Gavin Daly

English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1814

During the NapoleonicWars the Channel between England and France remained a major site for smuggling. Both the British and French governments faced this problem. From the French perspective, banned English textiles flooded continental markets; from the British perspective, smugglers evaded duties on continental goods landed on local shores and illegally shipped people and goods out of Britain to France and the Netherlands. While the smuggling of English textiles into Napoleonic-controlled Europe has become part of the history of the Continental Blockade, very little has been written on the contraband flows into and out of Britain and on the English smugglers who were the principal agents in a trans-Channel smuggling community.1 This article aims to address this neglect, throwing new light on the nature of the Channel and its coastal communities and offering further insights into the contested historical questions of identity, patriotism, and Anglo-French relations during the Napoleonic Wars. At the same time that the British state and its people were at war with Napoleonic France and its satellite states, English subjects along the Channel shore continued to trade illegally with the enemy, with the Channel proving a permeable border rather than an impenetrable defensive barrier. In general, English smuggling during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remains an underdeveloped field of historical inquiry.

The Religious World

Private William Wheeler could not help himself when it came to mocking Catholic practices. In the winter of 1811, he was billeted in a large household in the Portuguese town of Penamacor. He described the mistress of the household in the most unflattering terms as ‘an old shrivelled hag who has been smoke dried for some sixty winters and would be a fit character for one of the witches in Macbeth’. The women - the elderly mother thus described, her three young adult daughters and four servants — spent every night in a smoke-filled room huddled around a fire scaring themselves by telling ghost and war-time horror stories. ‘They then count their beads, cross themselves and repeat their Avi Maria till their fears are lulled to rest.’ Joining them one night, Wheeler felt unwelcomed and put it down to the women’ religious bigotry: ‘I was a heretic, and they began to consign me, body and soul to the Devil.’ Wheeler decided to exact revenge: he made a ‘Devil’ with the powder from three of his cartridges and placed it, unbeknown to the women, on the hearth. A comrade of Wheeler’ did likewise in another room. Raking the embers of the fire as if to light his pipe, Wheeler ignited the powder: ‘up jumped the party, calling on Jesus, Maria and Joseph and all the Holy saints they could think up.’ From that night on, the fire was Wheeler’.1

Napoleon and the 'City of Smugglers', 1810-1814

In the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon allowed English smugglers entry into the French ports of Dunkirk and Gravelines, encouraging them to run contraband back and forth across the Channel. Gravelines catered for up to 300 English smugglers, housed in a specially constructed compound known as the ‘city of smugglers’. Napoleon used the smugglers in the war against Britain. The smugglers arrived on the French coast with escaped French prisoners of war, gold guineas, and English newspapers; and returned to England laden with French textiles, brandy, and gin. Smuggling remains a neglected historical subject, and this episode in particular – the relationship between English smugglers and the Napoleonic state between 1810 and 1814 – has attracted little scholarly interest. Yet it provides a rich historical source, illuminating not only the history of Anglo-French Channel smuggling during the early nineteenth century, but offering insights into the economic, social, and maritime history of the Napoleonic Wars.

Conscription and corruption in Napoleonic France: The case of the seine‐inférieure

Abstract This article investigates the implementation and reception of Napoleonic conscription in the Norman department of the Seine‐Inferieure. Specifically, it illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of conscription regulation, and from a broader perspective, it enhances our knowledge of the nature of Napoleonic rule in the departments, and of local Napoleonic history itself. Conscription studies of Napoleonic France have traditionally focused upon desertion and draft‐dodging, and official responses to overcoming these problems. The importance of fraud — the illegal sale of military exemptions — as a means of conscription resistance has received far less historical treatment. The experience of conscription in the Seine‐Inferieure, suggests fraud was more common and sophisticated than is generally assumed. The fraud involved not only peasants and village society, but also notables in collusion with Napoleonic officials including the prefectoral administration. Seen in this light, conscription fraud prov...

British soldiers and the legend of Napoleon

Investigating the letters, diaries, and memoirs of British officers and enlisted men from the Napoleonic Wars, this article explores the hitherto neglected subject of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon. Soldiers often formed mixed and ambivalent views on Napoleon. At one level, this corresponds with a range of attitudes within Britain, highlighting the important connections between soldiers and domestic culture. Yet these views also reveal what soldiers as a distinct cohort prioritized about Napoleon, and how these perceptions evolved over time. They also reveal tensions and divisions within the army itself, and shed light on British soldiers and patriotism. And finally, they add to our understanding of soldiers’ writing practices, especially their cultural context and the differences between wartime writing and memoirs. A diverse and shifting set of cultural frameworks and lived experiences shaped soldiers’ writings on Napoleon – from the Black Legend and Napoleonic Legend, to the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and from Spain and its battlefields to Restoration Paris and post-Waterloo Britain. Tracing the evolution of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the mid-nineteenth century reveals a growing admiration of Napoleon and the increasing hold of the Napoleonic Legend.

'Barbarity more suited to Savages': British Soldiers’ Views of Spanish and Portuguese Violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814

This article explores British soldiers’ reactions to the violence that Iberian soldiers, guerrillas and civilians perpetrated against wounded French soldiers and prisoners of war during the Peninsular War. Whilst they saw this violence as retaliatory, and sympathized with the suffering of the occupied, British soldiers were shocked, disturbed and outraged, often leading them to self-identify with their very enemy — the French. On one level, this violence was seen as a fundamental violation of customary rules of war. Yet further, in British minds it revealed a deeper Iberian culture of violence and way of war, which set the Iberian peoples apart from ‘civilized’ nations.

