon her brother, Frederick William II of Prussia, to send a force to defeat the rebels in 1787. Although cowed for the time being, the Patriots laid low and awaited their next opportunity.
York Goes to War, February 1793
In 1793 the Patriots’ moment arrived when the armies of the new French republic were about to invade, bringing with them the promise of democracy and the overthrow of the House of Orange. Lord Auckland, the British Ambassador in Holland, urged on 15 February that the Duke of York and a few British officers should be sent to Holland to bolster the Dutch troops, which were technically under the control of the very inexperienced Hereditary Prince William, now aged twenty-one. The following day the French invaded the country from Antwerp with a small force of 17,000 men and received a considerable welcome from many of the Dutch population, as well as from the hard core of Patriots.
This development prompted Pitt to act quickly and to the king’s delight, as well as that of his second son, he agreed that York should go with all speed with an expeditionary force to assist the Dutch. The constitutional position in Britain at this time regarding the conduct of a war was that the king had the right to conduct foreign policy and declare war and peace and he was the supreme commander of all military and naval forces. However, it was Parliament that paid all the expenses, so it was essential that the king and his ministers should work together harmoniously. Apart from Pitt himself, the two main ministers involved were Lord Grenville, aged thirty-four, the foreign secretary, and Henry Dundas, aged forty, the home secretary, who at first had responsibility for war.
The decision to appoint York to the command of this force resulted from the insistence of the king, despite the doubts of his ministers, who had only known the duke in his more frivolous years since his return to England. Nevertheless, George III was not being foolish in demanding his appointment. Despite York’s relative youth and lack of wartime experience, he had been formally educated and trained to be a soldier and commander, he had benefited from the guidance of the Duke of Brunswick, one of the most successful generals of the age, and he knew from first hand how the Prussian and Austrian armies operated and what their strengths and weaknesses were. He was a high-ranking British royal prince and the son-in-law of Britain’s ally, the King of Prussia, and as he would be working together with the commanders of coalition troops, high social rank counted for a great deal. Moreover, there were precedents for the appointment of young British princes to military command, notably George II’s younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, who had fought against the French at Dettingen and Fontenoy and then crushed the Jacobite rebellion (with alleged brutality) at Culloden in 1745 at the age of twenty-four. Finally, only a small British force would be sent out at first and York’s main troops would be Hanoverians, whom he had commanded during his years in Germany.
On 20 February York assembled all seven battalions of the British Guards on Horse Guards and told them that the first battalions of the three regiments would be going on active duty. As these battalions were not up to strength, he called for volunteers and was pleased to find that the entire brigade stepped forward as one man.
Five days later the king and the Prince of Wales rode from Buckingham House to the Horse Guards, where York paraded the chosen three battalions, numbering only about 2,000 men. They were inspected by the king at 7.00 am and marched past in slow time. Then, with York riding at their head, they set off across the river and marched down the Old Kent Road to Greenwich. Along the way they were greeted by enthusiastic crowds who plied some of the soldiers in the rear columns with so much drink that several collapsed and had to be transported in carts.
The king, the queen, the Duke of Clarence and the three eldest princesses all accompanied the brigade down to Greenwich, but not the Duchess of York, who, we are told, ‘was so much depressed in her spirits that she could not bear to witness the departure of her consort in the career of peril and glory’.4 The Guards reached Greenwich by nightfall and transferred to ships, which seem to have been ‘too small to carry more than two-thirds of their number in safety, without medicines or medical appliances, without the slightest reserve of ammunition, and of course without transport of any description’.5 As they boarded the ships, in sight of the royal princesses, some men were heard to say ‘Who would not die for them?’6
Although York was in overall charge of this expedition and was also expected to take command of about 13,000 Hanoverian troops when they were ready, Major-General Gerard Lake had been given command, under him, of the three Guards regiments. The duke’s formal instructions, given by ministers in the name of the king, directed, very vaguely, that he should act ‘for the defence of the United Provinces and for acting against the enemy’. He was told not to divide his troops or place them in the frontier garrisons or to take them more than twenty-four hours’ march away from the port of Helvoetsluys, which is where they landed. It is very likely that these orders were originated by Henry Dundas, the minister who assumed most of the responsibility for the details of the conduct of the war.
Dundas was a Scot who became MP for Midlothian in 1774 and supported first Lord North, then Pitt, entering the Cabinet in 1791 as secretary of state for the home department. In this capacity he took responsibility for hostilities until his appointment to the new office of secretary of state for war in 1794, a position he held until 1801. He was a close friend and loyal supporter of Pitt but had no personal experience of warfare and most British military historians have blamed the disorganization and bad planning of the 1793 campaign almost entirely on him. From the start, he had no particular confidence in York and tried to make sure, in his orders, that York would be obliged to consult more experienced officers: more often than not this simply resulted in indecisive actions.
The Flanders campaign, 1793–1794.
Success at Valenciennes, July 1793
Once his small force had landed, York left it under the command of Lake and rode straight to The Hague to discuss the situation with the Stadholder, William V. He found ‘everybody here in the greatest consternation at the news which just arrived of the surrender of Breda, through the cowardice of the governor’. After a few days he told his father that he thought the biggest problems in Holland were the irresolution of William V, ‘and that no one thing can be done without a written order from him, which from his hurry he very often forgets to sign’. At least York persuaded William to allow his son, the hereditary prince, to accompany him on a tour of the defences of the country, and he decided to move his Guards to a position where they could protect the city of Dort (now Dordrecht).7
At this point the Austrians, under the command of an experienced general, Prince Josias of Coburg, made a spectacularly successful strike at the French. Coburg’s army of 40,000 men crossed the Meuse at Maastricht and defeated General Dumouriez at Neerwinden on 18 March, moving on to recapture Brussels. Dumouriez abandoned Antwerp and all of Flanders and personally defected to the enemy, urging his troops to do the same. This dramatic act of treachery had drastic repercussions in Paris, where it heralded the downfall of the relatively moderate politicians associated with Dumouriez and led to the rise of the radical politician Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. Its members governed France on the ruthless principles of a policy of ‘Terror’, which they saw as the only effective way of defeating the enemies that now confronted the Revolution at home as well as abroad.
Encouraged by the defeat of Dumouriez, Pitt and Dundas decided to send out reinforcements to York’s small British force. These consisted of men from the 14th, 37th and 53rd foot regiments, topped up with recruits. They were not impressive, as the duke was warned by a member of his staff, because so many of them were ‘nothing but undisciplined and raw recruits; and how they are to be disposed of until they can be taught their business I am at a loss to imagine’. They were placed under the command of General Sir Ralph Abercromby, aged fifty-nine, a Scottish laird and political supporter of Dundas who had not seen military action for ten years. When they arrived in Antwerp, two out of the three battalions ‘were found utterly unfit for service, the new recruits being old men and weakly boys, worse than the worst that had been accepted even at the period of greatest exhaustion during the American War’.8
Having been advanced by his father to the rank of full general, York reviewed these troops and took the decision to leave the two weakest regiments behind for further training. He was also sent squadrons of cavalry, which were in better shape, and this brought his British contingent up to a total of 4,200 infantry and 2,300 cavalry. Together with his 13,000 Hanoverians and 8,000 Hessians, he was now in command of a sizeable force, though of varying quality and lacking in cohesion. He was advised by a number of experienced officers, including Abercromby and also his adjutant-general (chief of staff), General Sir James Murray, as well as the foreign coalition generals. York’s younger brother Ernest had, meanwhile, been given command of a Hanoverian cavalry regiment. However, towards the end of April York had to deal with a mutiny in the Hanoverian ranks, caused by the fact that they were being paid less than they had been promised. He addressed the Hanoverians through their commander, General de Bussche, and as he reported to his father:
I went out to them and desired General de Bussche to acquaint them from me that I understood they thought themselves injured, but I would give them my word of honour that though I was not acquainted with the treaty, I would take care that whatever was their right should be given them, but that I was ashamed of their conduct as soldiers and that the first man who ventured after this promise to grumble again should be punished in the severest manner. I then told them myself that it was the first time I had ever seen a Hanoverian regiment with disgust and that the disgrace they had brought upon themselves could only be washed away the first time they met the enemy. I cannot express to your Majesty how ashamed and affected the men appear and I have no doubt from what I saw and have heard that this very disagreeable occurrence is totally over.’9
General Murray, impressed with the way York had dealt with this potentially tricky situation, wrote back enthusiastically to Dundas, remarking that, by talking to the soldiers ‘with firmness, declaring at the same time his intention to do them justice, His Royal Highness succeeded in re-establishing discipline and order … the Duke seemed to me to act with great judgement in this critical circumstance’.10
A conference had been held in Antwerp early in April between the military and diplomatic representatives of the allies, who eventually fell in line with Prince Josias of Coburg’s plan to attack the ‘barrier fortresses’, just over the border from France, which were still in French hands. Built by Louis XIV’s great engineer Vauban in the previous century, they were formidable obstacles, but Ypres, Menin, Tournai and Mons had already fallen to the allies. However, ten more fortresses still held out, including Dunkirk, Lille, Condé and Valenciennes. Pitt and Dundas were keen on York capturing Dunkirk, because this would be seen as a tangible victory at home, but they agreed that he should be subordinate to Coburg in his assault on Condé and Valenciennes, after which Coburg promised to lend Austrian support to a British attack on Dunkirk. Aware that Dunkirk was likely to be attacked, the brilliant French engineer and politician Lazare Carnot arrived there in April to supervise the strengthening of the dilapidated fortifications and to make it clear to the inhabitants that anything less than absolute loyalty to the Convention would be savagely punished.
The new French commander, Dampierre, despite being outnumbered by the allies, was under instruction to prevent the fortress of Condé being taken. Accordingly, he attacked the allied line on 1 May and on 8 May the Austrians were driven back near the town and appealed to York for help. As he told his father, ‘I immediately told the Coldstream which was nearest the battalion to advance: as they were moving along, I went up to them and said to them, My Lads, I have no doubt of your courage, but be likewise prudent and cool. The whole battalion answered me Never Fear, we will do you Honour, God Save the King. They immediately advanced, formed line, and moved into line, keeping their step and their distance as well as if they had been at exercise.’ Unfortunately the Coldstreams suffered about seventy casualties and ultimately blamed York for sending them into a wood bristling with enemy batteries, though the order had actually come from an Austrian commander.
The Austrians were grateful and spoke highly of York and his troops, ascribing eventual success to ‘their bravery and to a very quick and able manoeuvre by His Royal Highness’.11 On 23 May York received orders from Coburg to attack the French camp at Famars, just south of Valenciennes. He had to improvise on the original plan and he was restrained from immediate attack by the Austrians, so that when he did attack, the French army had largely retreated. Nevertheless, the camp was captured and York had won his first victory, details of which he lost no time in conveying to his delighted father.
Military analysts have subsequently argued that Coburg should have ignored the uncaptured fortresses and swept on to take Paris, because the French army was still below strength and there were serious political rifts in the capital as well as a major royalist rebellion in the Vendée. However, Coburg was a veteran of eighteenth-century warfare, which attached great importance to sieges, and he ordered York to besiege the fortress at Valenciennes, partly out of deference to the British success in the campaign so far. The Austrians were so slow and methodical in their preparations for the siege that York objected and was in turn asked to be patient.
By 22 July the Allies had taken Condé and Mainz, and four days later three allied columns attacked Valenciennes from the earthworks they had built on the eastern side. On 28 July the fortress surrendered and Coburg left most of the negotiations to York, who immediately became the object of flattery from the local French, some of whom suggested that he should be proclaimed King of France. The men of the garrison were taken prisoner and made to lay down their weapons but York allowed them to leave with the honours of war. The British were less disliked in France than the Austrians and, although Coburg entered the town ceremoniously with York, it was to the duke that the keys of the town were handed. He seems to have made a good impression there because on their way home the French garrison told their countrymen that ‘they loved the Duke of York, who seemed to them worthy of the throne of France’.12
The duke wrote constantly to his father during this period, in terms of the greatest courtesy, keeping him abreast of all developments and indeed seeking his permission on a number of counts – for instance in accepting Coburg’s offer that he should preside over the siege of Valenciennes. As well as telling him the good news about the capture of Famars and the fall of Valenciennes and commending the bravery of specific officers and men, he also related the bad news. This included an incident involving Hanoverian footsoldiers who had deserted their trenches, encouraged by two of their officers, as well as the more serious problem of Colonel Pennington of the Coldstream Guards, whose unpleasant behaviour to his fellow officers was causing deep unrest. York came to the conclusion that Pennington was ‘perfectly mad’ and told him so in front of all his officers, in the hope that he would resign. York also had to deal with the awkward question of his brother, the Prince of Wales, who had decided that, not to be outdone by Frederick, he would offer to serve in the Austrian army under Coburg. Not surprisingly, the king forbade him to go.13
After the fall of Valenciennes, the allies pressed on southwards to attack the French army in Caesar’s Camp, just north of Cambrai. Coburg ordered York with 25,000 men to lead a diversionary attack from the south of the camp, while the Austrians would deliver the main attack from the east. However, the French saw what was happening and retreated during the night of 7 August. The following morning York saw the rearguard of the enemy in the distance and, eager to pursue them, he quickly collected a cavalry force of about 2,000 men and led them to the burning village of Marquion. With only one aide, Count Langeron, he reached a point where he saw two lines of cavalry only twenty yards away. Crying ‘There are my Hanoverians’, he rode towards them, only to hear Langeron shout at the last minute that they were in fact French cavalry wearing uniforms similar to the Hanoverians’. According to Langeron, he seized the bridle of York’s horse and led him back to the safety of the village, and ‘but for me he would have been killed or taken – which would have been the same thing for him, for the Convention spared no Englishman’.14
In the end it was Prince Ernest, commanding a detachment of Hanoverian cavalry, who managed to have a hand-to-hand skirmish with the French. He told his father, proudly, that he had received a cut on his head. York was very irritated that the French had managed to get away and blamed the caution of the Austrian commanders, with whom he had heated words at the end of the day. This did not prevent him being offered the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Marie Theresa by the emperor, a high honour given only for a battle won or a town taken. However, as York was perfectly aware, acceptance of an award such as this could become an embarrassment if one day the Austrians should become enemies instead of allies.
Retreat from Dunkirk, September 1793
The allies had achieved considerable success up to this point and the French armies were demoralized and in disarray. Most military historians (sitting in hindsight-blessed armchairs) are agreed that they should now have risked a march on Paris, which is what both Coburg and York were keen to do. However, Pitt and Dundas were adamant that York should take Dunkirk first, partly so that they could demonstrate tangible gains to their political supporters at home and partly to use as a bargaining counter in future negotiations. There was no doubt in York’s mind that this was not a wise venture but he had been trained to be a loyal and obedient soldier, so with an additional force of 10,000 Austrians provided by Coburg, as promised, he marched his army of many nationalities north towards Dunkirk. By 17 August they had reached Turcoing. Some Dutch allies attacked the French at nearby Linselles but were driven back, requesting help from York. He immediately sent General Lake with just over a thousand Guardsmen, who, in what has been described as ‘one of the most brilliant actions of the war’, put the French to flight.15
On 14 August Lazare Carnot was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris and was given responsibility for the formation, training and movements of the French armies. He also worked harmoniously with two other colleagues responsible for arms, ammunition, hospitals and general supply. On 16 August a decree introduced conscription, which was expected to add 450,000 men to the army, and on 29 August a blue uniform was adopted to replace the Bourbon white. With his personal experience of Dunkirk, Carnot perceived that its fall must be prevented, and throughout August he moved as many troops as possible into the vicinity, under the supreme command of General Houchard.
