[Music] yeah hello my name is Alex Murray and I'm a member of the Dole Institute's Student Advisory Board the official's student group of the Institute welcome to the dole instead of politics and thank you for attending today's program presented by the department of military history at the command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth the Dolan Stute would like to hear from you about today's program please let us know your feedback by contacting us on social media or via email at dole Institute at Ko edu to view past programs visit our online video archive at WWDC to org a video of today's presentation will be available on our website soon we'd like to encourage each of you to consider becoming friends of the Dolan stitute our friends help keep the programs free and open and support archive research and our Student Activities please contact us if you're interested after the presentation we will have some time for the audience to ask questions if you have a question please raise your hand and a student worker will come around with the microphone please stand if you're able and ask just one brief question before we begin I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cell phones and now please welcome and please welcome me please join me in welcoming excuse me dr. Tom Hanson I could afternoon everybody and Happy New Year welcome to the 2018 season of the Fort Leavenworth history for the military mind lecture series and we're gonna deviate a little bit from past topics little less bugles and drums and a little bit more esoteric stuff we're going to talk not just about war fronts but home fronts and today's lecture is a great example of that we're going to talk about life in Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars but not on the battlefield but back inside England it's a fascinating topic I think everybody here is going to enjoy it our presenter today is dr. mark Girgis he is a veteran of the department of military history he's been here for 12 years no longer than that yeah much longer than that sorry said well it's also marks birthday today but I'm trying not to make people think that he's old so I'm trying to compress everything he's you're what 2019 today yeah anyway mark is you read to his Biograph or his biography in the the handout he's a graduate of the other US Military Academy the one north of West Point he is an armor officer and he's a veteran of Operation Desert Storm but more importantly he is a graduate of that Napoleonic center of excellence the Florida State University and he is currently working on a book on cavalry operations under Wellington in the peninsula for which he just spent two weeks in the UK last summer so if I expect to see great things coming from him shortly so even if you don't like the presentation make sure you applaud loudly because it is his birthday make him feel good okay so please welcome dr. Marcus makes me sound really desperate to get a good audience reaction I have to admit as we start this today with this particular topic my area is the British cavalry under Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington I work on British cavalry operations in Portugal and Spain in some way most of my focus is on the British Army British government in the political interactions with keeping an army fielded the organization and doctrine at the same time I'm a graduate of Florida State University and there we have the Institute Napoleon in the French Revolution so I get here it got everything from a French perspective and so even the title of the ocher kind of kind of puts a little chills down my back and so we're gonna talk about this today and hopefully as we go through this I'm gonna have you change a little bit of your opinion of how you look at this this particularly Europe and when you think of the Kingdom before I get started I'm going to go back and forth between using United Kingdom Great Britain Britain in England pretty much interchangeably 1801 the united kit becomes the United Kingdom of Great Britain in Ireland but really we're talking about Britain in Great Britain for the most of this and the the invasion threat of that Bobby a little bit loose of the terms as we go but when you look at the United Kingdom post 1815 in post Waterloo the view is what you see up here Napoleon on the HMS belfry after he has surrendered himself to his dear cousin Prince Regent Prince of Wales trying to look for asylum before he's going to be sent off to Saint Aleta and to his final exile the great Duke of Wellington at this point the hero of Europe and the view that comes out that cemented after 1815 as a Britain as this indispensable nation who has stayed like a rock constant against and this domineering despot and has really had this continuity of purpose over a 25-year time period that has allowed them to save Europe and bring it back from the the edge of what Napoleon threats threatens I'm gonna kind of talk about a couple of different areas here though one is going to be this political instability instability that you're gonna see that there is not this continuity of what they're trying to do against Napoleon also this idea that once the Battle of Trafalgar takes place in 1805 that there isn't a threat from Napoleon to invade Europe or break Great Britain which really isn't that true and also just talking about some of the economic challenges as Great Britain is fighting against Napoleon it's also the start of the Industrial Revolution the Commerce has been broken down there's going to be inflation rising food prices economic dislocation because of labor-saving machines and so we'll talk about all those things two myths I'm going to address kind of directly on here's one is this idea that Britain has had a constant policy against Napoleon that makes them the great the great savior Europe and the second one is this idea of a French invasion ends after October of 1805 so let's go back for a little bit and talk about Georgian England and during the French Revolution and for Napoleonic scholars we tend to break down this period into two blocks the French Revolution from 1789 up to 1799 with the COO of eighteenth Brumaire when Napoleon becomes the First Consul and then from 1799 to 1815 is the Napoleonic era so we're talking about that first piece when the French Revolution starts and when it starts Britain is really kind of torn in many ways the first three years the French Revolution is not the violent revolution we tend to think about we've eaten showing up on every street corner it is a step to create a constitutional monarchy with a king with the