Examining the Roots of British Strategy

In The Lion at Dawn, Nathaniel Jarrett seeks to answer a long-running debate regarding British strategy and foreign policy during the eras of the French Revolutionary and Napoleon. Distinguished historians from Piers Mackesy to Christopher Hall have argued over whether Britain’s towering prime minister during the first half of the period, William Pitt the Younger, was a proponent of a maritime, “Blue Water” strategy, or one that focused on the balance of power on the European continent.

Jarrett finds Pitt’s strategy in a third path, an effort to establish a stable European balance of power based on the cooperation of the Great Powers to maintain a territorial status quo. Jarrett sees a straight line from Pitt’s foreign policy to the stable system established by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-5. He has found important new sources in the archives to craft a much more complete picture of the inner workings of Pitt’s cabinets and how they made foreign policy.

Rather than start with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, or France’s Decision to go to war with Europe in 1791, Jarrett begins with the end of the War for American Independence in 1783. This allows him to bring in important events prior to the revolution, including the War of Bavarian Succession, the Dutch Crisis of 1787, the Nootka Sound Crisis of 1790, the Ochakov Crisis of 1791, and the First Partition of Poland. In these events, Jarrett sees Pitt and Pitt’s subordinates (in particular Secretary of War Henry Dundas, and Foreign Secretary William Grenville) attempt to convince the other powers to join Britain in defending the territorial status quo on the continent.

With the Dutch Crisis of 1787, Prussia was willing to provide its army to restore the status quo in the Netherlands in the face of the inability of a bankrupt France to support the populist Patriot Party that the French had backed against the Orangist Party based on the Prince of Orange. William V. Pitt hoped to build on the Triple Alliance (Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia) that was the basis for success in subsequent crises, but foundered when he sought to reverse Russia’s seizure of the Fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea at the expense of the Ottomans. The Prussians did not honor the Triple Alliance, preferring instead to join Russia in making territorial gains at the expense of Poland. An interesting little sidebar here is the evidence Jarrett has discovered in the British archives that the Russian ambassador to London, Vorontsov, was able to make shrewd use of his commercial and political contacts in Britain to undermine Pitt’s domestic support by courting Charles James Fox, and the Whig opposition to Pitt.

The book then plunges into the Wars of the French Revolution, well-trodden ground. Jarrett does good work in presenting the disconnect between the war plans that the British wanted to implement against France, and what their continental Allies desired. Time and time again, Austria and Prussia in particular were distracted by their wish to carve up Poland further in the Second and Third Partitions.

These divisions were exploited by France and its armies to first hold back the Allies and then to go on the offensive. Spain and Prussia made peace with France in 1795, while the Netherlands was overrun by French armies. Pitt then tried to bring Russia into a new Triple Alliance technically, but without any commitment of armies to struggle against Revolutionary France, so Britain had to largely rely on Austria. At the same time, Pitt pursued a plan to link the counter-revolutionary uprisings inside France, at Lyon and the Vendée, where Allied forces that came too late to prevent the armies of the revolution from crushing those revolts. Then General Bonaparte arrived to overturn the Allies plans by driving the Austrians from Northern Italy, culminating in the Treaties of Leoben and Campo Formio which ended the War of the First Coalition in a French victory.

I find Jarrett’s main thesis interesting, but I feel he misses several important factors. First, he misunderstands what a Maritime Strategy meant, conflating it with a policy focused on overseas colonial acquisitions for Britain. What Britain really sought was the destruction of France’s Navy, attempting to replicate the success they had had in seizing the French fleet at Toulon. That led the British to chase the acquisition of important French ports and the French warships blockaded in them, when they should have focused on joining with the Prussian and Austrian armies to defeat the French armies in the field. This is particularly shown in the British siege of Dunkirk in 1793, which set up the French victory at the Battle of Hondeschoote that allowed the French armies to ultimately conquer the Netherlands.

Second, I think Pitt’s policies were not fixed as early as Jarrett thinks they were. I see them shifting at times between Continental and Maritime goals.

Third, Jarrett misses the issue of subsidies and how Britain’s continental allies were financed. Pitt made a wrong choice in subsidizing the Prussians over the Austrians, who were given loans instead. Those subsidies were wasted when Prussia chose to sign a separate peace with France in 1795. Austria, which proved to be a more consistent ally against France, felt mistreated because of the financial burden of the payments they kept having to make for the loans they had contracted in London (those loans were only paid off after the Napoleonic Wars were ended). Subsequent British governments learned from these mistakes, with subsidies instead of loans being provided to all of Britain’s Allies in the later Coalitions against France.

In the end, the subject of British diplomatic, political, and military actions in the Revolutionary Wars has been covered by other authors more effectively: Piers Mackesy, Steven T. Ross, Jeremy Black, and of course the many studies of British strategy in the Napoleonic Wars which have been written. Still, I would hope that Professor Jarrett will follow up The Lion at Dawn in covering the Wars of the Second and Third Coalitions, to address Pitt’s Premiership to his death in 1805, putting his thesis to the test for the period of 1797-1805 against those other established works. The Lion at Dawn itself is worth reading for its provocative argument, though I do not share his conclusions.

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Note: The Lion at Dawn is also available in e-editions.

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