Napoleon's greatest foe

of all the people who did the world good by combating Napoleon Bonaparte and thwarting his ambitions who do you think did the most good well you could say what it's got to be surely the iron Duke could you go Ellington right cause he defeated them at Waterloo Wow maybe not Oh some of you might say I'll do it'll be a Russian general who threw him back from Moscow and the other retreat from Moscow and the destruction of the Grand Army is it that no possibly not aren't you mad aren't you of course it's Nelson isn't he because if Nelson hadn't smashed and Napoleon's for the combined Spanish and French fleets at Trafalgar and then Napoleon would have had so many more options around the Mediterranean around the rest well yes it's Nelson of course you know the column in in London and everything well all of those people are candidates but in the opinion of Napoleon himself it was someone that you perhaps haven't even heard of Sydney Smith later sir Sydney Smith all right he was born William Smith but never mind eat he used his middle name Sydney Smith and I believe this man deserves more recognition and so I'm making this video which has been sponsored by audible more of them later now I won't go into all the details of his birth they were quite mundane essentially he joined the Navy quite early and got a lot of experience early on fighting in the American Revolutionary War also known as that the war of independence and he distinguished himself in action with his conspicuous bravery such that he came to the attention of his commanders who promoted him to leftenant and that was quite remarkable because naval regulations stipulated that you had to be at least 19 to be a leftenant whereas he was 16 yeah very young and within a couple of years of that he had the command of his own ship so he was rising up the ranks it seems through merit though he was reasonably well-connected it seems largely through merit very very quickly but then well do you know peace broke out and there was nothing for a young naval officer to do at that moment and he was he was put on half pay and given some time off so he went travelling and already he was thinking about getting into diplomacy and intelligence knew he travelled quite widely to places like Spain and he ended up in in Turkey in Istanbul not Constantinople it's now Istanbul not Constantinople why did Constantinople get the works well that's new bodies with this but his brother worked for the Embassy in Istanbul and so that was one connection and so he was building up connections within that world of diplomacy and and foreign affairs and making connections in places it's significantly like Turkey now one of the things he did was in 1790 get employed by King Gustav the third of Sweden who needed a naval advisor and he appointed him despite that he was only 26 years old at the time he appointed him as chief naval advisor to the Swedish and gave him command of a squadron quite a large and significant squadron of the Swedish Navy and he fought at the Battle of Spence couldn't and won a staggering victory against the Russians who were the enemy at that time and the Russians lost 64 ships to the Swedish four ships and so pleased was King Gustav that he knighted Sydney and the city became Sir Sydney Smith although that he was of course not a British Knight at this point he was a Swedish Knight and many of his fellow officers teased him for many years after that as the Swedish knight now one unfortunate knack that Sydney had was making enemies but it seems that he made enemies not of people who actually met him and knew him but of people who didn't people high up and elsewhere did not like him for lots of reasons he had too much initiative and acted you know without what consulting them and and that they wanted to be feel what it revealed they were in control not this this guy who's there in the field with lots of initiative doing stuff even if it's good we are supposed to order these things drat it he also gained the enmity of a lot of British officers in the Royal Navy for that victory at Spence good because a lot of British officers had been serving with the Russian Navy and got killed in that battle well I suppose that's the risk you take with foreign adventures anyway he was in Constantinople when war broke out with the French yes again now in post-revolutionary France there were an awful lot of people who really didn't like this revolutionary France thing at all and they might not have been the greatest fan of all the various Louise that had had been king for so long into the past they preferred it to the reign of terror which was taking place in France at the time under people like ropes beer so there were loads of revolts against the revolution and these people who were often referred to as Royalists even if they weren't strictly speaking riders and several cities including to law rebelled against the reign of terror so he heard oh there's a war on great I'm a naval officer well sort of I'm not actually a serving naval officer at the moment I'm on half pay and have been been put out to pasture for a bit but I know what the hell I'll recruit a load of guys and get myself too too long we can sort out the paperwork later I want to do my bit so he arrived there and made himself available to Lord Admiral hood or Admiral lord hood who was commanding the defense of the city with an international force including quite a few Spanish but of course also lots and lots of French and they were holding out against the besieging Republican forces now in command there was one Colonel an artillery colonel whose name was Napoleon Bonaparte and this was the first time that sir Sidney and Napoleon Bonaparte actually were pitted against each other and from that moment on Napoleon who was a very superstitious man got this idea that somehow the Sidney was like his his nemesis and everything every time he came across this guy's name it seemed to fill in with a degree of foreboding even other people called Smith that he encountered made him stop and darken and sometimes go silent well this was as I say the first time they cross paths so Sydney was supposed to be had lots of support from various Spanish troops but he didn't get that so instead he's sallied out just himself and a few naval personnel to you know set fire to the French fleet a bit which he did and he destroyed half the French fleet by fire and would you believe it later he got criticized for not destroying all