Parliament and a series of checks and balances and as Britain looks at this they think it's kind of reflecting back to their own glorious revolution they look at this as a good good thing it's only as the revolution starts to become more and more violence over time that it becomes more and more of a threat to them the second issue that comes back is this relationship between George the third and his son the future George the fourth the Hanoverian Kings the four George's tend to have this terrible terrible father-son relationship where they almost hate each other and treat them so treat their their children very very badly and then also the concerns of George the Third's mental state he'll have a series of increasing mental breakdowns that will finally lead to a region being appointed later this time period George the third farmer George as his nickname has been the King of England since 1760 very frugal loves agriculture and new agricultural investments and has very very frugal and and and down-to-earth type of lifestyle he's unique for the Hanoverians and that he doesn't have a mistress he's married to his his wife and devoted to her has 15 children but he's very very strict on his children particularly the Prince of Wales the future king and so when the future King turns 18 he's going to revolt around or he's really going to revolt against this very very frugal lifestyle and he also has about 40 years he has to wait to become king so he is constantly going to be out there part of it just just just despite his dad he's gonna be a glutton he has it was fine taste he has a 55,000 pound a year allowance that he had that he gets and by 1795 he is five hundred and fifty thousand pounds in debt above that allowance so he likes to spend he likes to to really live the good life so as you look at these these two men the opposition's tend to to coalesce around him William Pett Pitt the Younger England's youngest Prime Minister takes over at age 24 and 1783 is going to serve George the 3rd and so he is really supporting that that royal background the the the conservative piece of George the third where James Fox is going to kind of start to to work in the orbit of the Prince of Wales and he's looked at as a bad influence he's not a many people consider him a poor character he is he's anti-slavery he's also pro French Revolution and it these two guys are going to be kind of an opposition in each other for about 20 years as the big drivers of the British government and of course the French Revolution is that key thing in 1790s that they are going to be focused on and and most of the discussion there the question is after 1793 is how can Britain get involved in the Napoleonic Wars they're gonna try to be part of coalition's the first coalition they get involved in 1793 won't work so well by you can see by 1797 they're the only country left in that coalition they'll have one campaign will they'll put troops into the Low Countries under the Duke of York the the brother of the king and it'll be an absolute disaster we get a nursery rhyme rhyme about the New York marching his men up the hill again and back down but there's everyone's left the kind of the coalition they'll come back and it'll be a second coalition that'll come out in 1798 again confront the French and again Britain is going to be the only country left by 1801 and you see their campaigns really ineffective of what they are trying to get and confront this threat of the French as they're gonna see the front British actions actually hurt their own cause in many ways they are so concerned about neutral shipping and what's being shipped to France that they will be boarding neutral strips the before Sweden Russia Prussia to form it a league of our beat rowdy it's a similar thing they happened during the American Revolution where these neutral countries will band together to keep Britain from interfering with neutral shipping and this will drive Russia out of the second coalition there's also going to be naval mutiny so we think of England's the Royal Navy as this rock that defends Great Britain but there will be a naval mutinies at the Spithead in the north and these mutinies have two different causes the the one at Spithead is much more about the conditions on board the ships long periods of time without shore leave very very poor provisions very very harsh punishments and that mutiny will really dress those type of issues the one of the newer though becomes much more political and overtone it's looking at things like it's gonna ask the king to dissolve Parliament and make peace with France and so these are very very concerning and Britain's gonna have to put some effort in to reforming their Navy and particularly how they pay in discipline the troops and how they they biddle them on board I don't want to go into all the British ministries here the one piece you should take away from this is that in the twelve years of the Napoleonic Wars there's gonna be six different Prime Minister's it's very very hard to have any sort of continuity you will see prime ministers like Henri Addington who's gonna be here who negotiates the peace that treaty vow ends who will then after war starts again lose his support because he's allowed them go back to war William Pitt will come back for a very very short time you'll also have other peace negotiation that go out back but this is a constant over looking back and forth of changing of the Prime Minister's and there's really not these these so less parties that you would see in in Britain so it's much more personalities around certain people that you get so peace finally comes after ten years of war the tritium ends is supposed to establish peace friendship and understanding it releases prisoners and hostages and it starts this large-scale transfer of lands that have been capture throughout the war going back to - each side you can see the list of all those there's different things I should point out that Lord Cornwallis and Joseph Bonaparte are the two negotiators there in the center who will assign this and for Britain and for France this treaty is a good thing for for ten years no one has been on the continent they have not had the opportunity to to really see what's been going on if you also think about just the dislocation in France itself where you have large households with aristocrats the society has changed much of that aristocratic just the servants you need to keep that household the porcelain the high-end luxury items that are produced the chefs all those things have changed in and gone away and so as the Treaty of the peace comes