Later, Rodney’s flag captain, Walter Young, claimed that he himself had given the order to chase and engage to leeward and that Rodney, because of the ill state of his health and his “natural irresolution,” had tried to call off the ships from the chase. Confined to his bed, Rodney had obviously had to rely on someone else’s sight of the situation, but Sir Gilbert Blane, the fleet physician, testified that the Admiral had discussed the leeward course with Young at sunset, when it was then decided on. Irresolution was not a characteristic that could credibly be attributed to Rodney. The order for a leeward course would have had to come from the Admiral and the action be his responsibility. That there had been no confusion and no hanging back by the captains indicated that much. In his report, Rodney expressed himself highly pleased by the promptitude and bravery of “all ranks and ratings” and by the advantage of coppered bottoms, which made it possible to bring the enemy to action. “Without them we should not have taken one Spanish ship.”
Sandwich wrote congratulations on the naval combat in terms which, in view of his earlier abandonment of Rodney, can only be described by use of the modern word “crust”: “The worst of my enemies now allow that I have pitched upon a man who knows his duty and is a brave, honest, and able officer.” Having been informed by one of Rodney’s captains, Sir John Ross, that our expedition “in nine weeks [had] taken from the enemy 36 sail of merchant ships valued by them at a million sterling and nine sail of the line [and] have supplied the garrisons of Gibraltar and Mahon with two years’ of provisions and stores of all kinds,” Sandwich at least had the decency to add that he hoped “to prevail on his Majesty to give some more substantial proofs of his approbation.” This he did, and the coming reward was to be ample.
News of the victory of Cape St. Vincent evoked from Horace Walpole an odd comment that does not quite seem to fit the occasion. “It is almost my systematic belief,” he wrote to the Reverend William Cole, another of his regular correspondents, “that as cunning and penetration are seldom exerted for good ends, it is the absurdity of mankind that … carries on and maintains the equilibrium that heaven designed should subsist.” Inapplicable to the Moonlight Battle, as it was soon everywhere known, Walpole’s remark was presumably intended as a philosophic maxim on human affairs rather than a reference to Rodney. “Adieu my dear Sir,” he concluded, “shall we live to lay down our heads in peace?” John Adams, too, felt peace to be elusive. With a bold and enterprising naval captain in action, he saw the British desire for a settlement receding, because “naval victories excite them to a frenzy.” Adams, as he often did, put his finger on the spot, for what Rodney achieved by the Moonlight Battle and the relief of Gibraltar was to invigorate British self-confidence, which was fatally to become overconfidence in the American war.
The prizes from Cape St. Vincent were sent back to His Majesty while Rodney himself, with four ships, set course for the Caribbean and his Leeward Island post at Ste. Lucie. He arrived in the same week that a French fleet under the Comte de Guichen came into Fort Royal at Martinique, intending with France’s revived naval powers to bring the war to the West Indies.
In this stage of the conflict, England was at a disadvantage that had not been so in the Seven Years’ War. Now she was militarily bogged down in war against the Colonies in North America, which drew strength away from support of the navy, while the reverse was true of her enemy. France, after the Peace of Paris, was relieved of continental war, which before 1763 had drawn her major strength to the army, keeping her maritime effort weak, but since then she had been pouring men and supplies, training and ship-building into the strong navy by which she hoped to prevail over Britain. In 1778, when France formally declared war, she had 75 to 80 ships of the line and 50 frigates, ships that were newer, better designed and faster than the British. Spain added 60 more of the line, although, like Italy in World War I, Spain’s uncertain will to fight made her as an ally as much a hindrance as help. Against the Bourbon allies, Britain had 69 ships of the line of which only 35 were seaworthy and 11 were in American waters, far from parity with the combined fleets of France and Spain.
Aggressive French designs on the Leeward Islands were to bring Rodney within a few months of his triumph at Gibraltar to the most disappointing battle of his career. Happily, to balance the blow, although it never obliterated the sting, great good fortune met him at Ste. Lucie when he returned to the Antilles after Gibraltar in March, 1780. The good news was a letter of congratulations from Lord Sandwich officially informing him that the King had conferred on him an annual pension of £2,000 and, more important, that after his death the pension would continue in the form of annual payments of £500 to his widow, £1,000 to his eldest son and £100 each to his other son and four daughters “to continue during each of their respective lives.” Relieving him of his worst anxieties for his family, the award also removes from history the force of the frequent argument that the money of St. Eustatius afterward bewitched Rodney into forgetting his duty at sea. The pension gave him ease of mind, he wrote to his wife rather too confidently. “All I want is to pay off my debts as soon as possible … Let me be clear of all demands, and our income will be more than sufficient to live as we ought, and to save money.” It was not to be that easy, for in the end the several lawsuits brought against him by the merchants of St. Eustatius and St. Kitts whose goods he had confiscated were to keep him in financial need for the rest of his life. That distress, however, could not be foreseen to spoil his newfound good fortune. At first notice, the pension reawakened the old yearning for membership in the one Club above all others, the House of Commons. Not yet informed of his election for Westminster, he raised the question with Lord George Germain. “To be out of Parliament,” he wrote, “is to be out of the world, and my heart is set upon being in.” And to Sandwich he confessed the same desire, writing that “the happy situation in my affairs” would not only discharge his debts but be sufficient “to spare a sum of money if necessary to bring me into Parliament.”
While he was en route from Gibraltar, news had been learned from escaped British sailors who had been prisoners in Brest that a strong French squadron of 15 to 20 sail of the line, with transports carrying 15,000 troops, had sailed for the West Indies. The object, after picking up one or two extra sail at Fort Royal, was to deliver Barbados where the British held 2,000 French prisoners and to recapture Ste. Lucie. Rodney saw an opportunity for a major, perhaps decisive blow. Never content with the parade tactics and ceremonious duels of his era and never a slave of Fighting Instructions, he believed in fighting for serious results. “The objective from which his eye never wandered,” as Mahan appreciates, “was the French fleet,” the organized force of the enemy at sea. This was indeed the crux. As long as French naval power had access to America as an ally and was able to furnish the rebels with men, arms and especially money, they would not be defeated. From the hour of the French alliance, British strategy should have made the blocking of France from America her primary aim. There was no cabinet decision that ever made this explicit nor orders to seagoing commanders to make it a primary concern. Ultimately the time came when the private loot of St. Eustatius and the public duty of protecting the overvalued West Indies, for which as Commander-in-Chief of the Leewards Rodney felt responsible, blurred his vision. Rodney’s eye did waver, and in a critical moment of bad judgment, strategic purpose was set aside.
Rodney’s plan for action in the West Indies in 1780 was a plan for breaking the line as envisaged by John Clerk in the harbor of Edinburgh. It was an unorthodox movement in which all of his ships at once, instead of section by section down the line, would fall upon and destroy the French center and rear before the van was engaged. The plan was explained to his captains in advance, but as it was contrary to Fighting Instructions, it was evidently not understood or else, as Rodney was later to charge, deliberately disobeyed for sinister political reasons.
Once again, the unregenerate signaling system that had not been changed for a hundred years was to
ruin what could have been a decisive fleet action. On the theory that, for the sake of comprehension, flags should be kept as few and as simple as possible, the system was primitive. The rule was that signal flags should be hoisted only one at a time, so that varieties of meaning could only be indicated by adding pennants or by the flag’s position on a mast or to which mast it was attached. Given these limitations, a flag usually called by a number for one or another of the Fighting Instructions. Unless his plan were very carefully explained, which was not his habit, Rodney could not count on prompt and accurate response when discipline was lax.
