Empire, Technology and Seapower

Royal Navy crisis in the age of Palmerston

Howard J. Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134200443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This book examines British naval diplomacy from the end of the Crimean War to the American Civil War, showing how the mid-Victorian Royal Navy suffered serious challenges during the period.

Many recent works have attempted to depict the mid-Victorian Royal Navy as all-powerful, innovative, and even self-assured. In contrast, this work argues that it suffered serious challenges in the form of expanding imperial commitments, national security concerns, precarious diplomatic relations with European Powers and the United States, and technological advancements associated with the armoured warship at the height of the so-called 'Pax Britannica'.

Utilising a wealth of international archival sources, this volume explores the introduction of the monitor form of ironclad during the American Civil War, which deliberately forfeited long-range power-projection for local, coastal command of the sea. It looks at the ways in which the Royal Navy responded to this new technology and uses a wealth of international primary and secondary sources to ascertain how decision-making at Whitehall affected that at Westminster. The result is a better-balanced understanding of Palmerstonian diplomacy from the end of the Crimean War to the American Civil War, the early evolution of the modern capital ship (including the catastrophic loss of the experimental sail-and-turret ironclad H.M.S. Captain), naval power-projection, and the nature of 'empire', 'technology', and 'seapower'.

This book will be of great interest to all students of the Royal Navy, and of maritime and strategic studies in general.

Part I
Palmerstonian ‘gunboat diplomacy’, ironclad technology and the ‘declinist’ controversy

1
The edge of naval defence

The past 30 years of scholarship have witnessed something of an aberration in classic British ‘gunboat diplomacy’ studies of the ‘Pax Britannica’, 1815–1914. As noted by Antony Preston and John Major in their work, Send a Gunboat! (1967), the more traditional definition here might be ‘the use of warships in peacetime to further a nation’s diplomatic and political aims. As such it is neither new nor old’. But here they also stress that the actual historical record does not really ‘begin’ until 1854, with the onset of the Crimean War and the serious development of the steam powered, light draught gunboat for littoral operations against Russia – and that afterwards such weapons platforms were utilised almost exclusively against what the mid­ Victorians regarded as ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’, certainly weaker, peoples around the world, on distant outposts of Britain’s maritime trading and colonial empire. Indeed, ‘in a world untroubled by conflict between the Great Powers the minor warships of the Royal Navy were force enough to oversee British interest abroad’. Significantly, this is followed by the disclaimer that the ‘moral attitudes implicit in certain examples of gunboat actions are neither condoned nor condemned, and the actions should be judged by the prevailing standards of the age’.¹ The authors took their cue from Professor Gerald S. Graham, whose published lectures on The Politics of Naval Supremacy (1965) emphasised the ‘general desire to avoid war that made the so­ called Pax Britannica possible’; for while it was ‘true that men­ of­war were used on occasion to effect specific ends whether in Greece, Latin America or China’, ‘it would be wrong to suggest that the Royal Navy imposed a British peace on the world. … Britain was in no position to seek or to ensure the peace of mankind by means of her fleet’. At best, the distraction of foreign powers, rival or not, throughout the period – from the revolutions of 1848 to the Civil War in America – left the British Empire largely free to pursue its own interests elsewhere, and the fleet itself hovering on the edge of Europe as a sign of Britain’s continued interest in a ‘Balance of Power’ there. Even then, as C. J. Bartlett observed in 1969: ‘Naval supremacy can provide only a limited number of clues to Britain’s nineteenth­ century successes, especially in Europe.’ The ‘Concert of Europe’ had a much more decisive role to play in maintaining peace since the fall of Napoleon. (He then goes so far as to suggest Russia’s defeat at the siege of Sevastopol was more the fault of her own logistics – her lack of railroads – than Britain’s (in)ability to resolve the contest by naval means alone.) It was in this environment, therefore, that British foreign policy in the ‘Age of Palmerston’ saw ‘the navy and its officers as peace­ keepers, international policemen, or as [Lord Palmerston’s] most infallible agents’:

