Bell Harry Read online

  The Prime Minister hired a rowing boat and went out to have a closer look. William Pitt had a farm near Deal and was Warden of the Cinque Ports. He commanded the Cinque Port Volunteers, a ragbag collection of ploughboys and fishermen armed mostly with pikes and pitchforks. In November 1803, they were all that stood between London and Napoleon’s Grand Army if the invasion troops ever managed to come ashore.

  Pitt had his niece with him as they approached the captured barge. Lady Hester Stanhope lived with her bachelor uncle at Walmer Castle and acted as his hostess at dinner. She often accompanied him on his inspection tours of the Volunteers, sometimes riding more than twenty miles at a stretch.

  The barge was an ungainly craft, flat-bottomed, about thirty feet long. It had two large guns on board, four sailors, and thirty soldiers. They stared back defiantly as Pitt and his niece inspected them from the rowing boat.

  ‘Picked men,’ Lady Hester whispered to her uncle. ‘They’re obviously good troops. You only have to look at them to see that.’

  Pitt agreed. His heart sank at the sight of the French. General Bonaparte’s troops were a lot more professional than the amateurish Englishmen opposing them. The men of the Grand Army were properly trained and superbly equipped, much more so than their British counterparts.

  ‘I suppose you were practising for the invasion when you were captured?’ he asked the prisoners.

  They nodded.

  ‘Well, you’re our prisoners now. You won’t go back to France. You’ll be taken ashore instead and kept in confinement.’

  ‘Not for long,’ one of them retorted. He was a small man in a cocked hat.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ll be rescued as soon as the invasion starts. It won’t be long now. A couple of months at most. We’ll all be free again after that.’

  The man was probably right, Pitt knew. There would be no stopping the French, once they had a foothold on British soil. Bonaparte had more than a hundred thousand troops across the Channel, ready to invade at any moment. Their tents had turned the clifftops white, all the way from Calais to Boulogne.

  But the French hadn’t arrived yet. They never would, if the Royal Navy had anything to do with it. The British were as strong at sea as the French were on land. The navy wouldn’t allow the French to come ashore without a fight.

  ‘I shouldn’t count on an invasion, if I were you,’ Pitt told the Frenchman. ‘It’ll be a lot more than a couple of months before you’re free again.’

  He and Hester returned to shore. Pitt wondered if he should tell London about the invasion barge. The telegraph station stood on the seafront. Its operators claimed they could get a message to the Admiralty in ten minutes flat, with good visibility.

  He decided not to bother. One captured barge didn’t make an invasion. Hundreds would have been a different matter.

  ‘It all depends on the Royal Navy,’ he told Hester, as they returned to their horses. ‘As long as the navy can hold the French off for a while, we’ll be all right.’

  ‘And if they can’t?’

  ‘We’ll fight them with everything we have. We can’t give in to Bonaparte. The man’s a dictator.’

  Hester agreed. She was greatly enjoying the invasion crisis so far. It was thrilling to be at the centre of events, following the Prime Minister around and entertaining all the generals and admirals at dinner as they discussed the situation. Hester had looked at France through a telescope and seen the Grand Army’s tents on the cliffs. She was excited to think of the beastly French storming ashore in Kent while her uncle’s Volunteers hacked at them with gardening tools in a battle to the death.

  Hester had recently had some excitement of her own at the hands of some troopers from the Royal Horse Guards. Five of them, half-drunk, had spotted her in the street at Ramsgate and followed her to her door. They had chased her upstairs and grabbed hold of her dress.

  The men were about to do their worst when Hester punched the nearest one so hard that he fell down the stairs, his sword rattling against the bannisters. The others retreated too. Hester had been a sensation for the next few days, everyone pointing her out in the street as the woman who had given a trooper of the Blues an enormous black eye.

  ‘What will happen to the Frenchmen in the barge?’ she asked her uncle, as they mounted up. ‘Are they going to be put in prison somewhere?’

  ‘They’ll be questioned first and then taken inland. They’ll be split up and dispersed in different places where they can’t be a nuisance.’

  ‘Inland?’

  ‘Well away from the sea. We don’t want their own people rescuing them if there’s an invasion.’

  Pitt and Hester rode back to Walmer Castle. The Prime Minister was a very worried man as they went. The threat from General Bonaparte was the greatest military crisis the country had faced since the Spanish Armada of 1588. Pitt knew better than anyone that there was very little to stop the French once they had their army on dry land. He could hardly bear to think about it as he and Hester returned to the castle.

  Behind them, the Frenchmen in the barge came ashore in their turn and were taken to the town hall for questioning. A hostile crowd gathered to watch, but the men were still defiant as they were led along the street. They knew that they belonged to the most powerful and highly trained army in the world. They had nothing to fear from the English.

  ‘We won’t talk,’ the man in the cocked hat told his interrogators, when they reached the town hall. ‘We’ve nothing to say to you. The rest of our army will be here soon, and General Bonaparte too. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘In a couple of months, you say?’

  ‘Certainly no longer than that. Our troops are all ready to go. There’s nothing to stop them.’

  ‘Apart from the Royal Navy.’

  ‘Pah!’ The Frenchman shrugged. He was a supercilious fellow. ‘Your navy won’t stop us. Nothing will. Nothing can.’

  The other soldiers agreed. The Grand Army was invincible. General Bonaparte’s troops would roll the English up in no time at all, once they had their boots on the ground. All the troops needed was a fair wind and a calm sea for a few hours and England would become a province of France. There was nothing more to be said.

  The prisoners spent the night under guard at Deal before being divided into groups and taken inland next morning. A dozen of them were sent to the cathedral gaol in Canterbury. The man in the cocked hat was among them as they set off under escort. They arrived in Canterbury that afternoon, still defiant as they entered the city and were led through the streets to the prison.

  It lay among the old monastic buildings on the north side of the cathedral. The prison had been used in pilgrim times for the detention of minor offenders in the precincts. It had lain empty for years after Henry VIII got rid of the priory but had recently been called back into service for the imprisonment of Frenchmen captured in the war.

  Curious eyes followed the Deal captives as they marched along Palace Street. The men turned into the Mint Yard and passed through the King’s School to the Green Court gate, the old monastic entrance to the priory. The prison lay next to the gate, underneath a row of Norman arches.

  The Frenchmen halted at the entrance as they waited to be admitted. On the wall next to them, someone had carved the date 1649 in large numerals to mark the execution of King Charles I. The date meant nothing to the men as they studied it. Louis XVI was the only monarch they knew anything about.

  ‘All right, Frenchies.’ A sergeant from the Canterbury garrison came forward to receive them. ‘This is going to be your home in England for the foreseeable future. It’s where you’ll all stay until we’ve beaten your General Bonaparte.’

  He led them through the gate. The prisoners were dismayed to see that the cathedral gaol was tiny, much smaller than they had expected. It had been designed to house the occasional drunk or petty thief caught stealing in the precincts, not a boatload of troops from France.

  They looked around with sinking hearts. There wa
s a small courtyard outside the prison. At one end stood the Norman staircase, an external stone stairway that had been there since Thomas Becket’s time. At the other, they could see the tower of Bell Harry looming over the prison fence. That was all the space they had.

  ‘Merde!’ The French were deeply disheartened. They were still in shock at their sudden reversal of fortune. Two days ago they had been part of a mighty army, full of self-confidence as they prepared to invade their ancient enemies across the Channel. Now they were prisoners of the English, clapped ignominiously into gaol like common criminals. Some of them still had laundry to collect in Boulogne, and girls waiting for them in the town.

  ‘It won’t be for long.’ The man in the cocked hat tried to rally his comrades. ‘Only for a few months. We’ll be out of here by the spring at the latest, on our way to London.’

  They all hoped he was right. The sooner the Grand Army came to their rescue the better. None of them wanted to be a prisoner of the English for any longer than could be helped.