On April 17, 1780, the English and French fleets sighted each other off the coast of Martinique. Gaining the wind in the morning, with his ships in close order while the French were strung out, Rodney, believing himself on the edge of a crushing victory, prepared to execute his surprise. Instead of the grand design he had laid out, the British system of signals virtually ensured that the captains would be bewildered. To indicate his intentions, Rodney had to raise signal 21, from Additional Fighting Instructions. A sport in regular tactics, signal 21 meant for each ship to bear down and steer for her opposite in the enemy line. It was made by flying the signal flag from the main topgallant mast in conjunction with firing a gun, not the most precise message when in the midst of action. The tired captains, puzzled by unorthodox maneuver, took off in individual disorder, some bearing down on the van as would have been normal, others, unsure of what to do, following each other against the wrong section in the French line, leaving their Admiral unsupported and his plan a shambles. For an hour he fought alone until his flagship was so hurt—with eighty shot in her hull, three below the waterline, with main- and mizzen-masts broken, sails gaping with holes, her main spar dangling uselessly like a broken limb—that for the next twenty-four hours she could barely be kept afloat, and Rodney had to shift to another ship of the rear division. Others of his ships were so badly damaged in the mělée that two of them sank afterward in the bay. Neither fleet having gained its object, they separated. In the fury of his disappointment, Rodney in private correspondence accused his subordinates of “barefaced disobedience to orders and signals” in a plot to discredit him and, through him, the government in the hope of turning them out of office. At long distance it seems possible that the disobedience arose as much from misunderstanding of unusual procedure so contrary to the sacred rule of line ahead as from politics.
More restrained in his official report to the Admiralty, Rodney felt compelled to inform their Lordships, “with concern inexpressible mixed with indignation,” that the British flag “was not properly supported.” Even that was too much for the Admiralty, which deleted this passage from publication of the report in the Gazette. Rodney’s private charges of outright disobedience quickly circulated, raising an unwanted prospect, after the Keppel disruptions, of more courts-martial. Sandwich promised the “shame and punishment” of those “who have robbed you of the glory of destroying a considerable part of the naval force of France.” Rodney, loath to reopen further damage to the navy by pressing for a public inquiry, chose rather to warn his officers that no rank would screen from his wrath anyone who disobeyed signals, and that if necessary he would use frigates as messengers to ensure compliance.
In the bitterness of being deprived of his great chance that “in all probability,” as he believed, would have been “fatal to the naval power of the enemy,” Rodney was determined that the French should not get away. Guichen, his opponent, had retreated to a base at Guadeloupe and would be sure, Rodney felt, to make an early effort to regain the shelter of Fort Royal, where Rodney, despite his own damaged ships, intended to keep guard and force him again to battle. Guichen, however, holding the windward position, was not to be lured from his advantage. When sighted again some fifteen miles off Martinique in the strait between Guadeloupe and Ste. Lucie, he could have initiated action if he had wished, but avoidance was rather the French game. Intent on conserving their vessels under the French doctrine of seeking strategic results without tactical risks, the French took evasive action, the more so as they recognized in Rodney’s actions an opponent ready to adopt unexpected battle movements that they thought best to avoid. In fickle winds, each admiral engaged in trying to outmaneuver the other. Guichen, with expert seamanship, managed to put himself in position either to enter Fort Royal or attack Ste. Lucie, while Rodney’s endeavor was to gain the wind in order to bring him to combat before Guichen could do either. To carry out his threat of closer command over his captains, he shifted his flag to a frigate. He believed they were “thunderstruck” by this resolution. “My eye was more to be dreaded than the enemy’s cannon.… It is inconceivable,” he told Sandwich afterward, “in what awe it kept them.” He was never shy in appreciation of his own efforts. Not content, he informed his captains more directly of the nature of command. “The painful task of thinking,” he told them, “belongs to me. You need only obey orders implicitly without question.”