Billets and Hospitality

Soldiers passed from the landscape to the doors of strangers. In his recollections of military life, John Patterson of the 50th Regiment, who served as a subaltern officer during the Peninsular War, sets up a comical scene of what supposedly transpired when British officers arrived at their billet for the night. Tired and hungry from the day’ march, and impatient to rest in comfort, a British officer arrives at the private home in question, with an entourage in tow including military staff, a servant, a batman and several mules. The door of the unsuspecting Spanish landlord is then struck with the force of a ‘sledge-hammer’. The startled occupant opens the door to find the British officer demanding entrance, and expecting to have the best room in the house. Dialogue follows, in broken Spanish and English. The Spaniard is immediately .greeted by the officer with: ‘O, Senor, where is the bed? — I want the bed, I have a billet here; — it is good, Senor; make haste, make haste!’ The servant adds his bit, in a hybrid of Anglo-Spanish: ‘Make haste, Senor; — where is the room? — where is the bed? — good bed for English officer, — he is a good Christian; — we want bread, wine, butter, acqua- ardent [a spirit], for the soldiers; — we want milk, oil for the lamp, — do you understand? -1 speak good Spanish, — be quick, be quick!’ The overwhelmed Spaniard merely shrugs his shoulders, but finally yields to the ceaseless barrage of demands and awful Spanish, and takes the ‘invaders’ upstairs. The Englishmen need no encouragement, taking it upon themselves to burst through every door and look into every nook and cranny, hoping to find the best apartment. The officer finally rests in comfort, ‘taking every means to attend to number one’.1

Searching for Civilization

On 14 November 1808, the Welshman Edwin Griffith, a captain in the 15th Hussars, made his acquaintance with Spain, disembarking in the northern port city of Corunna. Raised on the family estate of Rhual near Mold in Flintshire, Griffith had been a cavalry officer from his early adolescence. Now, he arrived as part of General Baird’ reinforcements for Sir John Moore, whose army had just arrived in Salamanca. Over the course of his first days in Corunna, Griffith recorded in his journal, and in letters to his wife Harriet and his sister Charlotte, his impressions of the city and the Spanish. His horror and disgust was like that of soldiers arriving in Lisbon, but without the partial redemption of a romantic river panorama. He painted a picture of Spanish backwardness and primitivism. The streets were filthy and the houses ugly. The cacophony of alien street sounds pained his ears: the animated and violent .babble of the locals; the cries of mules and asses; and, worst of all, the ear-piercing screech of the ungreased axles of the ancient wooden carts, pulled by none other than oxen. The houses were scantily furnished, with a ‘few skins of beasts scattered about the floors’ and beds swarming with fleas. As to the local ‘natives’, Griffith found them almost beyond belief. Their ridiculous clothes, poverty, filth and wretchedness ‘convince the Englishman that he is among a different race of beings’. He told Harriet: ‘I hope they may improve upon acquaintance but fear I can never like them.’ And he never did. He summed up his impressions of Spain: ‘At present I can only say that it appears some century’ behind England in everything.’ 1

‘Dark-Eyed Beauties’

It was the day after the end of the siege of Badajoz in April 1812, with British soldiers running amok in the city, that Harry Smith met the love of his life.1 He was a 24-year-old recently promoted captain in the 95th Rifles, and she, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, the scion of an old noble Spanish family, had barely turned 14. She and.3 her elder sister appeared in the camp of the Rifles, leaving behind a pillaged house within the city’ breached walls. Dressed in their mantillas, they were dishevelled and bleeding from the ears, plundering soldiers having ripped out their earrings. The elder sister, married to a Spanish officer, took it upon herself to plead with the British officers present for protection for her younger sister, who was not long free from a convent. Lieutenant John Kincaid, standing outside his tent, was instantly attracted to the younger sister, but she was won over by another — Harry Smith. From that moment on, Harry and Juana become inseparable, and eventually married in the Peninsula. Juana dutifully accompanied her husband throughout the remainder of the war and the rest of his military career. Smith described her thus: never was one so honoured and distinguished as I have been by the possession of this dear child... one with a sense of honour no knight ever exceeded in the most romantic days of chivalry, an understanding superior to her years, a masculine mind with a force of character no consideration could turn from her own just sense of rectitude, and all encased in a frame of Nature’ fairest and most delicate moulding, the figure of an angel, with an eye of light and an expression which then inspired me with a maddening love...2

Landscape and Climate

In the summer of 1809, a party of six officers from the 34th Cumberland Regiment left their encampment at Belem at four o’clock in the morning, bound for their first venture outside Lisbon. Amongst the party was Lieutenant Moyle Sherer. Despite the pre-dawn start, this journey was not part of the military campaign — it was a sight-seeing trip. Granted two days’ leave, the officers and their servants set off in three cabriolets and with great expectations made for their destination — the village of Sintra, ‘a spot’, Sherer recorded, ‘celebrated by all travellers, and proverbial with the inhabitants of Lisbon, for its romantic beaut)/. n Five hours after leaving Lisbon, the officers glimpsed their first sight of Sintra and entered another world entirely, far removed from the stinking metropolis on the Tagus: