The War of Wars (70 page)

Napoleon’s triumphalism was soon apparent in his own country. He ordered the patchwork of mediaeval Paris to be slashed across with great avenues to celebrate his triumph – admittedly by a great city planner, Haussmann. The Arc de Triomphe was built, 150 feet high and nearly as wide, at the head of the Champs Élysées, sweeping down to the Tuileries, where the Arc d’Austerlitz (now known as the Arc de Carrouse) was also built, with a column nearby in the Place Vendôme surmounted by Napoleon dressed as Caesar.

For the moment Napoleon’s more dangerous rivals in the army were entirely subdued. The opposition, faced by the ferocious surveillance of Fouché’s spy system, went to ground. Napoleon seemed unchallenged – master both of France and the continent. Yet the French power elites, although subdued, still existed. Talleyrand, in particular, so often depicted as a scheming opportunist at this moment of Napoleon’s apotheosis, showed strength and firmness by telling his master what he did not want to hear. He urged the Emperor to reach a generous peace with Austria so as to secure it as an ally, not a sullen and resentful defeated enemy:

The Austrian monarchy is a combination of ill-assorted states, differing from one another in language, manners, religion, and constitution, and having only one thing in common – the identity of their ruler. Such a power is necessarily weak, but she is an adequate bulwark against the barbarians – and a necessary one. Today, crushed and humiliated, she needs that her conqueror should extend a generous hand to her and should, by making her an ally, restore to her that confidence in herself, of which so many defeats and disasters might deprive her for ever. I implore Your Majesty to read again the memorandum which I had the honour to submit to you from Strasburg. Today more than ever I dare to consider it as the best and wisest policy.

The wily foreign minister, who had been given the Principality of Benevento in the Kingdom of Naples as his share in the spoils, was right; for Archduke Charles, the most intelligent and resolute Austrian leader, favoured a strategy of eastern expansion for his country at the expense of Turkey, leaving Europe as Napoleon’s domain. This would have been a not unreasonable compromise, but the Emperor Francis was disposed to oppose Napoleon and feared that the French Emperor was scheming to have him replaced on the throne by one of his more pliable brothers.

In the summer of 1806 Napoleon set up his Confederation of the Rhine, which effectively turned the states of Germany into French satellites, whose security and foreign policy he now ran. Francis formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire for fear that Napoleon would adopt that title too. In fact it had been merely an expression of Austria’s continuing influence in the region, which was already under challenge from the Prussians; with France’s victories, it had become obsolete.

Napoleon now enjoyed a unique position. Like Julius Caesar he did ‘bestride this world like a colossus’. France ruled the Low Countries, virtually all of Italy and effectively dominated most of Germany. To the south Spain was in sullen alliance with France, while only tiny Portugal was hostile, thanks to its old alliance with Britain; to the east Austria had been stripped of many of its possessions and neutralized, although not entirely subdued; Prussia was timorous and fearful under a weak and vacillating king, and the arrogant young Alexander’s Russia had been badly burnt in its first sally towards western Europe.

Napoleon’s conquests were not quite Roman in scale – they did not extend round the shores of the Mediterranean to Spain or Britain – but they exceeded Charlemagne’s and were the largest European empire in some 1,300 years. If the thirty-six-year-old Emperor sincerely wanted peace – and the French nation, exhausted by years of revolution, upheaval, war, economic crisis and conscription seemed to thirst for it – it was his for the asking. Moreover Napoleon himself had for the first time proved himself as a general of the first rank, both at Ulm and at Austerlitz. He could no longer be dismissed by his military peers as merely a winner of small victories in Italy, or as a ‘colonial’ general in Egypt.

When Pitt died at the end of January 1806, William, Lord Grenville, Pitt’s brilliant cousin, formed the Ministry of All Talents, so named for its dazzling array of senior political figures from all parties and its engaging liberalism. It featured such luminaries as Charles James Fox, foreign secretary until his death in September 1806, a dissolute figure in his youth who became a politician of notable calibre and Pitt’s perennial opponent; Lord Howick, who later as Earl Grey steered Britain to peaceful political reform in 1832; and, as secretary for war, William Windham, an enthusiast for a British role in South America.

Exhausted by war and with Pitt dead, the British now made a fresh attempt to make peace with France based upon an entirely new concept – not in fact dissimilar to that advocated by the Archduke Charles in Austria. France could dominate the west and centre of the European continent, leaving Austria, Prussia and Russia to contend and expand in the east, while Britain would be left with its maritime empire, possibly carving out a massive new province of this from the crumbling of the Spanish empire in South America. There had been an extensive history to this plan – and it was under Pitt’s successor that it seemed ready at last to take flight.

Britain had long played host to an extraordinary figure, Francisco de Miranda, the former French revolutionary general and self-styled Liberator of Latin America. In May 1790, Miranda, a mixture of skilled professional soldier, dreamer, poseur, man of letters, traveller and sexual obsessive, had first met William Pitt. Miranda prepared himself feverishly, drawing up an ambitious and wholly unrealistic plan
for liberation. He gave a careful estimate of the colonies’ resources, and of Spanish strength there. There were 21 million people, he claimed, in ‘the Spanish Indies’, half of them Spaniards, criollos, whites and of mixed blood, the rest Indians and blacks. The colonies produced annually about 55 million pesos in gold, silver, sugar, cacao, hides, tobacco, indigo and cochineal, and imported roughly 22 million pesos’ worth of goods from Spain, and a similar amount on contraband. Spain had around 36,000 troops in the colonies, of whom some 20,000 were locally raised militia, the rest regular soldiers; and a navy of 123 ships and 44,000 sailors.

Miranda subtly underlined South America’s potential by suggesting – with remarkable foresight – that a canal could be cut through the isthmus of Panamá to facilitate trade to the Far East for Britain and America. He argued that although Spanish America, more populous than Spain, should be able to stage its own revolt, its communities were cut off from one another by distance and poor communications. With control of the seas, the Spanish could send reinforcements wherever they liked – a crucial insight. Britain, he insisted, as a maritime power, could cut the Spanish lines of communication. He argued that Britain was a natural ally for South America, and ended on an elevated and flattering note: ‘In view of the similarity that exists in the character of these two nations, and the effects that must naturally flow from liberty and the fact that a good government can instruct the general mass of men, progressively doing away with the religious prejudices that cloud its people’s minds . . . these being otherwise honest, hospitable, and generous – we must expect soon to see a respectable and illustrious nation emerging worthy of being the ally of the wisest and most famed power on earth.’

His grandiose blueprint was for a kind of united states of Spanish America, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, excluding Brazil and Guiana, but including the land east of the Mississippi and south of the source of the river, below Parallel 45. The constitution of this great new state would be a hybrid of the monarchical and republican systems: a descendant of the Incas would sit on the throne – this to give the monarchy an authentically pre-Columbus flavour – but he would be accountable, British-style, to a two-chamber congress, with
an upper house elected for life and a lower one by regular popular (if restricted) vote. A two-thirds majority would be needed to amend the constitution, as well as a three-quarters majority of a council composed of the Inca Emperor sitting with the highest judges of the land. The clergy would retain many of their privileges, but the Inquisition would be done away with. The Spanish monopoly of trade would be ended and the new state would be open to commercial treaties with Britain and other countries. (On seeing this blueprint later, President Adams of the United States is said to have remarked that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The son of the Bostonian James Lloyd, however, wrote to Adams describing Miranda as ‘the most extraordinary and marvellously energetic man I have ever met’.)

In May 1790, equipped with his fantastic plan, Miranda had met the cold, analytical Pitt. He asserted to Pitt that the South American people would rise up in revolt as soon as a British fleet appeared, although he was in no position to give this assurance, having not set foot in South America for twenty years and being in contact only with a handful of wealthy criollo dissidents. He had not the slightest idea of the real opinion of the educated classes there, much less that of the populace. Pitt made it clear that he would help only in the event of a war between Britain and Spain. This, at that time, looked to be imminent, which was why Pitt’s officials had set up the encounter in the first place: Spain was claiming as its own the Nootka Sound, high up on the Pacific coast of North America, then in Britain’s possession. Miranda no doubt left the meeting with a spring in his step.