  The soldiers weren’t the only people in the prison. They were shocked to discover that a group of French sailors had got there before them and had been captive since June. The cathedral gaol was going to be even more cramped than they had thought.

  The old lags weren’t pleased to see them either, if it meant losing some of their bed space. The sailors clustered around, nevertheless, as soon as the newcomers had settled in. They were desperate for news from home.

  ‘So General Bonaparte is going to invade England?’ was their first, all-important question.

  ‘Bien sur. Any day now. The army is only waiting for a fair wind.’

  ‘Where is it going to land?’

  ‘In Kent, somewhere. We’ve been training for months.’

  The sailors were sceptical. There was more to landing flat-bottomed invasion barges in Kent than met the eye. It would need several days of good weather, for one thing, and the weather in the Channel was notoriously unreliable. They wondered how much General Bonaparte knew about the difficult conditions at sea.

  There were other problems too.

  ‘What about the Royal Navy?’ one of them asked. ‘It’ll take several high tides just to get the invasion barges out of harbour. The English won’t just stand by and watch, if they see us trying to invade.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the English.’ The man with the cockade was full of confidence. ‘General Bonaparte will take care of their navy. He knows what he’s doing.’

  The sailors certainly hoped so. They were all in favour of being liberated, if it could be done. They just hoped that whoever was in charge of the French invasion knew as much about the Channel’s shifting sands and treacherous cross-currents as the English did.

  ‘So he’ll be here soon?’

  ‘With a hundred thousand troops. It’s the biggest army anyone has ever seen.’

  The newcomers settled down impatiently to await rescue by their fellow countrymen. They found that life in the shadow of Bell Harry wasn’t too bad, once they had got used to their cramped surroundings. They were guarded by English soldiers from the barracks just outside the town. The sentries were decent men. As time went on, they began to tease the French about General Bonaparte’s continued failure to appear in Canterbury, as promised.

  ‘Where is he then, Johnny?’ All Frenchmen were Johnny Crapaud to the English. ‘Where’s your precious General Bonaparte? Shouldn’t he have been here by now?’

  ‘He’ll be here, soon enough. You’ll all know about it when he arrives.’

  The Frenchman in the hat was Bonaparte’s greatest admirer. The man had joined the French army for revolutionary reasons and wore the national cockade with pride. He saw it as his patriotic duty to subvert the English soldiers and bring them round to a revolutionary way of thinking.

  ‘You should be with us, not against us,’ he told one of the sentries. ‘We’re fighting for the brotherhood of man, after all. We’ve got rid of our king and the aristocrats and priests. Parasites, every one. You could easily do the same, if you wanted.’

  ‘Cut all their throats, you mean?’

  The Frenchman nodded. ‘That’s how to deal with them.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, mate.’ The sentry had a grasp of political theory unusual in a private soldier. ‘Why don’t you just keep your revolution and we’ll keep our King? That’ll be best for everybody.’

  The Frenchman shrugged.

  ‘Parasites,’ he repeated. ‘That’s how to deal with them.’

  ‘Not here it isn’t.’ The sentry waved an arm around the peaceful, beautiful precincts of Canterbury cathedral. ‘No Englishman around here is going to have his throat cut by a Frenchman in the name of the revolution. Your Mr Bonaparte will find that out, if he ever dares to show his face.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said the Frenchman.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jane Austen and Lady Hamilton’s Enormous Behind

  Jane Austen was staying with her brother Edward at Godmersham, his country estate near Canterbury. It was a lovely place in the Stour valley with a deer park of its own and good shooting in the woods. Jane always liked to spend a few weeks there every summer. It was where she did some of her best writing.

  Jane was still unpublished in September 1805, but that was only because she insisted on endlessly revising her work. She had already written several novels and other bits and pieces, but she wasn’t ready yet to show anything to a publisher. Jane was waiting until she had her books exactly right before she did that.

