The mysterious "Mr Anderson": a hilarious (but questionable) account of the 1809 Walcheren Campaign

by Jacqueline Reiter

A few months ago I was in Belfast, working through the papers of early 19th century British politician Lord Castlereagh at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. I wanted particularly to see his papers on the infamous Walcheren expedition of 1809, which he helped plan in his capacity as War Minister.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) (Wikimedia Commons)

Just before I had to leave to catch my plane I found a long 30-page document among Castlereagh's official correspondence. On closer inspection it appeared to be a first-hand account of the Walcheren campaign. I wasn't sure how useful it would be, but it looked like it could be interesting, so I arranged to have it copied and carried it away with me unread.

I consulted my copies on the plane that night, fully expecting them to be yawn-worthy and utterly useless. By the end of the second page I was having trouble suppressing snorts of laughter. After about the fifth, I was actually laughing out loud. (I apologise to those sitting next to me on the plane, but I couldn't help it.)

What I think I had found was an account by one of the Kent coast smugglers who were employed by the planners of the Walcheren Expedition to assist with intelligence and information gathering. Smugglers were employed because they were reasonably familiar with the difficult navigation of the Walcheren islands, and often also had useful contacts in every port, particularly enemy ones. The most famous smuggler employed at Walcheren was Captain Thomas Johnson (or Johnstone), who had helped the British during the bombardment of Boulogne in 1805 and had previously been imprisoned in Flushing.[1]

Captain Thomas Johnson in the 1830s (Wikimedia Commons)

This account was probably the one referred to by Sir John Fortescue in his account of Walcheren in his History of the British Army.[2] Fortescue described “an anonymous paper in the Londonderry [Castlereagh] MSS, described in the index of the MSS as by Anderson, a captious amateur soldier so far as I can gather from his writings”.

The document is not attributed to anyone in the index any longer, but it matches Fortescue's description in a number of respects. The author's bombastic and self-aggrandizing account, however, casts doubt over the validity of what he says. He appears to have been everywhere, and the purpose of the document seems to be to inform Castlereagh that he is due more money because he single-handedly stopped the campaign spilling into disaster long before it actually did.

And so I doubt much of what he writes actually occurred, at least in the way he writes about it. Yet this man was clearly on the spot, and familiar with the upper echelons of command. I've also managed to find confirmation of at least one of the events he describes. During the protracted siege of Flushing, “Anderson” talks of an attempt by Captain Johnson the smuggler to blow up the harbour with the aid of “a certain floating Machine back'd on the land side by 500 or 600 Men”. 

The Siege of Flushing, 1809 (BL Flickr Open Source collection)

Anderson goes on to explain how Johnson “embark'd with the Machine at Midnight towing it by himself in to the Harbour … swimming & conducting the Machine” in himself. This is seconded by the Morning Chronicle, which gives an account on 22 August 1809 of how Johnson swam “up to the very ramparts of Flushing” to tie the machine to the harbour pier. Johnson was a personal friend of Robert Fulton, whose torpedoes very much interested the British government at the turn of the 19th century. “The use of certain machines invented by Mr Fulton” was explicitly permitted by Castlereagh for use during the expedition: and so the pieces of the puzzle match up.[3] Unfortunately, Fulton's torpedo did not go off.

Robert Fulton (Wikimedia Commons)

Some examples of what made me laugh? I'll give some of the most snort-worthy below. Should anyone wish to read the whole MSS for themselves, it can be found in Belfast at PRONI in the Castlereagh MSS, D3030/3260.

• “Anderson” teaches the Commander in Chief his job:

“On the 30th July as we landed I took the liberty to caution the Commander in Chief to keep the Army sober, to be on his guard against French intrigue … & as a matter of great importance to stop the passage of Brascons [Breskens, the channel between Flushing on Walcheren and the mainland]”.

I imagine Lord Chatham loved that lecture!

• “Anderson” carries news of the surrender of Walcheren's capital, Middelburg, to Sir Eyre Coote, the second in command of the army:

“Being oblig'd to pass the Quarters of Sir Eyre Coote [I] found him before a large Fire wrapped in Blankets fast asleep. Judging from my own feelings that the Deputies [surrendering Middelburg] would be most welcomed by him, in my zeal I rous'd him with 3 Cheers. When acquainted with the occasion of disturbing his repose he surlily remarked 'Let them stop till day light'. This happened about 1 or two O'clock in the morning”.

Well, wouldn't you be “surly” if someone shouted “HUZZA! HUZZA! HUZZA!” in your ear at about half past one in the morning?

• “Anderson” does the job of Chatham's aides-de-camp for him, and they get their revenge:

“I provided a Waggon for his Lordship's baggage, & advis'd an immediate approach to Middleburgh [sic] in order to secure the Troops, Treasure &c … I was overruled by my Lord's Aide de Camps, particularly by Coll. Carey [in fact Chatham's Military Secretary], & was order'd a triangular instead of a direct road which occasion'd a serious dispute between Captain Gardner Aid du Camp & Myself”.

"Anderson" has several run-ins with Chatham's secretary and aides throughout the document, ending with Colonel Carey completely losing his temper (see below).

• “Anderson” dismisses the abilities of the commanding Admiral, Sir Richard Strachan, and Captain of the Fleet Sir Home Popham:

“The Fleet was inactive & allowed the passage to remain free between Flushing & Brascons [Breskens] … [but] Sir Richard Strachan … with Sir Home Popham were cruising Arm in Arm on shore enjoying Grape Shot at a Tavern”.

Very possibly my favourite line of the whole piece.

•  “Anderson” declares that Walcheren failed because Colonel Carey blocked his letters to Lord Chatham:

“I have every reason to believe that the Commander in Chief's advisers particularly his Secretary Colonel Carey conceal'd the true state of things from him, & that several Letters never reach'd him. It is well known & acknowledged by several respectable Officers & experienced Soldiers that had my plans been attended to the course of the Expedition wou'd have accomplish'd even more than the Country expected”.

•  Anderson chastises the Adjutant General of the Army for drunkenness:

“We were follow'd from Traguse [Goes, on South Beveland island] by several Spies, one especially … I therefore took him Prisoner & waited on Col. Long [the Adjutant General] who was busy at his Wine. All he said that I could understand was that he could not attend to it. … finding the Prisoner's case less attracting than the Wine. I told him I would call again”.

• Wherein Colonel Carey finally loses patience with “Anderson” and threatens him with the nearest blunt instrument to hand:

“I … requested Colonel Carey to grant me a Warrant [to pay the men he had employed to help him] … Colonel Carey flying into a passion desir'd me to withdraw & threaten'd to knock me down with a Chair; not accustomed to threats of this Kind I told him I should resist any violence, with such weapons & call'd him a Coward”.

Yeah, I'm sure that helped.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References

[1] Roy and Lesley Adkins, The War for All the Oceans (NY, 2006) p 138

[2] SIr John Fortescue, History of the British Army, vol VII (London, 1912), p 69

[3] Huge thanks to Lisa Chaplin for her help in identifying Fulton's “machine” referred to here. Castlereagh to Chatham, 12 July 1809, National Archives War Office MSS WO 6/143; Morning Chronicle, 22 August 1809

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jacqueline Reiter has a Phd in 18th century political history. She is currently working on the first ever biography of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, due to be released by Pen & Sword Books in September 2016. When she finds time she blogs about her historical discoveries at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com/, and can be found on Twitter as https://twitter.com/latelordchatham.

The Siege of Flushing, August 1809

by Jacqueline Reiter

At 1 PM on the 13^th of August 1809, about fifty British cannons and mortars of different sizes opened at once on the French territory of Flushing (Vlissingen) from five batteries. Several gunboats bombarded the town simultaneously from the Scheldt river. Early in the morning of the 14^th a sixth battery opened fire, joined a little later by the deafening roar of six warships of the line giving their all. William Congreve's rockets added to the terror the town must have experienced, setting it on fire in several different places.