But what is clear is that ‘gunboat diplomacy’ was a useful instrument only in certain conditions. This was a limited form of warfare which succeeded best against divided peoples, some of whom were attracted by western trade, capital and knowledge. If the internal weaknesses and divisions became too pronounced, the society would collapse, and a colonial solution result. The external pressures had also to be carefully controlled, and if more than one outside power were involved, respect for a common discipline was essential. The era of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ soon ended in the Africa of the later nineteenth century under the combined impact of international rivalry and internal decay. The upsurge of local nationalism was a contributory factor in the case of Egypt in 1882, when the successful bombardment of Alexandria really solved nothing. Local sentiment in Latin America repeatedly reduced the efficacy of naval action in the nineteenth century, and was to do so in China from 1919.²

Kenneth Bourne in 1967 had already revealed the practical limitations of ‘Palmerstonian’ foreign policy, for example, when discussing the fate of Greytown, or San Juan de Norte of the ‘Mosquito Coast’ (modern day Nicaragua); from its capture by Miskito Indians supported by a British man­ of­war in 1848 to its destruction by the USS Cyane on 13 July, 1854. Here both the British Empire and the United States sought control over this vital overland transit route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, particularly with the onset of the great gold rush in California. The American bombardment was itself an act of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ every bit as ration­alised by local ‘outrages’ committed against American citizens and officials in Greytown – but also by the imposition of special taxes and duties upon American ships in this British protectorate – as that of the notorious Don Pacifico Affair in Greece four years before.³ In the latter instance, the Royal Navy’s unilateral blockade of Piraeus (Athens) until the British demand for ransom was met by the Greek government sparked international protest. Foreign Secretary Palmerston, however, managed to defend his actions brilliantly in Parliament by declaring finally, that:

as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say civus Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.⁴

Now both the Americans and the British were playing the same game at the same time and place for the same prize. As Bourne noted, Palmerston hoped the circumstances of the Crimean War would mean that British public opinion and Parliament, would now ‘sustain him in a more aggressive policy towards the United States’. Far from ‘distracting’ the European powers from affairs in Central America, the war against Russia allowed Britain to mobilise and modernise its war machine – a tool which could be wielded overseas without the long­ dreaded interference from France, who was for the moment at least a fully­ committed wartime ally. Not only did Palmerston assume all Americans were ‘vulgar minded bullies’ who only responded to direct threats of force, his memorandum as Home Secretary in Lord Aberdeen’s cabinet made sure to specify:

When we have taken Sebastopol and have knocked down Sweaborg and Cronstadt as we shall do with the Lancaster Guns our naval force will be to a great Degree let free … The US have no navy of which we need be afraid, & they might be told that if they were to resort to privateering, we should however reluctantly be obliged to retaliate by burning all their Sea Coast Towns.⁵

This was heady stuff for the 70­year­ old British statesman; a unique opportunity to win a short, sharp conflict against a much larger, more tenacious and more troublesome power than Greece.

But even Russia failed to submit to British naval power alone; Sevastopol defied both Britain and France’s allied combined arms in a long and bitter siege, while the Baltic remained relatively quiet. With such facts before the country it was difficult to rationalise another war against the world’s other great Continental power on the far side of the Atlantic. The American people and their government, meanwhile, retained a defiant attitude, especially when news broke how Sir John Crampton, the British ambassador there, had attempted to sign up recruits for the war against Russia in violation of US neutrality – the whole point being that even Palmerston’s sense of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ required moral and popular support, preferably on both sides of the quarrel, in order for it to achieve with naval means alone any useful political or strategic ends at all. Hence Palmerston, even as Prime Minister from 1855, was obliged to jettison both ‘popular clamour’ and ‘the expression of national feeling’ once the Crampton affair intruded upon Anglo­ American diplomacty. On 15 February, 1856, he was uncharacteristically ‘persuaded’

that there is so much right feeling in the people of the United States, that they attach so much value to the friendship of the people of this great empire, and that they are so sensible that the interests of both are inseparably bound up with the maintenance of friendly relations between the two, that these matters of difference, when they are laid before the Congress of the United States, as they will be before the Parliament of Great Britain, will receive the calm, dispassionate, and reasonable consideration which is essential to their amicable settlement, and which will, I trust, prevent any intemperate individuals, either on the one side of the Atlantic or the other, from plunging the two countries into the calamities of war.⁶

So at the same time British troop reinforcements were quietly sent to Canada, and additional naval units considered for the West Indies – just in case – the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Clarendon, warned Palmerston that he:

Should not hesitate therefore about sending such a fleet to Central America as render collision impossible if we could be sure of support at home, but the cowardly feeling with respect to war with the United States is so general that I believe as soon as the orders for sending the ships were given we should have undignified meetings throughout Lancashire, and an expression of opinion in the House of Commons that would upset the Government.

