The Years of Endurance (12 page)

Because of these things and because, despite black spots in the national existence, most Englishmen were tolerably satisfied with their lot, King George's subjects echoed Parson Woodforde's prayer:

" And may so good a King long live to reign over us—and pray God that his amiable and beloved Queen Charlotte may now enjoy again every happiness this world can afford with so good a man, and may it long, very long continue with them both here and eternal happiness hereafter."

They could not follow events across the Channel without their viewpoint being affected by such personal considerations: and when the French people rose in their majesty and established liberty by flinging drunken insults at their sovereign and butchering his retainers, they refused to approve such goings-on. Liberty was one thing: " anarchy and confusion " another. Even John Wilkes, that tried champion of the populace's right to do as it pleased, observed that the new France was not a democracy but a mobocracy.

Not that Britons wished to interfere with their neighbour's concerns. The best of them continued to believe that good would come out of evil and that the
licence
which despotism had begotten would be succeeded by ordered freedom. For they knew that the French—that effervescent people—must be given time to learn the sober lessons which their own sane land had only mastered in the course of many centuries.

CHAPTER
THREE

The Failure of Appeasement
1790-3

" This Country and Holland ought to remain quiet as long as it is possible to do so."

Lord Grenville, November,
1792.

F
or
a time it looked as though the first nation in Europe—formerly the terror of her neighbours—might prefer the road of peaceful evolution to that of revolutionary violence. The clamour of the angry fishwives on the march from Versailles was followed by a reaction: the upper middle-class and the more liberal of the nobility assumed a kind of loose control. A business government of rich men dedicated to the proposition of liberty for the talents irrespective of birth temporarily took the place of the old aristocratic muddle and inertia of Versailles. The King to all appearance accepted his new situation as the first clerk of the nation. A man of genius with one foot in both camps, Mirabeau—a rebel who understood the necessity of order and an aristocrat who was also a demagogue—kept liaison between King and Assembly. So long as he lived there was reasonable hope that the French Revolution would take the steady and decent course that every British lover of freedom wanted to see it take.

No one was more convinced that it would than the Prime Minister. A reformer and a lover of peace, William Pitt at 30, after six years as the youngest Premier in English history, was a living example of the triumph of reason. He had apparently no passions, no prejudices and, save for a liking for port, scarcely any weaknesses. By his industry, sound judgment and financial acumen he had raised his country in a few years from the despairing aftermath of a ruinous war to a prosperity unrivalled in the world. He had restored her finances, liberalised her commercial system and begun to rationalise her laws and parliamentary system. Without humiliating his sovereign, he had red
uced the undue influence of the
Crown and simultaneously ended the long political monopoly of the great Whig families. Instead he had set up a liberal" Tory " government representing the smaller squires and the commercial classes and legislating not for an hereditary clique but for the nation as a whole. He had done, in fact, or begun to do all those practical things about which the French theoretical philosophers and politicians never tired of talking.

The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with them: unlike his father, Chatham, he loathed the very thought of war. In the King's Speeches of 1789 and 1790 Pitt scrupulously refrained from stressing the disorders across the Channel. " The present convulsions in France," he told the House, " must sooner or later culminate in general harmony and regular order, and thus circumstanced France will stand forth as one of the most brilliant Powers of Europe. She will enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate."

But one of his auditors, at least, did not share his optimism. After a quarter of a century in Parliament, Edmund Burke, though slightly discounted at home by a certain Hibernian vehemence of speech,
¹
had established a great international reputation as a political philosopher and the enemy of every kind of oppression. During the war with the Colonies he had boldly stood out against the popular v
iew and denounced in language wh
ich is part of human literature the senseless tyranny that had alienated British America from Britain. More rece
ntly
he had taken the lead in the impeachment of the great Indian proconsul, Warren Hastings.

In November, 1790, Burke took a momentous step. For some time he had been corresponding with a young Parisian who had begged for his reflections on the happenings in his country. Irritated by the extravagant praise lavished on these by a ha
ndful of British cranks, he publi
s
h
ed his
Reflections on the Revolution.
With splendid eloquence he analysed the divergence between French rhetoric and practice. Irish in his passion and excessive emphasis, Burke was never more English than when he applied to every principle of the revolutionary philosophers the evidence carefully collected from France of what had actually happened when it had been put into effect.

¹
Wilkes unkindly said of him that, just as the Venus of Appelles suggested milk and honey, so Burke's oratory was reminiscent of whisky and potatoes. —Sir Charles Petrie,
When Britain Saved Europe,
88.

Yet it was Burke's Irish logic that enabled him to see more clearly than any Englishman the unreality of the childlike discussions which were going on in the National Assembly about theoretical systems and constitutions. An Englishman would not have troubled about them at all until their practical effects had begun to touch him directly. Burke knew that those effects would be a universal conflagration. He saw at once the flaw in the reformers' philosophy: that it could not be applied to the world about them without disaster. It was all very well to talk about the divinity of reason and the General Will, but how was the reason of any man, let alone of a concourse or mob, to be distinguished from his baser passions and selfish desires ? For these just as much as intellect were an inherent part of human nature. To assume that the votes of an assembly or the acclamations of a crowd must be synonymous with the will of God was merely to condone despotism which was as evil when practised by a mob as by a king. Burke always insisted on testing the pretence of liberty by the reality. Before he could approve high-sounding generalisations he wanted to know how they accorded with stable government and justice, with the subordination of the military arm to the civil, with prosperous commerce and agriculture, with peace and order, with the security of property and private rights, with morality and religion, with learning and the arts, with social manners, in a word with civilisation. " All these in their way are good things, too," he wrote, " and without them liberty is not a benefit while it lasts and is not likely to continue long."

