The Battle of Maida 1806 Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Leo Cooper

  Reprinted in 2012 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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  Copyright © Richard Hopton, 2002, 2012

  9781844686070

  The right of Richard Hopton to be identified as Author of this work has been

  asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

  1988.

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  available from the British Library

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  TO THE MEMORY OF

  MY MOTHER

  1936 – 2001

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter One - WAR AND PITT (BIS)

  Chapter Two - THE THIRD COALITION IN PROSPECT

  Chapter Three - RELUCTANT ALLIES & A PROVOCATIVE ENEMY: THE BIRTH OF THE THIRD COALITION

  Chapter Four - NAPLES & SICILY: THE THIRD COALITION IN THE SOUTH

  Chapter Five - “THE DESCENT ON CALABRIA”: THE BRITISH TAKE THE INITIATIVE

  Chapter Six - “SOMETHING DASHING IS EXPECTED”: THE BATTLE OF MAIDA

  Chapter Seven - THE AFTERMATH: “MOPPING UP” AND THE SIEGE OF SCYLLA

  Epilogue: - THE FRENCH RECAPTURE OF SCYLLA JANUARY & FEBRUARY 1808

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have been helped by numerous people in the process of writing this book, in particular the staffs of the British Library and the National Army Museum, whose prompt and courteous service made my researches so much less stressful than they might otherwise have been. Patrick Mercer kindly read an early version of the book and made many thoughtful and helpful suggestions for improvements. Leo Cooper encouraged me from the start, while my father brought his great fund of historical knowledge to bear on many aspects of the book. Tom Hartman, who edited the book, has put me right on numerous occasions as well as providing amusing anecdotes over the lunch table.

  I have quoted from the correspondence between Sir John Stuart and Sir Sidney Smith with the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.

  Many friends have listened to me droning on about Maida over the last few years and to all of them I extend my heartfelt thanks for their forbearance. Finally, I should like to thank Caroline, who, luckily for her, missed the writing of the book, but whose wit and love has brightened the last stages of its genesis.

  London

  January 2002

  THE MEDITERRANEAN

  INTRODUCTION

  On Sunday 13 March 1803, Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador in Paris, attended a court levée at the Tuileries. He was taking some English visitors to the ceremony in order to present them to Madame Bonaparte. It was a formal occasion, with some two hundred people present, held in the magnificent state rooms of the palace whose elaborate decoration, gilded ceilings and imposing portraits reflected the power and glory of France’s greatest monarch Louis XIV, le roi soleil. When Whitworth arrived at the levée Napoleon, in a state of “very considerable agitation”, confronted him and in a voice loud enough for everyone thronging the room to hear said: “So you are determined to go to war?”

  Five days earlier, on 8 March, Parliament had unanimously voted an increase of 10,000 men to the strength of the Royal Navy, in reply to a Royal Message calling for defensive precautions in the face of warlike preparations in the ports along the French and Dutch coasts. By the time of Whitworth’s visit to the Tuileries this news had reached Paris, throwing the First Consul into a towering rage.

  “We have already fought for fifteen years,” he said, brushing aside Whitworth’s attempts at conciliation. “You want to carry on fighting for another fifteen years and you will force me into it.” Napoleon moved off towards the Russian and Spanish Ambassadors who were standing nearby and, in the same vein, continued, “The English want war but if they are the first to draw the sword I shall be the last to put it away”.

  Napoleon stalked off, doing his rounds of the room, evidently still very angry. Shortly afterwards he confronted Whitworth once more: “Why these armaments? Against whom are you taking these precautions? I have not got a single ship of the line in any port in France, but if you want arms, I too will arm. If you want to fight, I too will fight. You may perhaps be able to destroy France but you will never intimidate her. It is vital to abide by treaties, a curse on those who do not abide by treaties; they shall answer for it to all Europe.” With this Napoleon stormed out of the room, repeating the final sentence as he went.

  This celebrated scene is a milestone on the descent of England and France back into war in 1803. The violence of Whitworth’s description of the incident stands out from the usual polished, courtly diplomatic phrases; he remarks on “the extreme impropriety of [Napoleon’s] conduct”. Indeed, Napoleon’s tirade displayed a “total want of dignity as well as of decency” that was quite shocking to contemporaries.1 Negotiations continued throughout March and April between Whitworth and the French Foreign Minister, Talleyrand. The principal sticking-point was the fate of Malta: by the terms of the Peace of Amiens the British government had agreed to relinquish the island, but the arrangements for its future security were deemed inadequate. Article Ten of the Peace nominated the Tsar of Russia as the guarantor of Malta’s independence, but he was reluctant to become embroiled in a cause so far from home and declined to accept the responsibility. Faced with increasing evidence of Napoleon’s belligerence after the Peace of Amiens, the British refused to evacuate the island until a satisfactory solution could be found to protect it from French aggression.

