Navy on permanent red alert, with the astronomical costs this entailed.
The British were also wrongfooted diplomatically, by being forced into
illegal interventions against neutral shipping, as at Copenhagen in r8o7.
Napoleon's ill-starred attempt to invade England in r8o3-o5 was
essentially vitiated by his lack of understanding of the sea and the
problems faced by mariners. He expected his admirals to move like
generals, without regard to wind and wave, and was notably unforgiving
when they failed to come up to the mark. To an extent he was unlucky,
since the 'French Nelson', La Touche-Treville, died unexpectedly and he
was left with second-rate men. Bruix and Missiesy felt his wrath, but
none more so than Villeneuve. Taken prisoner after Trafalgar, when his
flagship Bucentaure was forced to strike colours, Villeneuve remained in
captivity in England until April r8o6. Returning to France and learning
that he was still in deep disgrace with the Emperor, Villeneuve, aged just
43, stabbed himself to death at Rennes.
Ironically, it was to Villeneuve that Napoleon owed potentially his best
chance of a successful descent on England. For six days in March r8os,
while Villeneuve was luring Nelson away to the Caribbean, the Channel
opposite Boulogne was virtually unguarded. But by this time Napoleon
had convinced himself that a crossing could never be made except under
cover of a fleet. In any case, he was not at Boulogne in March, and here
we see clearly the gravest defect of the imperial invasion plans. Too often
Napoleon's mind was on other things, when an invasion project required
monomaniacal twenty-four-hour concentration. The enemy he should
always have focused on was England. But he wasted his intellectual
substance on a dozen other projects: making himself King of Italy,
destroying the Holy Roman Emperor, founding the Confederation of the
Rhine, reviving Poland, adding Illyria to his empire, colliding with Russia
in the east. He should have grasped that England was the paramount
problem and devoted all his resources to defeating her. Why, for instance,
did he spend on his navy not even a tenth of the sum he lavished on
continental warfare? Napoleon seems always to have underrated the
problem of England, to have regarded her as a 'noise offstage', to have
viewed her as an obstacle to his plans rather than as the one enemy above
all others who had to be defeated. Yet concentrating on England required
a different, more Fabian, cast of personality. Even his hero Hannibal was
prepared to settle in for a fifteen-year war of attrition against Rome. But
Napoleon was temperamentally too impatient: he always wanted spectac
ular results and he wanted them now.
This inability to concentrate and the hopeless failure of Napoleon's
invasion plans in r8o3-o5 has tempted some historians, unwisely, to