Part #36: Cross of Fire, Heart of Blood
“
Dieu, et mon droit.”
– Louis XVII’s first words upon setting foot on the soil of Brittany
*
From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926) –
Looking back on the issue, many historians have found it rather strange that the French Republican government under Robespierre had not foreseen the fact that Brittany and the Vendée would be trouble spots for the Revolution. Both areas had benefited under the same quirks of the
ancien regime that the urbanite supporters of the Revolution had hated. In the words of Arthur Spencer, “no farmer has ever complained about a law that makes it more difficult for him to pay taxes to the government”. As a Duchy, Brittany continued to enjoy special privileges and autonomy under the Kingdom of France, including its own relatively powerful
parlement.
The Vendée, though having no such special constitutional status, possessed a nobility that was more down-to-earth and less divided from commoners than that in Paris, and the excesses of the Revolution against the First Estate shocked Vendean public opinion. But it was those against the Second Estate that really clinched it. Perhaps because it had been a battleground between Protestant Huguenots and Catholics two centuries before, the Vendeans were some of the more fiercely devout Catholics in all France. Anti-clerical measures on the part of the Revolution – both relatively passive ones such as stopping clerical privileges, and active ones such as Hébert’s pogroms – served to further align Vendean feeling against the Republican government.
The strange part was that there was no rebellion for the first three years of the Republic’s existence. This was simply because, to oversimplify somewhat, no-one had ever been sent from Paris to check that the western provinces remained loyal to Paris. The idea that
to possess the capital city is to possess the state was a cornerstone of Revolutionary thinking, and the Republicans’ possession of Paris did serve to turn much undecided French public opinion to their side in the early days. However, Brittany in particular had been largely unaffected even by the trend towards centralisation during the days of Bourbon absolutism. It was not a case of rebellion in the years between the King’s phlogistication and 1798: simply that Vendean and Breton officials ignored any pronouncements coming out of Paris. Even though Robespierre feared a British invasion of the western coast of France, the Republican government did not try to enforce its authority there simply because it was focused entirely on defeating Austria.
This changed in 1798. At a meeting between the three Consuls (Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, Pierre Boulanger and Jean de Lisieux) in Christmas 1797 (a.k.a. Chien Nivôse de l’an Deux), Robespierre voiced his fear of a British invasion, noting that no real troops could be spared from the planned invasion of Germany, the Rubicon Offensive. Boulanger had suggested that the
Armée républicaine françaises (ARF) instead use the western coastlands as training ground for raw recruits, marching them up and down to provide a convincing military presence for any British spies. Robespierre had agreed, noting that this would also help extend governmental control into an area that had (vaguely) been reported to be…difficult.
Ironically, it was this move that first sparked rebellion in the west. The first French recruits left their barracks in March 1798, at around the same time as the launching of Rubicon in the east. Initially Boulanger’s plan worked, with overly nervous British agents reporting that the French were moving troops in to secure the west, and that the British government’s planned Seigneur Offensive would have to be cancelled. However, even as the doddering Marquess of Rockingham hesitated, things came to a head. The recruits were drawn from all over France, practically foreigners to many of the locals, and they were led by drill sergeants often considered too undisciplined to be serving against Austria. And one of the things the troops practiced was Boulanger’s strategy of living off the land…the result was a reign of terror against the local people, with looting and confiscation rife. The troops were used to a world, by now, where you could get away with anything if you could bluff the other person into thinking you had sanction from Robespierre. The Vendeans…were not.
Historians are divided on what incident first sparked off the Chouannerie, just as they are on the causes of the Jacobin Revolution. Many people have drawn attention to a particular crime, the rape of a mother superior, the burning down of a noble’s house with his family still inside, the desecration of a church. It is quite probable that we will never know for sure. What
is known that, in an action similar to that of the Polish rebellion raging at the same time in Eastern Europe, many quietly organised rebel groups sprang into life on the same day: October 9th, the day of St Denis, patron saint of France. That day, Sarrasin Vendémiaire de l’an Trois, was also a day of celebration for the Republicans, at least before they heard about what was happening in the west. It was on this day that the French armies took Regensburg and the Holy Roman Empire breathed its last (details of which, see later chapters).
Yet victory in the east came together with crisis in the west. The rebels, who called themselves
chouans after their owl-call recognition signal, conducted a surprisingly organised counter-revolutionary campaign in the first few days of their existence. Drunken recruits, fat from eating off the backs of the Vendean people, had their throats cut. Captured Republican officers were executed by the same chirurgiens they had unleashed on the local nobles. Bloody Flags were burned, Temples of Reason blown up. The white flag of the monarchy came up, and with it was another: a red cross and heart on a white field, accompanied with the words
Dieu le Roi – the Holy Heart of the Vendée.[1] The people had issued a challenge to the Revolution, the first serious one it had had since Toulon.
The Vendeans were joined by the Bretons, who raised an army under Charles Armand Tuffin, the Marquis of Rouërie (or Rogery, as it was literally and amusingly translated by English journalists). Armand[2] was a veteran of the Second Platinean War[3] and was generally liked by the Breton people, who saw him as one of them. The Bretons added the Vendean heart to their own ermine flag and joined the Vendeans in their campaign against the terrorising troops. By November, the Revolutionary presence in the two provinces had been virtually wiped out. Royal France was no longer merely an
outre-mer idea, a government in exile with some colonies. If
l’état c’est moi, then Louis XVII was back.
The Chouannerie consumed the attention of both the British and French press in the winter of 1798, despite Robespierre’s attempts to gag the latter. Equally, both nations’ politicians began to demand intervention. In Westminster, when Charles James Fox attempted to condemn the Chouans for ‘backsliding against the cause of liberty’, he was booed down. It was at this point that Richard Burke, the still young son of Edmund, tabled his first Parliamentary motion by asking for British intervention on the side of the Chouans. Meanwhile in Paris, even the cowed rubber-stamp that Robespierre had reduced the National Legislative Assembly to nonetheless managed to pluck up the courage to insist on action.
It was not as though Robespierre himself disagreed, though. He had always considered Britain to be a dangerous enemy to have at your back, and now was a blatant opportunity for the British to attack. The Consuls recognised that this would have to be some sort of seaborne invasion, so one mode of action would be to attempt to intercept the British forces in the Channel (
La Manche). However, when Lisieux asked Surcouf to consider a plan for such an eventuality, the pioneering sailor simply stared incredulously at him for half a minute before replying that it would be nothing more than a waste of lives. Republican France had only perhaps a third of the navy that pre-Revolutionary France had, and that of suspect loyalty and training. Too many good sailors had left with Leo Bone and joined the Dauphin in Britain. Surcouf suggested that either the Dutch or Spanish Navies could at least give the Royal Navy pause, though, if there were some way that they could be drawn into the war diplomatically.
This exchange is often used to illustrate the difference between Lisieux and Robespierre. Upon hearing this, and informing Surcouf that it was extremely unlikely that the services of the Dutch or Spanish could be acquired, Lisieux simply rejected the idea that the Republic could mount a serious challenge to Britain’s forces enroute. They would simply have to find a way to defeat them on land. Robespierre, however, dismissed this opinion (and indeed Lisieux had to talk him out of sentencing Surcouf to a summary trial and execution for faint-heartedness). Having been told by one sailor that it was impossible, Robespierre simply asked another and another until he got the right answer. This came from Charles Villeneuve, a character who was afterwards considered a lunatic by both French sides, but bizarrely was quite popular among the British, who have always appreciated a really dramatic futile gesture, and he was referred to respectfully in the British press as ‘Mr Newton’, the direct translation of his name.
Villeneuve argued that much of the Royal Navy was dispersed around the world and that the home fleet would lack experience (not being aware of the Royal Navy’s practice of rotating ships between fleets fairly often). More sensibly, he pointed out the example of the Battle of Trafalgar[4] in 1783: the British had lost to the Franco-Spanish forces, but had nonetheless achieved much of their objective (to stop the allies resupplying their forces in South America) as they had sunk many of the troop transport ships and forced others to turn back. Villeneuve suggested that the small French Republican Navy could force a similar Pyrrhic victory on the British invasion force here.
Aside from the questionable wisdom of a course of action that was assumed to end in the near-destruction of the French fleet even if it succeeded, Villeneuve’s plan fell short in other ways. Seigneur, as the British operation to cross the Channel and support the Chouans was called, was a far cry from the Second Platinean War operation. The Franco-Spanish in that conflict had been trying to support troops thousands of miles away, across a vast ocean. The Channel, no matter how much some among the British thought it was, was anything but. The French would have a very narrow window of opportunity to attack the British fleet, and furthermore if a British troopship was damaged, it might well be able to return to port, be repaired and out again within a day or two.
Nonetheless, Robespierre seized on the plan and ordered it approved. Lisieux reluctantly consented, but he and Boulanger privately assumed it was unlikely to work, and began withdrawing forces from Germany to build up new armies to use against the Chouans. This is sometimes cited by historians as being the reason behind Mozart’s victory at the Siege of Vienna in March 1799, but in truth the effects of the shift of troops did not really emerge until midsummer of that year. It was simply that Leroux’s army had finally outrun its supply lines, despite Ney’s efforts, and that the French Revolutionary armies’ tactic of living off the land did not work very well when it came to besieging a city for months (for more, see later chapters).
The British launched Seigneur in February. The political side of the plan was the brainchild of Richard Burke and the Dauphin, who had cooperated while the latter had been staying in London and raising support among French exiles there. Their political alliance and friendship meant that Louis XVII was exposed to the political system of the British Parliament, and recorded in his diary that it was: “…certainly not without its flaws…but, much like the table they keep, the constitution the British maintain is devoted to a solid, stodgy sense of stability…and in the aftermath of what we have witnessed, perhaps France needs such a monastic Diet for some time…”[5]
Seigneur was deployed from then four ports of Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Lowestoft. The first three consisted of mainly British troopships carrying British or American troops and supported by British warships, while the Lowestoft fleet was a motley collection of borrowed troopships (some of them converted former slave-ships, a fact which the Revolutionary propagandists had much fun with), carrying the Most Catholic and Christian Royal Army of the King[6] and supported by the French Royal Naval ships that Leo Bone had ‘rescued’ from Toulon. The French force was commanded by the indecisive Admiral the Comte d’Estaing and his more competent subordinate Captain Etienne Lucas. The British Channel Squadron was under the overall command of Admiral Sir William Byng, the son of John Byng the hero of the Second Glorious Revolution. Under that, the Plymouth fleet was commanded by Commodore Horatio Nelson, the Portsmouth fleet by Commodore Leo Bone, and the Chatham fleet by Rear-Admiral Adam Duncan, a senior veteran. Each force consisted of about a dozen ships of the line and twenty frigates, protecting around fifteen transports of various sizes carrying infantry, cavalry and artillery.
Against these four forces – which only represented part of Britain’s worldwide naval strength – Villeneuve had twenty ships of the line and eighteen frigates (most of the Republic’s frigates had already been sent off by Surcouf on raiding or messenger missions). The British were aware, by their spy network (augmented by the fact that the Dauphin could call upon secret loyalists in France) that Villeneuve was concentrating his forces in Dieppe in order to raid any Channel-crossing force. However, British opinions of Villeneuve’s capabilities were low. “The French spend more time repainting their ships than they do rolling out their guns,” sneered Commodore Nelson in his diary, a reference to the new red-and-black Revolutionary chequer pattern that the Republican Navy had adopted.[7] The British made no serious attempts to harry Villeneuve’s ships as they gathered from other French ports.
Seigneur was launched on 14th February, St Valentine’s Day. Villeneuve was kept well informed by his own intelligence network, a series of disguised fishing boats that communicated over the horizon using flags, and was informed of the launch bare hours later. He had more time to prepare because the British did not go straight across the Channel, instead forming up the four fleets to swing around Finisterre to the west and launch a concerted descent on Quiberon. Villeneuve launched on short notice: despite Nelson’s scepticism, he had drilled his men well and they fought as well as could be expected considering the disadvantages they faced. Villeneuve was determined to intercept one of the British fleets before they combined: like Hoche in Italy, he believed that success might be grasped if he could divide the enemy and hit each portion with his whole force.
The wind was with Villeneuve and one of his ships, the
Égalité, sighted the Chatham fleet before Admiral Duncan had joined the others. It was just as possible that Villeneuve could have found the Royal French fleet that was travelling through the same waters, and some speculative romantics have considered the consequences of what might have happened if Villeneuve had managed to sink the Dauphin’s ship.
But no: Villeneuve attacked Duncan with the strategy he had developed. The French ships of the line formed the usual line against their British counterparts, tying them down, while the frigates ignored their British counterparts and engaged the transports directly, suffering damage as their did so. Villeneuve’s aggressive action was surprisingly successful: though the French lost eight ships of the line and ten frigates (to ten and three British, respectively), the French frigates managed to sink half the British transports before the others’ captains, deciding that their own escorts were not doing their job, gybed and returned to port. Villeneuve, his objective completed, ordered a withdrawal and regrouping. This required leaving some damaged French ships behind, but Duncan was unable to pursue. French gunnery tactics focused on attacking the masts, sails and rigging, with the result that many British ships were left only lightly damaged but disabled. Duncan’s remaining movement-capable forces, mostly frigates, were not enough to challenge even Villeneuve’s wounded fleet. Two frigates tried and were hulled at long range by French stern chasers before they could reply.
Villeneuve’s attack had been remarkably successful, though he had lost much of his own forces. Deciding that today was his day of luck, he decided to find another British force, but soon his scouts reported that the two remaining British fleets and the Royal French had successfully amalgamated off Portland and, having waited for a day for Duncan, had given up and set sail for Finisterre.
The French Admiral pursued, setting a course for destiny…
[1]
Coeur sacré is commonly translated Sacred Heart in English, but I think Holy Heart is more accurate.
[2]I have referred to him as Armand as this is how most OTL Americans know him.
[3]In OTL he fought in the American Revolutionary War.
[4]Recall that in TTL, Trafalgar was a 1783 battle between the Franco-Spanish and British during the Second Platinean War, and the British lost.
[5]Note the pun.
[6]I know it sounds a bit redundant but this is based on the actual names of some OTL loyalist French armies.
[7]This is an irony because in OTL it was Nelson who popularised a (yellow and black) chequer pattern on royal Navy ships.
Part #37: And Charlemagne Wept
“The Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”
– Voltaire
*
From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -
Not since the Third War of Supremacy had Austrian forces been so dominated. Forty years later, history repeated itself as battle after battle went the way of the enemy. Thibault Leroux was no Frederick II of Prussia, but he did not need to be.[1] Unlike the Prussians, the French were not fighting with outnumbered forces against two or three powerful foes at once. With the increasing withdrawal of the German states’ armies to defend their own frontiers, the forces that Vienna could bring to bear were sloughing off thousands daily without ever meeting the enemy.
The chaos of the unilateral withdrawals also served to hurt the Austrian war effort, as Ferdinand IV’s ministers would assume a town defended by loyal Hessian or Saxon troops, only to learn days later that they had abandoned it to the French. Sometimes an Austrian army under a good commander would make a stand and hold back one of Leroux’s armies, only to have to withdraw anyway, as the French had almost surrounded them by occupying areas that had been abandoned by Austrian allies. Such was the terrible beauty of the War of Lightning strategy: the French’s rapid advance had been the cause of the withdrawals in the first place, as the German states looked nervously at the fate of Baden and Württemburg; and now those withdrawals only aided the speed of the French drive to the east. It was a vicious circle, ever decreasing in diameter, and Austria’s survival sat at its heart.
Only Brunswicker and Hanoverian troops, backed by token British forces, continued to fight on, but they were too small in number to provide much help to the Austrians. Matters worsened as the Second War of the Polish Succession heated up, threatening to spill over into states bordering Saxony and Prussia, and states such as Mecklenburg – which had previously left their armies in place, considering their home territories not threatened by the French – joined the general withdrawal. The pan-German alliance, the attempt to rebuild the Holy Empire in spirit as well as name, had crumbled long before the French reached Regensburg.
The total defeat of Davidovich at Burgau in August 1798 resounded throughout all of Germany. Davidovich’s army had been Austria’s last hope of stopping the French advance before it entered Bavaria – which was now part of Austria’s core territory, since the land exchange in 1783. The Bavarian army was as yet not integrated with its Austrian counterpart, and many Bavarians were unenthusiastic about being part of Austria. Ferdinand IV feared that the French might find willing collaborators in the country, which would be both a disaster for Austria in general and sound the death knell for his attempts to reunite Germany.[2] The current withdrawals were helping the French indirectly, but if Germans turned to the Revolution and fought other Germans, then all was lost.
Leroux’s advance stalled somewhat throughout September. The War of Lightning was not about taking and holding territory; that was the task of follow-up operations, such as those that Ney was now pursuing in Swabia, having made his base of operations at Stuttgart. No, the goal for Leroux was simply to remain on the offensive, aggressively attacking along a narrow axis of advance aimed at Regensburg, and then Vienna. The Revolutionary doctrine of
to possess the capital is to possess the country was about to be tested.[3]
But Leroux realised that the Austrians would fight tooth and nail here, and if they remained on the defensive, the French could easily expend themselves and achieve nothing. Things were fragile. French victory rested on, not solid strength, but an
idea, the idea among the Germans that their invincible armies could be anywhere, everywhere, and were backed up by a horde who devastated the countries in their wake. If Leroux was routed at Regensburg, that image would collapse. Ney’s position was still delicate, and if the Badenese and Württembergers rose up in combination with a renewed Austrian offensive, the French position in Germany could collapse. Determined to avoid that nightmare scenario, Leroux allowed the advance to slow while he built up his forces, waiting for the ammunition steam-wagons to catch up and for Ney to send reinforcements through.
This gave the Germans a few weeks to prepare. Mozart had been placed in command by Ferdinand IV, and he withdrew the majority of the Austrian armies to Lower Austria itself. Mozart, an insightful general, had discerned the French strategy of aiming at possession of the capital. Therefore, he reasoned, if the French could be defeated at Vienna then their whole plan would come apart and Austria might be saved. He knew that they would first aim for Regensburg, but believed that there was simply not enough time to reinforce the Holy Roman capital, and that to do so would only fruitlessly throw away men that woul be needed to defend Vienna. He authorised only a single army under Alvinczi as a delaying force, then began to bring in troops from all across the Empire.
Archduke Ferdinand’s army came up through the Brenner Pass, leaving a guard to prevent Hoche’s force from following. Using the Alpine terrain against the French just as Marat’s Swiss Republic forces had against them the previous year, the Austrians were able to wear down Hoche’s already depleted forces enough that even that dynamic general gave up and retreated to Venice. Officials and garrison troops sent from Paris were already converting Venetia into an integral part of Hoche’s invented Italian Republic, which also encompassed Piedmont, Modena, Parma, and Milan.
Also, echoing Maria Theresa’s efforts of fifty years before, Mozart called up levies from the Austrian possessions in the east: Hungarians, Croats and Transylvanians. An attempt to levy troops from Krakau failed, with the city practically in revolt due to the war in Poland next door. However, these forces served to bolster the Austrians massing in Lower Austria. Mozart ordered the building of new defensive fortifications, mostly makeshift, knowing that he had little time. Vienna had resisted two sieges from the Turks, from the east, but could it survive this outbreak of new barbarism from the west?
Meanwhile, Ferdinand IV arrived in Regensburg to address the Reichstag. The Emperor, it was universally agreed by eye-witnesses, was not a well man. He had spent the past three years pacing up and down the Schönbrunn Palace, being fed gradually worsening news from messengers from the front. Perhaps even more damaging to him than the stories of defeats and reversals were those that told him that he was betrayed, that his great dream to create a Holy Roman Empire worthy of the name was dead forever. He first began to visibly sicken upon hearing of Charles Theodore’s betrayal and non-aggression treaty with France, and had rapidly worsened after the successes of the Poséidon and Rubicon offensives.
Now, on October 9th, he addressed the Reichstag in the city hall of Regensburg, where it had been meeting permanently for the last century and a half. Representatives of all the German states were there, though most of those states had practically withdrawn unto themselves and now remained in isolation, hoping that the French would pass over them like the angel of death if they made no aggressive moves. The Reichstag was a strange organisation. Ever since it had settled down in Regensburg, it had become gradually more and more divorced from real events in wider Germany, and had produced an elite ruling class of politicians and civil servants who had more in common with each other than either had with the states they were supposed to be representing. Even now, the Saxon and Brandenburger (Prussian) representatives discussed matters cordially, while their homelands fought a vicious, bloody war over the fate of Poland. It had an air of unreality, otherworldliness, as though concerns of the outside world could never come here.
But that was a lie. Even as Ferdinand IV stood up to address the Reichstag, the first distant rumbles began to sound on the horizon. Not thunder, something far worse. Leroux was on the move, his Cugnot-propelled heavy artillery in the lead, blasting a path through Alvinczi’s lines west of the city.
Despite this distraction, Ferdinand IV commanded the whole attention of the Reichstag. His eyes wild and staring, dead with hopelessness, the Emperor gave his infamous Dissolution Speech, culminating in:
“We are betrayed. The Empire is no more. I have failed as Emperor, and let that name die with me. The French are coming, and you must look to yourselves…as you already have. No more shall come from Vienna. I am the new Romulus Augustulus, and behold, my Odoacer comes out of Gallia! It is finished. Go! Take your fools’ baubles, and beg the Lord for mercy!”
By the end of his speech, the Emperor was having to shout, both over the words of outrage from the Reichstag and the thunder of the French guns from outside, as Alvinczi’s army was crushed. Ferdinand IV became red in the face with the effort, after he had remained in the Schönbrunn Palace and weakened for so long, and bare seconds after getting out the word ‘mercy’, he collapsed. The Reichstag descended into chaos, and it did not take long for the rumour to emerge – the rumour that was the truth. Emperor Ferdinand IV, Joseph the Last, had died from a heart attack.
The Holy Roman Empire was unique in its own way. Though the Empire had been made hereditary centuries ago, Joseph’s heir the young Archduke Francis would only become King of the Romans on his death. It was required that the Council of Electors confirm him before he become Emperor Francis II, and now the Council of Electors fled from the Regensburg city hall, followed by the Council of Princes and the Council of Cities. Legend says, though it has not been backed up by any historian, that the first one out of the door was the representative of Charles Theodore of Flanders and the Palatinate, the first Prince-Elector to betray Joseph, and he was followed by those of the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxony. But all the participants fled the city. They had all heard of the rumours from the west, of how the wild Sans-Culottes troops would lock all the nobles of a town in the city hall and then burn it down, capering and whooping as the sick stink of burning flesh wafted over the countryside.
Once the Reichstag had fled, the collapse at Regensburg was swiftly precipitated. Although Alvinczi himself escaped with a portion of his army, the French rolled over the city and burned down the city hall, even though no-one remained within. Both the Protestant mayor of Regensburg and the Roman Catholic archbishop – Regensburg was technically five states in the Reichstag, with the Protestant Imperial City and the Catholic archbishopric and three monasteries – attempted to surrender the city to the French, only to be cut down by the raging Sans-Culottes. Despite Leroux’s efforts to moderate the slaughter, the French armies were out of control and the sack of the city culminated in a fire that destroyed large portions of it. The monasteries were ‘requisitioned’, with the monks thrown out and the buildings used as arsenals.
Leroux was furious, both because the sack had destroyed much of the supplies he had hoped to obtain from the city, and because he had lost much of his chance for gaining support from the people of Bavaria. He pressed on regardless, reassembling the army, bringing it back under control. Regensburg was possessed by the forces of Revolutionary France. All that remained now was to take Vienna.
And yet, on the same day, the Vendeans and Bretons rose up in the Chouannerie, and in the darkest hour of Germany, a faint hope began to bloom that the Revolution’s hellish triumphs would one day come to an end…
[1] NB in TTL he is not Frederick the Great, because Prussia lost the war badly in the end, despite his early victories.
[2]Since Prussia’s weakening relative to OTL, the Austrians have been pursuing a moderately successful policy of trying to rebuild German unity since the 1760s, which is now crumbling.
[3] Of course this is before the Chouannerie, which starts in October 1798.
Part #38: Confrontations
“The great Chinese writer Sun Tsuy[1] writes that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; whereas if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win only half the time. This is unsurprising, as any politicially aware individual will know that half the real enemies lie within…”
– General Pavel Alexandrovich Andreyev, 1924
*
From – “The Sons of George III and I”, by Philip Hittle, University of Philadelphia Press (1948) –
After his father’s unconventional marriage, the British establishment was desperate to return to a policy of dynastic alliances with George III. British attempts to form alliances with the royal houses of Germany – marrying off daughters and granddaughters of George I to the rulers of Denmark, Prussia, the Netherlands and many more – had stalled with the Second Glorious Revolution, for Frederick I had become estranged from most of his sisters and aunts. British influence in the Germanies waned, and was only slightly restored when Frederick’s only daughter Princess Mildred was married to King Johannes II of Denmark.
From the perspective of the establishment, it would be better to walk before one could run. Hanover itself had grown gradually more distant from Britain over the years, the branches of the House of Hanover still living there mostly having preferred William IV to Frederick and being suspicious about the manner of his death. The governments of Rockingham and Portland (in truth, Burke) were determined to rebuild the bridge between Britain and Hanover, by ties of blood. To that end, George III married his cousin Princess Sophia of Hanover, the daughter of Frederick’s sister Princess Amelia Sophia.[2]
The marriage, though not as violent perhaps as that of his grandfather George II, was certainly loveless and it is generally acknowledged that George III maintained an American mistress. However, as it often paradoxically the case, it produced a large issue, whereas Frederick’s had only led to three surviving children – George III, Frederick William the Duke of York, and Princess Mildred, who became Queen of Denmark. George III, by contrast, was father to Prince Frederick George the Prince of Wales, his heir (born in 1765), Princess Carolina (born 1767), who became the Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel; then a gap due to two sons dying in infancy; then Princess Amelia (born 1770), who became the Duchess of Brunswick after marrying her cousin the Duke, sealing one of the rifts Frederick I had opened up; then Prince Henry William, the Duke of Cambridge (born 1771) and finally Princess Augusta (born 1772), who never married.
Prince Frederick George was a dashing and popular heir, generally agreed to embody many of the best traits of his namesake grandfather. He joined the British Army, serving in America against the Indians and then leading an army to Flanders during the early stages of the Jacobin Wars. Although that incident ended with an embarrassing withdrawal due to Charles Theodore’s declaration of neutrality, most men believed that Frederick William was a decent commander, and not so arrogant that he did not delegate to more experienced lieutenants. When he was placed in command of the Seigneur Offensive, the invasion of western France to support the Chouannerie in February 1799, these men included General Sir Ralph Abercromby, Colonel Sir Thomas Græme and Colonel Sir John Moore, resulting in the
Register’s well-known cartoon depicting the French Revolutionaries fleeing from an army of men in full mediaeval battle-armour from the waist up, but kilts from the waist down, i.e., an Army of Scottish Knights.[3]
His younger brother Prince Henry William could not have been more of a contrast. An intellectual, he preferred discussing art over the dinner table to the foxhunt, and took a proactive part in political debates, somewhat alarming the establishment, which felt that royals doing so was in violation of the British Constitution. Like most of the descendants of Frederick I, he travelled extensively to the Empire of North America and liked the country – mainly for its fauna and flora, on such a larger scale than those of Europe. Henry William sponsored the further expeditions of Erasmus Darwin (II) to the Susan-Mary region, and patronised the creation of the Royal and Imperial Museum of Natural History when it was separated from the British Museum in 1793. But, unlike his father and grandfather, Henry William was horrified by what he saw of the institution of slavery in the American colonies, and wrote extensive pamphlets on the subject, irritating many established business interests who thought that royalty should be above such things. It was inevitable that Henry William should become part of the Radical-leaning Whig movement led by Charles James Fox, which sought extensive political reforms.
The majority of Britons, therefore, were considerably relieved when Prince Frederick’s wife Princess Charlotte of Ansbach conceived in the winter of 1798, just before Frederick left for France. Anything to avoid such a dangerous individual as Henry William sitting on the throne of Great Britain…
*
From – “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926) –
After Admiral Villeneuve’s effective if Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Wight[4] the Frenchman was unsatisfied. He knew that he had to inflict as much damage as possible on the combined fleet, to sink as many troopships as he could: each would make the job of the overstretched French land armies just a little easier, and the Republic could afford to lose ships more than she could afford to lose soldiers, for the war would be won or lost on land. Villeneuve had a cold appreciation of all this, and was willing to give his life – and all those of his men, of course… - to ensure it.
To that end, Villeneuve paused only to make cursory repairs, to run up new sails and to swab out all of his guns. It was at this point that his ships of the line successfully sunk two pursuing frigates of Duncan at extreme range with their stern chasers, providing a boost of morale to the Republican sailors. Villeneuve seized the moment and sent out his famous message in flags: “
Allons, enfants de la patrie! Qu'un sang impur colore la Manche du rouge républicain!”
Possibly the message would have been more effective if the Revolutionary naval ministry had not changed the flag codes eight times in the past month in an attempt to find the most ‘rational’ one; as it was, only about half of Villeneuve’s ships worked it out, but it was nonetheless an historic moment. The Republican fleet pressed on westwards, but their damaged sails and hulls meant that they only slowly closed the distance with the combined Allied fleet, even though the latter was hampered by their sluggish transports.
The Allied fleet had formed up off Portsmouth the day before. It was organised to place the Royal French forces in the centre, with Nelson’s forces taking the van and Bone’s guarding the rear. The British were determined to protect the Royal French at all costs, being a valuable propaganda tool that turned this war ideological – liberal monarchists united against violent republicans – rather than being yet another futile round of Anglo-French war. The latter would be useless, as France had no possessions left that Britain wanted, save in India, and the results of wars in Europe had little impact on what happened in India. The French retained Louisiana and Haiti in the New World, but both possessed so many French colonists – Louisiana had been a sinkhole for all those the British had ejected from Acadia, Canada, the Ohio Country and Susan-Mary – that trying to assimilate them would be futile. In order for Britain to be able to achieve a continental victory, they had to have support from some of the people of France, and to do that they needed the King of France.
Villeneuve realised all this as much as the British. He received good intelligence from co-opted fishing boats that spied on the Allied fleet as it moved slowly around Finisterre. He correctly guessed that they were aiming at Quiberon – though it was still possessed fortifications held by besieged Republican troops, the British had previously fought there in 1759 and many of their older commanders would remember the layout of the bay from their service their as young midshipmen as lieutenants. So, for that matter, would the Royal French, many of whom had fought in the same battle on the opposite side. An advantage like that in intelligence could be significant.
The Republican Admiral decided, then, that the only target worth going for was the Dauphin’s ship, the Royal flagship – the
Améthyste. Sacrificing all his ships in a quixotic attack would be worth it, because the death of the Dauphin should result in a collapse of any coherency among the Chouannerie and Britain losing the ideological character of its war. To that end, Villeneuve drew up an attack of startling aggressiveness, which featured a feint on Bone’s guarded transports followed by a rapid push through to attack the
Améthyste when Bone broke away from the main fleet to form his line of battle. It would almost certainly result in the destruction of the Republican fleet, but if Louis XVII was cut in half by a cannonball then nothing else would matter. Villeneuve issued the orders. Blood would turn the Channel red indeed…
*
From - "The Man With Three Names - A Life and Times of Napoleone Buonaparte" (Dr Henri Pelletier, University of Nantes Press, 1962) :
Commodore Leo Bone had served in several actions after his great coup of ‘seizing’ the French fleet from Toulon. The Admiralty had moved him out of the Mediterranean, perhaps fearing the little man’s burning ambition – if he could con an entire fleet into leaving the Republicans, what more might his charisma do? Bone had served on dull blockade and convoy escort duty for years, but had successfully taken two Republican prizes that had been attempting to reach the West Indies, and the prize-money served to grease the rails of his ascent to commodore. He had left the
Diamond, not without emotion for the tough little frigate that had been the scene of his greatest act of tactical audacity, and had been given the second-rate ship of the line HMS
Lewisborough.[6]
Command of the rear of the Seigneur Offensive was his greatest responsibility yet. Like his friend Nelson (now in command of the first-rate HMS
Mirabilis[7]), he had been chosen over the heads of many senior commanders because of his youth, vigour, and unorthodox tactical ideas. The strategy that Admiral Charles Villeneuve adopted against him at the Battle of Penmarc’h might have worked on one of the crusty, conservative British Admirals mostly now consigned to blockade and convoy escort duties, though it would still have cost him most of his ships. It would not work on Leo Bone.
When Villeneuve attacked Bone’s transports with his fleet’s bow chasers as a challenge, Bone did not form the line of battle as Villeneuve had expected. Instead, Bone told off his frigates and arranged them into lines of
attack, a strategy which he had developed together with Nelson. Villeneuve initially assumed that the frigates were going to engage that part of his fleet attacking the transports, and thus ordered the rest to push through the remainder of Bone’s force and towards the Royal French.