Liberty to Burke had to be a practical thing. A nation in which a community of nuns could be dragged by a mob from a hospital in which they were nursing and scourged naked down the street was not redeemed from despotism because its national assembly had pronounced its own tolerance to be perfect, inalienable and absolute. Liberty to have any meaning had to be based on law, and law in its turn on morality: that is, on justice. For Burke brought to the French Revolution the historic English touchstone of every political pretension: its compatability with fair and kindly dealing. " Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice," he wrote, " neither is safe."

Unerringly Burke put his finger on the central weakness of the French philosophy: that in its pass
ion for logical abstractions it
did not recognise the existence of religion and morality. It boldly assumed that these were identical with the General Will: the popular vote or other mechanical manifestation of democracy that in some mysterious way embodied the aggregate of human reason and virtue while discarding human folly and passion. The French reformers,, who had disestablished their Church, thought that under a perfect constitution, men would have no need for religion because the ideal State would automatically create the ideal man. Burke knew that this was putting the cart before the horse: that in practice the ideal State could only grow out of the ideal man. Good men were not to be made merely by laws which relied for their sanction on force but only by religion and morality, which appealed to the conscience. Only when the people, he wrote, had emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will—and without religion it was impossible they should—could absolute power be safely entrusted to the State..

Burke foresaw that by worshipping an abstract ideal of the Popular Will and calling it liberty, the revolutionary philosophers were unconsciously preparing the way for an intolerable tyranny. " If the present project of a Republic should fail," he predicted, " all security to a moderate freedom must fail with it. All the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed: insomuch
that
, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth." Looking up the long avenue of promise which led through the self-worship of the State and nation to the precipitous final crag of the Dictator and the national storm-trooper, the eager, beak-nosed, bespectacled seer foretold the course of the Revolution: the pitiless elimination of everything that could withstand the will of centralised despotism, followed, after the rise of a military dictator to save the nation from its own anarchy, by an epoch of world-wide aggression. What some thought the dawn of Utopia and others a harmless exhibition of French enthusiasm, Burke denounced in 1790 as a tornado about " to burst like a levanter and sweep the earth with its hurricane."

His contempt for the slick arrogance of what he called the " philosophy of vanity," his profound historical sense and hatred of the shallow pedantry that viewed the enduring community—the delicate and mysterious growth of centuries—as something to be constantly remodelled according to the floating fancies or fashion of the hour; his strong, masculine realisation of the necessity of some restraint on the passions
¹
caused Burke to be less than just to the Revolution. He overlooked the stagnation and corruption which had given rise to the fallacies he denounced, and in an over-idealised picture of France under the
ancien regime
pitied, as Tom Paine said, " the plumage and forgot the dying bird." He missed the tremendous and ultimately healing power of unloosed energy. In his alarm at the dangers he foresaw, he unconsciously helped to bring them nearer. By sounding too powerful an alarm, Burke alienated his countrymen from France at the very moment when their sanity and long political experience might have exercised a restraining influence. Pitt wisely said that he wished Burke had confined himself to praising the British Constitution instead of abusing the French. There were powerful elements in the new France, particularly in the provinces, which might have responded to a generous hand from England. There were many good Englishmen who would willingly have extended it. Burke caused them to hesitate.

For the
Reflections,
as almost any book of genius will when written with burning sincerity on a topical subject, had an immense success. Within a year it had sold the unprecedented number of 32,000 copies. And though at first the bulk of Englishmen continued to regard Burke as a violent Irishman apt to be run away with by his feelings and more remarkable for the vividness of his imagery than for sober statesmanship, there was something so striking in what he had written that there was no forgetting it. And as one after another of his gloomy predictions were fulfilled by events across the Channel, the conviction grew that the old Whig hack was not an unpractical visionary after all but an inspired prophet. The effect on the pragmatical English mind was tremendous.

For moderate and liberal-minded men who felt generously towards the new France, including the majority of Burke's own Whig friends, drew back when they saw how Gallic practice of what seemed at first their own principles was accompanied by violence, illegality and cruelty. Every excess of the French mob confirmed

¹
" Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human
wants.
Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions."—
Reflections
', 333
.

what Burke had foretold. The sympathy of educated Englishmen for the Revolution was frozen in its tracks. As it froze, the extremer elements in France seemed increasingly to prevail over the moderate. In May, 1791, Mirabeau died: the one man who possessed both the magnetism to lead assemblies and the statesmanship to avoid a violent breach with the past. Henceforward power passed from the Assembly to the irresponsible republican clubs who controlled the mob. By June King Louis, alarmed by the rising tide of anarchy, had attempted flight, only to be caught on the road to the frontier and brought back in sordid ignominy to his capital.