the fleet which I think it's a bit much frankly I mean if he destroyed half the rent flee that's you know that's a good night's work isn't it I would have thought so anyway this officer doing his operations so much harm really stuck with Napoleon in his mind and he wrote vivid descriptions of the burning fleet and his feelings at the time so that was the first time the two of them the two of them crossed swords if you like so Napoleon found out who was that officer and he found out that was a Sydney Smith this is significant because a few years later in 1796 so Sydney was doing something that he was something of a specialist in he was doing a an inland waterway operation he didn't actually do much fighting in the open sea almost there all the operations that Sydney got involved with were within sight of land or even in rivers and so forth anyway he was trying to capture a French ship in la Jara and it was all going very well he'd got in there with just a few small rowing boats and unfortunately luck was against him the weather turned the wind the wind changed direction just at the wrong moment and he ended up getting captured now in those days what you did when you got captured was you wrote to the commander and said terribly sorry you know what with you know trying to fight a war against you and everything but you know you're all trying to do the same to us you've got prisoners we've got prisoners let's just exchange prisoners here are my details and can you please make the arrangements and this was the standard thing and it normally happened unfortunately the man into whose hands the letter was put was called Napoleon Bonaparte and he looked and he saw the name it's a Sydney Smith and thought oh yes fate has delivered this man into my hands and he had him thrown into prison in the temple prison in Paris and he repeatedly tried to get him tried with arson would you believe the his idea was that because he wasn't technically a serving officer at the time that makes him a noncombatant and so by the rules of war maybe even arson and anyway nobody actually did prosecutor Sydney for and I suspect it's because they looked at the situation and thought one would never get this charge to stick there you're being ridiculous Napoleon who do you think you are Emperor Oh ordering order is around honestly Napoleon so that didn't happen but he was that is Italy in that prison for two years and while he was in that prison he wrote a letter to Napoleon he wrote it on the shutters to his cell and I want to read you a bit of the letter that he wrote now from this book called beware of heroes beware of heroes by Peter Shanklin which is one of the books that I've read about Sidney one has to admit that fortunes wheel makes strange revolutions but before it can be truly called a revolution the turn of the wheel must be complete today you are as high as you can be but I do not envy you your happiness because I have a still greater happiness and that is to be as low in fortunes wheel as I can go so that as soon as the capricious lady who turns the wheel does so again I shall rise for the same reason that you shall fall I do not write this to distress you but to bring you the same consolation that I have when you reach the point where I am you will occupy this same prison why not you as well as I I did not expect to be shut up here any more than you do now but of course I don't have to convince you that you will come here because to read these lines you must be here I assume you will have this room because the jailor here is a good man he will give you the best room just as he did for me well that is what he wrote then and then he escaped he escaped because he had help and he had the help of pro royalist or anti Republican friends in Paris who at some risks to themselves helped him escape so he escaped and joined the Navy again and carried on with his work now he was as I say very involved with diplomacy and matters around the world and he looked at the situation and he advised the Foreign Office of his military assessment and his assessment - of Napoleon character he said this is Napoleon guys coming to power is tremendously ambitious and I predict that he's going to invade Egypt now at this point the Royal Navy didn't have bases around the Mediterranean the Royal Navy had actually largely pulled out of the Mediterranean so that left it as a River playground further that the French fleet and Napoleon was stupendously ambitious he wanted to be another Alexander he also in his own words wanted to make the English tremble he saw the English as the ultimate enemy but how could he do this well he could emulate Alexander by taking an army roughly the size of Alexander's and replicating his feats he could land in Egypt conquer Egypt and then go anti-clockwise around conquering Lebanon and Palestine and so forth up to Istanbul take out the that the Ottoman Turks and then go through Vienna conquering that and then return to France and then my goodness he would have complete control of the eastern Mediterranean and all the trade with the the Near East and the Middle East and that even the trade routes to the Far East he'd have controlled the Dardanelles he would be in such a strong position and at the time there was no one to stop him doing this there were in fact no organized armies in a position to stop any French invasion anywhere between the Mediterranean and India it is even possible that he was harboring some ambitions to do what Alexander didn't take India as well because could you imagine if he'd taken India and held it something that Alexander didn't manage to do well he would have gone one up on Alexander as I say Napoleon was a very weirdly ambitious man anyway so Sidney was right and the the British when they realized that this was a feasible plan put together a task force and went to Egypt and arrived to the big army in a big fleet and said right the French are coming we think you really ought to do something about it we're here to help and they were sent packing the local rulers said don't be ridiculous these did the Mamluks and don't be ridiculous did you be off on your way in fact the local ruler actually forbade them from taking on supplies which is very odd thing to do one because he didn't actually have the authority to do that there was no war on the British could have just bought supplies and and after being just fair trade but also Nelson and his task force was in a perfectly good position to just take everything they wanted by force anyway but neatly they said all right on your own head be it and they sailed away again which was perhaps a bit of a shame because the French then turned up and get conquered Cairo and Alexandria oops so then back Came Nelson with the fleet and we have the Battle of the Nile in which Nelson pretty comprehensively beat the French and destroyed half of its fleet in the in the mouth of the Nile itself so huzzah for Nelson well done and Nelson was expecting great rewards but actually he didn't get all the rewards of diplomatic positioning that he was expecting because this chap Sinise Smith much - Nelson's annoyance was was given a role which he saw as wrong because Sydney Smith was sort of a diplomat and and sort of a soldier and and sort of a Navy man at the same time because he was he was doing this this terrible wreck way this land and by sea he was landing parties of people using his own initiative here and there hang on that's army work hang on no no stick to the Navy and what are you doing all this diplomacy the thing is that he knew a lot of people in the area I don't actually haven't been able to find out what languages he spoke but presumably I get the strong impression that he was a bit of a linguist so he probably had some Turkish and maybe some Arabic and so he to some degree he was able to talk the locals so he had connections in the area and contact circles within the diplomatic service as well but this rankled with Nelson and Nelson did not like this Sydney Smith guy even though I didn't actually know him personally and one of the things he didn't like about Sydney was that Sydney was this young come up through the ranks really quickly guy who kept using his own initiative rather than following the orders given him by his senior commanders which is a bit rich because that's exactly what Nelson did but when he was younger but now Nelson was in charge and he didn't want any young Nelson types like him you know did fiying him drat it anyway the French however still had a big land army but that land army was now stranded largely the the brick the Royal Navy was powerful enough to stop him leaving and his fleet was now half smashed in but what he could do was carry on with his plan which is to conquer his way anti-clockwise around the Mediterranean and he attacked various places that Alexander attacked partly I think because Alexander attacked them and he wanted to emulate Alexander and the slaughter was horrendous it was extraordinarily brutal rule and when he took princess Jaffa used to be called Joppa but by this period was called Jaffa even after the garrison had surrendered to him and he had agreed terms he had them all massacred about four thousand garrison it just taken down to the beach and had them all bayonetted and he wasn't too squeamish to to watch it being done Napoleon was an absolutely horrendous person it's it's the more you you learn about Napoleon the more difficulties to believe that he could have been any worse now of course there have been a lot of monsters in history and there are people like Chairman Mao and Stalin and so forth who have killed considerably more people than the Napoleon managed to kill although don't forget that in in in the the mid 20th century when Mao and Stalin were doing their stuff there were far more people in the world to kill and they had railways and and aircraft and poison gas and radio and all these modern inventions which made being utterly horrendous to large numbers of people so much more efficient I suspect that in in terms of a tropic atrocities per capita Napoleon might might actually be top dog here he killed over 2 million of his own countrymen and goodness knows how many million of other people around the world so the amount of death that he brought to the world was quite an unnecessary death was quite extraordinary but he was also an appalling person in so many other ways some of which I'm probably unlikely to do mention in this where I start he had all these people bayonetted and the men that he was commanding some of them were utterly appalled some of his is his officers of course his officers were literate and they've left records were absolutely disgusted with this massacring of people who had accepted a surrender when after he'd accepted their surrender and some of them even became suicidal they were so disgusted that what they'd done following his orders and it was shortly after that actually the plague actual proper play not just some disease or other but plague broke out in the French camp as there was some sort of biblical retribution for the the atrocity but anyway he went round burning and murdering and lying his way around the Mediterranean yeah he was an astonishing liar I'm a really bad liar I mean a bad liar in the sense that he told absolute whoppers but also a bad liar in that he told lies that were obviously going to be discovered people were obviously going to see through these lies there and he was at least in this part of his career not believed by the locals he told all the local Christians they Coptic Christians and so forth that he was there on a crusade against the Muslims and he would protect them against the Muslims and he was telling all the Muslims that he himself Napoleon was a Muslim there to protect him from the nasty Christians and perhaps to exterminate these these verminous Christians and he was telling all the various different versions of the Muslims that he was this particular type of Muslim and was against that sort of Muslim or he was against this particular tribal would protect them against the others and it was an incredibly ineffective piece of a propaganda campaign because also Sydney Smith had to do was take Napoleon's propaganda leaflets that he'd been distributing about the place and used the same leaflets because all you had to do was take the leaflets that were a Dementor for those people and show them to those people and have some of yours find you and show you those oh and you might be just in these ones and everyone just saw that he was just lying to everyone and could not be trusted but he still was big powerful commander in command of a big powerful army and therefore to be feared so there was a definite danger that if he won then the low people would join him because you know you've got to join the victor haven't you otherwise the victor turns on you and this guy we'll definitely turn on you and kill everybody anyway mr. Sidney took the initiative