The Bombardment of Flushing (Wikimedia Commons)

A brief cease-fire between 4 pm and 9:30 pm on the 14^th was all the respite the townspeople of Flushing received. When the bombardment resumed, it continued throughout the night until the French general in command of Flushing's garrison, Monnet, surrendered at 2:30 am on 15 August.

The siege of Flushing provided the main action of the Walcheren campaign of 1809, intended to provide a distraction for Britain's ally, Austria, which had been at war with France since April. (More about the background to the expedition can be found in a previous EHFA post on thesubject). The British were to capture the French harbour of Flushing on the island of Walcheren, destroy the French and Dutch fleet at Antwerp, and ruin the navigation of the Scheldt River. To achieve this 40,000 soldiers and more than 600 ships sailed on 28 July – even though Austria had been defeated at Wagram at the beginning of the month.

The military commander of the expedition was John Pitt, 2^nd Earl of Chatham, the notoriously lazy elder brother of former prime minister William Pitt. The naval command was entrusted to Sir Richard Strachan, a brave but hot-blooded admiral who had contributed to the Trafalgar campaign. Neither was ideal for the task, but intelligence had been gathered for months that the French, distracted by war with Austria, had stripped the area around Antwerp of troops. Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for War, described the campaign as a “coup de main”, a lightning action designed to take the French unawares before they had time to strengthen their defences.

Walcheren (1660) (Wikimedia Commons)

The expedition, divided into four parts, would secure the island of Walcheren by investing Flushing and disabling the French batteries on the opposite coast at Cadsand, allowing the fleet access to the West Scheldt. Another division would land on the adjacent island of South Beveland and secure the approach to Antwerp. Once this was done, the main part of the army would land opposite Batz at the southernmost tip of South Beveland and march for fifteen miles to Antwerp. What would happen when they got to Antwerp remained something of a mystery, but ministers were confident that the town hadn't been strengthened in, oh, ages, or at least since the last source with which they provided Lord Chatham had been published (about 1794).

Unfortunately for the British politicians, things began to go wrong for the expedition before it even sailed. First came the news of Wagram, then adverse winds delayed the expedition's start. The newspapers had been gossiping loosely about the “grand expedition” for months, as a result of which the French, who could read just as well as the British, knew nearly as much about the expedition as the government did. Persistent adverse winds drove the fleet off course almost immediately, and the ships were nearly all forced to take shelter in a natural basin called the Roompot – which was, unfortunately, on the wrong side of Walcheren. Sir John Hope and his reserve force went through South Beveland like a knife through butter, but the Cadsand landing failed because of bad weather and poor communication.

The loss of Cadsand meant that the fleet could not get up the West Scheldt with the main force for Antwerp until Flushing fell. Flushing's commander, Monnet, apparently only had between two and three thousand motley troops of various nations and states of discipline, so taking Flushing should have been simplicity itself. Once again, however, the British were hampered by disastrous weather. Instead of landing somewhere sensible near Flushing, the soldiers landed at the opposite end of the island. Marching troops across land was bad enough, but dragging the ordnance and siege supplies across boggy land was an entirely different proposition.

More seriously, because Cadsand had not been taken, the French garrison there was able to throw as many reinforcements into Flushing as it liked. Obviously the British navy tried to stop them, but the weather pinned the British fleet too high or too low every time they tried to establish a blockade. The British could only watch as boat after boat of French soldiers crossed the Scheldt. By the time the fleet finally managed to complete the investment on the 7^th of August, Flushing's garrison had nearly tripled, and Lord Chatham was forced to disembark one of the brigades intended for Antwerp to reinforce the besiegers at Flushing.

Chatham had hoped to get to Antwerp while Flushing was investing, but he now had too few men to proceed. Nor could the navy bring the siege equipment for Antwerp round South Beveland until Flushing fell. Strachan could not understand why Chatham did not want to embrace the “simple” solution of marching across South Beveland to get to Antwerp, disembarking, re-embarking, and re-disembarking thousands of troops and cavalry. Chatham, for his part, could not understand why Strachan wasn't able to sail up to Batz with the siege supplies, or – for that matter – stop the French getting over from Cadsand to Flushing. Meanwhile, Sir Eyre Coote, Chatham's second-in-command in charge of the Flushing operations, was convinced his superior was staying on Walcheren deliberately to spite him.

