Admiral Lord Keith and the Naval War against Napoleon (review)

The bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of Horatio Nelson stimulated a great deal of interest in both the admiral and the navy in which he served. For the public, Nelson's personality dominates the history of the Royal Navy in this period and some excellent new biographies have reinforced this perception. However, the effective operations of a complex navy on a global scale required far more than the skills and courage of one man and too often an understanding of the navy at this time is obscured by the focus on Nelson. This is not to suggest that biography itself is a problem. The story of a life set clearly in its contemporary context is one approach to improving our understanding of the command and leadership of a navy at the peak of its effectiveness. Kevin McCranie has done this very effectively with his life of George Keith Elphinstone, Lord Keith.

Keith is well-known as a senior officer who served throughout the great wars with France from 1793, but the details of his work and achievement have largely slipped into obscurity. He does not fit easily into the Nelsonic mould of heroic naval officers like Cochrane, Cockburn, or Sidney Smith, who have their fair share of biographers. He fought no major fleet action nor did he ascend to the heights of professional or political leadership like St. Vincent or Barham. Nonetheless, Keith was undoubtedly an extremely competent fighting officer and a man who knew how to harass the enemy, as his wealth accumulated from prize money attests. He commanded squadrons in the East Indies, Mediterranean, North Sea, and Channel. He commanded the naval forces during the capture of the Cape of Good Hope in 1795, the landing in Egypt in 1801, and the North German campaign of 1805–6. While commander of the Channel Fleet, he assisted in the final phase of the Peninsular War. In a relatively short biography of under two hundred pages of text McCranie has done an excellent job of balancing these achievements against other aspects of Keith's personality to explain both his contribution to the war against Napoleonic France and his current obscurity.

McCranie has trawled a wide range of sources to trace Keith's career. Coming from a titled but impecunious background, Keith quickly learned the importance of patronage for his career. With this knowledge and being a capable and conscientious officer, Keith career advanced well during the War of Independence. On the other hand, McCranie shows from Keith's letters that he felt permanently slighted or disappointed by his patrons and others. The expression of these feelings and his criticisms of the plans or performance of others occasionally damaged relations with his patrons and made for difficult working relations with other naval officers throughout his career. This was particularly the case when he was commanding men of talent and ego like Nelson, Sidney Smith, or Cochrane. In a world in which celebrity among the population was emerging as a professional and political factor for naval officers, Keith was not a good self-publicist, nor were there many others who would sing Keith's praises, and his achievements lacked the dramatic ring of some of his contemporaries. His success with prizes caused some jealousy, but there were also professional failings that marred his career. He bore much of the blame (rightly in McCranie's view) for the failure to land the army to attack Cadiz in 1800. His later disputes with Wellington over support for the army in Spain soured his command of the Channel Fleet.

McCranie is able to show Keith as a competent but difficult man, who commanded in major theatres of...