he saw that the busying himself round in Alexander in places like that wasn't what was needed he put together a force and on his own initiative he went to place called acre and there he aided the local commander the the local Muslim commander who was the man who at the time was holding out against the French and in fact had himself taken the initiative he had for instance put troops into into Jaffa and other places this guy was the Pasha Jezza who was also known as it translates to slasher he was 60 years old and was a big ferocious man who showed nobody respect apart from interestingly so Cindy Smith whom he showed a lot of respect straightaway and that immediately made Sydney Smith very very respected by all the people that he was dealing with in that areas that made things a lot easier so slasher Jezza had seen that okay this is a guy I can do business with and he's useful and he was very useful so Sydney Smith for instance just happened to capture all the French guns the her on the on their way to the siege and he then denied the use of the coast road by bombarding it from the sea to the the marching French army and he then landed a load of troops naval troops mainly and guns and installed them in acre and did an awful lot to repair the defences which are in a very very poor state and for all this work he was given various rewards oh he was he was also given one one award that had previously been given to one Saint Richard whether we know as Richard the Lionheart yes who of course had taken acre when he was batting around the the Middle East the Near East anyway so he installed himself in Acre which was smack in the path of the advancing the pollyana Carmy and was commanded by the guy that Napoleon had to defeat if he could show everyone in the region that that he was now in control and we are told that the hillsides filled with people watching the siege partly out of fascination presumably but also because they needed to know which of these two sides was going to be the winner which side that we can do I have to side with in order to preserve our own lives now the siege lasted about three months and was absolutely epic and I cannot possibly give you all the details but there was a huge amount of ebb and flow an awful lot of times it really looked as though the French were going to take this this tiny miserable little town but they kept being flung back again and again even after they made breaches and the defenses breaches in the walls which so Sydney had been quickly plugging up they still couldn't take the town and Napoleon's frustration grew and grew and grew now he had a general clay bear jean-baptiste clairebear under him and Joe Matisse was quite a different man from Napoleon in lots of ways and this is him and isn't that hair great yeah I asked proper wild hey I hope one day when I go gray I'll be I don't think I will though I think my hair will be too thin by then but you know if I could I would anyway this man was a problem for for for Napoleon he was competent he was an ardent Republican having a proper Republican an actual French Republic not this Napoleonic version of a republic in other words something a bit more like a monarchy and his troops were really respect with him and even loved him and were gang loyal to him so he had to keep clay bear down and clay bear also was one of the just about the only person in fact as far as I can tell who dared speak up in staff meetings against these stupid ideas that Napoleon kept coming up with and he he also dared even mock him and one point they made a breach in the walls he said yeah yeah absurd spectacular but he said this I think a cat could get through that or when he shortly after he turned up he hadn't look at the trenches that Napoleon had had dug he said you call these trenches it's alright for you but they only come up to my waist and I dare say that probably rankled with mr. Bonaparte a little bit anyway clay bear was it seems honorable and straightforward and someone that's a Sydney could do business with but Napoleon just wasn't and the the pettiness the spite the nastiness the utter callousness of the lives of others showed itself when Napoleon was absolutely adamant that he haven't lost it was a victory despite the fact that it was quite definitely a loss he'd not achieved his aim had been thrown back and had lost a huge number of men and guns and so forth in fact he ended up losing almost all these guns these were the guns one of Napoleon's Maxim's sorry whatever sorry like one of his Maxim's was you never abandon your guns you can abandon your your your food you can abandon your allies you can abandon loads of things that you can abandon but you never abandon your guns and he was forced in the retreat to abandon guns guns that had famously crossed the outs with him had been with him for so many of his early campaigns he had to abandon them on in the retreat when he went past Jaffa on the way back the bodies that had just been left there apparently they the stink was just indescribable anyway so he's going up and down the desert losing men to first and loads to wounds now I was gonna say it's very it was very Petty spiteful in order to show that he hadn't lost he had to not agree for the evacuation of the wounded sir Sydney wrote to him and and offered evacuation of the wounded as as a good soldier would but if Napoleon had to do a deal with the enemy in order to get his wounded out then that would mean that he must have lost but so he wasn't going to admit that so tough to save his face he didn't he didn't strike a deal now in fact as it turned out a lot of the wounded were evacuated and had been told a lie one of many alive by Napoleon which was that sir Sidney sent home prisoners in plague ships and it seemed a lot of his men did actually believe this and so when they found out that they weren't going to be sent home in the plague ship they were almost pathetically grateful anyway another petty thing he did was burn every village destroy and burn all crops that he came across during his campaign as well just this scorched earth policy just the level of spite but possibly the most one of the most spiteful things he did was when he finally decided right I'm gonna give up on this siege and leave he ordered all the remaining ammunition they had to be fired not not at the defense's but just into into the civilian part of the town it's just an act of spite what what military purpose did that serve if anything all it did was