there's gonna be a huge influx a British tourist into France that are there to basically see what's happened in the ten years since they've been able to to go so this is a James gillray knife I should have pointed out there's a lot of Gilroy there's a lot of political car teams in this time period 1780s to the 1830s really a heyday of these these cartoons and they're fantastic they're very very biting in Sattar full satire but this particular one of Napoleon kissing Britannia after ten years so Wars gonna come back fourteen months of peace a lot of causes one historian is going to say that it was a mixture of economic motives and national neuroses an irrational anxiety about Napoleon's motives and intentions the trading of the lands going back to the various pieces are going on but at the same time to pull in is reorganizing Europe and not covered in the Treaty of omens the hell vision Republic what's going to be Switzerland is gonna be one of the issues but the real issue for Great Britain is that George the third from the House of Hanover is an elector of the Holy Roman Empire and he is being locked out of any sort of to say say in Europe itself and I should have mentioned here for French historian coming into this it's it's funny to read some of the comments because you're gonna read some things like you know Britain pushed beyond its limit of endurance will declare war in France well it's not because they were pushed behind because it makes perfect sense for them to go back to war and they didn't want to evacuate some of the lands that they had so war comes again mostly both sides are going to go on it but Britain declares war begins attacking and seizing British and Dutch ships in the channel the Polian retaliates by not allowing British tourists out of France interesting enough this is not the twentieth century when he says you can't leave France you just can't leave France you're not put into any kind of camp you just get to the border there's no no paper allowing you to leave and so you just stay in France and go about your business but you're not put into a camp of any sort the view of Napoleon this is that a fantastic nursery rhyme I don't I wish I had it when my children were little small baby baby naughty baby hush you squalling thing I say hush you squalling or it may be Bonaparte we'll pass this way baby baby he's a giant tall and black his grand steeple and he dines and stops to rely on it every day on naughty people baby baby he will tear you as he passes by the house and he limb from limb will tear you as a tears emmaus I think that will keep him quiet for a while but this idea that Napoleon's do an ogre Betsy ball crumb who is a as a young girl on santolina will befriend Napoleon and keeps a journal of this will say that the earliest idea I had Napoleon was that of a huge ogre or giant with one large flaming red eye in the middle of his forehead and long teeth protruding from his math with which he tore to pieces and devoured little naughty little girls especially those who did not know their lessons so what is Britton have to rely on of course the first bedrock is the Royal Navy 103 ships the one Lane their versions of battleships the largest guns battleships and about 160 frigates and you see Lord Vincent's comment there's I'm not saying the French won't come but there's not gonna come by sea which of course is one of the sayings if you're the first CD Lord or the first word of the Admiralty you have to say something like that and we're going to talk about Napoleon's plan a little bit about whether it was possible that Napoleon could have come by sea I already mentioned a little bit of some of the problems they had had just five years earlier with some of the some of the mutinies and there's four fleets for commands that are going to defend England what are they defending against well Napoleon has created six camps along the English coast with a center main camp at Bologna and this has become known as the camps of Bologna there's about 93 thousand French soldiers up there of these six camps each one of them's will become what's known as a corps court RMA when part of when the Poynting creates this grand army each one of these will become one of his course and he also starts shipwrights working on flat bottom or a barges 35 tonne barges that can be rowed across the the English Channel they can hold 150 1000 men there's only 93 thousand and so some historians dismiss this saying this isn't really a credible threat there was really no intention for him to ever do it because he didn't remove the troops up there a couple of pieces though one he spends almost 20 million francs on improving the roads between Paris and his various his various ports this is despite the fact that the roads he actually uses when he goes to attack Austria in Russia he spent $0 or zero francs on he's put all his money into trying to move troops up to the channel coast this is what Britain fears and you can see from these some of these cartoons they're pretty elaborate fears that central portion here that's not in color shows a few things one it shows balloons holding troops that are gonna float across the the channel in the center you see the barges they're going to come move them at mass mass of the army and then the last part which I particularly find interesting is the tunnel they channel a tunnel under the channel that is gonna be moving the horses and artillery supposedly Norma polian has asked for an engineering study about doing a a tunnel underneath it the channel that's as far as it gets the French army does have balloons that they're gonna use in the 1790s but Napoleon really doesn't put much effort into that and you see Britain's reactions one is of course the bombastic within 48 hours we're gonna have his head in a pike the other one is going to be in 1790s when there is another invasion threat showing the French army running around in England create an absolute bay ham and so as they look at this there's this this palpable sense of fear that is going on Napoleon's plan relies on a lot of moving parts and a lot of things he can't control mostly the weather but what he's gonna have is the French fleet and too long under an admiral Villeneuve who was going to leave the Mediterranean port go out to Cadiz and Spain pick up the Spanish fleet Spain of France or allied at this time and at that point race across the Atlantic going into the sugar Islands in the Caribbean this first portion of the plan works perfectly Villeneuve comes out he gives the slip to Lord Nelson the famous Admiral it vulgar and Nelson will go racing