  It was an exciting time at Godmersham. The French were still poised to invade, if they could somehow get past the Royal Navy. Edward commanded the local volunteers and drilled them endlessly in the park, ready to put up a good fight when they came. The feeling in the country was that the crisis must surely come to a head soon. The French would have to invade England by the end of the year or abandon the idea for ever.

  For the moment, though, the weather was glorious and there wasn’t a Frenchman in sight. Edward had some business to attend to in Canterbury. He invited Jane to come with him for the ride.

  ‘You could do a bit of shopping while I do my business,’ he suggested. ‘Then we could have lunch or something. Look round the cathedral.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d like that.’ Jane always enjoyed her visits to Canterbury. ‘Yes, let’s do that. It’ll be fun.’

  Jane did like Canterbury. She had found it dull in the past, but it had come alive during the invasion scare. It was full of people from Dover and other coastal towns, taking refuge inland until the danger from the French had passed. The city was full of soldiers too, handsome officers from the Foot Guards and other smart regiments. No ball at the assembly rooms was complete without a few officers in dashing uniforms lining up for the cotillion.

  They went into Canterbury. After Edward had finished his business, they had lunch before going to see the cathedral. There was something in particular that Jane wanted to look at in the precincts.

  ‘I have a mind to see the King’s School. Our friend George Lefroy, the vicar at Ashe, he was a boy there.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He said to look out for the school if ever I was in the cathedral precincts. His brother was there too.’

  It was the brother’s son who interested Jane. Tom Lefroy had grown up in Ireland, a clever young man with a degree from Trinity College, Dublin. Jane had met him when he was staying with his uncle at Ashe. She had been smitten at once.

  Tom Lefroy had taken to her too, but nothing had come of it. Instead, Jane had worked furiously at her novel, a fanciful tale involving a rich landowner with a French-Irish surname falling in love with a poor but clever girl from a large family. It was her experience that love affairs always worked out much more satisfactorily on paper than in real life.

  The King’s School occupied the Mint Yard. It didn’t take long to look around. Jane and Edward admired the old Almonry building where Christopher Marlowe had been a pupil and then moved on through th
e Green Court gate. They found the French soldiers still there, still captive in the prison beside the Norman staircase. A Frenchman in a cocked hat gazed forlornly at them as they peered over the fence.

  ‘Rowlandson was here last year,’ Edward told Jane.

  ‘The artist?’

  Edward nodded. ‘He did a picture of the prisoners by the Norman staircase. You can get a copy in the High Street.’

  They moved on again and turned to look at the cathedral. Bell Harry towered above them across the Green Court. Jane shaded her eyes to look at the great belfry, so very high in the sky.

  ‘You can see France from the top,’ Edward told her.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘On a clear day. The French coast is less than forty miles away.’

  ‘So you could watch the invasion from there?’

  ‘I imagine so. If the weather was right.’

  They had a strong personal interest in the invasion. Two of their brothers were serving in the Royal Navy. Frank Austen was the flag-captain aboard HMS Canopus, part of Lord Nelson’s fleet. He would be in the thick of the action if the French navy ever put to sea.

  ‘Do you suppose Frank’s balloons will ever work?’ Jane asked.

  Both Britain and France were employing the latest military technology in the war. General Bonaparte, now calling himself the Emperor Napoleon, was contemplating the use of hot-air balloons to ferry his army across the Channel above the heads of the Royal Navy. Frank Austen had a plan for an early warning system that involved balloons tethered to Royal Navy ships in the middle of the Channel. Both ideas seemed a bit fanciful to Jane and Edward.

  ‘I can’t see a lot of Frenchmen flying over here and landing on the Green Court,’ Edward said. ‘It’s too extraordinary for words.’

  ‘Interesting to watch, though. A fleet of Bonaparte’s balloons coming over Bell Harry to attack us from the air!’

  They moved on towards the cathedral. The covered passageway ahead was known as the Dark Entry. Christopher Marlowe had gone to the cathedral that way during his schooldays.