turn more people even more against him it was it wasn't just spiteful it was really stupid but there you go this was Napoleon one of the worst human beings ever to have disgraced the face of the earth so Napoleon then gave up is that why I can't now carry on with this campaign I'm not going to make it to Istanbul the Turks have now mobilized against me so he left he killed away himself back to France slipped away by sea and got back to France leaving claire-bear absolutely in the doo-doo he left clay bare with no guns no food no money or any other means to pay his troops and no fleet Napoleon took all the ships so clay bear was completely stranded but fortunately he was an honorable man who could do a deal with Sydney and so Sydney arranged a meeting that played court a place called El Arish and there struck a deal and his deal was this he would organize it such that the 18,000 troops under clay bear would be taken back to France safely by the British Navy they would own nothing save the the ground they were standing on when they were actually in Egypt but they will be taken back to France and that's it a peace and the Turks were quite happy with that the topes the Turks were cock-a-hoop they were they were so happy in fact with the way that the got rid of the French that one of the many little consequences of this is that a chap called Elgin got the permission to remove he did actually have to pay quite a lot of money for them as well but he's got permission to remove some statues from a temple on a hill in Athens these are now known as the Elgin marbles you can see them in the British Museum and if anyone tells you that they were stolen or they weren't they were paid for and they had permission and at the time Athens was a city that was in a country called Turkey so you dealt with the Turks anyway so sorry little aside snippet of history there a side effect of what was going on so why would secede nee want particularly clay bear and eighteen thousand a high a largely intact French army to go back to France well he saw clay there as a good bulwark against bulwark against Napoleon because he saw clay bare as an honorable ardent genuine Republican and someone who was not at all a friend of Napoleon's and someone who likes a Sydney saw Napoleon's ambitions were really dangerous to the point of deranged so if clay bear had gone back to to France and arrived this very very popular commander with an army loyal to him because this army saw how he had looked after them whereas Napoleon had definitely not looked after them he would have then perhaps have been a very good counter to Napoleon's rise into power within France but it didn't happen and I'll tell you what actually happened after I tell you about my sponsors now audible and just in case you don't know is an enormous website which has loads of audio books on it now it's the New Year well sorta well it's January it's close to the new year and you may be thinking of you resolution the new year the new you yes so what you could do is you get yourself into an improving book with its books this is well known are improving things so what pertinent to the Napoleonic Wars and improving miss could you could you be listening to well how about a bit of Tolstoy yeah how about yeah the big one war and peace and if you want you know bang for your buck as the Americans put it well war and 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like this and dealing with the enemy like this and you know once given him permission to do any of this so it was countermanded the deal was off and so Sidney now of course when you agree to surrender to to someone and you agree that you agree kindly to be transported away by him under his protection you are asked to do things like vacate the fortresses that you're occupying and so forth it's you know it's only right and fair but that was the deal and Sidney when he knew that the deal was off he sent word to play there saying I think a better reoccupy those force because I'm afraid I can't give you the protection that I I thought I was going to be able to give you I'm sorry now you could say that that was a very honorable thing he did or you could say he was being treacherous to his own nation I'm inclined towards the former of those two though I do see that there's an argument for the latter anyway so then that meant that it all had to be done again but this time by force so Sidney was sent to southern Turkey to rehearse an unusual thing an opposed landing and there's a character who turns up at this point of the story he's actually pretty irrelevant of the story but he's just an extraordinary character I think a medal just throw him in the local ruler where they were rehearsing that the opposed landings or instantly yes sir Sidney designed a landing craft of the purpose when he this this nut-brown grizzled guy with a big beard and sways in the big you know cloth garments of of the locals when he saw some Highlanders into Sidney's forces he addressed them in Gaelic it turned out that his name was Campbell and he was from Argyll sure and that he'd go into a bit of trouble in Argyll sure so decidedly better skip down to written go at venturing and you ended up fighting against the Russians for the Turks and he got his nose cut off and had a silver one made to replace it which he had painted flesh-colored dick dick dick I don't know a bit weird one of those characters who you saw him in the film now Carbone ass radicular sometimes history is stranger than fiction anyway he rehearsed for the opposed landings there and when they reckoned they'd got it got it sorted it went ahead and it was a successful opposed landing but a very costly one fighting the French of these circumstances was very difficult opposed landings are always difficult the British suffered 600 casualties in the first half an hour of fighting but they did manage to get inland as a Sydney himself was in the thick of it he actually fought so hard that he his sword broke and he was in command of getting the naval forces are shown what they were doing and getting the guns are sore and during the battle itself actually the use of those naval guns on shore so it is perhaps a little unfair that he wasn't mentioned in any of the write-ups of the how the battle went written up by the the British Army officers at the time which seems little as I say a little unfair anyway one interesting thing that happened during this battle was when the French heavy cavalry smashed