The Years of Endurance (65 page)

borough-mongers were bought out lock, stock and barrel: there was no other way. As the young Irish Secretary, Lord Casdereagh, put it, it had become necessary " to secure to the Crown the fee. simple of Irish corruption " in order to end it.

On January 1
st, 1801, the Act
of Union, passed by both Parlia
ments, became law. The new Union Jack, with the cross of St. Patrick superimposed on those of St. George and St. Andrew, floated over Dublin Castle and Westminster. But there was one further measure which Pitt and Cornwallis regarded as essential to a lasting settlement. In September, 1800, the Cabinet, wit
h three dissentients, had secretl
y agreed that the oath which still excluded Catholics from Parliament and supreme office must be revised to bring all Irishmen within the Union. A common Parliament with Protestant England and Scotland would give the Protestant interest in Ireland a perpetual majority over the dreaded Papists. " A broad and inclusive basis " in Church and State had at last become compatible with the security of the minority; without it there could be no permanent peace or safety in Ireland. Justice to the Irish majority, obligation to the Catholics who had helped Cornwallis and Pitt to carry the measure in the confident hope of a wider toleration, and Britain's supreme peril alike demanded it.

But there was one formidable and dreaded last fence in the race against religious fanaticism—the King's conscience. He came of an alien line which had been entrusted with the British Crown on certain conditions of which the exclusive Protestant Constitution was the first. To the contractual obligation of 1689 and 1714 he had given his coronation oath in his impressionable youth, and nothing could erase the memory of it from his narrow but tenacious mind. When the tactful Dundas tried to prepare it for a more tolerant interpretation of the law, he had been met by the royal rejoinder: " None of your Scotch metaphysics, Mr. Dundas ! None of your Scotch metaphysics! " Warned by Loughborough, the treacherous Lord Chancellor, of the Government s intention, he appeared at the Levee on January 29th, 1801, in a state of intense excitement, openly upbraiding Ministers and declaring that he would reckon any man who proposed such a measure as his personal enemy. For he saw it as a plot to destroy the Church and Civil Order: the most Jacobinical thing, he said, he had ever heard of. Two days later he sounded the Speaker, Addington, as to the possibility of his forming an Administration.

Against such royal obstinacy there was no contending, for the Government on a question which touched Protestant fanaticism could not look for solid support in the country. On the last day of January Pitt accordingly wrote to the King commending to his consideration the measures for Catholic Emancipation agreed by the Cabinet and begging to be allowed to resign if they were not approved. During the next three days further letters passed between Sovereign and Prime Minister, the one expressing his unalterable resolve to preserve the Constitution unimpaired and the hope that his Minister would not quit him, the other respectfully affirming the necessity for his resignation. On the 4th it was agreed that Pitt should go, and by the 5th Addington had consented to form a new Administration.

When the country learnt the news it was profoundly shaken. The uneducated urban populace had no love for Billy Pitt, whose name it associated with high prices and war restrictions and whose shy, reserved bearing was little calculated or designed to win the love of multitudes. But the thinking and propertied minority, the City and rustic England generally—the solid core of 18th century public opinion—had come to look on Pitt after sixteen years in office as an unchangeable institution: " the Atlas," wrote Minto, " of our reeling globe."
¹
The man chosen to succeed him was an amiable nonentity: the son of the great Chatham's physician and one who owed the Speakership and his political career to the friendship of the Pitt family. That such a mediocrity should take the helm at an hour when the country was facing a world in arms caused consternation. Even the collection of second-rate Tory noblemen whom Addington assembled round him—for Dundas, Grenville, Windham and Spencer all resigned with their chief on the Catholic question—scarcely believed in him. Several of them publicly expressed the hope that the experiment would be shortlived.

The situation was only made possible by Pitt's behaviour. While all around him were sunk in gloom, he appeared quietly cheerful, gave his unqualified support to Addington and uttered no reproach against his Sovereign, whose sincerity of purpose he praised warmly.