However, when the Republicans (who had the wind gauge) advanced, Bone’s frigates snapped into their lines and drove a three-pronged thrust through the mass of Republican ships, blasting away with their broadsides almost below the waterline of Villeneuve’s first-rate monsters. The French guns were, as usual, elevated to target the masts and rigging of other ships of the line, and so the Republican response was ineffective. Only a few of Villeneuve’s ships reacted fast enough, and Bone lost just three frigates. The others turned, tacked and began attacking Villeneuve’s rear.
Villeneuve recognised Bone’s strategy too late, and saw that all he could do was to push through as fast as possible. However, he realised that Bone was the most dangerous man in the tactical sense, even if the Dauphin’s death was his strategic goal, and thus while the bulk of Villeneuve’s fleet was sent through to attack the Royal French, Villeneuve’s own flagship
Egalité and one other first-rate, the
Jacobin, targeted the
Lewisborough and attempted to pound the smaller British ship to smithereens before Bone could react, trapping it in a crossfire.
Bone, however, trusted his captains, having drilled them beforehand, and thus saw he could use Villeneuve’s move against him. The
Lewisborough hoisted her royals and her skys’ls and fled, using the southerly wind to cut around the main fleet and make for the French coast. Villeneuve knew that a man like Bone could not simply be making a cowardly run for it, and thus became convinced that it must be part of a grand strategy. As his frigates were now fully engaged with Bone’s remaining ships of the line and the Royal French – who put up a harder fight than Villeneuve had hoped – all Villeneuve had to pursue the
Lewisborough with was the
Egalité and the
Jacobin. Making a snap decision, he ordered that the
Jacobin pursue, while he drove the
Egalité deeper into the battle and, even as his masts crumbled before the terrific hammering of both British and French gunnery, gave the order to engage the
Améthyste at point-blank range, and to prepare a boarding party.
Leo Bone’s strategy had worked less well than he had hoped, but he had drawn off one Republican ship. In order to keep the pursuit, he ordered that sails be hauled down in time with the
Jacobin’s volleys, as though they were being shot down. The
Jacobin finally caught up off the Île de Yeu, about a day later, and the two engaged in a terrific battle. The
Jacobin’s captain, François Barral, was a disciple of Surcouf and used an unorthodox strategy by French naval standards, hitting the
Lewisborough with plunging shell fire from howitzers, not usually carried on board ship. Although Bone’s carronades smashed a hole in the side of the
Jacobin at point-blank range and the Republican ship sank soon afterwards (though Barral and his officers escaped by boat), the damage was done. One of the
Jacobin’s shells blasted the poop deck of the
Lewisborough, and as well as killing twenty sailors and smashing all the windows in the officers’ cabins, the shockwave caused the planks of the hull to part near the keel. The
Lewisborough began taking on water faster than the pumps could drive it out. Bone ordered that they drive for the French coast, hopefully to take some little-defended harbour and then lay up there and repair the damage. He considered throwing his guns overboard to save weight and thus buy them more time, as was Royal Naval practice; however, in the end he decided that they were not too far from the coast and that the guns might be needed later. Thus Leo Bone was saved from sinking into obscurity, and the slowly sinking
Lewisborough sailed for Saint-Hilaire, and destiny…
Meanwhile, at the Battle of Quiberon (as the whole engagement was called), Villeneuve himself led the boarding party onto the
Améthyste, realising that it was an all-or-nothing affair. Villeneuve himself shot Admiral d’Estaing as his opposite number rallied his sailors, but was then knocked unconscious by a blow to the head by Captain Lucas. When he awoke, it was in the
Améthyste’s brig. He did not learn until later that his fleet had lost half its remaining strength before surrendering, and though several troopships had been sunk and Leo Bone had vanished, he had failed in his mission. The Dauphin lived; indeed, he came to visit him at one point, and Villeneuve’s later memoirs record his shock at the incident. Louis XVII was quite unlike what he had expected, having been influenced by Richard Burke’s ideas and already being liberal by French royal standards even before the Revolution. “Must Frenchman slay Frenchman in the name of liberty, while genuine tyrants profit from our division?” the Dauphin asked Villeneuve, and the admiral had no answer.
The Allied fleet attacked Quiberon, as had been planned. The Republicans still held the fortifications that the French had built on the peninsula after the British victory in 1759, and hot shot ripped through the Allied fleet, sinking ten British and French ships. But a swift action by British and American Marines, spearheaded by Lieutenant Alexander Cochrane[8], seized the fortress from the land side and the great guns fell silent. Cochrane was promoted to captain, as he had led the Forlorn Hope that escaladed the walls of the Quiberon fort. The British and Royal French finally fell on the city, the transports disgorging their troops and the Breton locals mostly welcoming them as liberators, at least before they drunk all the taverns dry. Louis XVII took his first steps on the soil of France for more than three years, and standing beside the Prince of Wales, spoke his famous words: “By God and my right, I reclaim my birthright.”
The war had entered quite a different phase…
[1]Russified transliteration of Sun Tzu.
[2]Who in OTL died without issue, but in TTL married within Hanover.
[3]In OTL the
Daily Universal Register soon renamed itself
The Times, which is what it remains to this day. In TTL it’s just been shortened to
The Register.
[4]The name given to his engagement with Admiral Duncan, the Isle of Wight being the nearest point of land.
[5]“Onward, children of the Fatherland! May their impure blood turn the Channel a Republican red!” Of course, this evokes the
Marseillaise, which was written in a modified form in TTL but has remained only a popular marching song, not an official anthem.
[6]Named for Prince Frederick’s victory over the French in 1759. Not the most politic name when escorting a fleet of allied French, of course.
[7]This is the ATL equivalent of HMS
Victory, laid down in 1760. Both were named after 1759, the
Annus Mirabilis, the Wonderful Year of Victories.
[8]Closer to OTL’s Thomas Cochrane, but has entered the Army rather than the Navy.
Part #39: This Means Nothing to Me, O Vienna
DREI HELDER; DREI RETTER; DREI MÄRTYRER.
- inscription on triple monument to Niklas Salm, Johann Sobieski and Wolfgang Mozart, Stephansplatz, Vienna
[1]
*
From – “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946) -
Some contemporary commentators attributed the stalling of the French advance into Germany, after the battle of Regensburg in October 1798, to the fact that Robespierre ordered the withdrawal of forces from the German front in order to repel the Anglo-Royal French Seigneur offensive in February 1799. Even the disparity in dates suggests the unlikelihood of this oft-stated assumption. While it is true that the French armies in Italy and Germany did not receive many reinforcements after February – all new troops being diverted to the Vendean front – this did not take effect until the start of Spring 1799.
It is more accurate to say that the French armies in Germany had simply reached their limits. Leroux’s
Guerre-éclair strategy had arguably been self-defeating by its own successes. The Revolutionary forces had, like Britain’s Duke of Marlborough and Frederick II of Prussia before them, proved capable of moving faster into Germany than the Austrians had thought possible. Yet, though their ‘
maraude’ practices meant they could live off the land effectively without much of a supply train – at the expense of stirring up resentment among the locals against them – the French still needed a ready supply of powder, shot and cartridges to fight battles, and these could not be so easily stripped from occupied country. Ironically, the superiority of French Gribeauval artillery (coming mostly from
ancien régime programmes originally, but the popular eye has always associated them with the Revolution) caused problems when
maraudeurs tried to use captured Austrian ammunition to restock their supplies. The new French cannon had been built to a slightly different calibre to their Austrian counterparts, with the result that the Austrian roundshot were too large. Leroux found himself being forced to order the drilling out of several cannon in order to use the captured shot, and such thinned weapons had a tendency to burst after prolongued use, killing their crews.
And, though the conscripted French armies were larger than the forces the Austrians could bring to bear against them, they were of course greatly outnumbered by the increasingly resentful civilian population. There was a limit to how much territory the French could hold down with the number of men they had, especially when Leroux needed to retain a large enough fighting force to continue the offensive. While Ney successfully built his authority in Swabia, creating the puppet state
La République Germanique Souabe (the Swabian Germanic Republic), Leroux was plagued continuously by bandits attacking his supply train even before the instigation of the formal
Kleinkrieg. He was placed in a difficult quandary: if he stripped more troops from his van to guard his rear, he lessened his chances of victory in any engagement, but if he did nothing, then his larger van might not get the supplies it needed to fight at all.
The spring of 1799 arguably marks the start of a breakdown between the various Republics, though this was of course not formalised until the Double Revolution. Ney refused to send more forces out of Swabia to guard Leroux’s supply lines, claiming that his dispersed troops were already hard-pressed in preventing a rising by Württemberger irregulars (almost certainly an exaggeration). And away to the south in Italy, Hoche reacted unfavourably upon hearing that Robespierre had diverted his precious reinforcements away to the Vendean front. This meant that Hoche’s Army of Italy could not try to force the Brenner Pass against Archduke Ferdinand’s rearguard, and it also meant that a pre-emptive expedition against the Hapsburg forces in Tuscany would be too much of an overstretch. Hoche was often impulsive enough to order offensives against the odds, but even he could recognise the situation. Without reinforcements, he only had sufficient forces to hold down the large arc of territory he had conquered from Savoy to Venice. The Italian Latin Republic, which was largely synonymous with the person of Lazare Hoche, began to realise that it was on its own. Only the Swiss Republic, or at least the French army holding it down and Jean-Paul Marat, its exiled leader, remained fully linked to Paris.
This background serves to explain why Leroux’s advance after the Sack of Regensburg began to stumble. The French took far longer to advance the two hundred and fifty miles from Regensburg to Vienna than they had in their lightning push over the similar distance from Haguenau to Regensburg. Despite Leroux’s difficulties, General Mozart – now in supreme command of Austria’s armies, marshal in all but name – held firm and refused to authorise an attack on the army as it slowly ground closer to the capital. An independent Austrian army pushing down from the north under Quosdanovich gave battle at Linz, together with local militia forces who feared the same fate as their neighbours to the east, but despite holding a strongly defensive position, the Austrians were decisively defeated by Leroux’s force, which was comparable in number. Mozart’s caution, previously derided as cowardice by many armchair generals, suddenly seemed like the only course distinct from suicide.
Archduke Francis, now King of the Romans and uncrowned Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, supported Mozart wholeheartedly, believing the general to be Austria’s best hope at weathering the French attack. Francis’ support meant that many of Mozart’s more radical proposals were pushed through in time to do some good. Despite the many conflicts in Germany during the eighteenth century, Vienna itself had not been threatened since the Ottoman siege of 1683, and the two situations, more than a century apart, were painfully similar in many respects. Vienna’s fortifications were outdated and it sprawled comfortably beyond them, safe in the knowledge that it lay at the core of a vast and powerful Empire. The main city wall, the
Linienwall, was almost a hundred years old and unsuited to face modern artillery. It was now faced by a war far more earnest and vicious than the usual territorial conflicts between the German states. In 1683 that had been a holy war between Christianity and Islam; in 1799 it was one between Christianity and the French’s deistic-atheism, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say between monarchism and republicanism. Either way, ideology and religion lent a sharper edge to the conflict. The horror stories coming out of Swabia and Bavaria reinforced the idea that this was all or nothing. If Mozart lost, the whole world as Germans knew it might fall with him.
So, Mozart’s ruthless ideas took shape. Taking inspiration from 1683, he had all the houses built outside the
Linienwall razed, providing a plain suitable for an artillery killing field. New temporary forts with modern, Vaubanised star bastions, were constructed around the
Linienwall. The hasty nature of these meant that they would probably not be as durable as Mozart would like, but he believed the important thing was to delay the French, rather than attempt to defeat them. “A siege can break the most invincible army,” he wrote in his diary. “Not merely roundshot and canister from our walls, but also sickness and starvation; they hurt the besiegers as much as, if not more, than the besieged. A Turkish army outnumbering the defenders twenty to one failed to take this city by siege. The French are far fewer in number. Let us hope and pray that the same strategy will be successful”.
Francis, meanwhile, made several public speeches to rally the people of Vienna. He was a skilled orator, more so than his father, and made the firm link in their minds between the Turkish sieges of 1529 and 1683 and the present invasion. “This is the third time the forces of barbarism have tried to topple civilisation,” he said. “This time, the barbarians come from the west rather than the east; but they shall be no more successful this time.”
Those confident words were not backed up by events, up until March 1799. Leroux’s army besieged the city starting from the third of that month, successfully repulsing attempts by Hungarian and Croatian cavalry to harry them as they dug in. Leroux was, like Boulanger, from a fairly humble background, and he invested direct command of the operation in the experienced Colonel Lucien Cougnon, an officer who had previously made sieges under the
ancien régime. It bespoke of Cougnon’s value that he had managed to retain his position through the worst of Robespierre’s purges.
Cougnon’s approach was fairly straightforward; to demolish five of Mozart’s new forts, opening a gap large enough to bring the whole army through without its flanks being enfiladed, and then to make a frontal assault on the outdated
Linienwall. He was confident that the modern French artillery could make sufficient breaches that the Austrians would be unable to effectively defend them all. Leroux endorsed the plan and the French steam-driven artillery began pounding Mozart’s forts from March 17th. The fragility of the hastily built fortifications swiftly proved itself, with two of the forts being battered down after only two days of bombardment. They were then taken by small forces of elite grenadiers without many losses on the French side. The mood in Vienna was one of a gloom of inevitability. Just as the Revolutionaries had defeated every general sent to stop them since Wurmser withdrew from Nancy, now Mozart too could not stop them.
Vienna was arguably saved by a night attack led by Istvan Mihály[2] on the 21st. The Hungarian cavalry under Mihály were this time able to break through the complacent French sentries and raid the artillery positioned against the three other forts Cougnon sought to destroy. The Hungarians wrought havoc before a counter-attack led personally by Leroux forced them to withdraw. Mihály had specifically equipped his men for sabotaging guns, and when the light of day dawned, Leroux found that – as well as a large number of his artillerymen being sabred down, some in their sleep – the vast majority of the guns had been spiked. Most of the damage was not irrepairable, as Mihály’s forces had had limited time and had wanted to remain stealthy, so could not try something more permanent and spectacular like forcing the guns to burst, but it would take time to repair – and those artillerymen could not be replaced. In one stroke, Austria’s forces had made their foe’s job significantly harder.
The two artillery companies directed against the now-destroyed forts had survived, and Cougnon redirected them against the remaining forts, while Leroux ordered repair work to commence. However, perhaps emboldened by the French setback, those three forts fought considerably harder and inflicted bloody casualties when they were stormed by Leroux’s grenadiers. The French lost several grenadier companies, significantly blunting what Cougnon had wanted to use as the vanguard for assaulting the breaches he planned to make in the
Linienwall.
The forts were finally secured on April 2nd. Leroux ordered the advance and the remaining guns began pounding the
Linienwall on April 6th. Cougnon’s prediction about the wall’s ineffectiveness had proved accurate, and several breaches were rapidly made. Mozart quickly made a decision. Just as Cougnon had thought, the breaches were too many to be defensible. Mozart gave the order that he had long dreaded: the bulk of the armies focused in Vienna were to sortie forth and engage Leroux’s army on the killing field cleared of houses, hopefully keeping the French in place where the guns on the
Linienwall could continue to wreak casualties on them. Only a skeleton force was left defending the breaches. It was a desperate gamble, and a sign that Austria had truly reached the end of its tether.
The Battle of Vienna was epic, a defining moment in German history. The Austrians outnumbered the French by a little more than three to two, but Mozart had still yet to find an effective defence against the Revolutionary tactics introduced by Boulanger. Leroux, taking over command again from Cougnon as the siege shifted to a battle, hammered Mozart’s deep lines with his columns again and again, while the steam-driven Cugnot artillery trundled left and right across the treacherously flat killing field, enfilading the Austrian lines as quickly as they redeployed. Twenty-pound roundshot continued to plunge from the walls and kill dozens of Frenchmen in the compact columns at a time, but many of the Austrian guns were unseated by return fire from Leroux’s siege guns. If Mihály had not succeeded, the French would have been even more successful; as it was, Leroux was forced to divide his remaining artillery between enfilading the Austrian troops and unseating the guns on the
Linienwall, with the result that neither task received as much focused bombardment as he would have liked.
Still, it seems clear that Mozart would have been defeated, had it not been for the Miracle on the Danube. As the sixth of April drew closer to night, with Mozart’s forces close to breaking, the people of Vienna heard the sound of a distant trumpet. Archduke Ferdinand and General Wurmser had returned from Italy, bringing their armies with them. Though the body of the Hapsburg armies were spread out along the road for miles behind, having made forced marches to return in time, Wurmser’s large force of Croatian cavalry marched in the vanguard of his army. Seeing the situation, the general immediately ordered that they charge the flank of the compact French army aimed at the
Linienwall.
