Battle of Fishguard, 1797: the last invasion of Britain

On the morning of Wednesday 22 February 1797 an old sailor named Thomas Williams, who farmed near St Davids, watched three warships and a lugger pass the North Bishops close inshore. They flew English colors, but he did not believe them. 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

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. General Lazare Hoche then planned a second blow, aimed at Britain itself. One of his forces, the Légion Noire, was placed under William Tate, an Irish-American who had served in the American War of Independence.³

Tate's instructions, found among his papers, 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. His first target was Bristol; if he could not reach it, he was to land in Cardigan Bay and march on Chester and Liverpool. Contrary winds kept his ships out of the Bristol Channel, and he turned west to Pembrokeshire.⁴

Armies and commanders

The French. The local account that Edward Laws followed counts 1,400 men and two women: 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; the plan published in London that March speaks of 1,200 men landed; the Royal Commission's record says between 1,200 and 1,500. They brought muskets, ammunition and grenades, but no artillery.⁵

The defenders. The defense fell to local forces. Lord Milford, the lord lieutenant, too infirm to command, handed the defense to John Campbell, Lord Cawdor, who was at his estate at Stackpole, a long ride to the south. Cawdor gathered the Castlemartin Yeomanry, the Cardiganshire Militia, companies of fencible infantry, among them the Fishguard Fencibles under Colonel Thomas Knox, and a party of sailors: by Laws's count 750 men in all. Rita Singer of Aberystwyth University puts the combined force at no more than 700.⁶

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; one boat overturned in the surf and its cargo was lost. Laws thought twenty determined men could have stopped them; Fenton, who lived nearby, called the task almost Herculean. Tate took the farmhouse of Trehowel as his headquarters, and sent his men out for food.⁷

They found it, and more. A Portuguese ship had been wrecked on the coast shortly before, and nearly every cottage held wine. 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. Farms were plundered for poultry, and the story ran that geese were boiled in butter. Llanwnda church was ransacked and its plate taken.⁸

The countryside fought back. Farmers armed themselves with fowling pieces, pitchforks and scythe blades on poles. Near Carlem two Welshmen and a Frenchman died in a scuffle, and the sailors of Solva killed another invader in a field still called French Park, Laws records. At St Davids, he adds, the townspeople stripped the lead from the cathedral to make bullets.⁹

Why did the French surrender at Fishguard?

On Thursday the French frigates weighed anchor and sailed away, leaving Tate with no way home. Cawdor's small army reached Fishguard that evening. At ten at night two French officers came in under a flag of truce, and a council of war met at the Royal Oak inn. The officers offered to capitulate if their men were shipped back to Brest. The British answered that only unconditional surrender would do, and Knox, Laws writes with relish, claimed that 20,000 men were ready to attack them.¹⁰

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.¹¹

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.¹²

The surrender on Goodwick Sands

On Friday 24 February the French drew up, deposited their spare arms and ammunition, and marched with drums beating but without colors down to Goodwick, where they grounded their arms before the Cardiganshire Militia and the Fishguard Fencibles. They were marched to Haverfordwest overnight and shut up in the churches, the old town hall and storehouses; carts of captured muskets followed.¹³

The ships fared no better. On 9 March the frigates San Fiorenzo and Nymphe caught the Résistance and the Constance off Brest. The Résistance was taken into the Royal Navy as the Fisgard, Laws notes, presumably the French pronunciation of Fishguard.¹⁴ › Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 1797

Aftermath

The cost in lives was tiny: by the local account two Welshmen and three Frenchmen killed, and a few wounded. The scare that followed was larger. A few local men, among them Baptists, were charged with treason on the word of French prisoners and discharged, because a foreign enemy could not testify in an English court; Fenton, writing soon after, angrily defended the loyalty of his county against the charge of disaffection.¹⁵

Among the defenders the quarrel went on. That May several officers signed a paper refusing to serve under Knox for his ignorance and incapacity, and Knox challenged Cawdor to a duel. One episode Laws tells with obvious pleasure: two Pembroke girls helped a group of prisoners tunnel out of their jail, escaped with them to France in Lord Cawdor's own yacht and a captured sloop, and married two of them.¹⁶

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.¹⁷

The best-loved figure in the story is Jemima Nicholas, a Fishguard cobbler in her forties, said to have rounded up twelve French soldiers with a pitchfork and locked them in St Mary's church. Singer notes that the story cannot be verified, for lack of contemporary sources. Over the following century she became Jemima Fawr, Jemima the Great, and at the centenary money was raised for the stone in St Mary's churchyard that still calls her the Welsh heroine. For the bicentenary in 1997 local women made the Last Invasion Tapestry, 30 meters long, now in Fishguard Town Hall.¹⁸

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 the terms are said to have been agreed, still stands, with Jemima Nicholas's stone in St Mary's churchyard.¹⁹