Peninsular and Waterloo General

Sir Denis Pack and the War against Napoleon

Marcus de la Poer Beresford

• Editorial: Pen and Sword Military
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781399083218
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Biografías militares

Denis Pack was one of a phalanx of senior Anglo-Irish officers who served with great distinction in the British army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, earning a reputation as one of the Duke of Wellington’s most able brigade commanders. Despite his remarkable and varied military career, he hasn’t received the individual attention he deserves, but this omission has now been remedied by Marcus de la Poer Beresford’s full biography. Pack, who was born in 1774, served extensively in Europe as well as in Africa and South America. He was one of the few brigade commanders to serve first with the Portuguese army, and then with Wellington, in the Peninsula, at Quatre Bras, Waterloo and afterwards in the occupation of France. His life was cut short by an early death in 1823, which may have been the result of the many wounds he received in his thirty years as a soldier. This perceptive and meticulously researched study draws on previously unpublished material from archives in the United Kingdom, Portugal and Ireland. It complements other works on notable officers of the period, as Pack served with Cornwallis, Baird, Beresford, Whitelocke, Chatham, Picton, Henry Clinton, and others as well as Wellington. In addition it offers an absorbing portrait of Pack himself and gives the reader a fascinating insight into the many campaigns he took part in and the military life of his day.

Chapter 1

Early life

Denis Pack was born in Ireland on 7 October 1774, the youngest of Thomas and Mary Pack’s four children.1 Thomas was the Church of Ireland Dean of Ossory, a position attached to Kilkenny Cathedral in the city of Kilkenny. The Pack family had arrived in Ireland in the second half of the seventeenth century, establishing themselves initially in the area of Ballinakill, County Laois (at that time Queen’s County). A successful and distinguished military career was terminated with Denis’s death in 1823 at the relatively early age of forty-eight.

As a young boy Denis attended Kilkenny College. Founded in 1538 by Piers Butler, Earl of Ormonde, Ireland’s oldest grammar school was situated in a seven bay Georgian building in the city built in the 1780s under the guidance of the then Master of the College, the Reverend Richard Pack, uncle of Denis.2 On leaving Kilkenny College, Denis, aged fifteen, enrolled in Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin), but did not graduate, leaving a year later. Denis’s mother, Mary Pack, was an heiress. She was the daughter of Denis Sullivan of Berehaven, County Cork. Denis Sullivan had been a captain in the British army and it was in his footsteps that the young Denis Pack followed when, aged sixteen, he was commissioned as a cornet on 30 November 1791 in the 14th light dragoons. He joined the regiment in Dublin in January 1792.3 The regiment, while ostensibly English, was by the time Denis joined it known as an Irish one, for on being sent to Ireland in 1747 it spent the next forty-eight years in Ireland, frequently stationed in the city and county of Kilkenny. Denis’s military career might have ended very quickly, for less than two years after obtaining his commission he was subject to a court martial held in the courthouse in Kilkenny. Some accounts reported young Pack as being cashiered for striking another officer, Captain Sir George Dunbar.4 However, there is no note to this effect in his military record or the London Gazette, so he may have been suspended.5 Much later, after his life had ended, Pack’s misadventure was still being quoted, for in 1834 the Naval and Military Gazette and Weekly Chronicle of the United Service referred to him as ‘having unfortunately fallen under the fangs of the law at the commencement of his military career’.6 The reason for apparently striking Dunbar has been lost in the mists of time but by all accounts Sir George was a difficult person and a later argument with his fellow officers was to have a disastrous outcome when he took his own life in 1799.7

Unabashed, and perhaps because of the British government’s thirst for soldiers, Denis reappears in the army as a gentleman volunteer in 1794.8 Remarkably, he appears to have been able to rejoin or continue with the 14th light dragoons. This seems to give weight to the theory that he was suspended rather than cashiered. Almost immediately, he left Ireland to serve in Flanders as part of the force commanded by the Earl of Moira, designated to assist the army already there under HRH the Duke of York. Lord Moira’s force disembarked at Ostend, but, while it managed to link up with that under the Duke of York, the campaign was a disastrous one, ending in a winter march across the Low Countries, finally reaching Bremen whence the army was evacuated back to Great Britain.9 This campaign, however, gave young Denis Pack his first combat experience. Commended for carrying a dispatch to Nieuport, south of Ostend, he was later joined there by part of his regiment. The town was subsequently besieged and captured by the French in July 1794. On its surrender the Hanoverian and British troops were taken prisoner but many French emigrés were massacred. Immediately prior to the surrender Pack and some two hundred emigrés managed to escape by boat and after a sharp engagement he rejoined the Duke of York’s army near Antwerp. Pack subsequently took part in the Battle of Boxtel in September 1794, which led to the precipitate withdrawal of the British and Hanoverian army to a new defensive line on the Meuse, only for that to be abandoned during the winter, beginning the long and severe retreat to Bremen.

Pack’s promotion to lieutenant by purchase was gazetted on 24 March 1795.10 In that capacity he served with a detachment of the 14th light dragoons on Britain’s next foray in continental Europe. This involved an attempt to support French royalists in Brittany and the Vendée. A force made up of French emigré’s and some British marines convoyed by a fleet under Sir John Borlase Warren landed at Quiberon in Brittany at the end of June.11 This landing was to prove a further military failure, with French revolutionary forces driving them off the peninsula before the end of July.12 The British government had determined prior to this withdrawal to send another force to support the royalists.13 This body of three thousand men under the command of General Welbore Ellis Doyle arrived too late to take part at Quiberon.14 Warren and Doyle then planned a landing to capture the island of Noirmoutiers, but this plan was abandoned before they finally seized Île d’Yeu just to the south of the Loire estuary on 30 September.15 The island was fortified, but a decision was taken to pull out British forces in mid-October on the basis that the likely benefits did not warrant a force of this size being garrisoned on the island. Bad weather first delayed the arrival of these instructions and then postponed the evacuation until the end of November. During this time Pack served on the island.16 Returning to England, Pack was made a captain in the 5th dragoon guards in January 1796.17 Although in origin an English regiment raised in response to the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, the 5th dragoon guards had been placed on the Irish establishment at the close of the seventeenth century and was heavily populated by Irish soldiers. Shortly after Pack’s appointment to the regiment it was sent to Ireland, where Pack was to serve for the next three years. In 1812, commanded by Major General William Ponsonby, the regiment was to win fame as part of Major General John Le Marchant’s cavalry charge at Salamanca, but in the closing years of the eighteenth century it was closely involved with the suppression of dissent in Ireland.18

The island of Ireland in the final decade of the eighteenth century was a ferment of agitation. The victory of William III (William of Orange) over James II, culminating in the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, resulted in Ireland being ruled by a small minority professing the Anglican faith of the established church: a minority determined to maintain its position, but beset by both the Roman Catholic overall majority and the thoroughly disaffected Presbyterians making up the majority in the north of the island. Discontent and resentment led to the formation of armed bands. The Protestant Hearts of Oak and Steelboys operated predominantly in Ulster opposing tithes, tolls and agrarian inequality. They were countered by the Defenders, a Catholic organization, originally defensive in nature. In counties further south, where Catholics substantially outnumbered Protestants, the Whiteboys emerged to defend tenant rights and oppose tithe collection and eviction. Outrages were met with savage retribution by the establishment and those relying on the support of the establishment.

The position of the Irish Protestant ascendancy, which relied on backing by the British government, was made more difficult when that government realized that in Ireland there was an untapped reservoir of potential soldiers to meet the demands placed on Great Britain by virtue of its struggle for world dominance with France. From the time of the Seven Years War (1756–63), through the American War of Independence (1775–83) to the French revolution and Napoleonic wars (1789–1815), the British government increasingly ignored and then repealed the laws forbidding Catholics to bear arms. Over the same period Irish Protestants increasingly flexed their own muscles, achieving free trade and greater legislative independence from England during the American revolution. That revolution brought radical ideas to the fore in Ireland just as it did in continental Europe, but the fire was well and truly lit with the outbreak and success of the French revolution commencing in 1789. The philosophy of a democratic republic led to the rise of the United Irishmen, an organization including radical Protestants and Catholic Defenders. The suggestion of an independent republic based on universal suffrage (for men) proved a powerful clarion call. These developments presented considerable challenges for a Dublin-based administration endeavouring to promote British policies, but dependent upon an often-divided Anglo-Irish support base to do so. The stage was set for conflict.

