‘Somewhere there was a fault.’The British campaign in Flanders, between 1793 and 1795, feels like an often-overlooked footnote in British military history. A disaster, that if we somehow look away, will be neatly swept under a rug, and we can return to the familiar narrative of a series of coalitions against France until the victory of Waterloo. Fortescue’s British Campaigns in Flanders is still the seminal work for understanding this campaign and sets the two diaries in context. The anonymous writer known as ‘Officer of the Guard’, was a member of the Duke of York’s staff and is a mixture of beautiful verse and pithy prose. Robert Brown’s account as corporal in the Coldstream Guards, is observant of the everyday. A shared war from very different social strata.
Terra Firma at length, thank my stars! We have gain’d,In February 1793, the French Convention declared war on Great Britain. In response, Great Britain sent a small army, a brigade initially with more men to follow. It was necessary to be on the continent, to be seen to be ‘doing our bit’ to restore the French monarchy; there were after all, political prizes to be had! While the Guards’ officers were no doubt keen to be rid of an overcrowded ship, Corporal Brown makes no mention of the hardship, instead comparing the villages around the port of Helleveotsluis to the country he had just left, ‘The streets are regular and kept remarkably clean, as well as the outside of their houses, which they are continually washing’.
And our raptures, believe me, can scarce be explain’d.
With more transport the breast of a debtor ne’er heav’d,
From straw and his fourpence per diem reliev’d,
Than ours when we shook all our friends by the hand,
As they joyfully leap’d from the decks on dry land.
Officer of the Guards Vol 1
The gaining of Terra Firma was an obvious relief to all the Duke’s soldiers. It had been a less than auspicious start.
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| The port of Hellevoetsluis at Hollands Diep |
The parade of two thousand guardsmen which had set off along the Mall had turned into a drunken ramble by the time it had reached Greenwich. Soldiers were loaded into three overcrowded transports. A soldier slipped on a gang-plank, fell and shattered his leg. Amongst the doctors in the three battalions, no medical supplies could be found. None had been loaded but at least the campaign furniture of the Guards officers had. Some consolation at least. The young officer from York’s inner circle foreshadowed the days ahead, “Somewhere there was a fault.”
The epitaph of the Flanders campaign.
The ships that sailed into Hollands Diep narrowly avoided a storm that would have surely wrecked them. Such an auspicious start was compounded by the constraints of operational orders sent by the government, and Henry Dundas in particular, which attempted to shackle the Duke’s army to a protection of the landing places along Hollands Diep. In early March 1793, there were around 2000 men under the Duke’s command. Two weeks earlier, the French convention had passed a law to levy 300,000 men to be added to a standing army that John Lynn in The Bayonets of the Republic suggested had shrunk from 450,000 in November to 290,000 in February 1793.
While the French were fighting on every border, the Army of the North, under General Dumouriez was around 23,000 with the Army of the Ardennes also nominally under his control. Fortescue paints Dumouriez as the supreme chancer, his aims with the Army of the North uncertain. It seems more likely that Dumouriez had designs on capturing Amsterdam and its gold rather than The Hague and the seat of the Dutch Stadtholder.
The war for Corporal Brown is one that any soldier across the ages could identify with. Marching, waiting, marching again. In fact, there was to be no major engagement in Holland. The French had begun a siege of Willemstadt, a fortress on the south bank of Hollands Diep, but the arrival of a strong Austrian army under Prince Josias, drew Dumouriez and the bulk of his men in the direction of Brussels and a fateful battle.
As the moment of high drama approached, the tempo of the ever present politicking increased. The Duke of York was given license to move further inland but strict instructions from Dundas that the ‘British army’ was not to become just another corps in Josias’ ranks. Two thousand men would barely constitute an Austrian corps but that was being rectified. Hanover was to supply 15,000 infantry and around 5,000 cavalry. More Germans, Hessian troops, would follow as well as several squadrons of British cavalry. All this due by May, but by then the emergency and the chance to secure the peace dividend and political prize could well be lost.
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| The Duke of York. The King's choice as the commander of the British army on the continent in 1793. |
Dunkirk might seem a strange choice as compensation for Great Britain’s efforts but, along with other French colonies in the West Indies, Fortescue suggests that such a deal had been brokered by Austria. The Imperials from Vienna were playing a much greater endgame, to ensure both its close ties with the restored House of Bourbon but also to expand north into Saxony. By greasing the palms and soothing the consciences of other nations, Prussia was also to receive French territory in the Austrian plan, who could deny Austria a rightful prize when she alone asked nothing of France. Pitt’s embattled administration thought that possessing a little part of France would play well at home with the mob.