towards Egypt thinking that the French are trying to land in Egypt and they actually go the wrong way Villeneuve and the Spanish will then sail to the West Indies stay there for a few weeks and then sail back across the Atlantic up to this point the plans gone perfectly but Villeneuve will think he's been spotted and thinks there's a British fleet nearby and we'll head south instead of North the plan is he's supposed to pick up the breast fleet and the 20-some ships there go around Ireland around Scotland and then come into the channel from east they're gonna stop at Texel islands pick up the ten Dutch ships the line there and then with approximately forty four ships compared to the channel Fleet Admiral Keith's fleet of 11 ships win control over the channel for a couple of days and that's all in the Polian says he needs he needs six tides three days to be able to move his troops across the channel when they get to text island outside of Amsterdam there's a semaphore system that goes all the way to Paris they're supposed to signal that they're there it's approximately 300 miles by sea from Amsterdam to bolonia takes about three days to get there by the time they would get there the troops that have been alerted based off the semaphore message would already be arranged arriving at the channel and so that 153 thousand troops that Napoleon has built the barges would would be available there to be moved across the channel and then that combined feat would go in there what actually happens is Villeneuve loses this his nerve head south de cádiz will stay there until October and then the 21st of October will try to come out again and will be defeated at Trafalgar I mentioned about liking to read sometimes the British pieces about this when I was looking at this the BBC had a history site talking about the the battle Trafalgar and one of the things they said was it seems likely that likely that the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had already abandoned his plans for invasion of England but the victory nevertheless candid Britain complete control of the Seas yes he had he had it definitely abandoned his invasion because he was two months into a campaign against Austria he had already defeated the Austrian army of Mac at home and was marching towards Vienna so he was several hundred miles from the sea so I'm pretty certain that before Trafalgar he had already given up the plans the campaign obviously does not go for Britain's way Austria and Russia at Austerlitz will be absolutely defeated and will leave the coalition and only Trafalgar on the 21st of October will be looked at as a real victory it is an amazing naval battle thirty-three French ships the line versus 27 British the French and Spanish lose 22 and the British would lose none so it's an absolutely devastating loss it leaves France with 35 line of battleships now let's shift a little bit to the land defenses of this time period and between 1803 and about 1807 there's a real threat that if the French would come that defenses would not be ready Britain has four different organisations defending the home the first is the Regular Army and the Regular Army has approximately 132 thousand men at this time but when you break it down 18,000 them are in Ireland 50,000 are in Great Britain and the rest are overseas defending the various colonies the second aspect they have or is the militia forces which they individually start off with 51,000 then the second militia act up to 75,000 volunteers and I should mention the Regular Army is under the commander-in-chief the Duke of York the militia forces are under the Lord lieutenant's of the counties so they have two different commanders and would have to cooperate but not under a single command volunteers they are infantry and what they call yeoman Calvary but there is no set organization for example the Calvary depending on how big the Calvary is depends on how many people come with their own horses to make up the yeoman Calvary for and 80,000 looks very very impressive until you realize that griten just doesn't have that many firearms laying around waiting to arm people and so 100 3,000 of them are armed by pikes and they have really new training that drew a cartoon there kind of shows the regular Army's view of the you can see the regular army officer and the militia man or the volunteer trying to drill the last aspect that's that's actually working also is this ordinance court not under the commander-in-chief it has the artillery the Royal Artillery the Royal Artillery drivers and also the Royal Engineers and that's important because they do permanent fortifications so castles masonry forts are under the Ordnance Corps but the Regular Army and the commander-in-chief does field fortifications so you have two different organizations trying to defend and build fortifications the answer that one of the things of the answers that they're going to come up with is this idea that they call Martello towers these are big masonry towers that are going to be placed every five to six hundred yards along the coast in Sussex and Kent to be able to fire onto the invasion beaches the ideas first proposed in 1803 but the Ordnance Corps is not very interested in it it's only gonna be in 1804 when the commander in chief of the army will say you know if you're too busy I can build these that the Ordnance Corps will then become interested in but it's as late as September 1804 before they actually build get a design for them are till Martella towers and what you're seeing in this in this one painting here our drawing is the morto towers along the beaches seventy-three originally they're gonna grow up to 103 once they start putting them on the the Channel Islands each one's supposed to have a 24 inch naval gun on it and then two candidates which are a short heavy heavy artillery piece used on board ship they're called smashers they're meant to throw large amounts of ordnance at enemy ships and so they're gonna put three guns in these marked OA towers 5-foot thick walls with a five-foot thick brick Center to hold the the guns up in 33 foot tall someone had done the calculations each of those big 24-inch guns they have two different types of shot a heavy shot and light shot the heavy shot carries 84 of these six ounce balls about this big that they could fire the light shot not because they're light in itself but it's because it only fires two inch or two ounce balls but it has 232 so basically every round this fires is about an infantry companies worth of firepower and they are meant to overlap on the beaches and the last port is this area