On the brink of victory, the French were nonetheless vulnerable. Mozart’s defence had been effective enough that Leroux had been forced to send forward some of the reserves guarding his flanks in order to keep up the pressure on the Austrian lines. He had gambled that the Austrians had already committed all their forces and they had no reserves with which to take advantage of this weakness. This had been an accurate guess…until now.
The Croats hit the French rear with such suddenness that the Revolutionaries – made up mostly of Sans-Culottes, enthusiastic but inexperienced about fighting in any manner beyond that which they had been taught – had no time to form square. Leroux hesitated, considering if there was any way the Croats could be repulsed without giving Mozart the breathing space to regroup. As he paused, a roundshot from the walls removed his head.
Without their commander, French morale crumbled. Cougnon took command and ordered a fighting retreat. He aimed the small force of Revolutionary cavalry straight at the centre of Mozart’s lines in an attempt to hold back the main Austrian army, then shifted his most experienced troops –
ancien régime veterans – to face the Croats in square. The Sans-Culottes Revolutionary rabble were evacuated swiftly westward. A fire-breathing Jacobin, Major Fabien Lascelles, effectively seized command of those troops, the bulk of the French army.
Cougnon successfully repulsed the Croats and retreated after the Sans-Culottes. His quixotic cavalry attack, though of course demolished by the overwhelming numbers of the Austrian troops, was more successful than he had hoped; the cavalrymen, armed with rifles[3], managed to target and shoot down several Austrian officers in their prominent uniforms – including Wolfgang Mozart. The general sustained a wound in his shoulder which immediately took him out of the fighting. This meant that the Austrians held under cautious lieutenants, rather than pursuing – where they might have routed the disorganised French.
Vienna had repulsed its third siege, and the bulk of Ferdinand and Wurmser’s armies paraded through the Graben to cheers and fanfares when they arrived a week later. However, Mozart’s wound became gangrenous, and he died on the 21st. His last words, spoken to Francis, were reportedly (on speaking of his great public acclaim among the people for his victory) ‘It means nothing to me, O Vienna’. There is some evidence that Mozart believed he had only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by an act of Providence, and went to his grave still believing he had somehow failed Austria. This belief was not shared by the Hapsburgs and their people, who erected many statues to the general over the years. A symphony by Beethoven,
Vittoria, was dedicated to Mozart and largely drew on his actions in the Battle of Vienna, focusing on martial, clashing harmonies.[4]
It was a turning point. Vienna marked the most eastward advance of French Revolutionary armies. The army formerly belonging to Leroux retreated to Linz, at which point a brief civil war was fought, with the fanatical Lascelles (who despised all associated with the
ancien régime, had Cougnon assassinated and then scattered his veteran troops. Lascelles further organised a retreat to Regensburg, his intention being to set up a Bavarian Germanic Republic. Cougnon’s troops remained as a coherent force under Major Phillipe Saint-Julien and turned northward, seizing the Bohemian town of Budweis[5] and establishing it as a minor military fiefdom, with only a passing sheen of Republican ideology. The Austrian failure to respond to this occupation is often cited as the reason behind the growth of the Bohemian national consciousness in the first part of the nineteenth century, just as the Spanish failure to respond to the British occupation of Buenos Aires in the First Platinean War had contributed to the idea of a Platinean national consciousness.
Austria had been set back on its heels, but the time was ripe for a counterattack. The country retained able generals such as Archduke Ferdinand, Wurmser and Alvinczi. Austria still had plenty of armies and could call upon more levies from Hungary or Croatia. The French occupation of Swabia was thin and new, that of Bavaria even more so. A decisive attack could shatter it and undo all the gains of the Rubicon Offensive.
But fate did not smile upon Vienna a second time. Since Hoche had sacked and occupied Venice, ending the ancient mercantile republic, the fate of the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia had been up in the air. The land was ethnically mostly Croatian, suggesting an Austrian claim, but this was opposed by the Ottoman Empire. November 1798 had seen the death of Sultan Abdulhamid II and he was succeeded by a dynamic nephew, who became Murad V. Murad and his vizier, Mehmed Ali Pasha, saw the fall of Venice as a significant opportunity. The Ottomans had focused on internal reorganisation under the cautious Abdulhamid’s reign, and response to the Russian Civil War had chiefly been the soft expansion of power, for example by increasing Ottoman influence in the Khanate of the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Romanian principalities, displacing the existing Russian puppets in those states’ governments. However, now Murad discerned that the Russians’ internal struggle meant that a war over Dalmatia would be restricted to conflict with the already weakened Austria. The Austrian ambassador to the Sublime Porte was summoned on 15th May 1799 and informed that a state of war now existed between Constantinople and Vienna. An Ottoman army under Damat Melek Pasha, a Bosniak, crossed over into the formerly Venetian Dalmatia on the 26th of May.
Francis was in an unenviable position. Without the legitimacy of confirmation by the Prince-Electors, he had diminished authority, and having defeated one great invasion, Austria now apparently faced a second – though the Ottomans’ declaration of war was largely a simple consequence of their desired annexation of Dalmatia. There were little signs that the Sublime Porte wished to attempt another invasion of the Hapsburg dominions themselves, but nonetheless Austria could hardly pursue an offensive war against the French occupying Swabia and Bavaria with the Turks sweeping up through the Balkans.
Thus history was decided. Austrian armies were shifted south to defend Hapsburg Croatia, while Lascelles was able to escape unharried to Regensburg, and the Cougnonistes to Budweis. The German front, which had been so bitterly fought for so long, descended into an almost sinister silence – at least until the beginning of the
Kleinkrieg.
The situation in Paris was almost comically similar to that in Vienna. The great enemy had been defeated, but an older, more traditional one had reared its ugly head. General Boulanger wanted to lead the scraped-together Revolutionary armies personally against the British and Royal French, but Jean de Lisieux dissuaded him. He would be needed here, he claimed mysteriously…he did, however, ensure Boulanger arranged matters so that most of the troops going to the Chouan-held lands would be made up of Sans-Culotte volunteers.
The Spanish were also a worry. Spain had been one of the first monarchist powers to declare war after the phlogistication of Louis XVI, and had been the first port of call for the Dauphin when he fled the country. Yet the Spanish prosecution of the war had been unenthusiastic. King Philip VI had always tried to steer the country through a path of peace since the disastrous Second Platinean War, focusing on colonial reorganisation to prevent a second breakaway and reforming finances in the Peninsula. His chief minister, the able Conde de Floridablanca, had favoured such policies even before Philip became King, and together they had prevented Revolutionary ideas from gaining much purchase in Spain, even though the country had itself had several popular rebellions against the unpopular Charles III in recent history. Floridablanca’s propaganda emphasised the Revolution’s atheistic and French-supremacist principles, successfully inflaming popular (though not necessarily noble) opposition. After all, the rebellions against Charles III had partly been sparked by him being too close to France.
Therefore, in the five years since the start of the war, the Spanish armies had not advanced a great deal. Under the competent but overly cautious General Fernando de Cuesta[6], Spain occupied those regions of French territory (and Andorra) to which it had a historic claim, such as Rousillon (French Catalonia) and Labourd (a heavily Basque part of Aquitaine). The Spanish were sometimes welcomed as liberators, particularly in those lands which had been Spanish prior to the Franco-Spanish wars of the seventeenth century, but were more often sullenly opposed by the locals. Revolutionary sentiment in the southwest of France was only moderate, but the Spanish troops did not behave particularly well and it was obvious to everyone that Spain was there for realpolitick reasons rather than some sort of altruistic restoration of their fellow Bourbon monarchy. A march by Spanish troops to Paris was inconceivable, not necessarily because of the state of the Spanish Army (which was already undergoing reorganisation after the lessons of the Second Platinean War) but because the Cortes refused to release the funding. No-one forgot that the French Revolution had ultimately been sparked by the expenditure of a century of war emptying the French treasury. Spain’s economy was already shaky enough after the loss of a third of the New World empire without such risky military adventures.
The Spanish offensive did pick up after Hoche moved into Spanish Parma in October 1797 as part of his Italian campaign. Public outrage at news of French atrocities was enough to spur Floridablanca into recommending a new offensive, if only for the sake of appearances. Cuesta therefore attacked into Gascony, laying siege to Bordeaux in an operation supported by amphibious descents by the Spanish Navy – the Revolution’s lack of naval force meant that the Spanish could operate almost with impunity. However, the siege was broken in July 1798 when a small French force under Custine – the victor at Toulon – was augmented by local militiamen and managed to defeat Cuesta’s army, which was already suffering from disease. The Spanish retreated into Labourd, with the French pursuing, but a shock victory was won over Custine at the Battle of Bayonne, when an outnumbered portion of the Spanish army defeated the French. The Spanish were led by a young major of Irish descent, Joaquín Blake y Joyes, who would go on to have a very interesting career…
French attempts to drive the Spanish back any further failed, as the French armies facing the Spanish were simply too few with the demands of the Italian, German, and then Vendean fronts. However, the bloody nose at Bordeaux meant that Spanish policy reverted to a cautious consolidation of their historical claims. The final showdown there would have to wait until the fate of the Chouannerie was decided…
[1] “Three heroes, three saviours, three martyrs.” Count Niklas Salm and Johan Sobieski (King John III of Poland) were the most prominent commanders in the repulsions of the Turks from Vienna in 1529 and 1683 respectively.
[2] The grandson of Kováts Mihály (Michael de Kovats), who in OTL founded the United States Cavalry during the ARW. In TTL he remained loyal to the Hapsburgs all his life and his son and grandson (not born OTL) have followed him into the cavalry.
[3]Recall that the assassination of William IV by Frederick’s Americans sparked a new interest in the rifle as a weapon of war in Europe, and it is much more common in armies of the period in TTL than it was in OTL.
[4]More like the 1812 Overture than anything OTL’s Beethoven composed.
[5]The German name; České Budějovice in Czech.
[6]An ATL ‘brother’ of Gregorio García de Cuesta.
Part #40: The Double Revolution
From – “The Seigneur Offensive” by Philip Rathbone (Collins and Wilston of Albany, 1972)
Jean-Baptiste Robespierre had been paranoid about the prospect of a British invasion of western France for many months before the Seigneur offensive was actually launched. Although Robespierre had pushed hard for the prosecution of war against Austria, as the successes of the Poséidon and Rubicon offensives led French armies ever deeper into Germany and Italy, he began to fear the possibility of an underdefended France falling to attack from the west.
Other historians, more pro-Administration, have argued that Robespierre’s fear was not for the Republic but for his own position. Robespierre had masterminded the Terror for several years, and seemed unable to learn that it was impossible to kill all the enemies of the state (i.e., himself; Louis XIV would have approved), because every chirurgeoning or phlogistication only served to turn more people’s hearts against him. Enthusiasm for the Republic itself still ran high in France, but Robespierre was becoming an ever more isolated figure. His power was only the shadow of the tiger.[1] While he might be able to intimidate the masses, there remained men in France powerful enough to oppose him, men whose power lay in different arenas, who could not be cowed through the emasculated National Legislative Assembly. To keep those men on side, Robespierre had to continue the idea that French was perpetually under threat and that any word raised against his Terror was tantamount to collaboration. To that end, as Leroux, Ney and Hoche effectively removed the immediate threat from Austria, Robespierre’s propagandists talked up the threat from Spain. Some historians have even suggested that Robespierre deliberately permitted the Spanish to remain in possession of French land (until Bordeaux was attacked) in order to use that as part of his propaganda.
But the real threat to the Republic now came not from Spain, but from Britain – Britain and Royal French exiles joining up with the Chouan rebels in Brittany and the Vendée. After the defeat of Villeneuve, who had weakened the allied force, but not fatally so, the British took the Republican-held fortress of Quiberon and marched into Brittany with their Royal French allies at the head. The British commander, Frederick George the Prince of Wales, understood his own limitations as a battlefield general, but on the other hand was skilled as spinning the invasion as a liberation. He kept his men under control, ensuring the provosts made sure that they paid for everything they requisitioned from the locals, and hanged a couple of looters as an example. The Prince also sought out Catholic troops in his army and arranged them into small elite forces which he used when securing potentially sensitive sites, such as churches. Frederick was aware that the Chouannerie was partly ultra-Catholic in character, and knew that he had to make sure no accusations of Protestant atrocities were made. Technically, there should have been no Catholics in his army due to the Test Acts, but in practice there were always ways around these. In any case, the British opinion of Catholics was slowly improving as more accurate reports of Wesley’s successes in Ireland began to leak out. This did, however, alienate the Huguenots who had joined the British Army, who saw it as a disgusting suck-up to the same forces who had led to their ancestors fleeing the country a hundred years before. Brittany and the Vendée still had one of the largest Huguenot populations in France – perhaps why the Catholic majority was so fervent, with an opposition to press against – and many Huguenot-descended British officers wrote hotly on the Chouans’ treatment of French Protestants.
Of course, this was irrelevant in the face of the big picture. Everyone knew that the alliance was uneasy. England, and then Britain, had fought Bourbon France almost continuously for a hundred years, and had a long history of conflict stretching back before that. The alliance rested on the Royal French seeing the British as the lesser of two evils, and Britain putting one foot wrong could change their minds, reducing the war to another of the futile Anglo-French conflicts that had made the world ring like a bell so many times. Prince Frederick was willing to do anything to prevent that.
In Paris, Robespierre ordered the immediate assembly of new armies to ‘throw the English and the impure traitors back into the sea’. In a meeting with the two other Consuls, Boulanger opened his mouth to protest, only to find Lisieux’s foot pressing down on his. Lisieux quickly spoke up and said that of course it would be done.
Boulanger said nothing at the time, but after reading the operational plans that Lisieux drew up, he confronted his fellow Consul at the tavern which the ‘Boulangerie’ used as their usual meeting place. While Jean-Pierre Blanchard argued with Robert Surcouf about the possibility of flying balloons off the deck of a ship, Boulanger met Lisieux in an upper room. The exact content of the conversation is not known. Michel Chanson, Boulanger’s onetime adjutant, later claimed that the General confided in him the words that were spoken, though there is no way verify this allegation. According to Chanson, the conversation ran…
BOULANGER. Jean, my friend, are you mad?[2] I have read your orders. They are a recipe for slaughter, nothing less!
LISIEUX. You are right, of course. We could try to prevent Jean-Baptiste’s insane plans this time. We have succeeded before. But how long will it be before our constructive criticism becomes a sign that we are irredeemably ‘impure’ and ‘treacherous’ and we are looking at the inside of a phlogistication chamber?
BOULANGER. Jean – you cannot be saying this.
LISIEUX. Perhaps we may even share the same phlogistication chamber.
BOULANGER. You know that…that it is…it cannot be said!
LISIEUX. Precisely, old friend. It cannot be said. Friend Robespierre had spies everywhere. Is this the Republic we all sought to build when we pulled down the old regime? Is this liberty?
BOULANGER. I – I cannot say.
LISIEUX. You have commanded vast armies in the face of cannonballs flying everywhere, yet you fear to say it. Such is the hold his Terror has on all of us. We must break it, for the sake of France. If Jean-Baptiste continues in his destructive regime, men will begin to think of him and the Republic as one. Then when he falls – for he must, before he reduces himself to the last man in France, everyone else executed as ‘impure’ – the Republic will fall with him. We cannot allow that.
BOULANGER.
(Long pause) No. We cannot…what do you intend to gain by this madness?
LISIEUX. You will note that the new armies are drawn largely from the remaining Sans-Culotte militias.
BOULANGER. Those not yet part of your Gardes Nationales, of course…ah. You seek to…?
LISIEUX. Quite so. A new era is about to dawn, Pierre. We do not belong in the shadows.
It is not the place of the author to speak of the plausibility of this account. In any case, Boulanger approved Lisieux’s plans, and new armies were formed up, drawn almost entirely from the Sans-Culottes and with inexperienced generals in command. They marched out of Paris in May 1799 and divided into two main forces, under Paul Vignon and Jacques Pallière. Vignon’s northern army assembled at Le Mans and then marched westward into Brittany, while Pallière’s southern force was sent on to Poitiers and then wheeled to enter the Vendée.
By the time the two Republican armies attacked, at the end of June, the British were well established. The remaining Republican holdouts at Lannion and Cherbourg were taken by British amphibious descents, securing control over all Brittany. A force moved into the Vendée under Sir Thomas Græme – though the politically aware Prince Frederick made sure to give it a Catholic and French vanguard – and cleared out the remaining Revolutionary strongholds that the Chouans had been unable to take, lacking artillery. All of the province of Brittany, and the western half of Poitou (which consisted of the Vendée) were now under Allied control. The Dauphin went to Nantes and was hailed as Louis XVII. He was blessed by the Bishop of Nantes (who had escaped the purge of the Second Estate) in his Cathedral, one step short of a full coronation. The two regions had almost no support for the Revolution, as those who had supported it had fled eastward when the Chouannerie threw out the Republican occupiers.
