Battle of Fishguard, 1797: the last invasion of Britain

On the morning of Wednesday 22 February 1797 a small squadron, two frigates and two smaller vessels, rounded St David's Head close inshore. The ships flew English colors, but the watchers on the cliffs soon suspected they were French. They had first been taken for merchantmen, but as alarm spread, families round Fishguard carried their children and their portable goods inland, and many farm people hid in the gorse and among the rocks. By the afternoon the ships had anchored off the rocky coast of Pencaer, and that evening boats full of men began to put off for the shore. The last invasion of Britain had begun. The battle is one chapter in the military history of Wales.²

Who won the Battle of Fishguard and why?

The British won, almost without a fight. Lord Cawdor's militia, fencibles and volunteers numbered perhaps a third or half of the invaders, but the French force was largely made up of convicts, had no artillery, lost its discipline in a drunken spree of looting and was abandoned by its ships. Tate asked for terms within two days.³

Background: why the French landed in Wales

In the winter of 1796 the French Republic had tried to land an army in Ireland, to help the United Irishmen drive out the British; storms broke up the expedition. A second blow was then aimed at Britain itself, under William Tate, an Irish-American who had served in the American War of Independence. Laws and Singer call his force the Légion Noire, the Black Legion; the instructions printed in London that year name it the Second Legion of the Franks.⁴

Tate's instructions, found among his papers and published in the London press, set out three aims: to raise an insurrection in the country, to disrupt British trade, and to prepare the way for a larger landing by distracting the government. Bristol, the instructions said, was to be the first target, set on fire from the windward side by night; Chester and Liverpool were to follow. Contrary winds kept his ships out of the Bristol Channel, and he turned west to Pembrokeshire.⁵

Armies and commanders

The French. The local account that Edward Laws followed counts 1,400 men: 600 regulars and 800 convicts, "the sweepings of the jails", dressed in old British uniforms dyed a rusty brown. People's Collection Wales gives about 1,400 troops aboard four warships; Lord Cawdor, in his report to London, wrote that about 1,200 had landed, and an eyewitness put the number who laid down their arms at very near fourteen hundred. The Royal Commission's record says between 1,200 and 1,500. They brought muskets, powder, ball and grenades, but no artillery.⁶

The defenders. The defense fell to local forces. Lord Milford, the lord lieutenant, too infirm to command, handed it to John Campbell, Lord Cawdor, who gathered the yeomanry cavalry, the Cardiganshire Militia, companies of fencible infantry, among them the Fishguard Fencibles under Colonel Thomas Knox, and a party of sailors. Their number is given as about 660 by the Annual Register of 1797, which lists 100 Pembroke Fencibles, 300 Fishguard and Newport Fencibles, 200 Cardiganshire Militia and 60 yeomen; as 750 by Laws; and as no more than 700 by Rita Singer of Aberystwyth University. Crowds of armed country people joined them.⁷

The landing and the looting

The landing at Carregwastad Point went unopposed. Through the night the men hauled barrels of powder and ammunition up a steep cliff. Laws thought twenty determined men could have stopped them; Fenton, who lived nearby, called the task almost Herculean; the Annual Register judged the spot one of the worst that could have been chosen, four or five miles of rough ground from any decent road. Tate took the farmhouse of Trehowel as his headquarters, and sent his men out for food.⁸

They found it, and more. A ship laden with wine had been wrecked on the coast shortly before, and nearly every cottage held a cask. Fenton writes that gluttony was followed by drunkenness, which raised the men above the control of discipline and sank many of their officers below the power of command; the Annual Register says that many officers were as unable to command as the soldiers were unwilling to obey. Abandoned houses were stripped, their furniture burned for fuel. The wine came from a Portuguese ship, Laws and Singer both say, and both pass on the tale, as legend, of soldiers boiling stolen geese in butter.⁹

The countryside did not welcome its liberators. Country people armed themselves with scythes and whatever else came to hand, and small skirmishes broke out between farmers and stray soldiers across Pencaer. Two Welshmen were killed in these scuffles, the Annual Register and Laws's local account agree, and both tell the same story of how: near the farm of Carlem a Frenchman gave up his musket, one of his captors struck him with it, and he drew his bayonet and killed his attackers.¹⁰

Yet the invaders were less savage than their reputation. The plunder was chiefly food and drink, and the Annual Register found the damage far less than might have been expected, with no wanton murders and no deeds of great cruelty; Laws, ninety years later, wrote of wonderfully little mischief and scarcely any violence. The worst sacrilege was at Llanwnda, where soldiers broke into the parish church and ransacked it, as both Laws and Singer record.¹¹