¹
Windham
Papers,
171.

At the moment when he was being relegated—shabbily and needlessly—to private life, he had only one thought: the good of his country. It was characteristic of his conception of public duty that, though he was almost penniless and heavily in debt through his long neglect of his own affairs, he declined to allow his admirers in the City to subscribe to a free gift of ^100,00
0 and refused a royal offer of
£30,000 from the Privy Purse. It was only with difficulty that a few intimate friends prevaile
d upon him to accept a loan of
£11,000 to avoid a distraint on his furniture.

To quiet the public mind and prevent a slump in the Funds, the great Minister agreed to remain in office until he had introduced the Budget. He did so on February 18th, making provision for an army of 220,000 Regulars and Fencibles and 80,000 Militia, a fleet of 220 ships of the line and 250 frigates, and an expenditure, including debt charges, of sixty-eight millions. It was the biggest Budget in the nation's history.

Three days later the King, who had contracted a chill while attending divine service on the National Fast and Supplication Day, developed alarming symptoms of his old insanity. The agitation of the past few weeks had proved too much for his excitable mind. At the end of the month his life was despaired of.

The situation of the country could scarcely have been more gloomy. Within a few days Pitt was to lay down his office, while the Sovereign's death or prolonged insanity would bring to the head of the State a prince of deplorable habits and levity, whose favourite counsellor was the irresponsible Fox, a man who was regarded at that time by the overwhelming majority of his countrymen as little better than a traitor. Every nation on the Continent save Turkey and Portugal was either a willing or a passive accomplice of Bonaparte in his crusade against England. A great fleet was known to be preparing against her in the Baltic ports and a new army of invasion was gathering on the Channel shore. The
corps d
’
elite
of the Regular Army, after its many humiliating experiences, was embarked on a remote and risky venture at the far end of the Mediterranean; to crown public anxiety it became known about this time that seven French ships of the line, after three months of vain endeavour, had evaded St. Vincent's blockade in a storm and, crowded with troops, had sailed southward, presumably for Egypt. At home the price of wheat stood at four times its pre-war figure and the 6d. loaf at is. 5d. The leader of the Opposition calculated that one-sixth of the population was living on charity: Crabb Robinson wrote in his diary that the sun of England's glory was set.

On March 3rd, however, the King took a turn for the better. By the 6th he was well enough to resume his functions. The nightmare of a change on
the
throne passed, but the country's danger remained unimpaired. On March 14th, having given his agitated Sovereign a promise that he would never again raise the Catholic question during the royal lifetime, Pitt ceased to be Prime Minister.

As the weak hands of his successor fumbled at the reins of office, England, confronting the three corners of the world in arms, launched her attack. At each end of a vast hoop of ocean—at the centre of whose arch stood the blockading fleet off Brest—enclosing the North Sea, Atlantic and Mediterranean shores of Europe, she struck simultaneously at her foes. On February 22nd, 1801, the day the King was placed under restraint, Abercromby sailed from Marmaris Bay for Egypt. At the same time a great naval expedition, secretly ordered three weeks earlier by Pitt's Government, began to assemble at Yarmouth to forestall the plans of the Armed
Neutrals.

Abercromby's venture seemed to his cautious, experienced mind if possible even more forlorn than that on which he had set out for Holland eighteen months earlier. With 15,000 troops, ill-equipped and without cavalry, he was going to invade an unmapped country occupied by an experienced enemy of unknown strength who had had several months to prepare for his coming. Actually the French in Egypt numbered 24,000, or 8000 more than the Cabinet had calculated. Only a few weeks before, some frigates from Toulon had run the gauntlet of Keith's fleet with ordnance and stores for Alexandria; and, though Abercromby did not know it, Gantheaume's relieving battle squadron had already entered the Mediterranean. In a semi-tropical climate the British army was to land on an open beach with no water but what it could draw from the fleet and little hope of regular supply until it could capture a walled town. The Turks, to whom Abercromby had been told to look for help and military collaboration, had proved a broken reed:

Moore, who visited their army at Jaffa in January, had found it a " wild, ungovernable mob " decimated with plague and, under corrupt, supine leaders, incapable of action.
¹
It was no wonder that Abercromby confided to his friend, the Military Secretary, that he could see little hope of success. " There are risks in a British service unknown in any other," he wrote.

