MINOR EXPEDITIONS OF THE BRITISH ARMY FROM 1803 To 1815.
BY CAPTAIN LEWIS BUTLER, (late) King’s Royal Rifle Corps. The United Service Magazine, Volume 30
https://books.google.com/books?id=96Q6AQAAMAAJ&

Published in 1905, Captain Butler's history is what might be called the full-English-Army biased view of things. Of course, I was interested to see what sort of treatment, our hero, Sir Sidney Smith received. As expected, there's not much, but, there is this interesting bit which got me to thinking.

page 591

"On the opposite side of the straits General Regnier, with five thousand men, occupied Lower Calabria; cut off from General Verdier, who, with a similar force, occupied the upper province, and whose time was chiefly taken up in quelling local insurrections of the Calabrese partisans and banditti, which, having been supplied with arms by Sir Sidney Smith, carried on a species of guerilla warfare with the enemy."

"species of guerrilla warfare' just drips with contempt for Sir Sidney's efforts and Sir Sidney's was, perhaps, the rarest of all species of guerrilla war; a royalist guerrilla war. The political environment of circa 1806 Naples (then a country not just the city) was upside down: the upper class was revolutionary leaning towards France and the lower classes were royalist: of course, this is the exact opposite of the classic French revolutionary model.

There was clear contempt for Sir Sidney's species of guerrilla war that generals Stuart and Moore expressed at the time in their letters to commanding-general Fox. In those letters the English Army generals in Sicily declared they would not support a war in which the upper class Calabrians would be the victims of lower class peasant bandits. The important thing not said is, when it came to Calabria, the English army would align with the French; thus abandoning the lower classes of Calabria to their fate at the hands of the French army, the direct result described by Finely in his book, is, The Most Monstrous of Wars.

It should only be expected, and entirely proper, of Sir Sidney to have aligned himself with the legitimate, recognized by England, court of Sicily, then resident in Palermo. All the more so because Sir Sidney had been in consultation with and was in fact carrying out the directives of Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Nelson concerning tactics and strategy for the defense of Naples: essentially a replay of the successful 1799 counter revolution. Of course, by the time Sir Sidney reached Sicily both Nelson and Pitt are dead, the new government in London is Whig, longtime French-leaning Fox is PM, and the brother of General Fox who is now the new commander Sicily replacing Craig.

In the end, what happened to Sir Sidney's guerrilla war was politics. PM Fox made feelers to Napoleon for a peace settlement with the bargaining chips being Hanover for Sicily/Malta. So, with Sicily being dangled as a option in negotiations this was not the right time to be fomenting an insurgent guerrilla war in Calabria.

Only adding to this, on the more immediate level, there was the ever-present enmity between the all-powerful glorious English Navy and the not so powerful and, up till then, mostly inglorious English army which had yet to defeat any Napoleonic army. Only to make things so much worse for these fragile army egos; here, in their presence, was that one singular individual who had defeated an elite French army personally led by the great Napoleon: Sir Sidney Smith. Smith's crime in the eyes of these army men apparently was that he was, first, a navy man, a navy man who had the nerve to defeat Napoleon on land which should have been a job for the army (there were actual complaints at the time from the local English army commanders about how terrible it was for the English navy to undertake land operations in Acre, clearly a task for the army!) So, Sir Sidney, the Swedish Knight, this great interloper on English army prerogatives, was yet again infringing upon army pride and honor with his dirty degenerative guerrilla war.

And dirty and degenerative it was. Sir Sidney's guerrilla army consisted of the lowest elements of society: galley slaves, released prisoners, known bandits, the worse of the worse in Calabria which might have been the worse on the european continent; anyone the Queen's agents could sweep up were welcomed, all being loyal subjects of Queen Maria Carolina. That the court's loyal subjects were the lower class is precisely what made the court in Palermo "degenerative" in the eyes of the army generals. This animosity between the English army and court is well documented, Moore only visited the court once and was appalled. So, the true situation was that the Navy (Smith) was on the side of the legitimately recognized royal government and the English army command in Sicily was against it and refused to support the court in any way, disregarding the fact that this same court received an annual subsidy from England. In fact, it is only a couple years later when the English administration actually overthrows the royal government and establishes a short-lived constitutional government. If ever English arrogance was on grand display, it was in Sicily during the Napoleonic war period.

To be fair to Fox, Moore, and Stuart, at the time, the concept of a guerrilla war was entirely foreign to the English army. Even the term guerrilla war had yet to be expressed. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Wellington as the oldest known source, speaking of "Guerrillas" in 1809! (wiki) That this foreign form of war, especially in that was supporting the vulgar lower classes in attacking upper class residents, led, OMG!, by a naval officer: the army just could not allow this to stand. So, it didn't. Smith was reassigned after Fox reports Smith as usurping the army (Smith was declared the Viceroy of Calabria by King Ferdinand.)

Clearly, the army generals had simply stabbed Sir Sidney in the back. This was noticed by none other than, that well known expert on such political affairs, Napoleon: - 29th Bulletin of the Grand Army, (Royal Palace ) Berlin, Nov. 9, I806.

The Warsaw mail brought (leading elements of French army were in Warsaw) many letters from Russia, which of course were intercepted. From these we perceive, that the fabrications of the English Journals meet with much credit in Russia. For instance; that Marshal Massena has been killed; that the city of Naples was taken and occupied by the Calabrians; that the King (Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother, King of Naples 1806-1808) fled to Rome; and that the English, with 5 or 6000 men, were masters of Italy! However, a little reflection will enable them to discover the fallacy of these reports. Has not France increased, not diminished, her military force in Italy; the King of Naples is in his capital; he has 30,000 French troops at his back; he is master of the two Calabrias, while at Petersburgh they imagine the Calabrians are at Rome! If a few galleys, armed and trained by the infamous Sidney Smith, the most worthless among the brave English soldiers, killed unprotected individuals, and massacred wealthy, unoffending, and peaceable proprietors; the gendarmerie and the scaffold have done them justice! The English navy disavows not in the least the epithet of infamous, bestowed upon Sidney Smith. Generals Stuart and Fox, and all the officers of the army, are indignant at beholding the English name associated with such brigands! The brave General Stuart has even publicly protested against these outrages, as unavailing with respect to their objects as they are atrocious in themselves, and which tend to exchange the noble science and business of war for a system of robbery and assassination! But when Sidney Smith was selected to execute the sanguinary suggestions of the Queen we can only perceive in him one of those unprincipled instruments, which governments do often employ, but whom they always abandon to that contempt, which they are the first to feel for them! The Neapolitans will one day be informed in detail, of the letters circulated by Sidney Smith, the commissions he has authorized, and of the money he has expended for the execution of atrocities, in which he is himself the chief agent—

Imagine the species of pride these English officers must have felt upon reading such high praise, admiration, and warm words of support from the great Emperor Napoleon, newly resident at the Royal Palace, Berlin. Of course, it will take less than 3 years for the English army (Wellington) to reject such high-class moral scruples in Spain.

Regarding N. on Sir Sidney? Proudly guilty on all counts. No doubt he was giddy with pride at reading it.

(to be continued)