into the British line what what was meant to happen in those days is when the heavy cavalry smashed through a line of infantry that line infantry is meant to flee in panic and scatter and no longer be an effective fighting force that's it you you sweep away a line of infantry with your cavalry only what happened at this point was that the French cavalry charged out then the British shot at them and then they went slashed through the line and the British then turned round and carried on shooting which you're not supposed to do better that's better scatter you going wrong there but anyway so the British defeat the French again and force them to sign a surrender and would you believe it the terms of the surrender were the same as at the conference of El Arish so if they had just let so Sydney just do what he had had done then 20,000 lives would have been saved 20,000 men died in that campaign who would have been otherwise alive and other nasty things happened for instance leave the Turks centel sent over a force which massacred a load of Coptic Christians to Sydney himself rushed when he found out where they were going in the Rosetta mouth of the the Nile to save the copy with you he was there too late and the deed had been done you see those Coptic Christians made the mistake of worshipping the same imaginary friends in a very slightly different matter manner so obviously obviously they had to die anyway so now instead of a a unified large army of 18,000 French under a commander going back to France and possibly acting as a bulwark against as a counter to Napoleon instead a half-size shattered remnant of an army without its leader went back to France because clay bear was assassinated we are told by an Arab student but an awful lot of people will have wanted clay bear dead so who paid the student it's a little bit suspicious but anyway clay bear unfortunately was dead his body was shipped back to France but Napoleon didn't allow it to land because Napoleon was a git and so that that camp that campaign King came to a close and again our man found himself at a bit of a loose end he went back to Britain for a bit where he found that he was ridiculously old fashioned his clothes was so old-fashioned he looked positively French that time out-of-date he was you know floral Wescott's and tail coats and Gratz were in now and oh my goodness man I have to get you some decent clothes you can't go out like that all the people think he was unfortunately broke you see the Foreign Office had disavowed what he'd done in finding the the con at the conference of El Arish and so it was felt that he couldn't be paid so he didn't get any money for any of the things he'd done he had just thought it Napoleon's entire campaign in the east with his amazing defense of acre and he was broke but people knew about what he had done and a lot of supportive members of the general public with whom he was tremendously popular because he was a great they saw that he was he was all right and a number of other things happened in his life he got married he became the MP for Rochester for a bit and oh I just remembered I I was going to read from this book a letter that he wrote to Napoleon I don't and it's somewhat out of sequence now unfortunately but it's it's a it's a good letter so this was after Napoleon's defeat at acre and Napoleon hasn't actually left the area yes so it's quite easy to get a letter to him and of course everyone knew in Napoleon's staff that a letter from Sir Sidney had arrived and it said general I have known for some days that you've been planning to raise the siege I have no cause to love you to say the least of it should never had said so but circumstances have led me to wish that you should reflect on the instability of human affairs would you ever have thought that a poor prisoner in the cells of the temple that an unfortunate man on whose behalf you refused to interest yourself for a moment when you were in a position to do him a signal service for at that time you were all-powerful would you ever have thought I say that that same man would become your opponent and force you in the sands of Syria to raise the siege of a miserable little town these are events you must admit that surpass all human calculations believe me general you must adopt a more modest line of thought and the man who tells you that Asia is not a theater creative for your glory will not in fact be your enemy this letter is a small revenge that I now allow myself anyway sorry that came a little bit out of water so he's becoming people rotters got married yes on various other things and and he now looks around for other avenues and again he visit visits places like Spain and Portugal and does more looking at diplomacy and so forth and he gets interested in a campaign in but first in Sicily and then he widens it to to Italy now he didn't actually have orders to do all the stuff that he did in Italy because he was one of these people who thought that if you want to defend this place rather than just cluster around that awake for the attack of the attacker to mass at his leisure and then at a time of his choosing attack at a point of his choosing much better to defend this place by attacking the enemy in lots of other places where the enemy is so with the Royal Navy so rather than wait for the canonic forces Indian in Italy to to amass an attack at Sicily that's let's go up and down around Italy and just generally cause havoc creating little forts and so there's quite a few times he would create a fort sometimes sacrificing one of the ships of the fleet so he would turn up and then just beat your ship take all the guns off it and use the wood for the ship and so the ship was very quickly turned into a fort you want a fort very quickly send up the ship and turn the ship into a fort bingo oK you've got one ship fewer in your in your fleet but hey a fort which could then can be used as a base for later operations and he used this in isles off small islands off france number times anyway sorry no the sidetrack Napoleon oh yeah that's right and he fought at the Battle of Maeda is quite significant so there was the Battle of Maeda which was 1806 and this seems to be quite a significant battle he himself became leader of the masse he became leader of partisans in the area he seemed to be very good at winning over locals and turning them against the French and at the Battle of Maeda which was a decisive victory for the British he used parties and forces