called the Romney Marsh it's that part of possesses that sticks out into the channel because of the way the weather and the tides it can be landed on almost in any weather condition the beaches are very good for landing but then there's a marsh behind it it is below sea level so they can be flooded by opening up the sluice is to let the the tides in but it takes three different or three days six tides to be able to flood it again and so the fear is is that if the French land on Romney Marsh they can march through the marsh and get there before it's actually able to be able to the flood and so the solution they're gonna do is come up with this Royal Military Canal it's 19 miles long 60 feet across the top about nine feet deep and they take all the soil from digging the towel they the canal and put it on the one side as spoil so they can then use that as a defense of rampart and it effectively turns Romney Marsh yeah into an island that could be defended so let's talk a little bit about the French threat after Trafalgar I had mentioned that they get down to 35 ships after they have lost their fleet Napoleon's at this portion a time as controlling most of Europe Italian shipyards French trip yards the Dutch shipyards and it's going to start them rebuilding within six years of Trafalgar by 1811 their French Navy will be act to 80 ships the line with another 35 ships the line in being built that compared to the front British by that time or back I did 102 the other thing he's going to do is maintain he's gonna keep maintaining frigates going out constantly to harass the British he figures if I can't beat him one on one I can economically harm him and he calculates that air for every for every ship of his that he has it takes for British ships to keep him under blockade so by constantly running out these these frigates he's constantly wearing out harassing the British fleet the other aspect is he keeps his squadrons ready to sail at a moment's notice he keeps him fully supplied fiddled he doesn't want him to sail he doesn't want to be picked off piecemeal but at the same time when he is ready for him to sail he doesn't want all the conditions of getting them ready all the supplies being sent to him to give to give the British any sort of advantage so he keeps them ready to sail at any time period plus he keeps large numbers of troops at his various ports ready to go at any in a moment's notice when I mentioned about this idea of romance notice and this idea that the French key could control the English Channel it's not a far-fetched idea during the American Revolution the French will French and Spanish fleet will control the English Channel for six weeks in 1780 an hour 1779 so in August and September the French and Spanish combined fleet will go their control the channel the only thing that saves Britain from an invasion is that the French army isn't ready yet it's still training and it's not up on the the channel ready to cross then later during the the French Revolutionary Wars in 1796 a French fleet with 15,000 soldiers will leave in the wintertime and make its way to Ireland the weather is too bad for them too be able to land many of the ships will running grounds will disperse the flea they'll limp back to port but the entire time these 15,000 soldiers and these ships are out there never interfered with by the Royal Navy the Royal Navy has been pushed into the ports because of the storm and they never find them and then in 1797 there'll be 2,000 French soldiers landed on Ireland as part of the the Irish rebellion to help assist the Irish rebellion and they will not be interfered with by the Royal Navy so this idea that the pony and the French can get local superiority and get troops across is not that outlandish where they're gonna go is the other piece French shipping Sardinia Sicily going back to Egypt all these places I will make the British continued to keep reinforcements there and keep the focus on their Napoleon also with the military threat is gonna go with an economic threat and this is what's known as the Continental System after the feat of Prussia in Berlin in 1806 he will make the Berlin decree which basically blockades our embargoes all British goods from coming into to Europe that's going to be responded by the Brits with what's known as the orders in Council which basically blockades all of Europe to prevent any kind of other goods coming into it and you see this this going backwards or going back and forth between the two sides preventing shipping coming across huge disruption in the normal commerce when you look at the the rates of what it does to just normal cost wheat prices in France go up by 57 or excuse me wheat prices in England go up by 57 percent coffee prices in Netherlands go up by a hundred and ninety percent and so the disruption of normal commerce exports and imports are very important in here we being a u.s. also get caught up in this being the neutral shippers the Chesapeake intrat incident in 1807 where British ships the leopard seizes the Chesapeake just outside of Baltimore searches it for British seamen almost leads us to war in 1807 we then embargo all foreign trade which of course works out terribly very very hard to enforce we thank view the non-intercourse act saying we're not going to trade with either France or England and then when we have the make and Bill will said well trade which with whichever one of them starts to limit or lessen there at the the embargo on us it sets up some really fascinating fascinating pieces there's a huge smuggling smuggling piece that will go on throughout a Europe trade between England but also see things like the Duke of Wellington's army in our Portugal in Spain who's relying upon us ships that are importing wheat to feed his troops and even though they're at war after 1812 Wellington will continue to allow us ships with wheat to come in you'll also see us privateers capturing British supply ships or transports with infantry and cavalry heading for the peninsula and we'll let them come into the peninsula as opposed to trying to take them back to a prize court and and dealing with them there so it's such a hard thing to interfere with of Emperor Napoleon will write to his brother who at this time is the lui he's the king of the Netherlands he says if you need to sell your gin the English need to buy it settle the points where the English smugglers are common fetch it and then bake them paying money but never in commodities so this this this mink it wink and a nod that this trade is going on is constantly going back and forth in there that's