Once the siege artillery arrived at Flushing, tugged laboriously across the entire breadth of Walcheren, the batteries took days to construct. The army blamed the engineers, and the engineers blamed the weather, which was about as unfavourable as it was possible to get, with torrential all-night-long downpours that flooded the trenches and stopped work. Chatham was comfortably ensconced in a “palace” in Middelburg, with as much turtle soup as he could eat, but his men, up to their ankles, then knees, then hips in water – Monnet had cut the dykes in an attempt to flood out the besiegers – weren't happy.

The British in Middelburg, 1809 (Dutch print)

On the 7^th there was a brief, confused sortie by the French, which resulted in the British gaining more ground towards the town, but the batteries were taking so long even Chatham was getting twitchy. He badgered Strachan about getting the ships to participate in the bombardment, but Strachan still hadn't managed to get the ships round yet. He finally did so on 11^th August, but the batteries still weren't ready for another two days. When they did open, the ships of the line weren't able to get underway for a further twenty-four hours, again due to the weather.

By the time Flushing capitulated on the 15^th, the campaign was effectively over. Reducing Flushing was meant to have made the march on Antwerp possible, but in fact it delayed further operations. Far from being Castlereagh's coup de main, more than two weeks had elapsed since the British sailed. The Flushing garrison did not march out till 18 August, and it took a further week for the fleet, beset by bad weather and navigational problems, to get the troops and siege supplies to Batz.

Chatham, meanwhile, was also inching towards Batz. He seems to have given up on Antwerp the moment he set foot on South Beveland. He went through the motions of preparing to continue, but intelligence put enemy forces around Antwerp at 35,000 men, the town's defences had been strengthened, and the French fleet was well out of reach.

Most seriously of all, however, was the mysterious fever sweeping through the troops. “Zealand fever”, or “Walcheren fever” as it became known, was probably a toxic combination of malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and typhus. It started virtually overnight in mid-August and raced through the army at a terrifying rate. Chatham's lieutenant-generals advised him to call off the campaign, and at the beginning of September the British fell back on Walcheren. In mid-September Chatham sailed with the bulk of his army, including thousands of sick, leaving Sir Eyre Coote with a holding garrison of sixteen thousand men. Within days even this was two-thirds out of action.

Cruikshank on "The Grand Expedition" (Wikimedia Commons)

The recriminations at home were terrible. Chatham and Strachan blamed each other for the disaster, and many doubted whether the expedition should ever have been sent in the first place. There was a lengthy parliamentary enquiry which cleared the government of incapacity, but Chatham was forced to resign his cabinet post as Master-General of the Ordnance. Neither he nor Strachan were ever employed again.

The real victims, however, were the thousands of soldiers crippled or killed by “Walcheren fever”, and the civilians of Flushing, ruthlessly bombarded in an attempt to cut short a siege and win an unwinnable campaign.

References

There are three major studies of the Walcheren campaign:
Gordon Bond, The Grand Expedition (Athens, GA, 1979)
Martin A. Howard, Walcheren 1809: the scandalous destruction of a British army (Barnsley, 2011)Carl A. Christie, “The Walcheren Expedition of 1809” (University of Dundee PhD thesis, 1975)
Sir John Fortescue also devotes fifty pages or so to it in his History of the British Army (volume 7). There is also a short treatment of the campaign from a Dutch perspective, particularly dwelling on the serious damage done to the town of Flushing: Tobias Gent, De Engelse invasie van Walcheren in 1809 (Nijmegen, 2009)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jacqueline Reiter has a Phd in 18th century political history. She is currently working on the first ever biography of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, due to be released by Pen & Sword Books in September 2016. When she finds time she blogs about her historical discoveries at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com/, and can be found on Twitter as https://twitter.com/latelordchatham.