Such manoeuvring was scarce confined to the allies. Dumouriez, the master strategist, had a foot firmly planted in both worlds and a step light enough to stay one move ahead of the guillotine. He was perhaps the last man to hold a private counsel with Louis XVI before the King’s execution. A courtier of some thirty years but also the Revolutionary Minister for War and now Commander of the Army of the North. Dumouriez believed that his men were more loyal to him than to France, much as Lafayette had done, the year before. A miscalculation that had nearly cost his predecessor his life.
When the negotiations between Dumouriez and Prince Josias first occurred, I cannot be certain. On the 18th March 1793, the two armies fought at Neerwinden. The Austrian victory sent the French reeling back towards their northern border. Somewhere in that time frame, the Convention in Paris heard that Dumouriez planned to defect. By the 1st of April, a delegation had arrived from Paris to arrest the traitorous general, only for Dumouriez to have them arrested and sent to the Austrian camp.
The timeframe is too tight for these events to play out consecutively. Eleven days for secret negotiations to be discovered, reported to Paris, a decision made and a delegation dispatched to the frontier? Which draws the obvious conclusion of collusion between Dumouriez and the Austrian Prince Josias before Neerwinden, making the battle a bargaining chip and the treachery to have been relayed to Paris from within the General’s close circle. If Dumouriez won, he had more choice. Amsterdam could still be taken. And with money, why restore an unpopular monarchy when a new-style of revolutionary leader might be more acceptable to the masses? The defeat weakened his hand but would the ultimate gambit of changing sides bear fruit?
So he sent the commissioners, under arrest,
To the Austrian encampment, and stood forth confess’d,
A friend to their cause, undertaking to bring
His army to publish young Louis their King.
And instantly mounting the modest cockade,
The power of his rhet’rick the Champion essay’d.
To his florid narration the answer reciev’d
Was, “Vive Dumouriez” Sounds he fondly believed.
Five thousand Frenchmen followed Dumouriez into exile, less than one in eight that had taken the field at Neerwinden. The rest of the Army of the North could return to France on the swearing of oaths by officers that its men would not bear arms again. Prince Josias was roundly condemned by his allies, even publicly by his own Emperor for the attempts to woo Dumouriez. For the rest of April, the Allies bickered about how best to impose peace, without it seems, the smallest concern that they still had to beat the French to accomplish such lofty goals. At the end of April, Prussia proposed its own negotiations with the Army of the North, to affect a mass defection, and found itself on the end of various verbal attacks from rest of the coalition.
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| Dumouriez, a man for all seasons? |
A plan was eventually agreed, the capture of the fortress at Valenciennes, which opened a route to Paris. The battle itself, called the battle of Camp Famars, foreshadowed the events of 1794. There were no maps of the terrain. If any reconnaissance had been undertaken, that information failed to reach the frontline. What it did expose was the propensity of the troops to plunder, a scene that appalled Corporal Brown “Every house was plundered in a most unseemly manner, by the Austrians and others of the foreign troops; whose hardened hearts, neither the entreaties of old age, the tears of beauty, the cries of children, nor the moving scenes of the most accumulated distress can touch with pity.”
Valenciennes fell in a protracted siege at the end of July. The Army of the North, whose leaders had either defected, died at its helm or faced the guillotine for their ‘failures’, retreated. The allies pursued and Paris was just eleven days march away. But the coalition faltered again. The fortress of Lille would be at the backs of the allied forces and the Austrians feared having their supply lines severed. The Duke of York, with two brigades of British infantry and his Hanoverian and Hessian contingent was under pressure to secure Dunkirk before it was too late. After all, grabbing the city once the revolution had been beaten might look a little disingenuous. There was a last meeting between Prince Josias and the Duke of York before the British, with a corps of 10,000 Austrians acting as corps of communications, moved north.
With this moment of separation, the coalition lost the momentum and tempo of the war and would never regain it.
If ever you do attempt to follow the machinations of this campaign, do invest in a map of northern France. How the Austrian corps that accompanied the Duke was meant to protect communications between Josias and York has baffled my understanding. Lille and Dunkirk are around 50 miles apart. That is just one of the many farces that this rich campaign has still to reveal.
The story of Dunkirk and the fateful days of September 1793 are for another post.
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Dominc lives just outside of Tavistock, in Devon where he enjoys walking on the moors and the occasional horse-riding excursion as both inspiration and relaxation.
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