kind of undermining the system but at the same time it's shown just how desperate this is John IRF Fischer who's the the First Lord of the Admiralty in the early part of the 20th century once said that the army is like a projectile fired by the Navy and as all these threats are going on British army is kept with expeditions ready to go at a moment's notice and you can see they are constantly trying to figure out how they can strike back and how they can pull a British forces into to Europe to be able to try to affect what's going on it leads to a number of huge disasters you look at the campaign in northern Germany this is a expedition that's landed there in January at 1806 just after the battle of Austerlitz Napoleon in Austerlitz defeats the Austrian a Russian army makes them to the Austrian sea for peace and then the British come ashore with a expedition and find that the actually the coalition they wanted to work with is gone they're gonna send a troops to Portugal it'll lead to the conventional century which allow it has three officers who can recall include Arthur Wellesley the future Duke Wellington to be here court-martial also had the retreat and the evacuation of Caronia this is every bit as epic a disaster as Dunkirk is for the 19th century out of Spain and then the wall store and expedition another expedition where they try to go into the Low Countries and an absolute disaster that'll affect the troops that go there with the with primarily they get a lot of the mosquito-borne diseases that'll affect them throughout the rest of their their use so let's talk a little bit about the homefront and the challenges that are going on there because of this economic dislocation with the commerce also because of the cost that is being borne by maintaining such a large Navy and maintaining a an army taxes constantly have to go up and you will see that the the taxes then the food prices that rise very very highly and then the economic desolation of just these new money or labor-saving machines are going to cause the problems in England the Luddite movement is probably the most famous and that's a painting or a picture of King Ludd it's a man with a beard dressed in a woman's dress there's no lud there is no actual leader of this Luddite movement but the Luddites and if you've been called of Luddites because your anti technology these the they don't like looms they don't like any of these new modern labor savings so starting in 1811 and for about the next four years these mobs will come go into factories at night and break these machines that are threatening their jobs it gets to be so bad that about 18,000 British soldiers will be deployed trying to put down these riots and catch the Luddites 1812 1813 if you're a factory owner and as you're having repair work done many of them are putting panic rooms into their factories so if they get broken to the night and they're there they can escape back into it but again these these this this changes of what's going on that's starting with the industrialization of England plays a huge role on the other aspect also is the madness of King George he either had a blood disease or a mental instability the first crisis comes in 1789 it leads to about a four month period where they're trying to think if his son will be appointed as the regent he'll just regain his senses just as they're getting ready to pass the law they'll have two other smaller bouts in 1801 and 1804 but in 1810 becomes his favorite daughter dies and at that point he descends into insanity and his son the Prince of Wales will be named the Prince Regent all of this in this changing of the political direction of England has been very very disruptive of again of what that fight is and how they're trying to go after Napoleon and France ironically when the Prince of Wales becomes the King Regent and all the very much more liberal people that have kind of circled around him expect him to be much more I guess liberal in there his views he ends up being more conservative and what my his things and and annoys a lot of those supporters that he has so let me talk a little bit about our just that conclude excuse me hopefully as you look at this that England is that one piece that one threat that Napoleon really can't ever get to as he consistently has consolidated Europe he has not been able to figure out a way to get across the channel however this is not it's not impossible to do it doesn't end in 1805 but it is always he's always searching for other ways to get back to him this is what's gonna lead him into Portugal Italy him into Spain and it lead him into Russia and these some of the biggest mistakes he makes that'll take out some of his power hopefully you kind of see that this fight is not necessarily Napoleon's being a despot but this is power politics 18th century style and the fight against it is only looks back and looks clear when you look at it from a post Waterloo type of position so if I have any questions now ya gonna wait for the microphone yes sir about the cross you know the English Channel did I read once and Napoleon had a very like superstitious or paranoid like a supernatural thing was going to beat him if we were to cross you know was that not true is that I really can't answer I'm not familiar with it enough to be able to to know so I I'm not yeah sorry was there you talked about Pitt and a little bit about Fox and about England's shifting positions with respect to an employee I wondered whether if in Britain at this time there was some theorists who were it was consistently aware French threat and and created a kind of master strategy of how to address it and our kind of vision of how big a threat this really was we say a master strategist I'm not really sure I mean when you talk about British military strategy one of the aspects that it's gonna that disrupted in the middle and I didn't get into it was the selling of commissions the Duke of York who was a very competent commander-in-chief his mistress is using her position as mistress to sell commissions and supposedly some of the rumors are that I won't have sex with him unless he agrees to the Commission's that she wants which will lead to him being taken out as the commander in chief and Lord Dundas from our British Army perspective Britain has always constantly wanted to play a role in England without a big army but with the the help of other large armies Austria France in the 70 or earlier but at the Prussia it's looking for that type of attempt and these smaller armies that they're these expeditions are always looking at where they can put their foot