Sharpe's Prey

Historical note

The British attack on Copenhagen in April 1801 is remembered (by the British), while the far more devastating attack of September 1807 is largely forgotten. Perhaps the former is distinguished by the presence of Nelson, for it was during the Battle of Copenhagen that he famously placed a telescope to his blind eye and declared he could not see the signal to discontinue the action.

The battle of April 1801 was between a British fleet and the Danish fleet which was reinforced by floating batteries and the formidable seaward defenses of the city. Some 790 Danish sailors and soldiers were killed and another 900 wounded, but all those men, like the 950 British casualties, were troops. In 1807 the British killed 1,600 Danish civilians inside Copenhagen (British losses in the whole campaign amounted to 259 men) and the Danish defeat was far more comprehensive, yet the campaign has been largely forgotten in Britain.

The cause of it was the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit between France and Russia which agreed, among many other things, that the French could take the Danish fleet. The Russians had no right to grant such a thing, nor the French to take it, but Denmark was a small country (though not so small as she is today; in 1807 she still possessed Holstein, now in northern Germany, and all of Norway). She did, however, possess the second largest merchant fleet in the world and, to protect it, a very large navy, with powerful ships which the French wanted to replace those they had lost at Trafalgar in 1805. The British, whose intelligence service was remarkably efficient, heard about the secret clause in the treaty and, to prevent its implementation, demanded that the Danes send their fleet into protective custody in Britain. The Danes, quite properly, refused, and so the 1807 expedition was launched to force their hand. When the Danes still rejected the British demands the gunners opened fire and bombarded Copenhagen until the city, unwilling to take more casualties, surrendered. The Danish fleet, instead of being taken into protective custody, was simply captured.

It was not a campaign in which the British can take particular pride. The Danish army was mostly in Holstein so the only action of any note was the one described in the novel, the Battle of Koge, between Sir Arthur Wellesley’s forces and the scratch army assembled by General Castenschiold. The Danes call it “the battle of the wooden shoes” because so many of their militiamen were wearing farm clogs. It seems rather tough luck on the Danes that at a time when the British army had many mediocre generals they should have run up against the future Duke of Wellington, not to mention the 95th Rifles. Companies from the regiment had served in a couple of actions before, but Koge was the first time that the whole 1st Battalion fought together. There was no attempt to bribe the Danish Crown Prince, though the “golden cavalry of Saint George” was one of Britain’s most potent weapons in the long wars against France and was used to subvert, bribe and persuade countless rulers. Between 1793 and 1815 the British Treasury spent no less than £52,000,000 on such “subsidies.”

It is a mystery why the Danes did not burn their fleet. The Crown Prince certainly sent orders that it should be done, for one of his messages was captured by the British. Copies probably reached the city, but the ships were not fired. There were no British seamen smuggled into the city to prevent such a fire; it simply seems that in the chaos of the bombardment the orders were overlooked, or else Peymann thought that the British would exact a terrible price if he so thwarted them. So the fleet was waiting, and the British, who occupied the city for a further six weeks, took home eighteen ships of the line, four frigates and sixteen other ships as well as twenty-five gunboats. They also stripped the dockyard of stores and destroyed the half-built ships on the slipways. One of the ships of the line was lost on the voyage home, but the rest were all deemed to be prizes, thus making the senior officers of the expedition indecently rich (Admiral Gambier and General Cathcart alone divided about £300,000 between them, a fortune). The British did leave behind a small and rather beautiful frigate, really little more than a pleasure craft, which had been a gift from King George III to his nephew, the Danish Crown Prince. The Danes, with a macabre sense of humor, sent this ship to England later in the year, together with a handful of British prisoners and a message saying that the frigate appeared to have been inadvertently forgotten. One of the minor trophies of the expedition was the capture from the Danes of the island of Heligoland in the North Sea which stayed under British rule until 1890 when it was amicably handed over to Germany.

The 1807 campaign was a disaster for Denmark. It forced her into a French alliance and ruined her financially. She lost Norway (to Sweden) and those parts of Copenhagen that had been burned by the British were not rebuilt for a generation. Over three hundred houses were destroyed, a thousand more seriously damaged, the cathedral was burned as were a dozen other churches and the university. The small tale of the artist extinguishing a mortar shell with the contents of his chamber pot is true; his name was Eckersburg and he left some harrowing pictures of the city under fire. Today there is little sign that the destruction ever took place, though a few of the rebuilt houses have British round shot mortared into their facades. The city’s great fortifications were demolished in 1867, though the citadel (now the Kastellet) remains. There was a small wooden fishing pier close to the citadel, not far from where the Little Mermaid now sits. Many of the street names have changed, thus Ulfedt’s Plads (which was burned out) is now Graabodretorv.

The campaign does have one curious footnote. One of the British generals on the expedition was Thomas Grosvenor who took with him a mare, Lady Catherine. While in Denmark, he discovered Lady Catherine was pregnant, so he sent her home where she gave birth to a foal, a stallion, that was later sold to Sir Charles Stewart who became Adjutant-General in the Peninsular War. Stewart, in turn, sold the stallion to Sir Arthur Wellesley and it became his favorite horse. Indeed, when he was Duke of Wellington, he rode the horse throughout the Battle of Waterloo and afterward retired it to his estate at Stratfield Saye. The horse died in 1836 and was buried in the grounds of Startfield Saye where it’s gravestone can still be seen. The name of the horse was, of course, Copenhagen. “There may have been many faster horses,” the Duke said of Copenhagen, “and no doubt many handsomer, but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.”

So, tenuous though it is, the road to Waterloo winds through Copenhagen, and Sharpe, like the Duke, must march every mile.