Against this background, the two Republican forces attacked. Vignon’s army met the main Anglo-French force, with Prince Frederick and Louis XVII present, near Laval. The Republicans were outnumbered and inexperienced, and were slaughtered by the Royalists and their British allies. Tellingly, the Republicans had also lacked any of the Cugnot toys that had been so useful against Austria. This was not because they did not exist. But Boulanger and Lisieux controlled their supply through the Boulangerie, and had ensured that none would be supplied. They wouldn’t want that large group of Sans-Culottes to win, after all…
The southern battle, at Cholet, was less decisive. Græme met Pallière with a force only two-thirds as large, and part of that made up of Royal French, less reliable without their King their to steady them. The fact that it was Frenchman fighting Frenchman was never far away from the minds of either side. Nonetheless, Lisieux and Boulanger had not failed there, either. Though Græme did not actually destroy Pallière’s army as Vignon’s was at Laval, Riflemen skirmishers attached to the 69th (South Lincolnshire) Foot did manage to kill Pallière himself. With little of a trained officer corps in command, the army simply disintegrated. The contrast with the orderly withdrawal of Leroux’s army from Vienna after his death is telling. Boulanger had ensured that the best of the Republic’s army had gone into Germany. He now deliberately sent its worst against the British.
Pallière’s army scattered over the countryside, some fleeing to Anjou and Aunice provinces. Their
maraude only served to turn more undecided locals to the Royalist cause. In truth, though, a bigger surge of support was the two handy victories. The Republic, seemingly invincible for so long, now appeared anything but.
Which was, of course, exactly what Lisieux had wanted…
*
From – “The Double Revolution” by Daniel Dutourd (Université de Nantes Press, 1964) -
When the news of the defeats at Cholet and Laval, Paris began buzzing with discontent. It came on the back of the news of the defeat at Vienna. The Revolution was imperilled once again, and a scapegoat was needed, someone to be burned in L’Épurateur’s flame of liberty. Robespierre had had no trouble finding them in the past. Now, having left a trail of corpses longer than that of any king, he was struck down by his own success: with no credible political opponents left, only one man could be responsible for the defeats.
Traitor. Impure…
Paris had seen several uprisings in recent years, this one no less confused than those that had preceded it. Chroniclers report that, despite the purges after Hébert’s death, part of the uprising was Royalist and Catholic in character, spurred on by the Royal successes in the Vendée. More of it, though, was made up of Republicans who sought to overthrow Robespierre and elect a new leader – for at this point most of them still thought of elections.
Both risings were held back by Lisieux’s loyal Garde Nationale. Lisieux advised Robespierre that it would be best if he remained in a secure area until the rebellion was put down. Robespierre argued, saying that he would not be seen to be hiding from his enemies. Lisieux…
insisted. And Boulanger ‘happened’ to recommend the old Château de Versailles, now long since looted-out and used for storage of ammunition and troops’ rations. Robespierre, realising he was being forced, attempted to call upon the Sans-Culottes, over whom he had always held supreme authority. His great political act had been to skilfully slip into the shoes of Le Diamant, a man who would almost certainly have found him repugnant if they had ever met, and control Le Diamant’s powerful supporters. Now, though, those supporters had been sent away: the competent to Germany, the incompetent to the west. Robespierre found himself without allies. He submitted.
The morning of July 31st, 1799 (Abricot Thermidor of the year 5) dawned with the news – not whispered, but shouted from the rooftops and trumpeted in the state-controlled newspapers – that Jean-Baptiste Robespierre was dead. He had hanged himself while hiding in Versailles, the editorials (controlled by Lisieux) said. The implication was clear, that Robespierre had begun to see himself as the very thing he had sought to destroy. A suicide note supposedly found on his body showed that he had literally signed his own death warrant, declaring himself an Enemy of the People, before summarily carrying out his own execution.
The vast majority of commentators, then and now, believe that Robespierre was murdered by Lisieux’s men and the death disguised as a suicide. Some modern revisionist historians have suggested that Robespierre’s suicide might in fact have been genuine – there had long been rumours that he kept a signed copy of his own death warrant about his person in case he ever found an impure thought entering his mind, and the depression on realising he had lost power might have pushed him over the edge. Whether Lisieux’s hand slayed him, though, it is definite that Lisieux had
planned to do so, and whether Robespierre pre-empted him is unimportant.
Almost from the first day, proclamations began flying out. Lisieux had already been the Republic’s main writer of pamphlets and propagandists, and now he turned them out for himself. The ‘erring’ period of Robespierre was over, it said. The corrupt Consulate was dissolved and the National Legislative Assembly would convene after fresh elections to confirm a new constitution. Until that time, that constitution would take temporary effect. Who, exactly, had drawn up this constitution and when was never quite stated.
In any case, the constitution of the ‘Apricot Revolution’, as it was termed, reorganised the Republic considerably. Instead of a three-person Consulate, it saw a single ruler given the deliberately lowly-sounding title of ‘Administrateur’. The Republic was then divided into
départements according to a system that had been drawn up by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret. Thouret, a Norman, was a great Rationalist who had been instrumental in the creation of the metric system. He was one of the few members of the National Legislative Assembly who had not been cowed by Robespierre. His new division of France ignored the existing provincial boundaries and, indeed, geography – he simply divided France into squares based on lines of latitude and longitude. These square
départements were named after the Revolutionary calendar’s days – Paris was assigned as Abricot, of course… - and would each be ruled by a Modérateur, a theoretically locally-elected official somewhere between an old mayor and duke.
The Thouret plan was an attempt to balance the local privileges of the
ancien régime, whose loss had been part of the reason behind the Breton rising, with the strongly centralised structure of the existing Republic. The Rationalist squares spoke of Lisieux’s philosophy that Revolutionary ideals could not be softened by compromise. “If we let the status quo affect our principles,” he wrote, “our principles will be worn down…but if we stand firm, we will sculpt the world until it is fit for the Revolutionary system.” Some less well educated Revolutionaries apparently thought this was literal, and there were rumours that Lisieux planned, after the conquest of Britain, to cut up the island and use its parts to build up all the partial
départements along the coasts to perfect squares. Lisieux’s control of propaganda was such that an impression soon emerged that there was nothing he could not do.
Lisieux’s first act as Administrateur was to complete the crackdown on the Paris rising, now useless to him, by his loyal Garde Nationale. He then appointed Boulanger as First Marshal of the Army, a new post which would give the former general enough independence to form a more coherent response to the British invasion. Lisieux picked out those competent but awkward members of the NLA and other politicians – usually Robespierre loyalists – and made them Modérateurs of
départements. This was central to Lisieux’s political philosophy. “The former regime,” he wrote, speaking of Robespierre, “thought that the wheels of revolution must be lubricated by the oil of sacrifice. Such a view ignores the fact that the ‘oil’ is in fact made of destroyed wheels. If it had been allowed to continue, soon we would have a great deal of oil and no wheels to lubricate…the correct view must be that men are a resource, just like wheat or iron or coal[3], and should not be wasted. It is a gross irresponsibility not to extract their usefulness, whatever the circumstances.”
These relatively mild words presaged a terror in some ways worse than Robespierre’s, but for now Lisieux remained focused on the British problem. In August, the main Anglo-French army invaded Normandy. Support for the Royalists was more lukewarm there, as Normandy had had no particular special status before the Revolution as Brittany had, but the majority of Normans saw which way the wind was blowing and supported the King. Lisieux demanded a response from Boulanger, knowing that many more Royal successes could tip the balance of the mood of Paris towards royalism. He, more than anyone, knew how fickle the mob could be, and how fragile his position was.
Boulanger was worried that his friend was heading towards becoming another Robespierre, with such demands, but agreed that something had to be done. He had assembled another army, one as capable as the ones operating in Germany, made up mostly of troops who should be going as reinforcements to Leroux and Hoche. Lacking an experienced command general, Boulanger went himself, in the face of Lisieux’s protests.
As Lisieux built his power in Paris, Boulanger’s army moved into Normandy, occupying Évreux and easily defeating a small Anglo-Royal French force that had been sent ahead. The bulk of the Allied army was in Caen, having taken the city from loyal Revolutionaries at the end of September. Boulanger fought another small, filmish [cinematic] action near the town of Lisieux, Jean de Lisieux’s home town – with which the propagandists, not least Lisieux himself, had much fun. Rather than trying to hold the damaged city against siege, the Prince of Wales ordered that the British army decamp and meet Boulanger on the field of battle. The British had not fought Cugnot engines before. They would soon find out what it was like, to their cost. Sir Ralph Abercromby held to traditional strategy of holding high ground and letting the enemy approach over a flat plain, a killing field. Just as Mozart had learned a few months before, this was not the winning tactic it had been before.
According to Michel Chanson, Boulanger called Caen ‘my second Lille’, referring to the victory he had won there, the first victory of the Jacobin Wars, by his use of the Cugnot-wagons. Now he had access to far more advanced Cugnot engines: Cugnot, Surcouf and the others had been working feverishly, spurred on by unlimited funding and the fear of failure.
Boulanger had many of the old-style wagons, essentially just steam-driven alternatives to the horse, which could tow guns into position and then unlimber to allow them to fire. But now he had what Cugnot called his
char de tir, gun-chariot. These were larger, more cumbersome Cugnot-wagons that, rather than simply towing an ordinary gun, were actually built around large pieces of artillery (six- to twenty-four-pounders) and consisted of a large flatbed on tall wheels.
Chars with trained crews could fire their gun whilst moving, a truly revolutionary development – though dealing with the recoil remained a problem, as the
chars had a tendency to flip over. Cugnot’s experiments with rotating cannon had been disastrous; in order to take the recoil, the wheels had to be aligned with the axis of the gun, allowing the wagon to roll backwards. Thus, Boulanger’s
chars had only fixed-focus guns, but it was enough.
It was the novelty, the unknown of the Republican weapons more than their effectiveness which intimidated the Allied forces. Abercromby remarked “Have the Jacobins placed mills on wheels?” The French bombardment was no greater than many the veteran British and Royal French troops had weathered before, but the fact that it came from moving cannon was unnerving. It also meant that the British artillery found it harder to reply to the guns. Abercromby ordered the cavalry to sweep in and take the
chars, if they could. Boulanger was reliably informed of all this, as he had a Blanchard observation balloon floating over the battlefield and signalling to him by flags, giving him an intelligence advantage over his opponents.
The British and Royal French cavalry did succeed in destroying several of the
chars, though they were hampered by the sheer size of them (“Like trying to sabre down sailors standing on the deck when you are on the pier below” recalled one cavalryman, a native of Portsmouth). More were immobilised by lucky shots from British galloper guns, one-pounder cannons that could be shifted around the battlefield even more rapidly by being hitched up to fast horses. The
chars were fragile in places, in particular vulnerable to having their steam-boilers punctured by roundshot, which could potentially spray their crews with boiling water.
But Boulanger had anticipated this. Behind and among the
chars rolled the
tortues, the same vehicles Lisieux had used to crush the uprising after Hébert’s death. They were armoured carriages, somewhat inspired by those developed by the Bohemians during the Thirty Years’ War, but were driven by steam engines. Inside were troops with muskets and rifles firing through slits, protected by the armour from anything but a direct hit by a cannonball. The
tortues were slow and cumbersome, of little use as a real weapon of war, but the Allied cavalry did not realise what they were until it was too late. Countless British and Royal French cavalrymen were volleyed down, the Republicans holding their fire until the last moment. Then, unable to reply to this unseen assault, the cavalry fled.
This started a panic through the Allied ranks. Men who would stolidly march against armies five times their size did not know how to react to these new terrors. Privates became newly nervous when they realised their sergeants and officers had no more idea of what was happening when they did.
The irony was that Boulanger’s vehicles could certainly not have climbed the high ground that Abercromby held. Yet the cautious Scottish general ordered a fighting retreat, while he worked out how to defeat the Republicans’ new war machines. Despite the anxiety in the ranks, the British and Royal French (the latter led by Colonel Grouchy, an exile ally of Louis XVII) made an orderly withdrawal from the ridge and retreated westward.
Boulanger could not believe his luck. His infantry, marching in columns behind the vehicles, quickly seized the ridge and then unlimbered their conventional artillery, those towed by horses capable of climbing the ridge. The Republicans directed a withering fire against the Allies as they withdrew, killing dozens of men with each plunging cannonball. If Boulanger had had cavalry of his own, the retreat might have become a rout – but the Revolution still had trouble recruiting trained horsemen, given its stance on aristocrats.
Nonetheless, the engagement might never have been so well known if one of the last cannonballs fired had not come down in the middle of the British command. Ironically, it was not the ball that killed him; it struck the ground before his horse, toppling it over on top of him, and broke his neck. In the confusion of the battle, few except General Abercromby and his aides noticed, but Prince Frederick George had just ignominiously died.
The incident would have shockwaves far greater than Boulanger’s successful repulsion of the Allies from Normandy. In Britain, King George collapsed upon being informed of his favourite son’s death, and fell into an illness from which he never recovered. This came at the worst possible time, as Britain entered a constitutional crisis. The Marquess of Rockingham’s government had shed support throughout the war, with the old marquess now holding only the slimmest majority in the Commons. Liberal and Radical Whigs who supported the Revolution found themselves strange bedfellows with conservative Tories who opposed the alliance with Catholic France, but nonetheless much of the Commons was united in opposition. The victories in France were swiftly followed by the defeat at Caen, and Rockingham worked frantically to prevent his government losing its majority. Too frantically; he worked himself to death, at a time when George III was beginning to lose lucidity, consumed by the death of his son.
London held its breath. The British Constitution relied on a balance of power between monarch and Parliament, but now Parliament had lost its Prime Minister and the King was in no state to perform his functions. There was talk of appointing a regent, but the authorisation for such an act would require a coherent government, which did not exist – and could not exist until a King or Regent asked someone to form one. The British political system was trapped in a vicious circle. The crisis was such that the previous topic of debate, whether Richard Wesley’s calls for Catholic emancipation in Ireland should be granted (opposed by the King, who saw it a violation of his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith), was temporarily forgotten.
From the chaos, Charles James Fox emerged. Leader of the parliamentary Radical faction among the Whigs, and a strong supporter of Revolutionary ideals, he spoke in favour of Lisieux and said that the excesses of the Robespierre period were now over. “We have fought the tyranny of the Bourbons for decades,” he said in a speech to the divided Parliament. “Now shall we side with them against the liberty that we have been so rightfully proud of for so long? I say no!”
Fox’s radical wing would normally not have received much support, but he was one of the few great orators in Parliament after Rockingham’s death, and a natural leader. Liberal Whigs who had defected from Rockingham saw him as the lesser of two evils, and thought Tories despised him, their desire to end the war was such that they temporarily supported him. The Whigs struggled to find a credible candidate for prime minister to oppose Fox, but could not. Richard Burke was too young and too Liberal, though he fiercely opposed the French Revolution as his father had. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Townshend, was politically suited but lacked charisma, having failed to come out of Rockingham’s shadow. There was even talk about rallying around Frederick Grenville, the ambassador who had escaped from the Republican French mob (his American colleague Thomas Jefferson not being so fortunate) and was now an MP, as a leader. But though Grenville had both charisma and a burning desire to oppose the Republic, he could not match Fox’s oratory or easy political skill. Parliament remained paralysed, as news of further victories by Boulanger poured in.
The deadlock was broken on November 9th, coming on the same day as the news that Boulanger’s lightning advance into Brittany had been halted by the combined British and Royal French forces near Mayenne. Boulanger, like Leroux in Germany, had outrun his supply lines and his army had become too dispersed. For example, he no longer had access to observation balloons, their transports being too large and cumbersome to move at his army’s marching speed. The Royal French had scored a propaganda victory by managing to capture several of Boulanger’s steam engines, and the French columns had for the first time come up against well-drilled British infantry under Colonel Sir John Moore. British Riflemen picked off French officers as they tried to rally their men, and the machine-like volleying of the redcoats – twice as fast as any continental army, thanks to the British Army budgeting for them to train with real cartridges – had ground down the columns until even their well-trained soldiers turned and fled. It was far from a rout, but Boulanger was forced to retreat. The war remained to be decided. On that day, George III finally slipped from life. His last words were reported to be “I am and always will be a Virginian, and let no man speak ill of that.”
Meanwhile, down in Saint-Hilaire, the legend of Leo Bone was being quietly made, overshadowed by greater events, but that does not enter into our tale.
Upon George III’s death, the automatic succession laws kicked in and Prince Henry William, despite the reservations of large parts of British society, became King Henry IX. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1799, as the war in France ground to a halt and the armies retreated to their winter quarters. It seemed symbolic that a new century would begin with Henry IX’s reign, for novelty abounded in the young, unexpected king’s ideas.
Henry had always been aligned with Charles James Fox’s Radicals, and it was no surprise that he asked Fox to form a government on January 14th 1800. Fox achieved a narrow majority in the Commons, part of his support coming from conservative Tories who wanted to see the war ended at any cost and ‘court party’ MPs in the pocket of whoever sat upon the throne, while he always struggled in the Lords. Fox formed his “New Cabinet” and immediately sent out peace feelers to Lisieux’s new Administration.
The positions of the two states were almost comically similar. Both thought they were in a weaker position than they were, but would not admit it. Lisieux was certain that if Boulanger had not achieved total victory now, he never would, not without the unavailable armies stuck in Germany and Italy, while the British could easily reinforce across the Channel. He also knew that the republics in Italy, Swabia and Switzerland were creations of Robespierre and might not support him. The British, on the other hand, thought that they had only barely held on against Boulanger’s new machines of war, and it would take years of study in peacetime to figure out means of taking on the Revolutionary technology and tactics. “If the Jacobins throw us back into the sea, who is to say that Boulanger cannot conjure up a bridge of steam and send his troops into England?” wrote the Marquess of Stafford, a leading Tory thinker. He jested somewhat, but was in other ways remarkably prophetic. “We need time to understand that these new marvels are not magical but simply the product of man’s ingenuity…time which we will not have unless this war is brought to a close.”
Therefore, when Fox’s government approached Lisieux’s, the Peace of Caen was signed only weeks later, on 4th March 1800. The shock of the end of the war resounded in Britain, but much less so in France. Lisieux had already taken control of the press and was forming it into the legendary propaganda machine it would become. The French papers said that Boulanger had thrown the English into the sea, and that the rebel areas would remain under special military administration until they were purified enough to be integrated back into the Republic. Until that time, the French people were forbidden to travel into those regions, lest they become ‘infected’ by impure ideas. Lisieux borrowed heavily from Robespierre’s language, but all of this was simply to conceal the fact that the areas were still rebel. As part of the peace treaty, Lisieux agreed to allow a rump Royal France consisting of Brittany and the Vendée, but no more. Louis XVII, appalled at the British betrayal, was forced to consent to this. He returned to Nantes and formed his capital there.
No-one thought the Peace of Mayenne (as it was called) would last for long. For both sides, it was a time for rebuilding. Fox might be naïve enough to think the Republic could be courted, but the majority of people knew the war would begin again one day.
For now, though, Britain returned to its domestic affairs and putting down the last vestiges of the USE rebellion in Ireland, while the Republic turned its attention to Spain. This was the Double Revolution, Lisieux coming to power in France and Henry IX and Fox in Britain. In North America, though, it is known as the Treble Revolution. American fervour for the war had died away slowly as Jefferson’s death had faded into the imagination, and Lisieux was wise enough to publicly apologise for the incident. Some parts of the Empire, notably Carolina, disliked the alliance with Royal France as they coveted expansion into the remaining French colonies in America, which as yet remained loyal to the King. So, in July 1799, when a new general election was called, James Monroe’s Constitutionalist Party won a majority of seats in the Continental Parliament, unseating Lord Hamilton’s Patriots.
The Lord Deputy, the Duke of Grafton, formally asked Monroe to form a government and Monroe became America’s third Lord President. He was the first not to in fact be a peer, refusing the offer and preferring to focus in the Commons – like William Pitt, he believed that that was where power had shifted in this age. The Constitutionalists immediately formally ended the war with France, which had technically continued past the British peace due to Albert Gallatin, the American representative there, lacking the powers to sign the treaty. This was a problem which Monroe rectified with the upgrade of Gallatin’s status to Lord Representative; later, he replaced Gallatin with a political ally, James Madison. Gallatin returned to New York to continue his work with maintaining peace and cooperation with the Iroquois, while Madison almost became a member of Fox’s cabinet, his own radical sympathies lying well with the new British government’s.
So four nations – Great Britain, Ireland, North America and France – had now been placed on wildly different courses. This did not mean, of course, that those courses would never again collide…
[1]The phrase ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ dates from a Hans Christian Andersen story published in 1837, long after the POD so therefore does not exist in TTL. The phrase ‘the shadow of the tiger’, meaning the same thing, comes from an animal story by Georges Gallet, a sort of French analogue of Rudyard Kipling who lived in Kérala, in which a crafty civet-cat intimidated a nest of snakes by simulating the shadow of a tiger, before one of the snakes saw through the illusion and ate him.
[2]Boulanger is using
tu rather than
vous, reflecting their close political relationship over the past few years.
[3]Lisieux’s naming of coal as a resource reflects how steam engines are growing in importance across the slowly industrialising republic. Of course, the fact that he was strongly involved in Cugnot’s operations means he is somewhat ahead of the rest of France in this respect.
Part #41: The Space-Filling Empire
Capt. Christopher Nuttall: As we move away from Europe for a moment, a brief note should be made that most African names have been altered to their OTL spellings to avoid confusion, though often different and less French-influenced transliterations are the norm in this timeline.
(Pause) I apologise for the absence of Drs Pylos and Lombardi, but I fear they had a somewhat heated argument over the nature of Societist doctrine
(indistinctly) where did I put those bandages?
*
“If you wish to win, first you must lose, and understand
why you lost”
– Michael Olesogun, Prime Minister of West Africa (1942-1946)
*
From “A History of West Africa” by Lancelot Grieves (1964, Mancunium House Publishing) –
Prior to the Royal Africa Bubble scandal of 1782, West Africa was a largely unknown land to most Europeans. Many powers – England and then Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Denmark – had maintained trading posts along the coastline since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there was little penetration into the interior. Those trading posts dealt in African commodities such as ivory, gold – and slaves. Slavery was, in fact, the major motor of trade with West Africa throughout most of the eighteenth century. A ‘triangular trade’ was practiced, with manufactured goods going from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to American colonies, and raw materials going from America to Europe. This status quo was not actively challenged until the second half of the eighteenth century.
Opposition to African slavery began as early as 1727,[1] when the Quaker Church of Great Britain (the Society of Friends) made it doctrine to oppose the practice. The Quakers in America took somewhat longer to cleave to this, perhaps because slavery was all around them and vital for the economy of areas of the colonies, but the movement was given a big boost when William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had a change of heart and freed his slaves, thereafter supporting abolitionism. Court cases in the 1760s and 70s over slaves brought to Britain were reviewed in the House of Lords, and it was judged that the abolition of (white) slavery made in 1101 by the Normans continued to apply. Slavery itself was therefore illegal in Britain, and any slaves brought into the country automatically became freemen, although this was not necessarily enforced. The slave
trade was, however, violently defended by established business interests in the face of opposition by a growing abolitionist movement.
Elsewhere in Europe, opposition to slavery was initially slow to arise. The biggest move in the arena outside Britain was in Denmark, when King Christian VII abolished the slave trade as part of his moves to withdraw Danish trade from Africa in order to focus on building power in the Baltic. By this point, the trade was becoming less profitable in any case, so Christian’s appealing to abolitionist sentiment was largely a calculated political move – but the fact that such a move was seen as holding any weight was an indication of how the subject was spreading through the intellectual classes in Europe. France and Portugal were the nations most hostile to the idea of abolishing slavery, both because their colonies depended heavily on the slave trade and because the French intellectual scene was dominated by pro-slavery thinkers such as Voltaire. Linnaean Racism, nowhere more enthusiastically embraced than France, also got in the way: it was easy to justify slavery on the grounds that Africans were incapable of success without white guidance. Of course, such theories were usually thought up by armchair philosophers who had not travelled to West Africa itself and found that slaves were bought by European traders from quite sophisticated native states…
The first nation in the world to abolish slavery was the proto-United Provinces of South America, in 1784. Though even the country’s name had not been thought of that point, the initially unofficial move was a ploy to gain wider support and an attempt to unite the people of Rio de la Plata behind the rebel government. Negro slaves were promised their freedom if they fought for the rebels. It fitted nicely into the general ideology of abolishing the
casta system that powered the rebellion. Although after the war, the promises were not always entirely lived up to (if slavery in name was banned, indentured servitude often remained) it was an important exemplar for other countries.
The northern Confederations of the Empire of North America, and the colonies that had preceded them, drifted away from slavery throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The General Assembly of New England passed a law calling for the gradual abolition of slavery in 1789, with the result that no-one would be born into slavery after that date within the Confederal boundaries (although the living slaves were unaffected). Pennsylvania, initially more hostile to the idea, was gradually won over by the actions of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, backed by the influential Benjamin Franklin. In 1795 the Pennsylvanian Confederal Assembly narrowly passed a law which included manumission similar to New England’s, but – importantly for American history – also banned the transport of slaves into Pennsylvania. This meant it was almost impossible to import slaves into New York or New England from the southern Confederations, except by ship. New York itself still had long memories of the Negro Uprising of 1741 (which Prince Frederick had used in propaganda to attack Governor Cosby), but surrounded by “free” Confederations and with a growing abolitionist movement of its own, relented. The New York Assembly’s law, passed in 1803, was a watered-down version of the other confederations’ laws and did not apply to unincorporated territories or the Iroquois protectorate. However, it set another important precedent.
All of this background serves to explain why the West Africa trade was slowing down throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. America and the West Indies also, by now, had enough of a black population to produce enough slaves by natural breeding, largely making new imports uneconomical. The triangular trade was impaired by this bottleneck, and Britain’s Royal Africa Company was beset by economic difficulty, even though it itself had abandoned the slave trade after losing its monopoly in 1731. The last Director, David Andrews – who was later tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by the House of Lords – attempted to conceal the extent of the Company’s debts, with the result that the Bubble wiped thousands of pounds off the New Jonathan’s Stock Exchange when it broke in 1782. It was not, in fact, an economic bubble in the usual sense, but was so named because it reminded many commentators of the South Sea Bubble fifty years previously. That meltdown had paralysed the British government and led to the creation of the (still unofficial) office of Prime Minister. This one would be no less influential.
The Prime Minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, was forced to resign over the scandal (though he would later return upon the collapse of Portland’s government in the face of Robespierre’s France). The new government, led by the Duke of Portland but masterminded by Edmund Burke, immediately distanced itself from the failures of the previous Ministry and decided to reform the Company considerably.
The Royal Africa Company had had an unhappy history thus far. Quite apart from being an organisation founded to trade inhumanely in human lives, it had been set up by James, the Duke of York in the seventeenth century – the same man who had later become the definition of evil to all non-Jacobite Britons as James II. It had already had several minor collapses and reinstatements throughout the eighteenth century, suffering from the loss of its slave monopoly and then refocusing on the gold dust and ivory trade. It had also been officially renamed so many times that any number of the names were in common circulation, and considered interchangeable – the Royal Africa Company, the African Company, the Guinea Company, the Negroland Company, and many more.
The Company’s organisation was in a sad state, and the Portland Ministry decided that the best way to rejuvenate it would be to bring in talent from its far more successful sister organisation, the East India Company. Despite facing hard competition from its French rival, the EIC’s trade had brought great wealth to Britain, while the RAC was struggling even to keep itself afloat.
Thus, the new Board of Directors set up for the RAC was made up partly of men brought over from the EIC. The two most prominent – and famous – of these were Arthur Filling and Thomas Space, two junior EIC directors who could not have been more different. Filling was a dour Scotsman who had joined the Company’s military and served in the Indian wars, losing an eye during the war with the last Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. He also had a keen acumen for business, and had found his way to his current position partly through careful investments with a fortune he had taken during the sack of Calcutta. Space, on the other hand, was an idealistic Englishman from a privileged background, who had joined the Company mainly in order to visit exotic climes and learn about new peoples and languages. He was a strong opponent of slavery, being a member of Frederick Wilberforce’s Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and importantly through that membership was on speaking terms with several of the most prominent among Britain’s West African community. These included Olaudah Equiano, an escaped slave who had become a respected writer. There was thus Anglo-African participation in the Company’s philosophy from the start.
The challenge facing Filling and Space, as well as the other directors, was vast. The Company had singularly failed to find a new profitable trade niche since the loss of its slavery monopoly, and it was competing with both independent British traders and other European outposts along the West African coast – the French and the Portuguese, the Danes and the Dutch, though the Danish outposts were gradually turned over to the Dutch thanks to Christian VII’s policies. After initially despairing of the difficulty of their task, Space claimed to have had a vision come to him in his sleep, along with a message:
look to the east.
The implication was clear – after all, the Prime Minister had brought them in to make the RAC more like the EIC. And the EIC’s current success was based on a more interventionist strategy, pushing influence deep into the hinterland while accepting natives into positions within the Company. The EIC had not been much more than a trading company while it was limited to outposts on the fringes of the Mughal Empire, but now it was so much more. Could the RAC copy that success? There was only one way to find out.
The partnership of Filling and Space meant that the philosophy of the New Company was both profit-driven and yet possessing a moral aspect. After all, slavery was commonly practiced in the African states themselves, usually captives captured in war. “Once upon our time, our ancestors did the same,” Space wrote in a letter to Filling. “Your grandfather many times removed may have captured and enslaved mine…” a reference to the fact that Space was from Northumberland, and the Scottish slave raids into English territory during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. “Yet I can now be assured of even travelling to Edinburgh itself with no fear of being clapped in irons and forced to work the fields…do not our fellow human beings who happen to have been born in a distant land not deserve that same assurance?”
With that in mind, the New Company’s directors cooperated with a contemporary group, the African Association,[2] made up of natural philosophers and dedicated to the exploration of the West African interior. The Association included such luminaries as Joseph Banks, who had become famous publishing works on the fauna and flora of Canada, Newfoundland and the new western territories of the North American Empire[3]; John Ledyard, a New Englander who had joined the Association after failing to convince the British Government to finance a rival fur-trading company to oppose the Russians’ efforts in Alaska; and Daniel Houghton, a veteran and the group’s leader, who was determined to find the exact location of the fabled Malinese city of Timbucktoo. It was obvious to Filling that such men could be of use to a Company searching for a new area in which to trade. Banks could identify economically important plants and animals using Linnaean techniques, Ledyard could figure out how to market them, and Houghton could help explore the interior. In return, having Company-subsidised access to a new land was an enheartening prospect to them.
The Company also soon became caught up with the Colonisation Movement, a loose alliance of societies operating both in Britain and America, dedicated to re-settling black freemen in West Africa. The Movement’s motives ranged from the belief that blacks could never live a normal life surrounded by white society, the idea that blacks who had been raised in such a society could go on to ‘civilise’ the natives, and the notion that moving former slaves back across the Atlantic was a restitution for the horrors of the slave trade in the past. The Company was approached by Equiano, one of the few Africans actually involved in the Movement’s activities, with the idea of providing transport. This solved a problem Filling had noticed. His great idea was to change the
direction of the triangular trade. Instead of raw materials going from America to Britain, they could go from Africa to Britain (once the Company located such materials that would be economically valuable). British goods could still be shipped profitably to America, as Britain had begun to industrialise but America, hampered by the vast distances between its cities, had lagged behind. The problem was that he needed some commodity to go from America to Africa to complete the triangle. Freed slaves paying their way to found new colonies filled that gap, as well as providing a pleasing symmetry for more idealistic individuals such as Thomas Space.
The Company had earned enough in its first five years’ worth of operations to sell off its outdated fleet – some of which were badly constructed former slaveships – and purchase new ships, often from the new dockyards in New England. The new fleet was more like the EIC’s East Indiamen, larger, more sturdy and with at least a desultory load of defensive armament. Like the EIC, the RAC did not so much have a trading fleet as a navy, suited to Filling and Space’s ambitions.
The RAC sent numerous expeditions into the African hinterland, many of which did not return or returned with fewer men, but a picture was gradually built up. Filling knew how valuable the EIC found those (usually white) men who had a clear and concise knowledge of Indian affairs, and was trying to build up a similar cadre for West Africa.
The hinterland of what Europeans called the Gold Coast was ruled by the Ashanti Empire, a powerful and increasingly centralising confederation. Ashanti was ruled from the city-state of Kumasi by the
Ashantehene, or King of all Ashanti. Thomas Space, upon visiting the area himself and recording his thoughts, compared the system of government to that of England under the Anglo-Saxons: the King enjoyed considerable power, but was elected by a council of the powerful rather than automatically inheriting his post. The Ashanti used a crude form of bicameral legislature (or advisory board), with most of the power held by a gerontrocracy of the oldest and most powerful chiefs, but this was balanced by a second body, the
Nmerante, made up of younger men. The King’s authority was symbolised by his throne, a golden stool said to have descended from the heavens to the founder of Ashanti, Osei Tutu I, and was partly religious in character. The Ashanti religion, which focused heavily on various taboos, infused government to the point where it could be called a theocracy. The current King at the time of the Company’s penetration was Otumfuo Nana Osei Kwame Panyin, who was seen as a stabilising influence after years of jockeying between the Oyoko Abohyen (his own) and the Beretuo dynasties. The Ashanti were the hereditary enemies of the Fanti Confederacy, another powerful state which already traded with Britain and the Netherlands. This was of interest to Filling, who knew from his EIC history that divisions and power struggles were open doors to have the boot of influence and trade wedged into them.