in and then use their economic might and subsidies to try to while bigger armies to stay in there I didn't get into the British subsidies which are huge role in keeping these coalition's together because Britain's paying millions of pounds to these various countries to keep troops in the field and it's one of the huge challenges that they have of being able to figure out how much we can buy how much we can support England is gonna keep Wellington's army in the peninsula but for most of it they think it's really it's a huge political fight because it's too far away they want to be in northern Germany the Hanover's House of Hanover is there they'll take troops out of the peninsula in 1813 to put into northern Germany and so they're there because it's the only place they can get back into pullian but they really want to be cooperating with the big he's up in Northern Europe so I'm not sure if that answers your question exactly but you know that's an interesting question when you say a theorist I don't know of one I mean British Prime Ministers are wrestling with these type of of issues there are some because the costs are trying to go for peace after 1806 there's another attempt to make peace Spencer Perceval in 1812 is the only British prime minister to be assassinated and part of it is he's assassinated by a man who has economic problems and will cause a crisis it's one of the if you take a look at the newspapers in the summer of 1812 after spence personals assassinated in May they have a hard time forming a new government and it's just at the time that President Madison's ultimatum to Britain is running out and the papers are screaming that we have to we being Britain have to get a prime minister so we can do something about this we don't want to be fighting another another country and of course they don't get a prime minister in time in the end the ultimatum runs out so yes what was the British view of the Napoleon selling Louisiana to the US were they aware that that was coming did they try to block it were they concerned about what would happen in the US and the ones that acquired all that extra territory yeah I mean it occurs during the the the fourteen months of peace and most people think it it's the pulling unloading something that he's gonna lose once the war starts again I don't know I really haven't read much about what the British would be use about this are I know do you know that it was surprised the American negotiators I mean we go just to get access to New Orleans by New Orleans and he offers up all the Louisiana Purchase so it doesn't seem it's like it's something that has been well advertised and fought out the British view was that it was not a clean sale between Spain and France and therefore this justified their attack on New Orleans later on that they would then grab New Orleans and give it back to Spain thus completely blocking up any traffic up and down the Mississippi by the United States so they they cried foul almost immediately just wasn't a clean sale okay mark III was not aware of the substantial bill of amphibious build-up that Napoleon was kind of waiting to don't make a leap across the pond there to what extent we're lessons learned codified from that to your knowledge he modified you know where I'm going and at some point in time perhaps picked up on by the Germans in terms of preparation for sea lion if at all yeah I mean in the room of course folks a focus is right on the amphibious pieces I don't know if any of that gets too codified at any sense of the way we would look at it today and it part of it is how what doctrine is at that time this idea of doctrine that we have of the military way of operating and a preconceived notions is really not it's more drill at the time period and so these best practices he's doing he will do after in between 1803 and 1805 and six he's making these barges that are basically rode barges they're gonna carry several hundred men across across the channel after two fogger when he starts the new rebuilding program he starts building what's called flutes these are worship or ships that are designed as transports and so as a crew of about a hundred men can transport three hundred soldiers on board and so it's it's a much more efficient way of doing it and for longer distances the the channel barges are relatively short distance across the channel and not good for throwing an expeditionary force but whether there's any kind of lessons learned from that and codified I'm really not familiar how serious is did they how much did they think it was really going to happen they think it was gonna happen and George the third in 1803 is actually out there but he's inspecting some of the volunteers about 20-25 thousand volunteers they have 50,000 people show up to watch this and he's going to write we are here in daily expectation that Bonaparte will attempt his threatened invasion should his troops affect the landing I certainly put myself at the head of mine and my other arm subjects to repel him there's also a naval commentator can't remember what his name is but he he says in January 18 oh six after the feet of Austria in Russia at Austerlitz he thinks that this now heightens the threat of innovation again is that Napoleon now is cleared up to Central Europe you can march back and try to try that despite the fact that your vulgar had just happened four months earlier so that first piece when you look at the building activity they're going to do I mean they're gonna build the Martel cowers relatively quickly two to three years to do that Romney March the the amount of troops they just put under arms it's a serious threat there is a real fear and part of it is because Great Britain has such a fear of a standing army that it doesn't have a big standing army it doesn't have a lot of field fortifications there were some pieces they were looking at the defense of London that if Napoleon gets to London how we can defend it and what the army does is they basically are gonna do the field fortifications that's what they can do and so they basically go out in survey the land and they put all the materials they need to do the wooden and stuff position there but they don't start digging so that way the farmers continue to use it they don't have to pay the farmers for the use of it but when you think of a large area like London they say it's going to take a hundred eighty thousand troops to defend it and of course the field the permanent fortification is the Tower of London in the middle of the city so it's not really that of effective fortifications so they haven't had the threat