Meanwhile York, despite misgivings, remained true to his orders and continued the march on Dunkirk. He divided his force into two columns, with the Hanoverian Field Marshal Freytag in command of the left column, which consisted of Austrians, Hanoverians and British. They were ordered to protect the siege operations while York with the main column attacked the French and drove them back to the walls of Dunkirk on 24 August. Unfortunately, as York explained, ‘the ardour and gallantry of the troops carried them too far and in spite of a peremptory order from me, three times repeated, they pursued the enemy upon the glacis of the Place [main square] when we had the misfortune to lose many brave and reliable men by the grapeshot from the town’.16
So preparations were made for a siege, but the bad news arrived that an English fleet, convoying transports bringing siege guns, had not landed as expected at Nieuport on 22 August; instead, French gunboats sailed off the coast and fired at York’s army from the sea. Then the Dutch, for whom York was rapidly losing all respect, made further blunders, as he told the king: ‘Our good friends the Dutch have again behaved with their usual cowardice. On the 28th the enemy attacked their positions at Turcoing, Waterloo and Lannoy, all of which they abandoned without firing a shot and retreated with the utmost precipitation.’ They did manage to regroup, but York was told that the Dutch would probably retreat back to Holland, partly because the Hereditary Prince of Orange was annoyed that he himself had not been allowed to lead the offensive on Dunkirk.17
The fact that the fleet bringing the siege guns did not arrive for sixteen days after York’s army reached Dunkirk turned out to be a decisive factor. Carnot sent commissioners from Paris to emphasize once more that any treachery would be ruthlessly punished and to make sure that the garrison and townsfolk were prepared to withstand a siege. York began firing on the fortress early in September with some cannon captured from a French ship, but Houchard attacked Freytag’s Hanoverians on 6 September. They resisted stoutly all day, but were forced to retreat during the night. York’s brother, Prince Adolphus, aged nineteen, had recently left his university studies at Göttingen and joined the Hanoverian forces but he was wounded in the shoulder on this day and briefly taken prisoner, until rescued by a detachment of Guards. On 8 September Houchard attacked the Hanoverians again and once more they sustained heavy losses and were forced to retreat. The duke held a council of war that afternoon and decided that, in the absence of the British fleet bringing siege guns and reinforcements, and with French troops massing menacingly in the country round Dunkirk, he had no option but to retreat from the siege in two columns, an operation which was carried out during the night amid considerable confusion, but with no further loss of life. Two days after the retreat, on 11 September, the British fleet arrived.
It is likely that York’s army lost about 10,000 men killed, wounded, taken prisoner or dying from disease during the siege of Dunkirk and there was no disguising the fact that it had been a significant defeat. Popular opinion in Britain inevitably held the duke to blame, unaware of the details of the operation. However, it is clear in retrospect that the prompt arrival of the fleet would have made a crucial difference and the reasons for its failure to appear were almost entirely the responsibility of ministers at home, chiefly Dundas. Moreover, most military historians are agreed that the British government’s determination to take Dunkirk was a mistake in the first instance. It was also unfortunate timing that Carnot had come to power in the very month of the siege, employing ruthless and efficient administrative measures to great effect. On the credit side, as with the British evacuation of Dunkirk 147 years later, York had successfully pulled his army out of what had become a position of great danger. Carnot recognized this and, far from Houchard receiving praise for his efforts, he was summoned to Paris and guillotined for letting York’s army get away.