in the rear of the French he used naval vessels off the coast that were aiding in the battle as it was going on so again this was landed by Sita Rama equator operation and I don't know quite how involved he was in the tactics of the battle itself with regard to letting a say look the infantry involved but it does seem to have been very significant for one reason being that one Arthur Wellesley did a very detailed study of this battle to see how do we beat the French particularly on land and he was very impressed by a number of things he's very impressed by the cooperation of naval forces on land and ships at sea cooperating with the army on land and how effective they were he also learned awful lot about how partisans could be used in a situation such as this and he also according to most historians until recently looked at how the French attacked in column and the British defended in line and how the line British line against the French column tactic was very very effective and he concluded that unless the French changed their tactics well he'd be able to beat them now more modern revisionist historians have said that there's a problem of that as far as we can tell the French really did not use column very much in this battle they were deployed almost entirely in lines so maybe that's a detail which is not quite right but even so this Arthur Wellesley chap went on to do terribly well for himself and you may know him by a title he got later the first Duke of Wellington and of course although these tactics became his his bread and butter in the Peninsular war which was coming later France decided with spec one to Poland in conjunction with the Spanish decided they were get a partition portugal between them and Portugal didn't like that idea and Portugal and Britain were allies and so Britain got involved in the Peninsular war and so sitting he was actually been involved with that he went to Lisbon and so forth but I don't want to dwell on that part of the story other than perhaps to mention at this point that an awful lot of partisans fought very effectively against the French in Spain and the get Napoleon seized all his a lot more seized all his allies major forts okay yeah let's do a deal to partition this other the country between us yeah send over a an army to help you with that although I seem to have seized all your thoughts my a lion though I think I'll actually install my brother as king of Spain and act anyway he was just a get beyond imagining however however bad you think the polio was see I really have very little very little in common with people who think that Napoleon was a great man he was great man in that he achieved a staggering amount of harm and if that's a way to measure greatness then oh okay yeah a great man but what good did he actually do the world oh I introduced the metric system for one he didn't introduce the metric system but he admittedly it was introduced you know while he was in charge but he himself actually hated the metric system and to its the metric system how is that good no he was responsible for staggering amounts of completely unnecessary death he was a duplicitous and incredibly touchy incredibly he couldn't bear to lose face at all for instance when mr. Sablan I'll go back to it when he marched back into Egypt he did so in triumph oh yes as though he'd won a great victory he in fact lost half his army and most of his guns and his ambitions in the in the East had been thwarted but in fact he marched back as if in victory and everyone had to wear Garland's no apart from one unit there to persuade had behaved very unimpressive Lee during an attack on the breach at one point he forced that unit to to walk back dressed as women yeah yes that's great man management isn't it I said to get your troops to love you and when he arrived in Egypt there were there were Egyptian 'he's there who had to celebrate his arrival and shower him from with gifts on pain of death yeah oh but he didn't allow Kleber after his victories any - just to celebrate them at all just in case his troops you know started to you know look it up look up to him a bit better god I was such a kid he was such a get it's extraordinary anyway so Napoleon Allies the Russians in 1807 he is of course going to attack them by then that standard he made very peaceful over to use to both the Ottomans and the Mamluks of of Egypt before attacking them he just thought well how can I increase the chances of surprise I know I'll be really nice to then attack them but I'm just such a genius or is it a kid it's a kid and he saw his partition Spain and eventually there was the Continental System that he he brought in to another side trying very quick he essentially continental system involved telling - or saying to everyone in Europe you can't trade with the British all these ports you can't allow the British to trade in any of them so back to the British haha that'll bring them to their knees this nation of shopkeepers but didn't actually work because the Royal Navy was very powerful and really frustratingly for Napoleon the Royal Navy was just not afraid of him you see Napoleon had had cultivated this myth of invincibility which seemed to really work on his land-based European neighbors you know they were terrified of him but he just couldn't get this blasted Royal Navy to be frightened of him which is you know quite understandable on there are Mavis Park given that the raw may be very consistently beat him easily anyway they're all maybe and then just blockaded all the ports and said okay fair enough you're not the trade with Britain or each other so what do we do about that then and in 1811 the Czar should just thought how this is ridiculous and he actually lifted lifted the embargo and started trading with the British again and that's possibly the real reason that prompted Napoleon to invade Russia I mean beyond just wild over ambition anyway so we all know that that didn't go too well 1812 overture' and everything the march back of the Grand Army there the destruction of the French army vast vast vast numbers of people on both sides dying but the girls Napoleon was alright and he came back and well yeah the zoom Ford because this the too many sidelines this story's getting too big so that's zoom forward to his imprisonment in Elba so in in Elba he turned up to be taken to exile on the island of Elba and he at the cheek of it the incredible cheek of it he demanded that he be escorted by British and transported