On March 2nd the expeditionary force, in close on two hundred transports, escorted by Keith's fleet, anchored in Aboukir Bay on the scene of Nelson's victory, facing the east or Aboukir Castle end of the long narrow strip of land on which Alexandria lies. For five days, during which time the French had ample time to make preparations, a gale made landing impossible. But on the afternoon of the 7th the wind dropped and orders were given for an attack at dawn.

The Army was in a grim mood. It had been drifting aimlessly about the Atlantic and Mediterranean for the greater part of a year. The men felt the injustice of the undeserved ignominy which had befallen them. They were fighting fit after their six weeks' training in Marmaris Bay, and, as is often the way with Englishmen over-long oppressed by adversity, had developed a feeling of contempt for their enemy. One of the young colonels waiting in the transports, Edward Paget, wrote to his father on the 7th: " You may depend upon it there is a certain devil in this army that will carry it through thick and thin. It is the first fair trial between Englishmen and Frenchmen during the whole of this war, and at no former period of our history did John Bull ever hold his enemy cheaper."

The operation began with the firing of a rocket at two o'clock on the morning of March 8th. By dawn most of the waiting troops in the boats were at the rendezvous some miles from the fleet and opposite a high sandhill which John Moore, who was in charge of the first division, had marked in his mind as the dominating point of the enemy's defences. But the work of assembling and arranging the boats could not be completed in the swell till after eight o'clock, the French remaining spectators of the curious scene. The flotilla then moved towards the shore in four carefully dressed lines,

¹
" They are in general a stout, active and hardy people, and are allowed to be individually brave. They are certainly material of which excellent soldiers might be formed ; but under a Turkish government everything becomes debased."—
Moore
, I,
396.

the first consisting of fifty-eight flat-bottomed boats, while supporting fire was given by naval gunboats and launches.

As soon as they came within range of the French guns on the sand-dunes and the batteries of Aboukir Castle, a storm of shot, whipping up the waters of the bay, drenched the soldiers who, packed fifty into a boat, sat patiently waiting with their firelocks between their knees. Many were killed, and several of the boats were sunk:. But the sailors continued rowing swiftly until, as the keels grounded, the men sprang ashore and formed up in the order so often rehearsed in Marmaris Bay. Assembling the Fortieth, Twenty-third and Twenty-eighth Foot, Moore led them at the charge up the great sandhill. Scrambling up its two hundred feet of seemingly almost perpendicular side without firing a shot, the men surprised and overwhelmed the French Sixty-first Demi-Brigade. Accustomed to warfare against undisciplined Turks and Arabs, the latter had never anticipated such a method of assault. Its men fled, leaving their guns in the victors' hands. Meanwhile the Coldstream, 3 rd Guards and 42nd Highlanders distinguished themselves by repelling cavalry on the beach.

The whole action was over in little more than half an hour, the British losing 600 men killed and wounded. The rest of the army landed in the afternoon and, on Sidney Smith's suggestion, set to work digging for water under the date trees that dotted the desolate landscape. Its position was precarious in the extreme. With Aboukir Castle untaken in its rear and dominating the only point at which it could draw supplies from the fleet, it had to advance along twelve miles of narrow isthmus under a burning sun towards Alexandria, a walled city held by an unknown number of French veterans. If repulsed, it must either perish of famine or take to its boats in the presence of a victorious enemy. On March 12th, having landed his guns, Abercromby, leaving two regiments to blockade Aboukir Castle, set out to fight his way to the port.