to build all these frontier type things like other European countries happen so they just when the threat is if they if the point can get ashore it's it's not good to be held up by fortifications this could be a battle in the field and they have not done well in the Revolutionary Wars particularly in the the Flanders campaign and so that's a real real concern in real life probably a valid concern also you talking about the the Martello towers and stuff I don't think you can rate them listen the and the question was about if that Napoleon himself and probably would not across he probably would have sent one of his marshals like Messina had crossed with for course and how would that come the the Martel or towers are designed to defend at the beaches and I've seen there's a fantastic book Brittany Bay that talks about these defenses which has some kind of extraordinary numbers in it the 24 pound cannons are these big naval guns the best-trained fleet in England can do three broad sides in a minute and a half so they can fire three times but this author will make the claim that these Martello tower guns can fire ten to twelve times in a minute and will do then do the calculations for the amount of lead that it can be sent probably extraordinarily risky the volunteer troops probably have a very very low very very low combat effectiveness the army itself not bad but it's only about fifty thousand in there and then militia forces are probably the biggest question there by dalit so you're basically drafting people from those look local counties the officers are from well-respected County families so they don't necessarily have a military connection however if you are an officer who is gone on half pay gone off back you have probably volunteered then to be back in there so they possibly could have some value to you but it would be very very questionable particularly when you talk about the Grand Army of 1805 the poem's Army has been along the channel for two years and they're in this six camps and they actually have a day to day training type of cycle that they were doing where they'll have regimental drills and they'll have Brigade drilled and Health Division drill then they'll have core exercises and they have a day off and they started all over again and they've been doing that for two years these are about a third of those soldiers or veterans and the other 2/3 are new volunteers and they're extraordinarily well trained and disciplined going against the force a British volunteer force that would be very very uneven so I would have to give the French see the D not in that particular piece I'm sure there's a lot of British historians who would disagree with me them did Napoleon's Navy have an amphibious doctrine and also they have say purpose preparations to carry the doctor now I'm not so sure about the amphibious doctrine is we talked about that this idea that there's a codified written down way of doing things is probably for the early 19th century - too far to go there's always the French Navy always has a real problem with experience compared to the British Navy Britain has been able to clear the high seas of French shipping for the most part what they can never stop is the coastal trade and so what Francis set up as a series of core forts along the coast protecting the ports semaphore so they were can report where the British fleet is when they see them and yet there's a thriving coastal trade that basically goes from port to port moving supplies long what that allows them to do is continue to train seamen and so you're getting experienced seamen from from this type of piece but it there's you still have to transition that into a naval type of experience I don't I can't answer well enough to give you the thing whether there is an actually written doctrine to be able to say that there they're learning upon that I mean when you talk about amphibious landings at this time this is a very very it's not the well orchestrated movement that you would see in the modern time period sailors are rowing boats to shore with soldiers on board the soldiers jump out and then the boats row back in their Calvary and artillery are particularly hard to land they have one technique where they'll take two of the whaling boats and they put boards across them and then they will lower the horse on to that and then row the horse in which is dangerous because the horse may not like it most of the time what they will do is they'll just lower the horse into the water and let the horses swim ashore but when you're doing this there's a there's a huge piece of a critical time of real danger in your landing before you can get in land enough and get organized and once you get there and get all that stuff on board but it's not any sort of if you think of a Marine landing of the Pacific and what we're - or some like that it's not anything of that kind of sense it's usually go somewhere where the enemy's not and then move your Expeditionary Force to shore I'll just add to that I think like you said it's not the notion of it a contested landing pretty much doesn't exist you're not trying to attack fortifications you're not trying to attack especially gunfire because you've got Shore batteries got mortars they're going to destroy any landing force so like you said it's not there's not this kind of Omaha Beach idea where you've got LST is rolling onto the beach and Amtrak's and all that it's just they wouldn't even think that way now do you think Napoleon as he looked across the channel which is quite wide there maybe you're gonna have to talk 120 miles it is it it's his hesitation or concern influence at all by his understanding of how our difficult river crossings were and of course a river crossing would be much shorter distance than what he faced with the channel yeah I'm not sure if it's river crossing that's it's causing him the or just the fact that the British flee until the British fleet is taken out of it the danger for his army because it's gonna take three days six tides to get across and unless he can control the channel for that period of time a single arm ship in the middle of that fleet was just absolutely cause devastation so you have to drive off that British Lee I don't think the the challenges of river crossing which are absolutely like you said significant challenges I don't think that's weighing as much as to control the channel no the questions okay I just I do have a slide up here for Knicks next month mark hole who's back there you can all pick on will be talking about the German home front in World War two okay thank you [Applause]