Further eastward, the area known as the Slave Coast was better known, due to the fact that its local states had extensive slave-trade contacts with the Europeans there. Settlements by Britain and the Netherlands were joined by the small outpost of Whydah, which had been a Prussian venture ceded to the Saxons after the Third War of Supremacy. The Saxons, with no interest in African trade, had let it lapse, and the Company unilaterally seized the settlement, despite protests from the Dutch (who’d had the same idea). Whydah had formerly been part of the Kingdom of Savi, which had been conquered by the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1727. Dahomey in turn though, despite being one of the most powerful and warlike states in the region, had been conquered and vassalised in 1730 by the cavalry-using Yoruba empire of Oyo. The Dahomeyans had lost the war despite their King Agadja having invested heavily in European firearms. Now, though, the country was chafing under being forced to pay tribute to Oyo, and it was obvious that breaking free was on the mind of the current King, Kpengla. Kpengla was interested in buying more modern flintlock muskets for his troops, recognising that Agadja’s failure had been partly due to having bought obsolete, unreliable matchlocks from the Danes. Filling could see another opportunity there – or two.
The Dahomeyan army included an elite corps of female warriors known as the ‘Amazons’ to Europeans, who made the connection with the Greek myth. The victory over Savi was considered to have been partly due to the shock deployment of the Amazons. The idea was exotic enough that, when the Company’s agents published articles about it in the
Register, British intellectual interest in West Africa was sparked and even threatened to equal the orientalists fascinated by India and China. Dahomey also had an elective monarchy, though the King had to prove his descent from their legendary founder, but its voodoo religion required annual human sacrifices, and this pushed Space into describing the people as savages. It also explained why the Dahomeyans were so enthusiastic about selling even their own people into the slave trade, given that their culture meant they placed a low value on human life (or more accurately saw this world as only the surface of a much more fundamental one, and life or death was not a particularly important distinction). This did not stop Filling investing heavily in trade missions to the capital, Abomey, of course. On the other side of Oyo itself was Benin, barely yet breached by European traders but an important market in palm oil. The Company was ready to change that.
Further west, Britain’s acquisition of the French posts in Senegal after the Third War of Supremacy now paid dividends. Senegal had an existing colonial apparatus compared to the British one in Calcutta, with half-bloods (
Métis, in French), filling many administrative positions and contributing largely to the area’s culture. The former French colony was centred around Fort St. Louis and the island of Gorée, both of which were considered part of the capital of Dakar. Gorée had previously been English, as well as Dutch, so while the French had held the area for about eighty years prior to losing it, in many way the change in ownership had been accepted with a shrug by the locals. However, it is unlikely that Britain would have been so successful in the transfer of power if she had not appointed John Graves Simcoe (later knighted) as Governor of the conquered territory after a period of mismanagement and corruption throughout the 1760s. Simcoe was a veteran of the Second Platinean War, who had observed the Platineans raising a regiment of freed black slaves and had even had his life saved by one such soldier. He thus had more enlightened views about what black Africans could achieve than many Britons or Americans.
Upon taking command in Dakar, Simcoe was quick to take action against corruption and root out several organisations still trading illegally with the French. Until the late 1780s, though, his grand designs could not be matched by reality, as he had little resources to work with. While Simcoe despised slavery, he recognised that Senegal’s economy was dependent on it and that taking direct action against it, with no thought for the consequences, might do more harm than good.
This changed when the new Royal Africa Company moved in to Dakar, which had been included in its revised charter. Simcoe was innately suspicious of all merchants and speculators, but the fact that the RAC did not deal in slaves made a favourable impression, and Arthur Filling discussed with him his plans for running British possessions in West Africa in a more East India-like manner. Simcoe, who had only served in America prior to this, was unaware of the details of this, and Filling spoke at length on the subject. It was the idea of sepoy regiments that stuck in Simcoe’s head, more even than Space’s plan to try and broaden Senegalese trade to the point where slavery might be wound down. This was the germ of what would become the Company’s African equivalent of sepoys, native troopers trained and equipped in the British fashion, intended to exert the Company’s will on, and in alliance with, native states. Although they were first raised by Simcoe in Senegal, the term that eventually stuck was ‘Jagun’, from the Yoruba word for a soldier,
ologunomo ogunjagunjagun. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that it sounds similar to
jäger or ‘hunter’, the name used by various German armies for an elite skirmisher, and that the Company employed some German veterans from Hanover, Hesse and Brunswick to help train its sepoys.
Simcoe soon needed such troops, because Equiano and Space approached him with the idea of founding a black freedman colony in the region, to the south of Senegal proper. Simcoe agreed with the idea, partly because he thought such an example might eventually lead to a decline in slavery elsewhere in the region. Coastal land around St George’s Bay was purchased by the Company from the Kingdom of Koya, a local power that had had extensive diplomatic contacts with Britain and the French and recognised, from the changing of hands of Senegal, that Britain was now gaining supremacy in the region. Koya signed over the little-settled land in exchange for British help in a war against their neighbours, the Susu. Company troops, consisting largely of hired Hessian and Scottish mercenaries paired with Simcoe’s first cohort of native soldiers, assisted the Koya and forced a Susu defeat in a war which ended in 1793. Koya then vassalised Susu and thus gained overall from the deal, at least in the short term.
The new colony was supported by the Colonisation Movement, and was named Freedonia, with the inhabitants being known as Freedes and the adjective being Freedish.[4] The capital, overlooking St George’s Bay, was called Liberty.[5] The colonists who arrived in that first decade were a very diverse crew, from many places and many classes. Some were educated, such as Equiano, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor. There were many ‘Black Poor’, as the blacks of London who had become stranded there after being press-ganged into the Royal Navy were called, and some of them brought white English wives with them. Many freed blacks from the northern Confederations of North America, and the West Indies, came also. This vast range meant that mutual communication was often difficult, and a simplified version of English known as ‘Freedic’ or the ‘Tongue of Liberty’ became the common language.
Freedonia was at first under serious risk of attack from native powers – Koya and Susu were only two among many – and bandits, including slavers. Because of this, Equiano raised militia regiments from the colonists, sharing resources with Simcoe’s sepoys, and this was the start of a close cooperation between the Freedes and the Company. Filling had envisaged an EIC-like bureaucracy consisting of (visibly) natives who spoke English and understood British methods of government; the Freedes were a pool of just such people, and ones who passed on their ideas to genuine natives as the colony grew.
Yet all of what the Company achieved would have been impossible, or at least very difficult, without the work performed by James Edward Smith. Smith was a natural philosopher and Linnaean, who ignored Linnaeus’ racial theories and worked on what Linnaeus had seen as the far more important work, his classification of animals and plants. Originally Linnaeus’ intention had been to find economically important plants that could be grown back in Europe. In this he had never succeeded much himself, but Smith eventually did so. In this he was assisted by Alexander von Humboldt, a Dutch natural scientist of Prussian birth[6]. Humboldt originally approached the British after failing to sell his new idea to the Dutch, in 1800. While based in Africa, he had travelled to Dutch Suriname three years before and then made an expedition down into Platinean Peru. Humboldt’s writings are now keenly studied by those who can see, in his incidental descriptions of the country and its people, the seeds of resentment and rebellion against the regime in Cordova, which had taken power away from conservative Lima and ended its
casta system.
But Humboldt was mainly interested in the fauna and flora of the region, and in particular the cinchona tree – the source of quinine or ‘Jesuit’s bark’, a remedy for malaria that had been known of since the seventeenth century, yet had not been widely adopted. “It almost goes without saying,” he wrote, “that among Protestant physicians, hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance lie at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or harm effected by Peruvian Bark.” Perhaps this, or simply the fact that it was such a pie-in-the-sky idea, led to the Dutch VOC rejecting his notion based on this. The RAC, however, had Smith, who listened to Humboldt’s idea and then recommended it to Filling and Space.
It was certainly a bold idea. Humboldt advocated the planting of new plantations of cinchona trees in West Africa, thus providing a ready supply of quinine to combat the endemic local malaria, which had so far killed many whites who settled and traded there – along with some of the re-settled blacks.[7] The prevalent theory that black resistance to malaria was intrinsic and not due simply to growing up in the region turned out to be wrong, which was serious, as part of the Company’s economic policy (rely on educated British black colonists as administrators) rested on it.
After some hesitation, Filling invested in the idea. A fleet of Company ships travelled to Peru in 1805 – just in time – and returned bearing transplanted trees, seeds and also a great deal of the dried bark itself. It returned at a crucial time, as the Company’s chief scout Daniel Houghton was dying of the disease. His dramatic cure by the bark, witnessed by the King of Dahomey (who he had been visiting at the time) served to convince the local Africans of quinine’s efficacy more easily than might otherwise have been expected.
The plantations were not all successful, but Smith and Humboldt used Linnaean principles to deduce the right climate, building variedly-heated sheds and considering which plants survived. The Company continued to import quinine from Peru for years afterwards before becoming self-sufficient, and malaria was far from the only deadly disease plaguing the region, but nonetheless, Humboldt’s cinchona plantations served to work a remarkable transformation on West Africa…
[1]Which is, of course, the year of this timeline’s POD.
[2]Founded 1788 OTL; I have butterflied it a little earlier to make this work.
[3]OTL of course he accompanied Cook to Australia. Banks’ work here is a bit less eye-catching so he’s not a Sir (yet).
[4]I know it sounds a bit mad, but these were actually terms considered for the USA in OTL, and given that Sierra Leone was originally called the Province of Freedom, I don’t think it’s that far a leap.
[5]Built on the site of OTL Freetown.
[6]Due to Prussia being reduced to a rump in TTL, Humboldt went to the Netherlands instead to get his university education, and then joined the Dutch East India Company in order to study new animals and plants in exotic climes.
[7]OTL, a British expedition in 1860 led by Clements Markham did the same for Ceylon/Sri Lanka, which is now a big producer of quinine.
Part #42: Jiyendo
From – “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956) :
An oft-stated apparent ‘historical paradox’ is that many of the strokes that led to Russian dominance in the East were made at a time when Russia herself was convulsed by civil war. In fact this simply illustrates that – even before the formal founding of the Company – the Pacific expansion was as remote and separated from St Petersburg as the British and French East India Companies were from London and Paris. Just as French East India remained loyal to the Dauphin even while there was no Royal France, the Russians and Lithuanians in the Far East continued with their operations without even
knowing about the Russian Civil War until late 1798. This was probably just as well, as the First Fleet included a number of politically suspect Leib Guards who Peter III had deliberately exiled, suspecting them of supporting Catherine. Had news of the Civil War reached Okhotsk earlier, it is likely that the ‘Japanese venture’ would have torn itself apart. As it was, by the time any potential Potemkinites were aware of the situation further west, things were too hectic for any disunion to arise…
Let us recall that in early 1795, the mercurial Lithuanian expedition leader Moritz Benyovsky[1], impatient with Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin’s progress in expanding the Okhotsk colony, decided to unilaterally launch an expedition to Edzo[2] in order to establish trade relations with the Matsumae Han who ruled there. However, being unfamiliar with the waters, Benyovsky’s ships were blown off course in a storm and they landed in the north of the island, in the area still inhabited by the indigenous Aynyu people.
Benyovsky was adamant that the expedition sail again as soon as possible, but was beset by two problems: firstly, both his ships had been damaged by striking rocks off the coast and were taking on water, their pumps not capable of keeping the level steady for a long voyage; and secondly, they still had no clue where they were or how to get to Matsumae-town. At this point, Benyovsky’s second-in-command, Jonas Raudauskas, suggested that it might be best to return to Okhotsk for repairs and make a later attempt, as that was the port that the ships had the best chance of being able to find, and within the range that their leaking hulls permitted. Benyovsky vetoed this: according to his logbook, because he thought it would still be too far for the pumps to keep the ships afloat. In practice, almost all historians believe he rejected it simply because he was unwilling to swallow his pride and return to Lebedev with his tail between his legs.
Instead, Benyovsky ordered a landfall at the nearest natural harbour that could be found, and that the ships be beached for repairs. This was perhaps overly ambitious, particularly for the young and still fairly inexperienced Lithuanian navy, but the beaching operation was accomplished satisfactorily. However, Benyovsky’s carpenter, Antanas Vaitkus, claimed that the trees visible from the harbour were unsuitable for plankage. Benyovsky threw a fit and threatened to have Vaitkus hanged from the yardarm, but at that point was interrupted by Raudauskas informing him that the Aynyu natives had been sighted, watching the beached ships curiously from a distance.
Benyovsky was never one to miss an opportunity like this. Most captains would have assumed that any native activity was likely to be hostile, and prepared to defend their ships. Instead, he immediately ordered that both ships’ crews be scoured for any speakers of the Aynyu language. Two were found; a Nivkh and a Russian out of Yakutsk who had previously dealt with the Nivkhs.[3] Benyovsky sent them, along with his captain of marines, Ulrich von Münchhausen[4], to treat with the Aynyu.
The natives turned out to be surprisingly hospitable. Although conversation was slow and halting at first, Benyovsky himself learned the language quickly[5] and a relationship was soon established. The Aynyu contacted their chieftains and, in exchange for part of Benyovsky’s trade goods, agreed to find the appropriate timber Vaitkus required and bring it to the Lithuanians. Of course, Benyovsky’s trade goods had been intended for the Japanese, not tribal peoples like the Aynyu. European naval explorers who expected to encounter the latter commonly brought things like jewellery, fine steel blades and so forth. Benyovsky had planned to trade with the Japanese, an advanced and civilised people about which one fact in Russia was particularly known, via the Dutch: the Japanese had banned firearms back in the days of firelock muskets. Benyovsky had thought that they might change their mind when they saw the latest rifled products out of European gunsmiths. In the end, though, he mostly ended up trading them to Aynyu hunters…or at least they
claimed to be hunters…
Of course, Benyovsky was not stupid. He realised that trading weapons to a people surrounding his stricken ships was not necessarily the best idea in the world. To that end, he tasked Münchhausen – who was quite an accomplished spy and tracker – to tail those Aynyu buying the most rifles and find out if they were planning an attack on the Lithuanian ships. What Münchhausen found, though, was even more extraordinary: the Aynyu were indeed planning an attack, but on someone else entirely.
It was not until one of Lebedev’s ships, the
Zhemchug, finally found the beached Lithuanians six months later (still with no sign of the promised timber from the Aynyu) that Benyovsky learned the name of the place where his ships had landed –
Shiretoko Hanto…
*
The Aynyu rebellion of 1797 was an event difficult to predict.[6] Tension had certainly been rising for a long time, with the Matsumae Han slowly changing trade rules over time to favour Japanese interests over the Aynyu, and occasionally engaging in land displacement and resettlement. The Daimyo of Matsumae had begun to interpret his Shogunal grant for trade with the Aynyu as a license to rule over them. But the particular catalyst could have been anything. In this case, it was an accusation that the Japanese had attempted to deliberately poison Aynu chieftains at a trade meeting. Whether this claim had any accuracy to it was irrelevant: it was enough to unite many disparate Aynu tribes under a charismatic leader, who called himself Aynoyna, after the first man in the Aynu religious tradition.
It is likely that, without Benyovsky and Lebedev, the rebellion would have gone the same way as that of Shakushain a century earlier: the Aynyu might have scored some early victories, but as soon as they inflicted a serious defeat on the Matsumae, it would be enough to make the Shogunate concerned enough to send forces to restore order there. The Matsumae enjoyed many special privileges, such as being exempt from the
sankin kotai[7], precisely because they were seen as no real threat to the Tokugawa.