The commanders' decisions

Tate's orders told him to strike fast and spread terror. The Annual Register thought his force could have done enormous damage had it pushed on with the promptitude and boldness recommended to its leader, but the hostile leader, it wrote, was ill disposed to act with the vigor his instructions enjoined. Tate made no attempt to march inland; his men stayed on the headland around Trehowel, where hunger and wine did the rest.¹²

Cawdor, on his side, had no trained army, only militia, fencibles and yeomen. He set off from his estate at Stackpole as soon as the news reached him, took command at Fishguard, and had his small force drawn up on the high ground in the way best calculated to hide its real numbers from the French, as both the Annual Register and Laws record. And when the French asked for terms, he refused anything but surrender, writing as if far larger forces were on their way.¹³

Why did the French surrender at Fishguard?

On Thursday the French ships weighed anchor and sailed away, leaving Tate with no way home. Cawdor's small army reached Fishguard that evening. At about ten at night French officers came in under a flag of truce with a letter, and Cawdor and his officers met to consider it. The French offered to capitulate on terms; the British answered that only unconditional surrender would do.¹⁴

Tate's letter, dated the 5th of Ventôse, Year 5 of the Republic, said that the circumstances in which his troops had landed made military operations unnecessary, since they would only lead to bloodshed and pillage. Cawdor replied that the superiority of his force, "which is hourly increasing", forbade any terms short of surrender as prisoners of war, and gave the French until ten in the morning.¹⁵

Whether the British were helped by more than bluff is debated. The local tale holds that crowds of women in red flannel shawls and tall hats, watching from the hills, looked like regiments of the line. Laws reports it as something the ill-natured said; Singer as legend. What the sources agree on is that the invaders' morale had collapsed with their discipline.¹⁶

The surrender on Goodwick Sands

On Friday 24 February the French marched down to Goodwick Sands, below Fishguard, and grounded their arms before Cawdor's men. Cawdor reported that they laid down their arms at two o'clock; an account from Haverfordwest says noon. Some, the same account records, began to sing, smoke and dance, while others looked on with dark faces. They were marched to Haverfordwest that night and shut up in the castle, the churches and storehouses.¹⁷

Counting the losses

The cost in lives was tiny. Both the Annual Register and Laws count two Welshmen killed. No French death toll survives in two independent accounts: neither Cawdor's report nor the Annual Register gives one. Close to 1,400 French soldiers, by the eyewitness count from Haverfordwest, or about 1,200 by Cawdor's, became prisoners.¹⁸

Aftermath

The ships fared no better. On 9 March the British frigates San Fiorenzo, under Sir Harry Neale, and Nymphe, under John Cooke, caught two of them, the new frigate Résistance, of 48 guns in the Annual Register and 40 in James, and the corvette Constance, a few leagues off Brest as they made for home. After a short running fight both struck their colors. The British ships had no losses; the French lost 18 killed and 15 wounded by James's count, between thirty and forty killed and wounded by the Annual Register's. The Résistance was taken into the Royal Navy as the Fisgard, after the spot where her troops had landed.¹⁹ › Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 1797

What the expedition had been for puzzled its enemies. William James, the naval historian, judged that no one, not even among the French, seemed rightly to understand the object of this silly expedition. Laws, writing in 1888, was still asking what it all meant, and could only note that it was generally thought to have been bound for Ireland, then close to rebellion; the Annual Register, for its part, called it a buccaneering expedition.²⁰

The scare that followed was larger. In the days after the surrender local men were taken into custody on suspicion of having helped the French, as both the Annual Register and Laws record; Fenton, writing soon after, angrily defended the loyalty of his county against the charge of disaffection.²¹

Why Fishguard is called the last invasion of Britain

The Royal Commission calls it the last attempted invasion of Britain, and the landing is remembered as the last time a hostile foreign force came ashore on the British mainland. In 1897, for the centenary, a memorial stone was set up on the headland above Carregwastad Point, inscribed in Welsh and English: "Carreg Goffa, glaniad y Ffrancod, Chwefror 22, 1797", the memorial stone of the landing of the French.²²

The best-loved figure in the story is Jemima Nicholas, a Fishguard cobbler who, local legend says, rounded up twelve drunken French soldiers single-handed and locked them in St Mary's church. Rita Singer, who tells the tale, warns that it cannot be verified, for lack of contemporary sources, and Laws, writing ninety years after the event, does not mention her at all. She belongs to the folklore of the invasion, not to its record.²³

Where did the French land at Fishguard?

Carregwastad Point lies on the coast north of Llanwnda, with the memorial stone on the summit above it. Goodwick Sands, where the French surrendered, lie across the bay from Fishguard, and in Fishguard the Royal Oak, where Cawdor's council of war met and where the terms are said to have been agreed, still stands.²⁴