Authors: Barbara W. Tuchman
In gathering up the treasure of St. Eustatius, Rodney well knew that unlike a naval prize, which was customarily divided among admiral, captain, crew and shipowner after its value had been realized at an advertised auction of ship and cargo, the spoil of territory or treasure seized in the name of the nation belonged to the sovereign. Yet, eager to feel the clink of real money in his hands, he greedily or foolishly adopted the prize-court process, and advertised auction sales of the goods seized from the inhabitants. Because the sales allowed the goods to go below cost, the owners entered claims against Rodney for the deficits,
creating the lawsuits that were to sour his victorious hour and harass his life thereafter.
For the moment all was glory. “
Joy to you, my dear Sir George,” wrote his wife happily, “equal to what you have given your friends at home and I may say the whole nation, on your glorious successes.… Every countenance is lighted up with joy, every voice rings with your praises.… My house has been like a fair from the moment” his express arrived, on the 13th.… “Every friend, every acquaintance came.” At the drawing room on Thursday, “the attention and notice I received from their Majesties were sufficient to turn my poor brain. In the evening I went to Cumberland House, where the congratulations were equally warm and flattering.… This glorious news has been a thunderbolt to the Opposition, very few of whom appeared in the House of Commons. It is reported that you are to be made a peer.”
Equal and opposite was the shock in the Netherlands at the fall of St. Eustatius. “You can have no idea,” wrote John Adams, “of the
gloom and terror that was spread by this event,” which also distressed, as Rodney was glad to report, the French West Indian islands “beyond conception. They are greatly in want of every species of provisions and stores” and he hoped “to blockade them in such a manner as, I hope, will prevent their receiving any.”
By his capture of St. Eustatius, Rodney reminded their Lordships, “the loss to Holland, France and America is greater than can be conceived.… The capture is immense and amounts to more than I can venture to say. All is secured for the King to be at his royal disposal.” By this time, in fact, the entry of France in the American war as an ally of the Colonies supplied most of their need of arms, so that St. Eustatius’ role was no longer crucial. Rodney’s capture of the island came too late for any larger purpose than loot.
Not a peerage but appointment as Knight Commander of the Bath was all that was forthcoming, which, considering that George III was always complaining of passive commanders and seeking bold men of action, was rather meager. Reports of Rodney’s dubious methods may have been the reason. He hopes that “if His Majesty is graciously pleased to bestow any part of it between the navy and the army, that he will dictate in what manner his gracious bounty may be bestowed, that all altercations may be prevented.”
The furor aroused by Rodney’s confiscation of British-owned property from the merchants found to have been trading with the enemy naturally
reached the government’s critics at home and brought the most forceful voice of the Opposition, Edmund Burke, to his feet in the House to demand an inquiry. In denunciation, the power and passion and overflowing torrent of Burke’s rhetoric could make a man believe his own mother was an arm of Satan. His theme was “the cruelty and oppression” of Rodney’s treatment of the inhabitants of St. Eustatius which could provoke, he said, reprisals by their nations while “we were engaged in a most calamitous war in which we had many enemies and no friends.” Pursuing the happy notion that gentler methods toward the enemy instead of “pushing war to its extremes” would, Burke claimed, “soften resentment” and bring their minds to a “favourable inclination towards peace,” while neutrals “might be brought to applaud the dignity of our sentiments as a people and assist us in the conflict. But a contrary behaviour on our part was likely to provoke them to unite against us and make the protection of human nature from plunder and robbery a common cause.” For so keen a political mind and so well-informed an observer as Burke of the real behavior of states at war, this was moonshine in which it is hard to suppose that Burke believed or that it changed a single vote not already determined by party loyalty. Burke could indulge and hold the attention of the House in this kind of rhapsodizing by the force of his language and the hypnotizing magic of its flow. The terms used in declaring the Dutch war, he went on, “threatened no inhuman cruelty, no uncommon severity,” but “seemed rather to portend the short variance of old allies in which all their old friendship and affection would operate rather as the softener than the inflamer of the common calamities of war. It breathed expressions of kindness and long suffering” and its menaces “seemed to be torn by constraint from a heart bleeding under the affliction of unwilling strife.” Then the expedition against St. Eustatius was ordered close upon the “most melancholy and general disaster” of the recent hurricane, “which had involved all the islands in common suffering and common distress.” Here he had a point. “It might have been expected that the deadly serpents of war would for a time have been hushed into a calm in that quarter of the world … and would not have increased the stock of their distress.… Surely when human pride was levelled in the dust and we saw what worms we were beneath the hand of Omnipotence it became us to crawl from our holes with a feeling of brotherly love to each other; to abate a little of our rancour and not add the devastations of war to those of the hurricane. But it was not so with Great Britain.”
