Britain Against Napoleon by Roger Knight – review

Giving Wellington credit is all well and good, but the British state had to transform itself to beat the French

At the end of this fascinating and exhaustively researched book on the British contribution to the war against Napoleon, Roger Knight provides an “aftermath” which, among other things, follows up the careers of many of those who played a vital part in the emperor’s defeat. But even to those with a fair knowledge of military history, the names of many of those Knight includes may be unfamiliar. John Herries, William Wickham, William Marsden, John Barrow, Henry Bunbury, Samuel Bentham, to name some of the less obscure – who were they, and what did they do that was so vital to the war effort?

“The historical headlines,” writes Knight, “have been usurped by Napoleon and Wellington, the drama of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna.” But the foundations of British victory were the expertise and diligence of craftsmen – makers of arms, of ships, ropes, uniforms; the contractors responsible for the ever-increasing capacity of the defence industry, public and private; the farmers and farmworkers who ensured the growth and efficiency of agricultural production; the merchant seamen who transported food and raw materials and many, many others. The co-ordination of the efforts of all these men and women depended in turn on “the men who signed and passed contracts across tables in government departments, the civil servants who drafted documents and did sums in the backrooms and basements of Whitehall, and the international merchants and dealers who traded in the city. They were all needed as much as the tens of thousands of young soldiers and seamen.” It was, above everything else, Knight argues, the superior management of resources, the greater efficiency of supply and logistics, that enabled Britain to defeat an enemy much larger and more potentially powerful than itself.

The financial acumen of Herries, commissary-in-chief to the army, and Bunbury, deputy quartermaster general and subsequently undersecretary of state for war, had been vital to the regular supply of the army in the Peninsula. Herries was 24 at the start of the war with Napoleon, and Bunbury barely 25, boys in the backroom indeed. Wickham was a spy-master and master spy; Marsden was second secretary to the Admiralty, with responsibility for the development of dockyards; when in 1804 he was promoted to first secretary, John Barrow became his second. Bentham was inspector-general of naval works, a tireless reorganiser more Benthamite even than his brother Jeremy.

These men, and others named in Knight’s “aftermath”, were all to different degrees involved in the much-needed reform of the services, whether in recruitment, record-keeping, financial management, inter-departmental liaison, intelligence-gathering, communications, the construction of defensive works, the repairing, refitting, arming, provisioning and building of warships or a thousand other tasks. The opening chapters of the book describe how ill-prepared the armed civil services were during the largely unsuccessful war against the new French republic that began after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and was brought to …read more