In a long letter of explanation to his father, which remained private, York blamed above all the failure of the fleet to arrive in time, but also emphasized that superior French numbers had overcome the Hanoverian troops defending his besieging army and complained that, contrary to the Convention signed after the fall of Valenciennes, French prisoners released after the siege had been used again to attack him at Dunkirk.18 York did not himself go public with any personal defence of his actions, partly so as not to cause dissent among his allies or to antagonize the ministers at home, although it seems clear that in private he blamed the Duke of Richmond, who, as Master-General of the Ordnance, was responsible for the provision of the artillery which had failed to arrive in time. York’s case was neatly put in the Morning Chronicle two days after the battle by an officer who wrote:
There is but one sentiment through the whole camp. If the gun-boats and floating batteries had been ready, according to the express promise to cooperate with the Duke of York, and if his alacrity had been at all seconded on the part of the officers in England there is no doubt that Dunkirk would have fallen at the first attack. Every man that has since perished … is to be set down to the score of the ministers …19
York did not waste any time fretting about the failure at Dunkirk and once his force had regrouped he assisted the Austrians in a successful attack on Menin, causing the French to evacuate the town and retreat. He then joined the Austrians in besieging another fortress-town, Mauberge, but a successful offensive by the French not only drove the allies back to Tournai but also recaptured Menin. On 28 October York’s troops captured a hundred French prisoners at Lannoy, between Tournai and Menin. According to an eye-witness, ‘Every possible assistance was given to the suffering Frenchmen. All the surgeons in the camp were sent to dress their wounds, and His Royal Highness, the commander-in-chief, humanely ordered wine and food to be distributed to them.’20
Eighteenth-century armies tended not to fight in the winter and with the arrival of November the allies established themselves in winter quarters between Ghent and Courtrai, with York’s headquarters close to the latter town. He asked his father’s permission to return home on leave, but it was refused. The king told him that if he went on leave, other officers would expect the same, but that he would summon him home for consultations in due course. Although the king’s faith in his son was unshakeable and although he was highly regarded by allied commanders, York had strong critics in the government and also among some of his own officers, especially in the Guards. Many Guards officers came from the highest ranks of society, and several of them wrote to people of influence at home, criticizing the performance of their commander.
The reasons for this may well go back to 1787, when York first became Colonel of the Coldstream Guards. We have seen how, during his six years in Germany, he came strongly under the influence of the Prussian military machine through the Duke of Brunswick and Frederick the Great himself. Two of the main features of that machine were that the men were well cared-for in terms of uniform, equipment and food, but in return they were submitted to a highly punitive system of discipline, which kept them in constant fear of committing any misdemeanour, however trifling. This would result in very harsh punishment, often of a corporal or physical nature. It seems that when York took over responsibility for the Guards he found that there were many instances of slackness and he introduced measures which, by English standards, were considered those of a martinet. Excessive discipline has always been resented in the British army, and after a year or so York realized this and relaxed the rules accordingly.
In addition, many of the Guards officers came from aristocratic Tory families which might have resented York’s early political connections with the Whigs, while the duel with Lennox, who had his admirers, doubtless alienated a few young officers. Once the campaign started, York’s detractors blamed him for the seventy Guardsmen lost near Condé in May, and a steady number of critical letters trickled back to influential figures in London. Most of them were sent by officers who disliked York on a personal level, probably resenting the fact that he owed his command, at the age of thirty-one, to the personal favour of his father rather than to any outstanding qualities of his own. The failure to take Dunkirk was a golden opportunity for his opponents, most of whom would not have known, or cared, much in detail about the practical difficulties York faced.