This time, however, things were different. Some of the Aynyu – not many, but enough – were armed with European weapons. It was sufficient to result in the complete rolling-back of all Matsumae settlements north of the Ishikari plain. By 1799, the situation in Matsumae-town was of panic. The Daimyo of Matsumae decided to send a call for help to Edo, only to be assassinated by one of his lieutenants, who feared a purge like the one after the Shakushain Revolt – when, for a generation afterwards, the Tokugawa had imposed their own men on the Matsumae, throwing out all existing Matsumae ministers and generals. The Han descended into chaos, with only vague reports of the situation reaching Niphon.[8]
By 1800, things had stabilised, apparently. The new Daimyo, Matsumae Hidoshi – barely more than a boy – sent a representative to the newly rebuilt Shogunal palace in Edo, who reported that the situation was under control and the Aynyu had been defeated once again. Hidoshi apologised that he could not come himself at the present, as tradition demanded, as matters were still too volatile at home. Emperor Tenmei[9] and the Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi[10], were relieved to hear the news, as the country was still recovering from a succession of natural disasters that had hit in 1772, including a great fire in Edo, destructive typhoons, volcanoes and earthquakes, and authorising a military expedition against the Aynyu would have made already strained finances creak alarmingly. Later Japanese chroniclers would record this as a warning or prophecy to both Court and Bakufu. If so, it was not heeded. Matsumae had always looked after itself, and no-one thought to send an envoy to check that the representative was telling the truth.
In reality, the Aynyu won – at least in the short term. It was likely that their dominance would not have lasted long, as their temporary, artificial unity began to break up as the tribes re-asserted themselves. But Benyovsky had had another of what Lebedev described sourly as ‘his great ideas, of which he has fifty in a day, perhaps three of which will not result in us being killed by the end of that day’. From his talks with the Aynyu, and later some Japanese as he visited the lands conquered by the Aynyu, Benyovsky had built up a picture of Japanese society – stratified and built strongly on tradition and history. He knew that, no matter how optimistic Lebedev might be, there was no way that the Shogun would permit Russian and Lithuanian trade through Edzo. It was simply against the rules.
That, of course, assumed that the Shogun
knew about that trade…
The strategy Benyovsky adopted was similar to those sometimes used in Germany, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and even his native Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before its dissolution. If the system was just that stratified, the way to deal with it was not to try and work around it, but just to play it. The fact that most foreign trade was forbidden under the Tokugawa was irrelevant if the Japanese didn’t
realise it was foreign trade.
Therefore, the Russo-Lithuanian forces co-opted the dead Matsumae Daimyo’s third son, Hidoshi, who had been dismissed from the succession in most Japanese’s minds as his elder brothers fought in the burning house of the Aynyu revolt. Münchhausen was made the boy’s bodyguard and filled him with tall tales of Europe, Russia and the adventures of himself and his father. It was obvious to the Shogun in Edo that such a young Daimyo must have a regent of some kind, but he never dreamed that it might be a round-eyed barbarian.
The Russians and Lithuanians, the latter now with repaired ships, descended upon Matsumae town in August 1799, just as the Aynyu had drawn off most of the Matsumae’s remaining army. Once upon a time, two hundred years before, Japan had had one of the largest and most powerful navies in the world, but under the Tokugawa
sakoku system of isolationism, the very construction of oceangoing ships was forbidden. With no ships and no cannon – also banned – the Matsumae were effectively defenceless against the descent.
Led by Peter’s suspect Leib Guards, the Russo-Lithuanian forces took the city and broke into the castle, using European cannon taken from the Lithuanian ships to batter down the mediaeval walls. After a brief struggle which culminated in the deaths of the two elder Matsumae brothers, things were secured. Benyovsky’s wild gamble had worked, to Lebedev’s not-so-private amazement. Of course, things were helped by the fact that the Matsumae’s influential family surgeon, Sugimura Goro, had fallen from grace during the dead brothers’ power struggle and was willing to help Hidoshi and the Russians establish themselves in return for regaining his former prominence. It was primarily Sugimura who helped the Russians and Lithuanians first insinuate their way into Japanese society – a fact which means Yamato nationalists ever since have equated his name with Judas.
By 1801, then, when news of the now-finished Civil War was just breaking in Okhotsk, Benyovsky and Lebedev were finally established. Under the guise of internal Japanese trade quietly continuing with a Han that had always been a little…edgy, a little odd…and so it was not entirely a surprise to find some unusual new goods included there…Europeans other than the Dutch had finally broken into Tokugawa’s closed market.
Sakoku had been breached.
Things were looking up for the venturers, at least for the present. But back in Okhotsk, people were getting careless. As soon as Emperor Paul heard of the successes, he sent more men and more supplies to expand the colony and the trade. The correct response, perhaps, but it meant a lot more trade going through the Amur region…a region whose precise status had been left carefully undefined for a long time, and a very good reason.
Japan had been a surprisingly easy nut to crack, though few men would have had the daring to accomplish it. China…China was a different story…
[1] Remember this is a Russified form of Móric Beňovský.
[2] Before the Meiji Restoration in OTL, Hokkaido was called Ezo (or Edzo in Russified form).
[3] The Nivkhs are the native people of Sakhalin, who before this point acted as intermediaries between the Russians, Japanese, Chinese and Aynyu (what little contact there was).
[4] Anglophones may not realise it, but Baron (Karl Friedrich Hieronymus) von Münchhausen was a real person, a German who was page to Anthony Ulrich, Regent of Russia, and then joined the Russian Army and served in the Russian Army. In TTL he has had a similar career, but also fought in the War of the Polish Partition and married a Lithuanian. His son (OTL he did not have children) Ulrich (named after his old master) has joined the Lithuanian navy as a marine.
[5] As he did Malagasy in OTL.
[6] OTL there was a more minor rebellion in 1789 – this, on the other hand, is as big as the 17th-century Shakushain’s Revolt.
[7] A system by which the Shogun essentially took members of the various Hans’
daimyo hostage in Edo, to guard against potential betrayal and factionalism.
[8] Niphon (not Nippon) is an archaic name for Honshu.
[9] In TTL Emperor Emperor Go-Momozono had a son, who became Emperor Tenmei, and did instead marry his daughter to a royal from a distant branch of the family (who in OTL became Emperor Kokaku). Tenmei’s name means ‘dawn’ and reflects a hope for a bright future after the disasters of the 1770s. A forlorn hope.
[10] Not the later OTL one – a butterflied ATL ‘brother’.
Part #43: Hounded by the Afghans
“I forget the throne of Delhi when I remember the mountain tops of my Afghan land. If I must choose between the world and you, I shall not hesitate to claim your barren deserts as my own.”
– Ahmad Shah Durrani
*
From – “A History of Northern India”, by Philippe Desaix (1954) -
The eighteenth century was a turbulent time for warfare and politics, to the extent that some have theorised that worldwide crises might have been precipitated by unusual shifts in climate or the coronal energy from the sun. But this lies beyond the scope of the conventional historian’s work. Suffice to say that Europe was far from alone in seeing turmoil and rapid changes in that era, though in Europe the chaos of the eighteenth century soon faded into memory beside the viciousness of the early nineteenth.
Persia suffered a series of civil wars throughout the century. The long-standing Safavid dynasty was brought down by a weak Shah, Soltan Hossein, and invasions by rebellious Ghilzai Afghans out of Kandahar. The Ghilzais, led by Mir Mahmud Hotaki, killed Soltan Hossein’s brother the Persian governor of Kandahar and then attacked Persia proper in 1722. The Safavid response was muted, hampered by the fact that Soltan Hossein’s corrupt court did not see fit to inform him of the invasion until the capital, Isfahan, was already under siege. The Afghans starved the city out, deposed Soltan Hossein and forced him to crown Mir Mahmud as Shah of Persia.
However, the Persian armies did not recognise this coronation, and remained hostile to the Afghans. Soltain Hossein’s son, Tahmasp, fled to the Qajar tribe of the north and established a government-in-exile in Tabriz. He declared himself Shah and was recognised by the Ottoman Sultan, Ahmed III, and the Emperor of all the Russias, Peter the Great. The Ottomans and the Russians were both cheerfully using Persia’s difficulties to expand their own influence in disputed regions such as Mesopotamia and the Caucasus; however, both Constantinople and St Petersburg feared the other gaining too much influence over Persia as a whole, and so both backed Tahmasp as the rightful ruler.
Meanwhile, the Persian general Nadir Shah Afshar pretended to submit to the Afghan ruler of occupied Mashhad, Malek Mahmud, but then escaped and began building up his own army. Mashhad was a holy city and one of great symbolic importance to the Persian nation, so the Afghan occupation was more important than the city’s strategic value alone. Tahmasp II and the Qajar leader, Fath Ali Khan, asked Nadir Shah to join them. He agreed and soon halted the Afghan advance, then began to drive them back. He discovered that Fath Ali Khan was in treacherous contact with Malek Mahmud and revealed this to Tahmasp, who executed Fath Ali Khan and made Nadir chief of his army instead. He took the title ‘Tahmasp Qoli’ (servant of Tahmasp) and began increasing his personal power through his army command. His success in retaking Mashhad in 1726 made him a legendary figure, a Persian Alexander as many would later call him.
Nadir decided not to directly attack occupied Isfahan, but instead invaded Herat, which was controlled by the Abdali tribe of Afghans. He defeated them and many joined his army, adding valuable cavalry strength. The Abdalis assisted Nadir Shah in two epic victories against the new Ghilzai leader, Ashraf, who then fled and abandoned the city of Isfahan to the Persians in 1729. After Tahmasp made his triumphal entry into the city, Nadir then pursued Ashraf back into Khorasan. Ashraf was eventually murdered by some of his own soldiers.
The Ottomans’ gains during the civil war were largely undone by Nadir’s campaign in 1730, though he was hampered by a rebellion by the Abdalis, who briefly seized Isfahan and had to be put down. The Ottoman general Topaz Osman Pasha also foiled his plans at Baghdad, one of his few defeats. However, Nadir was now sufficiently powerful that he was able to force Tahmasp to advocate in favour of his baby son Abbas III, to whom Nadir became regent. In all but name, he had become Shah himself.
Nadir’s reign had considerable consequences for Persia itself, both his attempted reforms and his unashamed barbarism towards opposition – he idolised Tamerlane. After his assassination in 1747, Persia descended into a second civil war, a three-way conflict between the Qajars, Nadir’s nephew Adil Shah and a new Zand dynasty founded by Karim Khan. In the end, the Zands won, but by this time, much of Nadir’s territorial gains had been undone.[1]
But, in the long run, Nadir’s reign was perhaps even more influential for Afghanistan and the north of India. As part of his campaign against the Ghilzais, he conquered Kandahar in 1737 and founded a new city near it, named Nadirabad after himself – part of the Alexandrian legend. As part of this conquest, he freed numerous prisoners of the Ghilzais, important hostages from the ruling lines of the other Afghan tribes. Among these was Ahmad Khan Abdali and his brother Zulfikar Khan Abdali, sons of the Abdali chief. Nadir took a liking to Ahmad Khan, calling him ‘
Dur-i-Durrani’ (“Pearl of Pearls”) and making him head of his Abdali cavalry.
Ahmad Khan then participated in Nadir Shah’s invasion of the Mughal Empire. That once-powerful state had declined since the days of Aurangzeb, and its current ruler, Mohammed Shah, was unable to prevent encroachments by the growing Maratha Empire from the south. Nadir continued his conquest of Afghanistan, taking Kabul and Ghazni, then – using the pretext of pursuing enemy Afghans over the border – conquered Lahore and crossed the Indus. With assistance from the Durranis, he defeated the Mughals at the Battle of Karnal in 1739. Mohammed Shah bought off Nadir’s army with almost his entire treasury; the Persians withdrew, but took with them the Peacock Throne, symbol of the Mughal Emperors, and the Koh-i-Noor and Darya-ye Noor diamonds, along with much other booty. Such was the loot, in fact, that Nadir was able to halt taxation in Persia for three years upon his triumphal return, increasing his popularity.
Upon Nadir’s assassination, Ahmad Khan accused Adil Shah of having a hand in his uncle’ murder, and withdrew his Abdali forces from the Persian army, fighting their way through Adil Shah’s forces back to Kandahar. The Abdali chiefs then called a
Loya Jirga to choose a new leader in 1747; after nine days’ worth of indecisive squabbling – in which Ahmad Khan remained silent – Sabir Shah Abdali, a respected holy man, spoke up and declared that, despite his youth, Ahmad Khan was the only one he saw with the qualities to take up the burden of rule. The chiefs agreed and Ahmad Khan Abdali became Ahmad Shah Durrani, changing the name of the Abdali tribe to the Durranis in honour of Nadir’s nickname for him.
Under Ahmad Shah’s rule, the new Durranis immediately began consolidating their power over all Afghanistan. Ghazni was taken from the Ghilzais and Kabul from its own ruler. Not recognising any of the claimants as legitimate Shah of Persia, he did not limit his campaigns to Afghanistan, taking Herat and Mashhad in 1750-51. But the main force of his will was directed at India. Rather than his hero Nadir’s brief, Alexandrian push, Ahmad Shah was able to achieve lasting success against the still-divided Mughals. After three separate invasions of the Punjab, the Mughal Emperor, Ahmad Shah Bahadur, was forced to concede all of the Sindh and Kashmir, and most of the Punjab itself to Ahmad Shah.
Ahmad Shah was occupied for some years as the rebellious Sikhs of the Punjab rose up against his forces, ejecting them from Lahore briefly before Ahmad Shah returned with the bulk of the army to reconquer the city. In 1756, he attacked the Mughals once again and besieged Delhi, overthrowing Ahmad Shah Bahadur and installing a puppet emperor, Alamgir II. He married his second son Nadir to Alamgir’s daughter[2] to cement his control, and Nadir mostly remained in Delhi while his father continued to campaign with his elder son Timur.
Ahmad Shah and Timur returned to Afghanistan in 1757, pausing on the way back to sack the Sikh holy city of Amritsar and defile its Golden Temple, increasing the bitterness between Sikh and Afghan. Ahmad Shah did not remain in Afghanistan for long; the Indian situation soon began to fall apart, as the vigorous Maratha Empire continued to attack the Mughals and drove the Afghans out of the Punjab. Ahmad Shah returned and led his army to a crushing, epic victory at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, which saw the Marathas smashed so utterly that their empire broke apart into a loose, disunited confederacy. This bought time for the Mughals to reform and regroup; Ahmad Shah assisted his son Nadir in seizing control of the empire on the death of Alamgir. Nadir’s son Ibrahim Shah, out of Alamgir’s daughter, would have a legitimacy to rule the empire afterwards.
The Durranis controlled northern India, and the Marathas were too disunited to pose a serious threat again, but the Sikhs continued to stubbornly rebel every year or two, forcing Ahmad Shah to continuously return to India to put down their rebellions. The constant travel weakened his health and he died of cancer in 1773. Upon his death, his first son Timur brought most of the Durrani army back to Afghanistan and called a
Loya Jirga which elected him new leader, while Nadir remained in Delhi and successfully put down an attempted rebellion led by the brilliant Mughal general Mirza Najaf Khan. After Nadir held on, Mirza Najaf retreated to Oudh, whose Nawab was married to his sister, and focused on reforming the Oudhi army. In doing so, he extensively studied the infantry tactics and technology of the British East India Company, which held Bengal and made Oudh a protectorate.
After a hesitation that could have turned into civil war, the sons of Ahmad Shah Durrani came to an agreement to divide their father’s empire. Both agreed that the sheer size of the Durrani state was too large and needed too much attention for any one man to rule. Timur took the Afghan territories – which were too threatened by a newly resurgent Zand Persia for him to worry about India anyway – and Nadir, of course, continued to rule from Delhi. Sindh and Rajputana went to Nadir, Kashmir to Timur. Neither could agree about the Punjab; in any case, the situation was taken out of their hands when the Sikhs rebelled once more in 1781 and neither Nadir nor Timur could spare the forces to put down the rebellion. An independent Sikh Confederacy sandwiched between the two halves of the Durrani Empire was thus quietly allowed to remain, so long as it did not attempt to expand.
The Durranis of Afghanistan lost some lands to the Zands, including Mashhad and Nishapur, but successfully retained Herat. However, Timur did subdue Kafiristan, an area which proved to be at least as troublesome as the Sikhs had been. Timur’s son Ahmad Shah (II) went on to conquer the northern part of Baluchistan.
But in India, the Durranis of Delhi (often known as the Neo-Moguls to European writers) began to reform and centralise the old empire, assisted by the fact that most of the Empire’s enemies were too busy fighting each other to threaten Nadir’s throne. His reign was focused on strengthening the power of the imperial institutions, knowing that new threats would soon arise.
And this was the situation that greeted the impact of the War of the Ferengi Alliance, as the combined forces of Britain, Royal France and Haidarabad marched upon Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore…
[1]Up till this point this is all OTL. In TTL the Zands won, or rather
stayed dominant rather than briefly holding power and then being defeated by the Qajars.
[2]A POD. OTL, it was his first son, Timur. Both Timur and Nadir are different to OTL – Timur was a bit of a Richard Cromwell figure in OTL.