For fourteen days and nights, with cannon loaded and slow match lighted, the opponents maneuvered for position, so near to each other that “neither officers nor men could be said to have had sleep.… The greatness of the object,” Rodney wrote to Sandwich, “enabled my mind to support what my strength of body was scarce equal to.” He did not go to bed during the fourteen days and nights: Only “when the fleet was in perfect order, I stole now and then an hour’s sleep upon the cabin floor.” Rodney liked to dramatize himself; in fact, when his ship was stripped for action, his furniture would be stored in the hold and his cabin transformed into an extension of the gun deck.
Further endeavors during the next six weeks to bring the French to action were unavailing.
Despite his own damaged ships with top masts shattered and leaking hulls, Rodney persisted in his pursuit, discovering as he sailed that Guichen, under orders to bring the trade convoy back to Europe, had withdrawn his fleet from the West Indies to return home. In one more “piff poff,” the campaign of 1780 in the West Indies had closed ahead of the hurricane season in early fall with no great advantage to either side, except that the presence and imminent threat of Rodney’s fleet checked the French from further offensives against the islands.
The withdrawal freed Rodney from anxiety for the fate of the Leewards under his command but not from his rage over the blundered battle, which had spoiled “that glorious opportunity perhaps never to be recovered of terminating the naval contest in these seas.” He craved a renewed opportunity for decisive action. Just at this time he learned from a captured American ship that a French squadron of 7 liners escorting troop ships had been sent to America to aid the rebels. This was de Ternay’s squadron bringing Rochambeau’s army. Perceiving that the added enemy would outnumber the British at New York and gain superiority in American waters, Rodney decided he must go to New York to save the situation. During his enforced idleness in Paris, he had kept his mind at work in studying a strategy for America, where he believed the war was being badly mishandled. He had formulated his thoughts in a letter to Sandwich in 1778, soon after France had entered the war. No copy is extant, but references by himself and others indicate that, first of all, Rodney believed in the necessity of viewing Britain’s conflicts as a whole, as a single war with a united plan for all its forces and a specific aim. Based on his recognition that French aid to the rebel colonies would now be a decisive factor, he advised that England’s effort should be to keep the French busy in the West Indies, so that they could not spare ships or men to intervene in America, and that during the hurricane months, when operations in the Caribbean were static, he should take his fleet to the American coast and, by uniting all available resources there, crush the rebellion. Sandwich had acknowledged and approved, or wrote Rodney a letter to that effect, but in fact England did not have enough ships to spare for action in the West Indies to keep the French busy.
While Rodney prepared for his venture, his friend Wraxall, who spent much time with him at his residence in Cleveland Row just b
efore he left for America, found him “naturally sanguine and confident” and repeatedly prone to talk too much about himself.
The only change the British war ministers made was to name a new Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America. Sir William Howe, whose heart was not in the fight, was replaced by Sir Henry Clinton, who was not an improvement. The appointment of Clinton—a cousin of the Duke of Newcastle, manager-in-chief of political patronage—was not unrelated to his having the right “connections.” It gave direction of the war in the field to a man of neurotic temperament, whose constant hesitation always made him reach decisions too late for the event that required them.
Within three months of his appointment in May, 1778, Clinton’s survey of the elements of the situation—its immense geography, the fixed resolve of the rebels on nothing less than independence, as the Carlisle Commission was just then discovering, and the absence of active support by a large and eager body of Loyalists which the British had counted upon—left the new Commander-in-Chief with little enthusiasm and no illusions. Almost his first act, as he tells in his postwar narrative, was to solicit the King for leave to resign, on the ground of the “impracticability” of the war. Refused in his request, Clinton became as unhappy in his function as Lord North was in the premiership, not so much from North’s sense of personal unfitness for the post as from recognition, like Pitt’s before him, that the war was unwinnable. The means were too limited for the task. He complained of delay in promised reinforcements, which left him without adequate forces and “without money, provisions, ships or troops adequate to any beneficial purpose,” while being constantly prodded for more vigorous action here, there, or anywhere by Lord Germain, the war minister at home, his ministerial chief whom Clinton disliked and distrusted.