He followed with a sobbing passage about the “unprepared, naked and defenceless” conditions of the islands, as if this were somehow Britain’s fault, adding to her guilt, and then moved to a peroration about the confiscations: “Without regard to friend or foe,” to neutrals or British subjects, “the wealth of the opulent, the goods of the merchant, the utensils of the artisan, the necessaries of the poor were seized on, and a sentence of general beggary pronounced in one moment upon a whole people. A cruelty unheard of in Europe for many years … a most unjustifiable, outrageous and unprincipled violation of the laws of nations … accompanied too with cruelties almost unheard of in the history of those barbarous times … warehouses were locked up, and access was denied to the proprietors,” depriving them of the “honest profits of their labours.… Was there known till that moment a more complete act of tyranny than this? … unparalleled in the annals of conquest, but it was surpassed by what followed.” The next step “was to seize upon all their letters and their private papers,” which made it impossible to apply for loans abroad … “merchants and inhabitants plundered and robbed of all that they possessed in the world and of all the hopes that they had of having their property restored.” In his compassion for the beggared merchants, living with their silver and servants and bulging warehouses, Burke seemed unmoved by their trading with the enemy. He said not a word about this aspect or the fact that the account books had been seized for that reason. Because the affair was being used to accuse the government, he made no attempt to be objective.
When, in his long speech, Burke came to Rodney’s treatment of the Jews, he showed the interest of a wide-ranging mind. Speaking of the order exiling them on one day’s notice, without their property and without wives and children, he described their vulnerability through statelessness eighty years before the Jews themselves were to formulate the nature of their problem. “If Britons are injured,” said Burke, “Britons have armies and laws to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power and no such friend to depend on. Humanity then must become their protector and ally.” Burke perceived the problem, if not the solution in statehood. That had to wait for the next century, for Burke was not concerned with the Jewish problem but with the wrongdoing of his own government embodied by Rodney. His motion precipitated a vigorous debate about whether there was or was not a recognized law of nations.
Lord George Germain spoke as Rodney’s principal defender, saying
that Burke showed himself a “perfect stranger” to the conduct of war, as there was scarcely an island captured or a territory seized that had not suffered the same circumstances as the “unavoidable and common consequences of capture” which, however “humanity might recoil at them,” could not be prevented; that the Dutch had made the island a very depot for the use of Britain’s enemies; “that without regular supplies from this island the French could not have carried on the war,” no more so the Americans; that when Rodney, in “great distress for rigging and stores” after the storms of October, had applied to purchase rope at St. Eustatius, he had been refused on the pretext that they had very little left when in fact they had several thousand tons in their store—enough to supply all the shipping that could have needed any for years to come; that as regards the confiscations, private property had been sealed and marked to show ownership to wait for disposition by the courts; that, in short, he “found nothing to blame in the conduct of the commanders.”
