The War of Wars (54 page)

The Peace of Amiens brought an atmosphere of eerie unreality to the European scene. After nearly nine years of non-stop fighting, the parties had drifted into the eye of the hurricane although some mistook it for escaping the storm altogether. After just a year of calm, they were to re-enter the storm and not emerge for another twelve years. In that brief interlude the combatants had time to reflect and peer at each other: to discover whether peace really was possible. For France’s new ruler had decided that the Revolution, which had unleashed the tempest, was at an end. Was Napoleon a pragmatic leader of France that the rest of Europe could live with?

The amiable, pompous Lord Addington plainly thought so, as he had conceded almost every demand that France had asked for. Napoleon thought so too, for he had secured much of what he wanted from Britain without a fight. If his adversary would leave him as the undisputed power in Europe, why should not the world’s greatest maritime and greatest continental powers live alongside one another?

For the moment the war party in Britain was smothered by the overwhelming relief of the population at the prospect of peace. Grenville remarked caustically that the treaty was secured on the principle of England giving up all she had taken and France keeping all she had acquired during the war. William Windham, the former secretary of war, head of Britain’s spy network and Norfolk magnate, was equally opposed to the peace. A sympathizer, Charles Burney wrote to him: ‘I had always seen the danger of making peace with France under her present rulers . . . With all Europe at her feet, except this country; in actual possession of half Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Savoy, Piedmont, Lombardy, Genoa, the Ecclesiastical States . . . as are Naples, Spain and Portugal as well as Holland: and all this territory and its inhabitants under the direction of such miscreants, regicides, assassins, plunderers, Jacobins, atheists and anarchists! – what had we to expect?’ Sheridan observed that Amiens was a peace of which everybody is glad and nobody is proud.

These, however, were lone voices. British nobility flocked to Paris to see Napoleon’s brilliant foreign minister, Talleyrand. Lady Bessborough gushed at a dinner party at the foreign ministry: ‘I never saw anything so magnificent – the apartments beautiful, all perfumed with frankincense and as soon as seventy-eight people (of which the company consisted) sat down, an immense glass at the end of the room slid away by degrees, and soft and beautiful music began to play in the midst of the jingle of glasses and vaisselle. The dinner was, I believe, excellent but from some awkwardness in the arrangement it was very difficult to get anything to eat.’

Talleyrand did not impress everyone. Many considered him pompous and affected, with a diseased white face gazing out over his extravagant clothes – ‘the most barefaced teller of untruths I had ever met with,’ commented one British visitor. Fouché, the ruthless chief of police, was described as ‘foxy’ and unnaturally pale, a small man in a resplendent blue uniform and the boots of a hussar.

The British visitors were most curious of all to meet France’s new ruler, the man who had ended the Revolution, welcomed back the émigrés, restored the church, and concluded peace. This was surely someone Britain could live at peace with. Power always hypnotizes the gullible and even the shrewd Fanny Burney was impressed.

The door of the audience chamber was thrown open with a commanding crash, a vivacious officer-sentinel . . . nimbly descended the three steps into our apartment and, placing himself at the side of the door, with one hand spread as high as possible and the other extended horizontally, called out in a loud and authoritative voice, ‘Le Premier Consul!’ You will easily believe nothing more was necessary to obtain attention; not a soul spoke, or stirred, as he and his suite passed along.

[I had] . . . a view so near, though so brief, of his face as to be very much struck by it. It is of a deeply impressive cast, pale even to sallowness, while not only in the eye but in every feature, care, thought, melancholy and meditation are strongly marked with so much of character, nay, genius and so penetrating a seriousness – or, rather, sadness, as powerfully to sink into an observer’s mind . . . He has by no means the look to be expected from Bonaparte, but rather that of a profoundly studious and contemplative man.

Less exalted visitors that flocked across the Channel during that phoney peace found Paris pleasing, although smaller than expected.

English visitors were shocked by the nearly transparent and low cut dresses of French women. A British officer observed: ‘The Bishop of Durham would expire at seeing the dresses . . . The ladies are almost quite naked . . . There cannot be anything so profligate, so debauched, or so immoral as the ideas or manners of all ranks of people, particularly the higher class.’ It was generally agreed that the most beautiful and cultivated young woman in Paris was the young Madame Rémusat. Fox’s secretary, John Trotter, described her as ‘a lovely phantom, breathing a thousand delicious charms . . . and so ingenuous and unaffected! Shunning the ardent gaze and, if conscious of her dazzling beauty, unassuming and devoid of pride; rich in the first of female virtues – a kind and noble heart!’

Not everyone was overwhelmed. One visitor considered France ‘the completest military despotism’. Charles Williams Wynn wrote of ‘the almost Asiatic pomp, splendour and luxury of the government. [Napoleon] rules with a rod of iron without the smallest attention to popularity.’ Lord Aberdeen observed that ‘a martial air reigns through the town, soldiers parade most of the principal streets and keep the peace; the utmost respect is paid to everything military.’ Another English visitor remarked that ‘the civilian power is not distinguishable in Paris . It is the musket and the bayonet that settle all differences.’ Wordsworth, who returned to France after more than a decade’s absence, was shocked by what he saw and quickly returned, after hearing that Napoleon had been made Consul for life, to sing the praises of English liberty:

Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more.
The cock that crows, the smoke that curls, that sound
Of bells; – those boys who in yon meadow-ground
In white-sleeved shirts are playing; and the roar
Of the waves breaking on the chalky shore; –
All, all are English. Oft have I looked round
With joy in Kent’s green vales; but never found
Myself so satisfied in heart before.
Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass,
Thought for another moment. Thou art free,
My Country! And ’tis joy enough and pride
For one hour’s perfect bliss, to tread the grass
Of England once again.

The English people were on the whole delighted to be at peace. Addington incautiously abolished income tax, halved the size of the British army, disbanded the volunteer regiments, reduced the fleet of warships from a hundred to forty, broke up the Grand Fleet at Torbay and discharged 40,000 sailors. Lord St Vincent was summoned with his enormous prestige to launch an attack on corruption in the dockyards, which brought them to a near standstill. It was peace in our time.

The peace was used by Napoleon to gain time for a programme of further expansion southward. As this dawned even on Addington’s addled government, the British dragged their feet in leaving Malta. This angered Napoleon, who demanded they leave the island forthwith. The British refused. He needed more time to rearm, so he proposed that the Russians take over the island on a ten-year lease. This was refused. Napoleon was furious and overplayed his hand.

The able British ambassador in Paris, Charles, Lord Whitworth, along with his wife, the haughty Duchess of Dorset now came into play. With his beaky nose, self-assurance and switch-on – switch-off charm, he was perfectly suited for his role. In March 1803 he enraged Napoleon by treating him with particular disdain. The Emperor, accustomed to complete deference, buttonholed Whitworth with very considerable agitation: ‘We are too sensible of the advantages of peace. But now you mean to force me to fight for fifteen years more! . . . If you arm, I shall arm, too! If you fight, I shall fight also! You think to destroy France; you will never intimidate her! . . . You should respect treaties! Bad luck to those who cannot respect treaties!’

A British witness reported graphically:

Bonaparte either was, or pretended to be, in a rage. Never, throughout his life, a gentleman in his feelings or conduct, he now outraged a ceremony and a time of courtesy, coming up to Lord Whitworth and addressing him in the loudest tones of anger and even with gestures which suggested the possibility of an assault. Lord Whitworth was a tall, handsome man with great dignity of manner. He stood perfectly unmoved whilst the Little Corporal raged and fumed beneath him – now and then saying a few conciliatory words as to the desire of his government to secure an honourable peace. Yet so violent was the demeanour of Bonaparte that Lord Whitworth was compelled to think what he ought to do with his sword if, in his person, the Majesty of England was to be publicly insulted by an actual assault.

On 12 May Whitworth resolved to leave Paris, and by 18 May the war had been renewed. Napoleon thereupon issued an order unprecedented in European diplomacy to arrest all Englishmen in Paris between the ages of eighteen and sixty: some 700 of them were rounded up, 400 of them businessmen. There were fears that they would be used as hostages and even executed.

The British, under their inept prime minister, immediately went on the defensive against Napoleon’s bombast and assembly of an invasion force. There was only one man, everyone knew, with the stature to rally the nation.

At his country house in Walmer, William Pitt was enjoying the first real free time he had ever had in his life. Prime minister at twenty-four, after more than seventeen unbroken years in office, he enjoyed laying out the gardens of his small estate, shooting and seeing a handful of old friends. Yet with the declaration of war, in his notional office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, he endeared himself to the British people by throwing himself into the general defence of Britain: he raised and drilled a volunteer corps of 3,000 men.

After more than a year of refusing to attend the House of Commons, he made his first appearance like a ghost. On 20 May 1803, Thomas Creevey wrote of him that his old-port-ruddied complexion was sallow, his face downcast, his speech interrupted occasionally by coughing. There was ‘a universal sentiment in those around him that he was done’. George Canning, Pitt’s faithful young disciple, had written on his birthday:

And O! if again the rude whirlwind should rise,
The dawning of peace should fresh darkness deform,
The regrets of the good and the fears of the wise
Shall turn to the pilot that weathered the storm

Yet Pitt would not move against Addington, his old friend, whom he had agreed to support loyally when he had left office. The diehard opponents of the government were led by Pitt’s old friend and intimate, William, Lord Grenville, his first cousin and former foreign secretary, a steely and principled Whig grandee responsible for the superb execution of foreign policy during the preceding years, and Charles James Fox, the perennial and mercurial opposition leader who, however, had long opposed war with France and even now refused to take the threat of invasion seriously.

But these two political giants, alongside Canning, continued to stay outside a government of mediocrities whose only able figure was a young Ulsterman, Lord Castlereagh, who was trying to prod Addington towards war. Creevey wrote: ‘Upon my soul! It is too shocking to think of the wretched destiny of mankind in being placed in the hands of such pitiful, squirting politicians as this accursed apothecary and his family and friends.’

Britain’s enfeebled government was now buffeted by another misfortune: in February 1804 King George III caught a chill reviewing volunteers, and his old insanity returned with a rush. He opened parliament with the words ‘My Lords and Peacocks’. With his equilibrium apparently in danger, the hideous prospect of a regency under the future George IV during a time of acute national crisis loomed: Pitt viewed the prospect of a rudderless Britain under an indebted, usually drunk, bigamously married voluptuary and a feeble prime minister with mounting horror.

Pitt had suffered from the legacy of his own slow response to the problem posed by revolutionary France. While many British politicians had been calling for war after the execution of Louis XVI, Pitt still hoped for peace – leaving the French Convention to declare war on 1 February 1793. As Rosebery summed it up:

It is, then, abundantly manifest from every source of evidence that war was forced on the English ministry; that Pitt carried to an extreme his anxiety to avoid it; that his resignation could not have averted it; and that in any case it was impossible for him as a man of honour, or a serious statesman, to resign. We shall see, when war had begun, his constant endeavours to put an end to it. Whether he was a great war-minister, as he is generally considered, or an incapable war-minister, as he is called by Macaulay, he is certainly the most strenuous peace-minister that ever held office in this country.

Pitt had also formed a deeply hostile view of Napoleon as a devotee of war.

all centred and Condensed into one man, who was reared and nursed in its bosom, whose celebrity was gained under its auspices, who was at once the child and champion of all its atrocities and horrors. Our security in negotiation is to be this Bonaparte, who is now the sole organ of all that was formerly dangerous and pestiferous in the Revolution.

He paid the colossal price of discarding his principled support for Catholic emancipation in order to resume the reins of government. Pouring sarcasm upon the government, he brought it down in a debate on the army. Pitt was a coldly calculating man, accustomed to being in power virtually all his adult life. It must be considered possible that he had installed the luckless Addington precisely because he knew he would fall flat on his face, while the former leader bided his time, engaged upon patriotic duties likely to make him even more popular as a war leader. A couple of days later he issued his call to arms. Creevey described it: ‘The great fiend bewitching a breathless House, the elevation of his tone of mind and composition, the infinite energy of his style, the miraculous perspicuity and fluency of his periods . . . Never, to be sure, was there such an exhibition, its effect was dreadful. He spoke nearly two hours – and all for war, and for war without end!’