  Various compromises were mooted, but the two sides failed to reach a settlement. On 23 April Whitworth was sent his final instructions by the Cabinet in which he was ordered to insist, as a minimum, on a ten-year lease of Malta and, if the French government would not agree to this, he was to leave Paris. On 4 May Whitworth had a further and inconclusive interview with Talleyrand, at which he was persuaded to refer another French officer to his government. This he did; it was refused. When the news of the Cabinet’s refusal reached Paris Whitworth requested his passports and, on 12 May, left for home. Britain declared war on France on 18 May.

  So Britain and France were once more at war. The respite provided by the
Peace of Amiens had lasted a mere fourteen months and the war which now resumed would continue for a further eleven years. This long period of visceral struggle against the Napoleonic Empire falls, from the British perspective, into three phases: The War of the Third Coalition, the Peninsular War and the final, triumphant act of 1814 and 1815.

  The Third Coalition, as is well known, achieved mixed results. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar ended any pretensions the French had to challenge the British mastery of the seas. Austerlitz, on the other hand, scotched all hope that the Coalition’s armies might have had of defeating Napoleon’s ambitions on Continental Europe. Ulm and Austerlitz allowed Napoleon to dictate terms to Austria and sent the Russian army scuttling home, but, despite these crushing victories, there was for the allies one small chink of light in the surrounding gloom: the Battle of Maida. The campaign on the Danube in the autumn and winter of 1805, which ended in disaster, was only a part (albeit the major part) of the strategy adopted by the leaders of the Third Coalition. They had hoped to mount an effective campaign in North Germany but were frustrated by Prussia’s refusal to join the alliance. The Mediterranean theatre was important, too; here they did manage to put a combined force of British and Russian troops into the field even if, in the event, it achieved very little.

  The Anglo-Russian expedition which landed near Naples in November 1805 retreated, ingloriously, without firing a shot in anger in January 1806, the Russians to Corfu and the British to Sicily. There the British troops remained to guard the island against the expected French attack. It was this small army that, striking into the French-occupied mainland, won the Battle of Maida on 4 July 1806. It was the only conclusive victory achieved by the armies of the Third Coalition.

  Maida was fought in Calabria, on the western side of the Italian peninsula, about fifty miles north of the Straits of Messina. It was a small battle – there were only 11,000 combatants in total – fought on a distant shore far from the hub of affairs. Neither, strictly, can it be said to form part of the story of the Third Coalition, which had been pronounced dead at the Peace of Pressburg six months earlier. But Maida was a child of this alliance, albeit a posthumous one. The history of the combination against Napoleon between 1804 and 1806 and its strategy explains why the British troops were at Maida in this distant part of Italy at all.

  William Windham, the Secretary of War at the time of Maida, proclaimed on receiving news of the victory that it ranked along with Poitiers, Crecy and Agincourt in the annals of British military history.2 Undoubtedly Windham was guilty of over-exaggeration; perhaps The Times was nearer the mark when it reported the news under the headline “Glorious Victory”.3 Neither can one claim that Maida, the youngest offspring of the alliance, in any way makes up for the failings of the parent at Ulm and Austerlitz. Nevertheless, Maida was a signal victory and has sunk into an historical obscurity it does not deserve.

  The grognards of the Army of Naples disparagingly referred to “l’affaire de Sainte Euphemie” (their term for Maida) as “la bataille d’un quart d’heure” – the fifteen minutes of my subtitle – and it is almost as if the Napoleonic establishment decided to erase any recollection of that brief yet painful battle from the collective memory, such is the lack of contemporary French reference to it.

  Perhaps not surprisingly the British, by contrast, were greatly heartened by the battle. It showed how to defeat the mighty French and, as such, presaged the triumphs of the Peninsular War. Sir Charles Oman, writing in the early twentieth century, observed:

  “But for all of those who were present, or who received the report of an intelligent eye-witness, the little-remembered Calabrian battle of Maida was an epoch-making day in British military history. On the sandy plain of the Amato 5,000 infantry in line received the shock of 6,000 in column, and inflicted on them one of the most crushing defeats on a small scale that took place during the whole war.”

  The moral, Oman wrote, was unmistakable; neither did it escape the attention of some of those who fought in the battle.

  “It is worthwhile remembering that some of the officers who were afterwards to be Wellington’s most trusted lieutenants were present at Maida, and understood its meaning, among them Cole, who later commanded the Peninsular 4th Division, the brigadiers Kempt and Oswald, and Colborne the famous colonel of the 52nd Light Infantry.”

  This book tells the story of the battle, of the men who fought in it, of the generals and the tactics they employed. It sets Maida in the wider, European, diplomatic and political context in order to explain how a British army came to fight a battle on the shores of the Mediterranean so far down the boot of Italy.

  Chapter One

  WAR AND PITT (BIS)

  Napoleon’s astonishing public tirade against Lord Whitworth was neither the beginning nor the end of the road towards the resumption of war between Britain and France but a marker along the way. Relations between the two countries were soured by deep mutual suspicions long before Whitworth received his dressing-down at the Tuileries and war was not declared for nearly another two months.

  The administration headed by Henry Addington which took up the reins of government following the resignation of Pitt in March 1801 was determined to seek an end to the war with France. Negotiations began almost at once and on 1 October 1801 the Preliminaries were signed. The terms of the Preliminaries were widely regarded as unsatisfactory, but such was the general desire for peace after so many years of war that these shortcomings were overlooked. Men hoped that the final form of the treaty would clear up the difficulties and ambiguities that were all too apparent in the Preliminaries. The two most unsatisfactory aspects of the draft agreement were the lack of any provision for the future of the Low Countries – the original casus belli – and the fate of Malta.

  Addington’s government has had a bad press down the years, perhaps being seen as an administration that tried to appease a dictator. Contemporaries were frequently scathing about Addington himself; he was widely referred to as “The Doctor”, a snobbish jibe at his relatively humble origins. Neither was his Cabinet greatly distinguished by administrative talent or, importantly, by oratical prowess in Parliament. “The most important offices in the state were bestowed on decorous and laborious mediocrity,” as Lord Macaulay succinctly put it.4

  Those who had been prepared to accept the shortcomings of the Preliminaries in the hope that they would thereby “give peace a chance” were soon to be disillusioned. In the six months between the Preliminaries and the signing of the final treaty in March 1802 it became evident that Napoleon’s aggressively expansionist policy had not been in any way curtailed by the outbreak of peace. During that short period the French acquired the vast territory of Louisiana and sent troops to San Domingo. Both of these were direct threats to the important British commercial and strategic interests in the West Indies. Nearer to home Napoleon severed the canton of Valais from Switzerland, bringing it under French control. This gave France at a stroke sole use of the Alpine passes of Simplon and St Bernard, thereby improving the access for his armies to Italy.

  In the summer and autumn of 1802 Napoleon continued on his course of expansion and aggression in Europe. Displaying a blithe disregard for the terms of the treaties that had so recently been signed, he annexed both Piedmont and Parma in northern Italy and refused to evacuate French troops from around Flushing or Utrecht. These were serious breaches of the European settlement that the Powers had enunciated at Amiens and at the earlier Peace of Luneville (1801) but raised little by way of protest from Addington’s government. The nation and its rulers were enjoying the fruits of peace too much, it seemed – and after so many years at war who could blame them? – to pay any great heed to events across the Channel.

  In October 1802 Napoleon invaded the remainder of Switzerland – whose integrity was supposedly guaranteed by Luneville – on the most feeble of pretexts. Addington, taking up the cudgels on behalf of a small country under threat, formally protested to Paris. The Cabinet dispatched an agent to off
er arms and money, an empty gesture given the respective geographic positions of the two countries and the fact that Switzerland, being landlocked, was beyond the reach of the Royal Navy.

  Addington’s ill-considered action had put the government in an awkward position: unable, materially or militarily, to help the Swiss, it had nevertheless succeeded in angering Napoleon. The Swiss, seeing that help would not be forthcoming, gave in to the inevitable and capitulated to the French. Napoleon, delighting in another example of Britain’s powerlessness to intervene in continental affairs, issued a reminder in the Moniteur, the official newspaper of the regime in Paris, that Britain, not being a signatory to Luneville, was not entitled to appeal to its terms.

  But for all the toothlessness of Addington’s response to the Swiss crisis it did represent a turning point. No longer would the British government look supinely on at European events, nor would it continue to regard the encroachments of the French with indifference. The stiffening of British resolve was exemplified by the instructions issued in November 1802 to Lord Whitworth on his appointment as Ambassador in Paris. Whitworth was ordered to insist to the French government on Britain’s right to intervene in the affairs of the Continent, a right that Napoleon had specifically denied.

  In January 1803, hard upon the Swiss débâcle, the Moniteur published a highly provocative report by Colonel Sebastiani, a French agent, of his activities in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. It reinforced British suspicions that French ambitions in the area were still very much alive. The Sebastiani report also acted as a reminder to the government of the importance of Malta as a base from which to defend British interests in the Mediterranean.