Mackesy P. The War for America, 1775-1783
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which had ever served there. General Medows went on with four battalions from the abortive Cape expedition in
1781; and the reinforcements despatched with Admiral Bickerton in the last weeks of the Ministry contained a
regiment of cavalry (the first European Horse to serve in India), two battalions of British infantry, and two of
Hanoverians. The whole European force in India thus came to compare in size with the garrison of Jamaica. Ten
thousand miles from home, these troops were the force which saved the Carnatic.
INDIA
Like the army in America, the force in southern India was dependent on the sea for its reinforcements, supplies and
lateral movements. After the initial clash of 1778 the French fleet withdrew from the coast of India for two and a
half years, and Hyder launched his attack without its help. But in January 1781, as Sir Eyre Coote marched to
relieve the Carnatic garrisons beset by Hyder, Admiral d'Orves descended with six two-deckers and joined Hyder at
Pondicherry. De Grasse and Washington in their different degrees were to present no more formidable combination
when
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they united in the Chesapeake a few months later. Coote was at Cuddalore, utterly dependent on seaborne supplies;
Admiral Hughes was at Bombay, assured that the French had brought no troops and oblivious of Coote's real
danger. Had the enemy persisted, they could have starved the only British force in southern India into surrender.
But, knowing that reinforcements were on the way from Europe, the Governor of Mauritius had ordered d'Orves to
return by April with his force intact. Like d'Estaing in America, he quit the coast with his mission uncompleted,
and two rice vessels reached Coote from Madras when he had been reduced to two days' supplies. The external
threat removed, Coote launched the astounding campaign in which 8,500 Europeans and sepoys crushed ten times
their numbers at Porto Novo.1
When the approaching monsoon ended the campaign in August, news of the war with Holland had reached
Madras, seven months after its outbreak. Suffren was known to have reached Mauritius; and to forestall his attack
it was necessary to deny him the use of Dutch bases, for Trincomalee in Ceylon was the only all-weather harbour
in the Bay of Bengal. The British had no natural harbour on the Coromandel coast of India; and in the violent
north-east monsoon from October to January no fleet could remain on the coast. Ships retiring to Bombay to
escape the monsoon or refit after battle would leave the Madras coast at the enemy's mercy for several months. It
had happened in 1759; and Hughes and Coote urged the Governor that the Dutch ports must be seized, and Hyder
driven back from the coast and deprived of French support. Their advice was adopted. The Dutch mainland port of
Negapatam was taken in November 1781, and in January a small force stormed the main fort at Trincomalee. But
success was short-lived. Suffren was at hand, and a desperate struggle of eighteen months was to decide the fate of
India.
If the British government's arrangements had been properly executed, Hughes would have confronted Suffren's
eleven French ships of the line with twelve or fourteen; and the Rockingham Ministry might have inherited a
victory in India to match Rodney's in the Caribbean. Commodore Johnstone had brought two ships of the line and
three fifty guns as far as the Cape; the Monarca and a fifty-gun ship had followed him closely; and the Sultan and
Magnanime sailed in June 1781. But greed, neglect and shortsightedness were to frustrate the concentration.
Though Johnstone knew Suffren's strength, it will be remembered that he adhered to the letter of his instructions
and turned back from the Cape
1 The following account of operations in India relies chiefly on James, The British Navy in Adversity;
Richmond, The Navy in India; Fortescue, History of the British Army; and Harlow, Founding of the Second
British Empire.
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with two of his fifty-gun ships to escort some prizes to St Helena.1 On his way he fell in with the 'fifty' which had
followed him from home; and in the full knowledge that Suffren would give the French a superiority in the Indian
Ocean, he ordered her to cruise off the Cape and Mauritius instead of hastening on to join Hughes. Her captain
obeyed, perhaps not unwillingly, and taking two prizes he brought them back to St Helena, from which he sailed
for the second time eight weeks after his first arrival. On his second passage he was taken by the French; and the
odds east of the Cape lengthened from ten British two-deckers against eleven French to nine against twelve.
Captain Gell's Monarca had joined Hughes with a healthy complement after the shortest possible passage; the three
ships forwarded from the Cape by Johnstone, which had left England before her, arrived three months later after a
long and circuitous voyage, barely in time for the first clash with Suffren and with their crews ravaged by disease.
But the Sultan and Magnanime were still absent. They had sailed a few weeks behind the Monarca, but had wasted
time at St Helena and in towing a prize to Madras, and arrived on the last day of March 1782, 'more like hospital
ships than men of war'. Such was the execution of ministerial designs on which the fate of India might depend.
The odds might indeed have been worse, for as soon as Suffren joined him d'Orves had sailed from Mauritius to
attack Hughes before Johnstone's reinforcement reached him. Had he gone straight to Trincomalee he would have
succeeded, but winds and currents carried him to the north of Madras. Hughes was able to return from
Trincomalee, and the French found him lying under the Madras batteries with nine sail of the line.2
D'Orves had handed over his command to Suffren, who declined to attack the British under the batteries. But the
clash was not long delayed, for Hughes followed him to sea, and fought the first of their five fierce battles. Suffren
had about 800 guns against 600, and intended his rear to double on the British rear and crush it; but his second in
command failed him, and after an indecisive struggle the fleets parted in a squall at dusk.
Thus Suffren's first bid for the command of the sea was foiled. Nevertheless he landed 3,000 French troops at Porto
Novo without hindrance; and Hyder, who was so discouraged that he had begun to withdraw from the Carnatic,
took fresh heart and resumed the offensive. With his help the French troops captured Cuddalore, obtaining a base
on the coast and a supply port for Hyder. The conditions for a sustained French intervention had been achieved.
1 See above, p. 390.
2 Including fifty-gun ships. The convention deplored by Middleton whereby fifties were not used in the line of
battle was not observed by the small forces in Indian waters.
32
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Suffren had orders to return to Mauritius and refit, but he was of tougher metal than d'Orves; and recognising that
withdrawal would be fatal to the alliance with Hyder, he remained in Indian waters. Hughes did not intend to renew
the fight: his first need was to reinforce the weak garrison of Trincomalee, and though the two laggard ships from
England had joined him, he did not intend to risk a battle which might force him to relinquish his object. But battle
was forced on him. Suffren regarded no other operations as profitable till he had won a decision at sea; and on 12
April, while Rodney and de Grasse were fighting for Jamaica at the Saints, Hughes and Suffren fought off Ceylon
for India. Again the results were indecisive, and Trincomalee received its reinforcement.
4
The Last Battles
Both sides were aware that the crisis had yet to come. For de Bussy's plan was in train to bring the Indian struggle
to a climax, and the North Ministry's counter-move was unrolling.1 One of the government's last acts had been the
despatch of Admiral Bickerton with six sail of the line and a convoy of troops. Sailing in February 1782 he got
safely away: the French reinforcement was not so fortunate. The second French detachment to sail was mauled by
Kempenfelt and then driven back by a storm, and only two storeships proceeded to the rendezvous. When this
force sailed again in April it fell in with Barrington, who took two ships of the line and drove the third back to
Brest with its convoy.2 Thus only about half of the ten ships intended for Suffren reached Mauritius, where the
raging plague caused a seventy-four to be burnt as too pestiferous for service. The military force was also whittled
down by Kempenfelt and Barrington, and still further reduced by a detachment left to protect the Cape from
Bickerton; and at Mauritius hundreds more were swept off by the plague.
Both Hughes and Suffren knew that Bickerton was on the way, and Suffren determined to stake a throw on a third
battle while the odds remained in his favour. Hughes was lying at Negapatam to protect that place and
Trincomalee; and here on 6 July 1782 the fleets re-engaged. The fight was fierce, the casualties were heavy, the
tactical results once again indecisive. Much now depended on speedy repairs. But instead of going straight to
Madras, Hughes lingered at Negapatam expecting Bickerton; and when he eventually went to Madras and
completed his repairs, Suffren was ready to strike again. Appearing off Trincomalee, he offered the garrison the
honours of war for a speedy capitulation, and they surrendered virtually without resistance only two days before
Hughes returned to their relief.
1 Above, p. 437.
2 See above, p. 478.
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For the British the loss seemed disastrous. While the French now had a safe refitting base off southern India,
Hughes had none nearer than Bombay; nor could he round Ceylon with a damaged fleet in the monsoon. Another
punishing battle might therefore prove fatal; and defying the Madras Council he retired to Bombay, where
Bickerton joined him.
To all appearances southern India lay at the enemy's mercy. But the calculations of oceanic strategy were as
deceptive to the French as they so often were to the British. Expecting de Bussy, Suffren planned a decisive stroke
against Madras for the spring of 1783, and to ensure a safe rendezvous with the reinforcement he withdrew from
the scene of action to Sumatra. But the grander design miscarried. For at Sumatra Suffren learnt that de Bussy,
who was due in September with ten sail of the line, had been delayed by the Mauritius plague. He could not be
expected till February, and then with only four ships. The French government had hoped for a decisive contribution
from the Dutch, who had eight two-deckers ready at home and seven in the East Indies. But though a force sailed
from the Texel, it never passed the Cape but stayed to protect the colony. Nor did the squadron at Batavia stir.
Perhaps it was deterred by Commodore Johnstone's false instructions to attack Java and Sumatra, of which the
French obtained a copy; perhaps by the East India Company's attack in 1781, when China ships based on
Bencoolen in Sumatra had swept up all the Dutch settlements on the west coast of the island. Here again a minor
and apparently irrelevant offensive may have served to retain the initiative and exercise unforeseen pressure on the
plans of the enemy.1
Thus Suffren was disappointed of Dutch help; nor could he wait at Sumatra for de Bussy's retarded junction, for by
February Hughes and Bickerton might return with disastrous effect to southern India. He therefore took the risk of
returning on his own to Ceylon, where de Bussy followed and joined him in early March. They did not know that
peace was already spreading across the world. They knew only that with fifteen ships against eighteen they had no
hope of a decisive naval victory. In its dying moments the North government had achieved a superiority in both
the East and West India commands.
Yet the command of the water could still be held in dispute while de Bussy's troops delivered the decisive blow on
land. Suffren had the greatness to see that the French army at Cuddalore, not the fleet at Trincomalee, now held the
key to decision. Though the British fleet might appear at any minute, he rushed de Bussy's troopships to Cuddalore
escorted by his coppered warships, and escaping interception by a hair's breadth returned to Trincomalee.
1 For the Sumatra operations see Harlow, 13640; for the false instructions, Mariner's Mirror, 1942, pp.
2023,
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The army at Cuddalore now consisted of 3,000 Europeans, 3,000 French sepoys, and 5,000 Mysore infantry and
cavalry. Against these the British marched from Madras in April with 1,700 Europeans, 8,000 sepoys and 1,000
native cavalry. These might have been enough in the hands of Coote, but he died at the end of April, leaving
General James Stuart in command. Stuart marched slowly forward and reached Cuddalore at the beginning of June.
Five days were then spent in landing stores from the fleet, while the French rapidly entrenched a formidable
covering position. This was attacked on the 13th, and though the losses were heavy Stuart dislodged the enemy and
drove them into the town.
At this critical moment Suffren appeared. He had only fifteen ships against Hughes's eighteen, and 1,000 guns
against 1,200; but unlike most French admirals of the day he was willing to expose his fleet for a great object.
Hughes's fleet was short of water, and his best hope was to obtain the weather gauge and win a decisive victory
which would release him to go in search of water and provisions. But scurvy had so ravaged his crews that though
he had more ships and guns than the enemy he had fewer seamen. In a line-to-line engagement on 20 June the
French inflicted heavier casualties than the British. Hughes then bore away for Madras in search of water,
abandoning the command of the coast to the enemy; and Suffren landed 2,000 men to strengthen de Bussy.