in a British ship because he feared for his own safety yes a lot of other people in France wanted him dead at this point in fact a lot of people in the world wanted him dead which was entirely understandable even his own brother Lucien really regretted having helped him into power and he then demanded that he be taken there by the British thank you very much and when he showed up to be escorted to that the barges couldn't take him out of the ship I stepped out of the carriage and try to look as hot he's good I asked to speak to the captain of the guard and who was the captain the guard it was one left-handed Smith this was so Sydney Smith's nephew and history records that at that point his face darkened and he went silent and stayed silent for the rest of the voyage anyway so it was when Napoleon himself wrote his memoirs that he said that it was secede Nesmith who made him miss his destiny but of course we all know that they had the final nail in the coffin was Waterloo so incredibly incredibly he was able to come back to power yet again largely by lying again well due to reasons that he came back to power well one was that the incredible greed of the army see when Napoleon was in charge of things in France he made the army really important really well-funded really powerful Gil gave it loads of privileges and then he destroyed it a bit in campaigns in Russia and so forth and then the king came back yet another Louis and the army lost its power so when he turned up and went oh I'll give you all your prep power and privilege back really get off him Prince back yay vive l'empereur they put incredible isn't it I mean he went Emperor he would Emperor he did not King you look at the portraits done of him at the time when he crowned himself Emperor and you can see all the trappings of royalty these staggering flagrant hypocrisy of the man anyway he also lied to the population he said that France was in danger and he was the man he was the man who could save France okay put your faith in me give me a massive army this was a complete lie that the Allies had in fact already signed an alliance treaty guaranteeing the borders of France no one was there no one was fighting to conquer France or even a bit of France the borders were guaranteed they declared war not on France but personally on the Polian but Napoleon used another lie to convince everyone that he was their Savior and that they didn't he was saving them no no he was trying to get them to save his skin but hey ho he was a liar and he fought the Battle of Waterloo and during the battle sir Sidney was not far away and heard the sound of guns so bang war what this right takes a few guys together and went toward the sound of the guns and arrived at the battle about halfway through he wasn't given the command ministry command in the battle but instead he was given the task of dealing with the wounded of both sides and as part of his experience about he then designed a new improved ambulance a six wheeled thing with a very smooth ride suspension so that the wounded wouldn't be jostled so much as they were moved at speed across a battlefield because he wasn't impressed with the design of ambulances it was being used anyway he was then tasked with getting various places he got an me on to surrender and are asked to surrender and he then organized the safe passage of the king into Paris because they had to get the king into Paris without any bloodshed so he got these various cities to surrender and was able to organise this and for that for that he was given a knighthood a British knighthood and so now no one was mocking him for being there the swedish knight anymore so now he was a british night and I realized as I get to this stage in the in this rambling story that I've missed out quite a lot of other remarkable things about him he not only did he do a lot of useful work in Italy but he did a lot of diplomatic work for loads of people including the King Gustav who got outed because he was Pro he was anti Napoleon Mike and he tried to do more diplomatic work but tended to get cut out because he and people saw him as a little bit jumped up they wanted to be in control not this other guy yeah he had connections and so forth and people liked him but you know connections and people liking him yeah I'm in charge so he wasn't tremendously successful but he did mount some campaign one of which being he was going to anti-slavery who's gonna be one of his big things and he was going to put together a force to take on the Barbary pirates of North Africa who had for centuries have been capturing people from Mediterranean Shipping and raids on coasts that went as far as Ireland and Cornwall a whole villages of people captured and sold into slavery by the Barbary pirates he was going to take them on and it is said by some historians that he invented something he invented the charity dinner now it strikes me as unlikely that he exactly it was the first person ever to do anything like that but certainly for his day it was a novel thing so perhaps in there in the way we know it today the modern charity dinner was invented you sell tickets and get loads of people to spend a very large amount of money on these expensive tickets and the make speeches turning each other just how wonderful they are to raise money to take on the Barbary pirates but then it was actually Napoleon coming to back into power again and interrupted things and there I missed that out but I got it in so so Sydney Smith the wheel of fortune for Napoleon turned and it seems that this man not maybe we're not Wellington not maybe not Blucher not maybe not Nelson not maybe any of those those in the other Russian guys whose names unfortunately I failed to learn for this this video yes maybe wasn't any of those like you might mean of course you know but in Napoleon's rather suspicious mind it was so Sydney Smith [Music] the man [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 952,484

Rating: 4.6338243 out of 5

Keywords: Sidney, Smith, sir, Napoleon, Bonaparte, Napoleonic, wellington, acre, royal, navy, gustav, nelson, kleber, turks, turkish, egypt, campaign, alexandria, jaffa, joppa, history, foe, nemesis, dictator, toulon, siege, massi, maida, nile, temple prison, paris, france, french

Id: jdM3ID4m38U

Length: 57min 22sec (3442 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ComradeSomo]

Levels of Eternal Anglo in this video are on a scale never seen prior.

[u/[deleted]]

/r/badhistory