Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (13 page)
1
Creevey, I,
14-15;
Colchester,
1
,420;
Minto, III,
287;
Pe
llew, II,
105;
Malmesbury, IV,
256;
Horner, I,
221.
All he sought was numbers.
It took many months to train Regular soldiers: it was only a matter of weeks to enrol Militiamen or Volunteers. The latter, too— and this made a strong appeal to the Treasury—were far cheaper. Regulars had to be wooed to the Colours by State bounties. Volunteers were to be had gratis by an appeal to patriotism, and Militiamen could be raised by compulsory ballot. Yet as every man balloted could avoid service by paying a fine or hiring a substitute, any increase in the Militia was automatically followed by a scramble for substitutes. These were drawn from the same class of thirsty ne'er-do-wells as the ranks of the professional Army. The effect was to dry up recruiting for the Regular Forces at the very moment when they were most needed.
Even before the outbreak of war the Government had begun to embody the Militia—the traditional home-defence levy of provincial England. An Act of the previous year—passed during the Swiss crisis—had authorised the balloting of 51,000 militiamen for five years' service; on March nth, 1803, this force was called out by Proclamation. As soon as war broke out the Government embodied a further 25,000, so sending the price of substitutes up to £30 a head and hopelessly outbidding the Regular recruiting-sergeants who could only offer
£7
12s. 6d. A few weeks later Napoleon's preparations caused resort to the old feudal expedient of calling on the whole nation to help repel invasion. Yet, in their haste to pluck the flower safety out of the nettle danger, Ministers passed a Defence Act exempting from the impending
leve
e-en-masse
and all other forms of military service all between the ages of fifteen and sixty who volunteered for home defence before June 16th. Thus they deprived the Crown of its ancient prerogative of embodying every able-bodied subject for the defence of the realm on its own terms. For the Volunteers, who in the nature of things comprised all the most patriotic, healthy and educated elements in the nation, were allowed to enrol in any kind of local corps or Association under any kind of conditions they chose to frame.
When Windham objected that Ministers were raising a Militia, not an Army, the Secretary-at-War frankly admitted that this was their object; nothing else, he argued, could meet the emergency. They so far yielded to Opposition pressure, however, as to create on June 20th an entirely new force entitled the Army of Reserve, for which 50,000 men between the ages of 18 and 40 were to be raised by compulsory ballot for second or Depot battalions to the Regiments of the Line. Serving for five years i
n the United Kingdom only, they
might subsequently be voluntarily enlisted by bounty into first-line battalions. This was an important administrative principle for which the Duke of York at the Horse Guards had long contended. But as the loophole for evading service by fine or substitution was retained, the only immediate result was to increase the already heavy demand for substitutes.
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The confusion in the public mind, as well as in the state of recruiting, was by now indescribable. The local government system of England put a high premium on freedom but very little on efficiency. It almost completely broke down under the strain of simultaneously conducting three separate ballots and dealing with so many claims for exemption. Overwhelmed by the success of its appeal for Volunteers—more than 300,000 came forward in a few days—the Cabinet at the end of July suspended the
levee-en-masse.
The public, now thoroughly aroused to its peril, was naturally bewildered. "Is the Administration going stark staring mad ?" wrote one of Wilberforce's correspondents, "that they recall the bill for arming the nation and suspend its execution ?" The truth was that there were neither the arms nor the officers to train such a force at such short notice.
2
To complete the muddle the Government on August 18th issued a circular forbidding the enrolment of further Volunteers in all counties where their numbers exceeded six times those of the Militia. Having appealed to the nation to come forward under the slogan " one and all," it was now forced to damp down the patriotism it had aroused. Instead of giving the military authorities an Army, it had saddled them with«an immense, amorphous force of untrained, unarmed amateurs serving in a hotchpotch of self-governing units, each subject to rules of its own choosing and none under regular discipline. The confusion was the greater because Volunteers who joined before and after July 22nd were granted different scales of allowances. Everybody was asking for clear directions arid nobody in authority seemed able to give any. One indignant peer, hearing that his wife had encountered the Prime Minister in the street, blamed her that she had not run after him for an explanation of the contradictory circulars that kept arriving every day.
3
By this time the country was as conscious of the danger in which
it stood as the Government.
1
Fortescue, V,
205,
211;
Wheeler and Broadley, I,
54-5;
Pcllew,
n,
104;
Minto,
in,
291;
Bunbury,
170;
Wilberforce, I,
268-9.
Among those drawn for the Army of Reserve was Walter Scott, who claimed exemption as a member of the Royal Midlothian Volunteer Cavalry.—Scott, I,
195.
2
Wilberforce, I,
278;
Fox,
HI,
420;
Fortescuc, V,
206,
209,
211;
Ashton,
98;
Wheeler and Broadley, I,
56;
Colchester, I,
433;
Farington, II,
124.
3
Granville, I,
432.