Lord Malmesbury, a British diplomat working on delicate negotiations to bring Prussia into the coalition, visited the army in December and found that one British colonel ‘spoke most highly of [York] as a man and an able general’, while an Austrian minister praised him and his army, and a Dutch minister praised York and criticized the Prince of Orange. Most of the Austrians, indeed, were full of praise for York but were highly critical of their own commander, Coburg. Malmesbury had quite a long conversation with the duke and noted in his diary that ‘it confirmed me in the opinion, that the Duke of York has a very good understanding; but he talks too much, and is careless to whom. I ventured to tell him so, and took an opportunity of recommending him to ask the superior officers to dinner; and, as he could not prevent their writing home, to try at least to furnish them by his conversation there, with materials which would do no harm. Now they, and particularly the Guards, write nonsense, almost equal to mutiny. To this he attended with great good humour.’ On the same subject, the Duke of Portland, writing to Malmesbury from England, referred to ‘the licentious, not to say mutinous spirit which prevails amongst the troops and which originated in and is even cultivated in the Guards’.21
During the winter York sent one of his staff, Colonel Craufurd, to Vienna, where he had an interview with Baron Thugut, the Austrian minister responsible for the war. He told Craufurd that he and his colleagues had come to the conclusion that the main reasons for the lack of success in 1793 were that the Austrians had been too slow in besieging Valenciennes and had then failed to besiege Maubeuge after its capture. The allies also missed the opportunity for a knock-out blow against the French at Famars, mistakenly abandoned the siege of Maubeuge and engaged in field operations in terrain unsuitable for cavalry, the arm in which the allied armies chiefly excelled. This seems fair comment, and it makes no criticism of York or the forces under his command.22
By December York had come to the conclusion that two key individuals needed to be changed before the start of the next year’s campaign. One was his own adjutant-general, Sir James Murray, and the other was Murray’s Austrian counterpart, Prince Hohenlohe. Although Murray had been loyal to the duke, he was indecisive and unpopular and York persuaded his father to replace him with Colonel Craig, a short, stocky man who had allegedly begun his army career as a private in the Household Cavalry and subsequently fought with distinction in the American War. Craig arrived at York’s headquarters early in January 1794 and wrote back to Dundas to say that York treated ‘everybody with a degree of good nature and politeness which I know have not had justice done to them in the accounts which have been given of him in London’. He also felt that ‘the late Promotion’, presumably meaning a considerable clear-out of personnel, ‘has in a great degree removed the sources of the misrepresentations which have been made on this subject; at least it is very clear that a certain corps [the Guards] amongst the officers of which it has occasioned the principal removals, has been infinitely more quiet since’.
Still on the matter of the duke’s popularity, Craig wrote:
The only circumstance which I have observed in the Duke’s treatment of the officers which I could wish changed, is with respect to the invitations to his table; in this it appears to me that insufficient attention is paid to the field officers and those of a higher rank. I am endeavouring as much as lies in my power at present to bring about a little alteration in this respect, which if I can accomplish it I am sure will tend to increase the Duke’s popularity in the army. It would not perhaps be unpleasing to you to know that the entertainment that His Royal Highness gave on Her Majesty’s birthday – a ball and supper – was perhaps one of the handsomest and best conducted things of the kind that was ever given. There were about 800 people at it. Prince Ernest was here, but Prince Adolphus did not arrive until next day.23
This is a strong reminder that we are still dealing here with the practices of eighteenth-century warfare, where royalty and aristocracy held lavish balls and dinners in the vicinity of their military headquarters – admittedly during a suspension of the fighting.
York also wrote to his father urging him to persuade the emperor to replace Hohenlohe with the brilliant tactician General Karl Mack, who was much admired in Austrian military circles. It is not easy to say how influential York’s view was but Mack was duly appointed and he and York met in Brussels on 1 February 1794, where Mack showed York his plan for the new campaign. York then left for England to tell the king about this, and invited Mack to come to England himself. Clearly an amicable relationship had developed between the two.
Mack’s arrival in England in February came at a good time for York, because Pitt and Dundas, who had never been keen on his appointment as commander, were about to urge the king to appoint Lord Cornwallis in his place. A veteran of the American War, Cornwallis had just returned from a very successful spell as Governor-General of India and most people considered him to be Britain’s most able general (despite his disastrous surrender at Yorktown). Mack, however, argued strongly in favour of York retaining his command and as the king never wavered in his support for his son, the ministers gave in and York was present in London when Mack outlined his plan to Pitt, Dundas and Grenville. It envisaged a main advance towards Paris by the Austrians in the centre, with a British army of 40,000 men protecting the right flank by a march on Amiens.
York had about a month’s ‘leave’ in England, during which he was reunited with his wife after a long absence, but he was back at the front on 8 March to make preparations for the beginning of the new campaigning season.