Five months later, however, the Nootka Sound dispute was settled, and the project was off. Miranda, given financial support by the British government so long as his potential nuisance value to the Spaniards was useful, now found this source of funds drying up, and was upset that he had revealed his plan to Pitt. Miranda them moved on to France. After a series of breathtaking exploits in the French Revolution (see
pages 36–46
), during which he narrowly escaped the guillotine, Miranda set off to try and launch an invasion of Venezuela on his own. This duly proved a fiasco.

Miranda had however, convinced the British that the Spanish colonies were indeed ripe for the picking, and that Britain could soon
help itself. With Spain effectively under the control of the decadent Manuel Godoy and Queen Maria Luisa of Parma (her amiable but vacant husband Charles IV was virtually powerless), the opportunity seemed to present itself. After a brief conflict between Spain and revolutionary France, Godoy, fearful of French incursions across the frontier and heartened by the re-emergence of moderate elements after the fall of Robespierre, sued for peace in 1795 – a catastrophically inept move which undermined every diplomatic gain of the first four years of his ascendancy. As well as ceding to France Santo Domingo (the western half of the island of Hispaniola, of which Haiti was the eastern half), Godoy sought to appease the French further by introducing some of their reforms into Spain; these included an attack on the Inquisition and on clerical privileges, the threat of land redistribution, and permitting the circulation of revolutionary texts. At a stroke, he alienated Spanish sympathisers and the still dominant Spanish colonial classes, who viewed France’s ambitions in the Caribbean with deep suspicion, facilitated the spread of revolutionary ideas and, not least, reinvigorated the old enmity between Spain and a Britain dismayed by this pro-French tilt.

The British moved to disrupt Spanish trade with the Americas, and the colonists made up their shortfall by trading illicitly with Britain and the United States. British landings were staged in Puerto Rico and Central America, and Trinidad was occupied. Then the Spanish fleet was mauled off Cape St Vincent in 1797. In the space of just three years, Spanish Americans acquired a withering contempt for the weakness of the mother country. This was added to the sense of grievance and injustice they had long borne against Spain for her commercial monopoly and the dismal quality of the administrators and traders sent to lord it over them. Meanwhile Godoy, supposedly dismissed in 1800, continued to act as the court’s chief adviser, pursuing his policy of appeasement towards France.

A dramatic new turn ensued with the accession to power in France of Napoleon Bonaparte. His policy towards Spain was to bully her. She and Portugal must close their ports to the British; this the Spanish did promptly, while the Portuguese put up only a show of resistance. The criollo upper class was horrified afresh by these signs of Spanish
cowardice, and by the arrival on their doorstep in 1802 of the French force of 20,000 under the command of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Leclerc. Leclerc’s attempt to reintroduce slavery into Haiti was met by a fresh black revolt, ending with the expulsion of the French into Santo Domingo and in 1804 the assertion of Haitian self-government – the first declaration of independence in Latin America.

Spain was now involved in an unpopular alliance with France; and the British were again bent on subverting her empire, desperate for commercial outlets now that Napoleon had closed the continent to them, and very aware of tempting opportunities. The seriousness of Britain’s long-term desire to add the supposedly suppurating Spanish empire to her dominions – thereby making good the losses in North America – should not be underestimated.

On 27 June 1806 the Spanish Viceroy of La Plata, Rafael, Marques de Sobremonte, was at the theatre in Buenos Aires when he was informed that a British army of 1,600 men had landed outside the city. The first-ever overthrow of a Spanish colonial administration in South America had begun. British soldiers commanded by General William Carr Beresford and naval forces under Commodore Sir Home Popham had sailed from Cape Town, having retaken it in the name of the British Crown following the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens and Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar.

Although the British government claimed to have no hand in the Popham–Beresford expedition – Popham sailed without orders – the roots of it ran deep. William Pitt had long coveted South America as a potential market for the products of Britain’s growing industrialization, and other eminent men of the time also interested in its possibilities included Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty between 1802–6, Nicholas Vansittart, a young Tory politician who later became chancellor of the exchequer, and the prominent trading house of Turnbull & Sons. Popham later recorded that in 1805: