Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (12 page)

The news of the first British capture at sea—of two Fre
nch ships
on May 18th—threw the First Consul into a towering rage. He at once ordered the arrest of all British travellers in France. Ten thousand civilians were seized, some like Sir Ralph Abercromby's son as they embarked at Calais, others as they landed on French soil. One infatuated baronet immolated himself for eleven years by delaying a few hours to enjoy the favours of a fair Parisienne; a future Duke of Argyle only escaped across the Swiss-German frontier by disguising himself as a chambermaid. Such internment of civilians was contrary to all civilised precedent, and made the English more convinced than ever that they were dealing with an untamed savage. But it brought the war home to the British ruling classes, on whom Bonaparte was determined to avenge himself.

Simultaneously he closed the Continent to their ships. In Italy his troops poured into the puppet kingdom of Etruria and seized their property at Leghorn. Others marched through the Papal States to occupy Calabria and the harbours of Brindisi and Taranto. The King of the Two Sicilies feebly protested,, but opposition was out of the question. Another French army invaded Hanover which, after a token resistance, capitulated at the beginning of June. Thence, defying international law, it occupied the free towns of Hamburg and Bremen, shutting the Elbe and Weser to British trade. The Continental nations silently acquiesced. They were far too frightened to do anything else.

Yet nothing but a blow at Britain's heart could satisfy the Corsican's craving for vengeance. A race of insolent shopkeepers barred his path to world dominion. Since they had thwarted his project to destroy them with their own weapons, he must destroy them with his. He must conquer the sea by the land. On his ability to cross the strip
^-
of water between Calais and Dover depended his dream of world empire and his revenge. " They want us to jump the ditch," he cried, "and we
will j
ump
it!"

The challenge roused his titanic energy and powers of concentration. The vulgarity and petulant vanity of his character became dwarfed by the intensity of his purpose. " His habits changed," wrote a contemporary; " his genius, which had appeared to slumber, woke full of courage and daring. He raised himself to the height of the formidable circumstances which our eternal enemies had created, and soared above them. From that time began a new life, of action, of combat, given up to the hardest labours, to dangers of every kind, to the boldest conceptions; a life from which no diversion was allowed to deflect his mind even for a moment."

For Napoleon's wrath was a
terrible thing. He embodied the
revolutionary belief that to those who willed, all things were possible. He had already ordered the construction of several hundred invasion barges and gunboats. He now mobilised every French seaport and inland river town for building vessels to carry an army to England. Two thousand were to be ready by the autumn, when the tricolour was to be planted on the ruins of London. "Since it can be done," he wrote to his Minister of Marine, " it must be done!" " Try to get double," he ordered, " there will be no lack of money.... Remember that hours are precious."

Behind Napoleon was a people who shared his belief in the conquest of the impossible. He appealed to them for a programme unprecedented in marine construction. The jealous islanders, who had so often stirred up trouble, had once more plunged Europe into war to crush the nascent commerce of France. This time they should learn their lesson. Brushing aside their untrained mercenaries, the veterans of Lombardy and the Danube would march at resistless speed to London, plunder its usurious counting-houses and leave only St. Paul's to mark the site of the modern Carthage. The Irish and the British peasants and workers would rise against the aristocrats and money-mongers who exploited them. Thereafter England should be governed as nature intended: as an appendage of France.
¹
'Her commerce and the mastery of the waves would pass to a people who would know how to use them.

Lord Whitworth's prediction that on the outbreak of war the French people would overturn the tyrant who had duped them was not fulfilled. Every shipyard resounded with hammering, and the cost of equipping the invasion was met by an appeal to Corporations and private citizens. It was an article of faith with the French that their leader could achieve the impossible. He had done it before and would do it again. When, taking with him the Bayeux tapestry as an exhibit, he set out to view the work of the northern ports, he was greeted in every beflagged and laurelled town with torrents of eloquence. "Let the English," cried the Prefect of the Somme, " betrayed by the weakness of their Ministers and the folly of their orators, see with terror the hero of France advancing to punish perjury, to force the yoke of peace on the pirates of the sea and proclaim on the ruins of Albion the commercial independence of Europe
1
"
At a State dinner at Calais toasts were drunk to the first barrack-master to billet troops at Dover and to the review of the
Grande Annie
in St. James' Park.

¹
"Nature made her as much one of our islands as Corsica or Oleron."—Napoleon at St. Helena—
Las Cases.

It was not only Frenchmen w
ho were to enjoy these salutary
triumphs. Other and humbler Europeans were to share them—in a subord
inate capacity. The Dutch were o
rdered to provide, at their own cost, five ships of the line, a hundred gunboats and two hundred and fifty barges; they were also to maintain 18,000 French troops and 16,000 of their own. As their share of the plunder they were to recover Ceylon, which the First Consul had so mistakenly permitted the perfidious English to keep at the Peace. Spain, coerced by an army of observation on the Garonne, was to pay six million francs a month and open her dockyards to French warships. More active Spanish participation in the crusade against the Anglo-Saxon was not at present called for lest it should provoke Nelson to seize Minorca as a base for blockading Toulon. The forests of the Rhine-land and Germany, the arsenals of Hanover, the shipyards of the Ligurian Republic were all to play their part. Even the Swiss in their mountain fastnesses were permitted to contribute 28,000 soldiers and their upkeep.

At first the doomed islanders watched these preparations with detachment. They were not in the habit of being invaded, and it took a little while to accustom themselves to the idea. No people in the world were so sure of their capacity to defend themselves. When at the height of the peace fever of the previous summer, Nelson visited Birmingham, he had been drawn through the streets and acclaimed at the theatre with the refrain:

" We'll shake hands and be friends; if they won't, why, what then ? We'll send our brave Nelson to thrash 'em again!"
¹

Deep in their hearts the insular British despised the French. "They are all so!" the King barked at Benjamin West who had spoken of an art-dealer as an "intriguing Frenchman," "there is no depending upon them!"
²
"I'll tell you what, Mr. Boneypartee," growled John Bull in Gillray's cartoon, " when you come to a little spot I have in my eye, it will stick in your throat and choke you!"

The response to the declaration of war was spontaneous. Whatever the islanders' differences, they were united in their resolve to resist. Windham encountering Sheridan in the House took his arm and, forgetting a decade of bitterness, asked if old friends could not meet and try to do something for the country. As the latter had said in one of his speeches, Bonaparte had proved " an instrument in the hands of Providence to make the English love their constitution

¹
Macready's Reminiscences
(ed. Sir F. Pollock),
1875,
4-5.
²
Farington, II,

better." A few eccentrics like the Duchess of Bedford might rave about his greatness,
¹
and deplore the war. But the nation as a whole saw that every effort had been made to preserve peace. It was no longer progressive ideas that England was fighting but undisguised tyranny and aggression.

Yet if the people felt confidence in their cause and themselves, they felt little in their Government. "Upon my soul!" wrote Creevey, "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." Even the most wholehearted supporter of the Administration doubted its ability to conduct a war. The ordinary Briton turned instinctively to the great Minister who had weathered the perils of the past. " I want to know," wrote Lady Stafford, when war became inevitable, "that Lord Whitworth is in London and that Mr. Pitt is where Providence meant he should be!"

For a few weeks in April it had looked as though he soon would be. Rumours that the Ministry was to be reconstituted had been followed by news that Lord Melville—the former Dundas—had visited Walmer Castle with proposals from Downing Street that Pitt should return to the leadership of the country. But it had all come to nothing. Some said that Pitt was insulted by the offer of a subordinate office;
²
others that, suborned by Canning and the implacable Grenvilles, he had insisted on the recall of those who had reviled the Peace as the work of traitors: a humiliation too great even for the Doctor to stomach. The anti-Jacobin Party which had saved England in the dark days of '97 and '98 was hopelessly split by eighteen months of intemperate recriminations. The Addingtonians remained in office while the Grenvilles, Windhams and Cannings continued to sit in uneasy juxtaposition with the Foxites.

At the outbreak of war Pitt returned to the House. On May 20th, 1803, he took his seat for the first time since the General Election. Creevey who hated all he stood for rejoiced to see him cold-shouldered by Ministers. His face, formerly ruddy, was sallow, his looks dejected, and every now and then he gave a hollow cough: "princes of the blood passing him without speaking to him and an universal sentiment in those around him that he was done." But two days later Creevey had a rude awakening. During the debate on the Address Pitt made a speech which excelled the greatest oration in the oldest Member's memory. In the rush to the galleries the reporters were

¹
"If it would not give her too much consequence, she ought to be sent to the Tower." —Lord Mal
mesbury to J. H. Frere
,
27th
May,
1803.
Fe
sting,
152.

⁸
"Really," he was reported to have told Wilberforce, "I had not the curiosity to ask what it was to be!"—Wilberforce, III,
219.

crowded out and his words were not recorded. But their effect was prodigious. Fox declared that, if Demosthenes had been present, he must have admired and envied. That night Creevey described the scene: "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!"
¹

But though the war party moved a vote of censure on the Government for its want of vigilance, and Pitt, while refusing to condemn his former associates openly, made it plain that he could support them no longer, neither the King nor the Tory majority were ready to exchange the Doctor's easy yoke for the peremptory ways of his predecessor. The lolling benches might titter when some wag, "duly attending to the decorum of professional expression," spoke of the Prime Minister giving the House nine "motions," moved for papers on the "evacuation" of the Cape, or described the Administration as the " Medici" family. But they continued to afford the latter solid if unenthusiastic majorities. Nor was its basis broadened. No man of talent save Sheridan was prepared to join it, and Sheridan was by now too habitually drunk—"bosky," as his friends called it— to lend lustre to even the dimmest administration. The only new recruit was the stout Hibernian, Tierney, who in June became Treasurer of the "Navy. After all the talk of a combination of all the talents under Pitt, the solitary appointment made the Government appear only the more ridiculous.

It was the fate of Addington to follow—at a weak and obstinate man's uneasy pace—where others led. He had followed Bonaparte during the peace negotiations, and his own outraged countrymen when they insisted on resistance. Now once again he followed Bonaparte. Alarmed by his threats, he became obsessed with the idea that he would have to contend with the conqueror of Marengo on English soil. The prospect naturally unnerved him. Farington was told that, lacking courage for his situation, the poor man had taken to drinking a dozen glasses of wine at dinner every night to invigorate himself before facing the House.

To such a Minister the defensive seemed the only attitude. His one idea was to get as many men as possible into uniform at the earliest moment to hold Bonaparte in Sussex and Kent. With their
capacity to make offensive war he was not concerned.