It was not so much appalled as enraged. In millions of hearts there blazed up that summer "a fierce, unenquiring, unappeasable detestation" of one man. For "that vile, proud, ambitious, hated villain," as old Lady Stafford called him, no calumny was now too great: every crime in his career, real or imagined, was magnified in press and pamphlet: his bombardment of the Paris mob, his massacre of the inhabitants of Pa via and Jaffa, his repudiation of Christianity in Egypt, his murder of his own sick in Palestine. He was described as assassin, ogre, renegade, toad, spider, and devil; as a minute, swarthy brigand with a squint and jaundice; as a pervert who seduced his sisters. In the cartoons that crowded the bookstalls the public were shown not a man "but a monster." It gloated over every malicious emigre" tale of his obscure origin: his great-grandfather a publican condemned to the galleys for robbery and murder, his grandfather a butcher, his father a pettifogging lawyer who betrayed his country, his mother a common trull. "God!" cried Mr. Elliston in the patriotic epilogue at the Haymarket theatre:
"must this mushroom despot of the hour
The spacious world encircle with his power?
Stretching his baneful feet from pole to pole,
Stride, Corsican-Colossus of the whole?
Forbid it, Heaven!—and forbid it Man!
Can Man forbid it? Yes—the
English
can."
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There was no doubt that, from the King to the humblest rustic, the English intended to. The underwriters of Lloyds opened a Patriotic Fund; five thousand leading merchants met in the Stock Exchange and declared that the independence and existence of the British Empire and the safety, liberty and life of every man were at stake. "The events perhaps of a few months, certainly of a few years, arc to determine whether we and our children are to continue free men and members of the most flourishing community in the world or whether we are to be slaves.... We fight for our laws and liberties— to defend the dearest hopes of our children—to preserve the honour and existence of the country that gave us birth. . . . We fight to preserve the whole earth from the barbarous yoke of military despotism!"
1
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
249, 256-7, 260-1, 266, 285;
Ashton,
93.
Lady Bessborough with her usual good sense thought that the principle of such propaganda was mistaken: "by the same followed up, if Bonaparte was a good man instead of a bad one, we ought not to oppose him. The first thing is to preach that we should repel whoever attempts to attack us, let them be who or what they may, and especially without any regard to what their great-grandmother might be."—Granville, I,
426.
The Lord Chief Justice in his charge spoke of the duty
the nation owed the world to save it from its degraded terror, while Bishops exhorted the clergy to remind their congregations of the enemy's cruelty. "Oh, Lord God," prayed an aged Nonconformist minister at Colchester, "be pleased to change the tyrant's wicked heart or stop his wicked breath!"
In that hour it became accounted righteousness to appeal to every feeling of hatred, scorn and insular pride that could mobilise the people for battle. Pamphlets and handbills poured from the presses; the "Museum of Genius" in Oxford Street and the print shops in Piccadilly were stacked with cheap, patriotic literature which the gentry and professional classes were urged to distribute among their poorer neighbours under such titles as
Britons to Arm
s! Ring the Alarum B
ell! A Relish for Old Nick ! Bob Rousem’
s Epistle to Bonaparte! Horror upon Horrors!
Writers like Sir James Mackintosh and the inevitable Hannah More were enlisted, while the crudest cuts and broadsides were hawked in the streets. Church doors and village trees were placarded with Queen Elizabeth's speech at Tilbury and the Harfleur lines from
Henry V,
side
-by-side with blood-curdling posters describing the consequences of invasion—universal pillage, women of all ranks violated, children slaughtered, trade ruined, the labouring classes thrown out of employment, famine with all its horrors, despotism triumphant and the inhabitants carried away by shiploads to foreign lands. The visual appeal was much used among a people still only half-literate; brightly coloured cartoons depicted French ruffians burning cottages and sacking London. Often these took the form of angry taunts; of little Bonaparte exhibited in a cage by
a
gigantic Jack Tar, King George holding up a dripping Corsican Fox to baying hounds, or a yokel displaying the tyrant's head on a pitchfork and bawling out: "Ha! my little Boney, what dost think of Johnny Bull now? Plunder our houses, hay? Ravish all our wives and daughters, hay?" The very broad-grin humour of old England, Tom Campbell wrote, had become tinged with the horrible.
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The songsters and ballad-writers bore their part in this patriotic
fanfaronnade.
Charles Dibdin told how:
" The French are all coming, so they declare, Of their floats and balloons all the papers advise us, They're to swim through the ocean and ride on the air, In some foggy evening to land and surprise us!"
and humbler poetasters how:
' Campbell, I,
447;
Granville, I,
426;
Ashton,
89, 93-4;
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
249, 272-3, 276-7, 287, 316;
Horner, I,
225-6.
"...
he'd fain stop our Press, yet we'll publish his shame; We'll announce to the world his detestable Fame; How the traitor
R
enounced
his
R
edeemer
and then How he murdered his Prisoners and poison'd his Men!"
One genius produced a masterpiece entitled "United and Hearty, Have at Bonapartee"; the gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh echoed to the sound of Braham or the great Incledon singing " Heart of Oak" or " Scots wha' hae'"; Charles Dibdin's " Britons, Strike Home" played night after night to crowde
d audiences in the Sans Souci
theatre in the Strand.
For the average Briton, though far from endorsing Windham's lugubrious predictions, by now fully expected to see the French cavalry riding down English lanes and the pyre of smoking villages darkening the Weald. Francis Horner confessed that, though he tried to persuade himself that the people of England were about to gain a splendid triumph for civilisation and true democracy over military despotism, it was terrible to reflect that at best this could only be called a probability. Even a half pacifist like Wilberforce, who a few weeks before had been coughed down in the House for opposing the war, shared the anxieties of the hour. "Did you ever see Denon's travels ?" he wrote; " they exhibit a faint sketch of the treatment we might reasonably expect if the French should invade our peaceful dwellings."
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