The British army's situation was serious. Though it was obtaining cattle in plenty, the troops were tired and the
enemy with their reinforcements much more numerous. A French sortie from Cuddalore was repulsed with loss,
but everything depended on reinforcements. Stuart had summoned the force in the south of the Presidency, and in
spite of the Governor Lord Macartney's counter-order Colonel Fullarton was marching up to his help. Whether
Stuart would have been forced to retreat with the loss of his siege-train, or could have liquidated the French bridge-
head in India with the help of Fullarton, was not to be decided. For on 28 June, with Fullarton within three days
march, news arrived that five months earlier the Preliminaries of peace had been signed. The struggle had opened
in a grey dawn at Lexington; its last shot was fired eight years later on the other side of the world outside a dusty
town in southern India.
Note:
European Troops in India
(1) At outset of fighting in 1780:
1/73rd Highlanders (Macleod's) (now 71st)
Madras European Infantry (later 102nd Foot)
Company regiment from Bengal (later 101st Foot)
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Conclusion
1
The Peace
In the months between Yorktown and the battle of the Saints it must have seemed to many that peace could be
achieved only on disastrous and humiliating terms. An army had been destroyed in America; all the British Caribee
islands except Antigua and Barbados had gone, West Florida was lost and Jamaica seemed doomed. In India Hyder
Ali remained in the centre of the Carnatic, French troops had landed at Porto Novo, and the reinforcements on their
way with de Bussy might turn the scales decisively against the British power. Not only the loss of the American
colonies but the total overthrow of the Peace of 1763 might be feared.
Yet that winter was only a trough in the changing fortunes of the war. Yorktown, which had caused the country to
despair, was less a proof of British impotence than an uncovenanted mercy to the enemy. For the alliance was
staggering under the burden of the war. Vergennes had made his preparations to sell American independence if
necessary at a mediated negotiation, and the rebels themselves were at the end of their resources. The collapse of
the enemy alliance, for which King George and Germain had waited as they continued the struggle, was no
chimera: it was averted by Yorktown, but the internal stresses existed and in the skilful hands of Shelburne were
turned to account.1
For the lonely Shelburne, unfitted to conduct a war, to manage his Cabinet or to explain his intentions, was better
suited to the secret paths of diplomacy. With his vision of a future Atlantic trading community, he grasped that
America was the partner in the enemy alliance to whom concessions should be made: to whom the wide plains
beyond the Alleghenies should be opened, even at the expense of Canada's claim to the fur-trapping lands south of
the Great Lakes; whose independence should be conceded without conditions if the speed of the negotiation
required it. These surrenders made, England could contend for the restoration in the rest of the world of
1 The negotiations are analysed from a British angle in Harlow: for the discussions on Gibraltar see esp. pp.
34261, on which the following account greatly relies. See also Bemis, Diplomacy of the American
Revolution, which perhaps underestimates the strength of the British hand in the negotiations; and Stetson
Conn, Gibraltar in British Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century, which attributes the Spanish failure to
obtain Gibraltar to the designs of Vergennes (p. 236), but does not make sufficient allowance for the
strength of English public opinion and the division in the Cabinet. For an admirable summary of the
negotiations, see J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 2527.
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the situation of 1763. In the American negotiators he was matched by shrewd, hard men for whom raison d'état
was as decisive a consideration as it was for the more experienced French. Suspicious of Vergennes and alarmed
by Spanish claims on the Mississippi, they pushed the negotiation on, relinquishing their claims to Canada and
financial indemnity. The Preliminaries of 30 November 1782 were signed before Vergennes was informed; and
though the signing did not in law remove America from the struggle, it was clear that they might quit the war in
fact if France and Spain unduly prolonged their own negotiations.
The Bourbon Powers had indeed been protracting their negotiation through the summer, hoping that Gibraltar
would fall to their September attack. Its failure and the arrival of Howe's relieving convoy a month later destroyed
this expectation; and France opened negotiations in earnest. Though bound by treaty to support the Spanish claim
to Gibraltar, she had no interest in Spain's recovery of the fortress; for Vergennes knew that the jealousy of
England which it kept alive in Madrid was the foundation of the Family Compact. Nor was he happy to see the war
prolonged. He feared that the situation was tilting against the Bourbons. Rodney's campaign in the West Indies had
put an end to their factitious supremacy in the western Atlantic, their navies' morale was low, and a total silence
from the commanders in India suggested that de Bussy's stroke had gone astray. Even if the war situation had
looked more promising it might have been unwise to prolong the struggle; for the French finances were collapsing,
and the ambitions of Austria and Russia required the Bourbons' attention in Europe. The Spanish Court, however,
saw things in a different light. They desperately desired to gain Gibraltar and to expel the interloping British from
the Gulf of Mexico, the 'waterfront' of their decaying American Empire1; and they professed an optimism about
the next expedition against Jamaica which Vergennes could not share. France now stood pinched between Spanish
intransigence and the rising confidence of England.
For in the British Cabinet itself divisions were appearing as the crisis of the negotiation approached. Shelburne,
with the support of Pitt, Thomas Townshend, Grantham and Thurlow, favoured the rapid conclusion of peace even
at the cost of Gibraltar. The King agreed: he regarded the loss of the American colonies as a betrayal by his people,
who had thrown over the great object of the struggle when the House of Commons had voted against the war in
America. He counted on the East and West Indies to restore the country's prosperity and was opposed to sacrifices
in those areas for the sake of Gibraltar. Shelburne for his part may even have regarded the fortress as a liability
which permanently damaged British relations with
1 Harlow, 342.
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Spain; for he had been impressed by Richard Cumberland with the idea that 'no accommodation can be sincere as
long as the fortress is withheld'.1 But Keppel and Richmond would have none of it. Rather than lose Gibraltar they
would fight on; and as the negotiation proceeded they drew Grafton, Conway and Camden into their camp.
Caught between Spain and England, Vergennes soon found himself obliged to consider buying Gibraltar for his
ally with a French possession. When the suggestion was first made by Spain, he greeted it with indignation; but the
same idea was soon to be put forward by Shelburne in London. Vergennes was anxious to break the deadlock in the
negotiations before the meeting of Parliament on 27 November, and on the afternoon of the 20th his emissary
Rayneval re-appeared without warning in London. Shelburne saw him at nine that evening, and they talked into the
small hours of the morning. On his own responsibility and with the King's approval he told Rayneval that England
would consider the cession of Gibraltar in return for restitution by Spain of all her captures (Minorca, West Florida
and the Bahamas), with the addition of either Porto Rico or one of two groups of French islands: Martinique and St
Lucia, or Dominica and Guadeloupe. France might be compensated with the Spanish part of San Domingo.
On the following afternoon Shelburne faced the Cabinet with these proposals. The meeting was stormy, with
violent opposition from Keppel and Richmond. They had swallowed the American terms a few days earlier, and
were in no mood to give way to the Bourbons. But Shelburne carried the waverers. Vergennes for his part could
not be expected to receive the new proposals with enthusiasm; but Rayneval had been persuaded by Shelburne, and
succeeded in persuading Vergennes, that the survival of the present British Ministry was of vital interest to France,
and depended on a tolerable peace. Vergennes set to work on the Spanish Ambassador in Paris; but a seven hours'
conference was needed to bring the tormented man to reason. At last Aranda put down on paper a compromise
proposal: if France would yield Dominica and Guadeloupe for Gibraltar, Spain would give up Minorca; but he
insisted that she must keep West Florida, and that Britain must abandon her settlements on the Main. With these
proposals Rayneval returned to London, where he arrived in the early hours of 3 December.
But in Rayneval's absence English opinion had hardened. For the secret of the new proposals had leaked out. The
City was clamouring against the proposal that France should acquire Spanish San Domingo, and the whole
1 G 3919, 3962, 3984, 3987, 4004, 4021. That Cumberland's advice was given weight in Ministerial circles
is suggested by the presence of a copy of his memorandum among the papers of Lord Walsingham, who
was Under-Secretary in the American Department and in 1786 was offered the Madrid Embassy.
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