France not unnaturally sought to take advantage of a situation involving substantial discontent with British rule in Ireland. In the winter of 1796 a naval force of over forty vessels carrying some fifteen thousand soldiers under the command of General Lazare Hoche sailed from Brest intending to invade Ireland. This expedition was no mere chouannerie, for the ships carried arms for forty thousand. The French managed to evade the Royal Navy squadrons responsible for surveillance off the west coast of France. However, the invasion fleet became separated by storms, and though a number of vessels carrying 6,500 troops entered Bantry Bay on the extreme southwest of Ireland on 21 December, bad weather prevented a landing. The fleet, suffering heavy losses, returned to France, but not before it had caused consternation in Ireland. The British government and the Irish administration had placed great reliance on the ability of the Royal Navy to intercept and destroy any invasion force before it effected a landing in Ireland. This factor, and demands elsewhere for military intervention, had led the British government to withdraw regular regiments from Ireland following the outbreak of war with France in 1793, replacing these with local militia and regiments sent from Britain either seeking to recruit or bringing with them untried recruits, or both. Expectations of the likely performance of yeomanry and fencibles were not high. In December 1796 General Dalrymple, who commanded at Cork, felt he could not defend the city but would have to engage in diversionary tactics, while Colonel Vallancey, in command of the Tyrone militia in Limerick, expressed a distinct lack of optimism about the defence of that city.19 The failure of the French to effect a landing, while earning the administration a temporary reprieve, did not remove the threat of invasion. It did, however, enable those in charge to both improve military capacity and move to violently suppress disaffection, primarily in Ulster. This turn of events was to prove disastrous for the United Irishmen and their supporters.

Denis Pack and the 5th dragoon guards, along with other troops, had undertaken a forced march to County Cork in late December 1796 to counter the threatened landings but in the event were not called into action. The regiment returned shortly afterwards to County Kildare, where it was based on the Curragh of Kildare throughout 1797. There it was reviewed by Lieutenant General David Dundas, who approved of what he saw. Dundas wrote the definitive texts for the regulation of both infantry and cavalry drill and in later life became commander-in-chief of the army. Increasing government apprehension at the prospect of a rising led to the regiment being moved to Dublin, where it was based when rebellion broke out in 1798. Part of the regiment was involved in the fighting in counties Wicklow and Wexford, but Pack led a detachment sent to County Kildare.20 There he encountered several rebel forces, most notably at Prosperous on 19 June where, following the defeat of the rebels, Pack was mentioned in dispatches by Lord Cornwallis, the recently appointed lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief of the British forces in Ireland.21 Pack was called into action again later in the summer. The rebellion had by then been defeated in Ulster and Leinster, when a small French force of some thousand men under General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert landed in Killalla in County Mayo on 22 August.22 After initial success in the west of Ireland, that force was defeated at Ballinamuck on 8 September. The 5th dragoon guards were engaged there, and subsequently the recently promoted Major Pack was charged with conveying the French prisoners, including General Humbert, to Dublin.23 Here the officers were treated with generous hospitality. Humbert and his second in command Jean Sarrazin, together with a number of other officers, were put up in the Mail Coach Hotel in Dawson Street, before being repatriated by way of exchange.24

On 16 September, unaware of Humbert’s surrender, a much larger French force than Humbert’s had sailed from Brest for Ireland. Commanded by General Jean Hardy, it involved some three thousand men placed in eight frigates and the Hoche, a 74-gun ship of the line. Theobald Wolfe Tone, a leading member of the United Irishmen, travelled on the Hoche. The squadron was intercepted by a larger British fleet under Sir John Borlase Warren on 12 October off the north coast of Ireland and, with the exception of two frigates, was captured without loss. Wolfe Tone, along with 2,500 French soldiers and those serving in the French squadron, was taken ...