The debate swelled into the open in heated prosecution and defense. Charles James Fox, who had a lashing tongue for invective, began. With an elaborate bow to the persons and character of Sir George Rodney and General Vaughan, for whom he was sure the honorable gentleman who moved the inquiry (Mr. Burke) professed and “felt as sincere a regard as any men upon earth could possibly do,” he stated that their personal responsibility was not at issue, “but to pronounce on the great national question”—the reputation of Britain: “Would the nations of Europe wait for the slow decision of the Admiralty courts before they pronounced judgment on the case and proceeded to retaliate …? without taking the trouble to inquire … whether it was the lust of plunder or the profligate cruelty of an insatiate military or the barbarous system of a headlong government, they would instantly and justly pronounce it to be a violation of all the laws of war on the part of Great Britain and would hasten either to punish us for the horrid renewal of these savage practises which once buried England in ashes or remain with their arms across suffering us to be extirpated by those foes which our madness or impolicy had joined against us.” For this reason, Parliament must come to an immediate resolution “declaring their surprise and horror at such proceedings and condemning them in the most pointed and emphatical terms.…” He was glad to hear that the noble lord [Germain] saw nothing to condemn in the matter, for “now it was known and would be proclaimed all over Europe that ministers and not our commanders were the plunderers of St. Eustatius and the violators
of the rights of war” and the army and navy [were] thus “rescued from the ignominious aspersion and the character of Sir George Rodney,” his colleague as fellow-member for Westminster, “was rescued from the obloquy which even great and good men must have otherwise thrown upon them.”
With heavy sarcasm, Fox declared he was “happy in the generous acquittal which the noble lord had given of the navy and army. The military of this country and particularly the navy was dear to him and their fame ought to be held sacred to every British heart. It was from that virtuous body of men that the empire had derived all its respect and strength and from which it must continue to receive its security and its fame. If they by some hasty act of rapaciousness or of avarice should blacken the purity of their character and stain their former deeds, Great Britain would sink to a state from which neither their future repentance nor their gallantry could be able to raise her, a state of ignominy more dreadful than disaster since enterprise might retrieve disadvantage but not restore reputation so destroyed.” Fox’s verbal vision of reprisals and contempt of nations flowed on with its wonderful command of words matched only by the exaggeration of its sentiments, which, one would think, would have been more likely to repel his listeners than win them. Following Fox, the Lord Advocate of Scotland entered into what the rapporteur described as a serious “defence of the proceedings at St. Eustatius,” which in his mind were “justifiable on the ground of necessity, policy, and by the laws of nations,” and that it was “good policy in the commanders to destroy that magazine from which the enemy were supplied with arms against us, it was in fact their duty … that as to the laws of war, it was a principle on which Grotius, Puffendorf, Vattel and every writer agreed, that it was just to destroy not only the weapons but also the materiels of war.”
Six more speakers carried the debate to late hours, until it was concluded by Burke with more of his magniloquent rhapsodizing. Upon the vote being taken, all the words might as well have gone unspoken. Burke’s motion for an inquiry was defeated by a safe government majority of 160–86. When the party system regulates, argument addresses the deaf.
Rodney’s savage feelings toward the English merchants’ greed and treason were genuine and profound, as would be those of any man who sees fellow-combatants facing bullets supplied by their own countrymen. He intended to remain on St. Eustatius, he wrote to the Governor of
Barbados on February 27, three weeks after taking the island, until the iniquitous “English merchants, base enough from lucrative motives to support the enemies of Great Britain, will for their treason justly merit their own ruin … till all the stores are embarked and till the
Lower Town
, that
nest of vipers, be destroyed, and lumber sent for the use of your unfortunate island and St. Lucie.” He was not going to leave until this “iniquitous island may be no longer the mart for clandestine commerce.”
While it is easy to say, and has frequently been said, that Rodney, mesmerized by the riches lying at hand on St. Eustatius, stayed too long on the island in his desire to gather them up, outrage and desire to punish the traitors were clearly as strong additional motives. “The Chief Judge of St. Kitts, Mr. Georges, is returning to expose the villainy of the English merchants who resided in this island of thieves,” he noted. “
They deserve scourging and they shall be scourged,” Rodney wrote with passion to Lord George Germain, and that intention remained his abiding aim. The judge from St. Kitts “takes all their books and documents,” which Rodney had ordered to be seized and in which “all their base designs are brought to light. Fifty-seven English merchants of St. Kitts and Antigua were equally guilty.” To a commissioner of the government he writes that he had had “daily experience” of the “iniquitous practises and the treasonable correspondence” of the British merchants in this and neighboring islands by intercepting hundreds of letters, and he is “fully convinced that had it not been for their assistance the American war must have been long since finished.…” They made themselves Dutch burghers who had once been Englishmen—“Providence has ordained this just punishment.” Here the Admiral was succumbing to the luxurious temptation of equating Providence with himself.