To Bourne this represented ‘more than a mere battle for moral position and prestige’ which Palmerston and his closest hard­ line supporters subsequently lost in the wake of the Crimean War:

In fumbling for a tougher line they had conjured up the most decisive intervention yet of merchant and radical opinion on American affairs and with Derby, Disraeli, Gladstone and Russell, too, joining with Cobden, Bright, and Roebuck, that intervention was soon to prove of lasting effect. For in the press and parliament alike, not just a passing phase of Anglo­ American relations but the whole concept of an anti­American balance of power policy had been challenged and publicly defeated. The damage to British shipping and trade, the cutting off of those vast supplies of cotton and grain upon which the United Kingdom had become so dependent since the tariff reforms of the 1840s – all this would be horrifying enough. But, as the critics wondered, surely the policy responsible for the war scare was itself futile and wrongheaded.⁷

Notes

1 Preston and Major, Send a Gunboat, 1967: 3–8. The second revised version from Conway Maritime Press (2007) was given the more forceful and ambitious subtitle of ‘The Victorian Navy and Supremacy at Sea’ with the added intention of supplying ‘lessons applicable to modern limited naval warfare’.

2 Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy, 1965: 119–20; Bartlett, ‘Statecraft, Power and Influence’ in Bartlett (ed.), Britain Pre-Eminent, 1969: 175–91. Over 20 years later and Bartlett still confirmed that ‘Palmerston’s “gunboat diplomacy” was a usable instrument against only weaker states or peoples’, Bartlett, Defence and Diplomacy, 1993: 2.

3 ‘No doubt it was all the more offensive inasmuch as in the sheer effrontery of gunboat diplomacy it had outshone even the best efforts of the British navy.’ (Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1967: 182.)

4 See Hansard, 25 June, 1850, 3rd Series, Vol. 112: 380–444. Don Pacifico was a Portuguese Jew, born in Gibraltar in 1784 and therefore a British citizen. On Easter Day, 1847, his house was attacked by a local mob and burnt down. When his claims for compensation went unheeded by Greek officials he turned to British authorities who were already exasperated with the local government’s financial dealings. The British squadron under the command of Sir William Parker blockaded Athens from January 1850 until April, awaiting new instructions, while the Greeks finally gave in to the inflated claims then detailed by Pacifico.

5 Memorandum dated 10 September, 1854, from Bourne, ‘Lord Palmerston’s “Ginger­ beer” Triumph, 1st July, 1856’, in Bourne and Watt (eds), Studies in International History, 1967: 148–50.

6 Hansard, 15 February, 1856, 3rd series, Vol. 111: 844–50.

7 Clarendon to Palmerston, 4 June, 1856, from Bourne, Great Britain, op. cit.: 197; 200. See also Dykstra, The Shifting Balance of Power, 1999. Charles Campbell likewise observed ‘this outlook was strongly reinforced by the new realization that a [Central American] canal could not soon be built after all’, with Britain abandoning her tiresome protectorate over the Mosquito Coast to Nicaragua in 1860; Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement, 1974: 89–91. Duncan Andrew Campbell has since taken a contrary view, claiming that US opposition to the attack on Russia by Britain and France engendered ‘a new lease of life’ for anti­Americanism in Britain by 1856, and this rightly justified Britain’s ‘lack of sympathy’ for the United States during the Civil War; Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 2007: 137–8.

2
British decline

By 1976, Paul Kennedy’s own examination of British gunboat diplomacy during the nineteenth century expanded into a sobering history of the ‘Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery’ as a whole. James Morris had devoted three volumes over ten years (1968–78) eulogising the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Palmerstonian ‘gunboat diplomacy’, ironclad technology and the ‘declinist’ controversy
• Part II From the Crimean War to the American Civil War: naval innovation and the Anglo-French balance of power
• Part III ‘Splendid Isolation’, the ‘Cherbourg Strategy’ and the ‘Great Armament’ reconsidered
• Part IV Iron Lion or Paper Tiger? The myth of British naval intervention in the American Civil War
• Bibliography
• Index