Navy | History and books and dance and stuff

Sir Home Popham, a Napoleonic man for all seasons

by TCW | Sep 27, 2024 | Guest post

Next week (1st to 5th October) Tales of Empire – four short stories by four historical fiction authors – will be FREE on Amazon. One of those authors is Jacqueline Reiter who dabbles in fiction but whose main writing efforts are impressive works of historical non-fiction. The latest is Quicksilver Captain, her biography of the man famous for developing the flag code used by Nelson at Trafalgar (“England expects that every man will do his duty”). Arguably, he was responsible for the British invasion of Buenos Aires that features in my book, Burke in the Land of Silver. He did much, much more in his remarkable life and I’m delighted to host Dr Reiter to introduce him on my blog.

Quicksilver Captain

Quicksilver Captain: The improbable life of Sir Home Popham is about one of the more under-appreciated characters of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Popham (1762–1820) was a Royal Navy captain for most of the period, the era of Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower. In contrast to his fictional counterparts, however, Popham’s real-life exploits were almost too strange – too improbable –for a novel.

Popham is best known as a scientific officer who invented the naval signal code used by Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, and as the instigator of the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806 (he appears in Tom Williams’s Burke in the Land of Silver, which uses this campaign as a backdrop). But Popham first came to prominence helping the British army evacuate from Germany in 1795, where it had been abandoned by its allies and was being hounded by the French. This made Popham’s reputation as an expert in amphibious operations and got him promoted to post-captain through the personal intercession of the army’s commander, the Duke of York. This did not make Popham popular in his own profession: his Navy peers always considered him, to quote my book, “as a charlatan who had got lucky with the Army”. [1] He didn’t care. His exploits in Flanders allowed him to stand out from the crowd of other post-captains looking for employment, and he usually took on the trickier, often dirtier, jobs nobody else wanted to do. He was, as one military man put it, ‘very useful upon all occasions and in all ways’. [2]

Popham was much more than just a ship’s captain – in fact the one place he was almost certain not to be, throughout his career, was aboard his own ship. He acted as an agent for transports, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, a Member of Parliament, a hydrographer, a scientist and inventor, a publicist, and a government adviser. He muscled himself into the trust of some of Britain’s most prominent politicians, including prime minister William Pitt and Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas. Despite only being a post-captain for most of the wars with France, his political contacts meant he punched well above his weight: he influenced several important British campaigns all over the world, not just at Buenos Aires but in Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and Africa.

Britain, with its nascent empire, had trade networks and military concerns all over the world, and much of British strategy revolved around protecting its colonies and securing strategic naval stations – as well as destroying, or more preferably capturing, those of the enemy. The foremost proponent of this ‘blue-water’ strategy during the wars was Popham’s main patron, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, who believed ‘It is … as much the duty of those entrusted with the conduct of a British war to cut off the colonial resources of the enemy, as it would be that of the general of a great army to destroy or intercept the magazines of his opponent. … Exertions of that nature ought to admit of no limitation’. [3] Popham wholeheartedly agreed. Fuelled by ambition and supreme self-confidence, he became very good at shaping his ideas to suit the inclinations of the politicians – in other words, at telling his patrons what they wanted to hear.

Popham’s career involved taking risks and pushing boundaries, which often led to controversy (as at Buenos Aires), and his schemes were not always successful. His reputation was mixed in his own lifetime: he was described by one disapproving contemporary as a kind of ‘Naval Quack’. [4] Historians have mostly agreed with this; the most recent assessment of his career described him as ‘a gambler … a fiddler, a filibuster, a raider, a buccaneer and a freebooter’. [5] It did not help that Popham had once run his own smuggling vessel, and his exploits at Buenos Aires, which led to his court-martial, did not help. Still, Popham should not be dismissed so lightly. His rollercoaster career shows how one man could help shape an unfocused, but dynamic, British strategy during the wars against Napoleonic France. I definitely found Quicksilver Captain a story worth telling – and I hope readers will agree.

Notes

[1] Jacqueline Reiter, Quicksilver Captain: The improbable life of Sir Home Popham (Warwick: Helion & Co., 2024), p. 233

[2] Francis Culling Carr-Gomm (ed.), Letters and Journals of Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, GCB … (London: John Murray, 1881), pp. 131–132

[3] Speech by Henry Dundas, 25 March 1801, as reported in William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England … to 1803 … (London, 1819), vol. 35,cols. 1072–1073

[4] The British Library G.19449, p. xxv: marginal comment by Benjamin Tucker in his copy of A Full and Correct Report of the Trial of Sir Home Popham (London: J. and J. Richardson, 1807)

[5] Chris Coelho, ‘The Popham Code Controversy’, in J.E. Pearson, S. Heuvel, and J. Rodgaard (eds), The Trafalgar Chronicle: New Series 5 (Barnsley: Seaforth Publications), pp. 133–147, p. 133

Picture credits

Sir Home Popham, by Anthony Cardon after Mather Brown, 1807 (Public domain, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

Attack upon Buenos Aires by General Beresford, engraver unknown, 1806 (Public domain, Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library)

Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, by R. Freeman after Henry Raeburn (Public domain, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library)

About Jacqueline Reiter

Jacqueline Reiter received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006. Her first book, The Late Lord: the Life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham (Pen and Sword, 2017), illuminated the career of Pitt the Younger’s elder brother. Her articles have appeared in History Today and the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research; she has written for the History of Parliament and co-written a chapter with John Bew on British war aims for the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. Her latest book, Quicksilver Captain: The Improbable Life of Sir Home Popham, is published by Helion.

Tales of Empire

Tales of Empire is free on Kindle next week (1 – 5 October). Here’s why you should grab a copy.

Tales of Empire is a book of short stories. There are only four, which is why even when you have to pay for it, it costs only 99p. The four showcase the work of four very different but uniformly excellent historical fiction writers. (Well, three excellent writers plus me.)

The authors were asked to submit a story set anywhere from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the century. Although they all write conventional historical fiction with no revisionist agenda, all four stories ended up challenging some of the more traditional approaches to Empire.

Explore a new take on Empire with this free book.

The Battle of the Nile

by TCW | Aug 4, 2023 | Napoleonic history

Last week was the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile back in 1798. Nowadays we associate Nelson so firmly with Trafalgar that his other victories can be overlooked. Back in the early 19th century, though, the Nile featured prominently on memorials like this one at Greenwich.

Memorial Arch to Nelson at Greenwich Hospital

As with many battles, the name isn’t geographically accurate. The battle of the Nile didn’t actually take place at the Nile but at Abū Qīr Bay near Alexandria. Napoleon had invaded Egypt, his troops travelling in an enormous French fleet. After the troops had been successfully landed, his warships remained on the Egyptian coast ready to protect his lines of supply. They moored near the shore in the shelter of the bay.

Conventionally, naval battles were fought broadside to broadside, one ship against another. The French fleet was immensely strong. L’Orient, the French flagship mounted 118 guns. The French anchorage meant that the ships’ broadsides were facing out to sea, allowing an enormous concentration of fire to be brought to bear on any force attacking from the Mediterranean.

The British fleet that discovered the French lying at anchor was, on paper, vastly inferior. However, the British realised that the French had anchored slightly too far out into the open sea, allowing a channel between their line and the shore. The British split their force, some ships sailing between the French and the shore while others sailed between the shore and the open sea. With an onshore wind, the French were unable to manoeuvre away from their anchorage and the British sailed slowly down the line, each French ship being engaged one after the other by at least two British ships firing simultaneously from both sides.

The tactic was overwhelmingly successful. Of the 13 French ships of the line, nine were captured and two destroyed. No British ships were lost.

The most dramatic moment of the battle was the loss of L’Orient which caught fire and exploded when the flames spread to the powder magazine. The Captain’s young son had been ordered by his father to stand at his position until his father told him to move. His father having died, the son is said to have remained on deck and died. His death is commemorated in the poem, Casabianca:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled.

*Battle of the Nile, August 1st 1798 at 10 pm*, by Thomas Luny

After the battle, the British had complete naval dominance in the Mediterranean. With his lines of supply cut off, Napoleon’s plans to use Egypt as a jumping off point for further invasions were in disarray. Napoleon fled back to France the following year and the French army lingered on in Egypt until surrendering to the British in 1801.

Burke and the Bedouin

The Battle of the Nile is the climax of Burke and the Bedouin. William Brown is on board, the Orion, one of the British ships, and witnesses L’Orient’s sinking.
“It’s the Orient… The Orient is ablaze… The Orient is sinking.”
An officer appeared. “All hands on deck!”
Confused, William joined the procession of seamen clambering onto the deck. The night was still warm, but after the atmosphere of the gun deck, it was bliss to breathe fresh air.
Out here, the view was dominated by the blaze from the Orient. Sales and rigging were well alight and the spars were dropping onto the deck. Flames could be seen running along the joints between her timbers, where they had been sealed with tar. Here and there, the fire had spread to the timbers themselves. Against the light, the crew could be seen desperately throwing water onto the fire, but many had clearly already given up hope and were shimmying down ropes to escape into the sea.
“Stop gawping! Start dousing the deck.”
Buckets of water appeared, passed hand-to-hand up ship from the bilges or hauled to the deck from the sea below. While most of the men from the gun deck poured the water over the timbers at their feet, the crew who had been manning the sails aloft hauled buckets from the deck and soaked the canvas and ropes.
William could not understand the reason for this frantic activity, but it became all too clear after they had been at work for only a few minutes.
William had his back to the Orient when it happened. The night was lit up with a brilliant flash of light and, while his brain was still trying to comprehend what he had seen, the noise of the explosion rolled across the ship. William felt himself pushed forward by the force of the blast.
“Get down!”
William fell to the deck, along with the rest of the crew.
Debris from the wreck flew across the ship. Pieces of hot metal scoured tracks in Saumarez’s immaculate deck. Pieces of the Orient‘s hull – two yards long and three feet thick – were hurled at the Orion as if they weighed no more than pieces of paper. There was other debris too – things William did not want to look at too closely. Most of the bodies were in pieces too small to be recognised as human, but William saw what was clearly an arm, the fist still clenched, although whatever it had been holding was lost somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Like all the Burke books, Burke and the Bedouin is first and foremost a spy story. But I wanted to describe one of Nelson’s greatest victories for a generation that has no longer grown up with the tale. There are French spies and a beautiful woman and midnight gallops across the desert, but the story ends with the historical reality of the Battle of the Nile and the end of Napoleon’s dreams of conquest in the east.

Header picture

The picture at the top of the page is ‘The Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798‘ by Nicholas Pocock.