Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (2 page)

Until it encountered England this force swept everything before it. But against England it failed. This was not only because she commanded the sea—that superficially barren and unrewarding element which only she had consistently taken the trouble to master. It was because her social creed, though less dynamic in the short run than the great explosive, fanaticism, proved more enduring. It wore better because it was founded more closely on the realities of human nature. Fanaticism's weakness is that it tires, and that its selfless objective presently becomes identified with self and its corroding frailties. Napoleon began by embodying the omnipotence of human reason. He ended by identifying that universal abstraction with his own irrational and corrupt passions. When he marshalled Europe's millions in a crusade for the former he temporarily triumphed. When, in the face of reason, he made them fight on for the latter alone, they disintegrated. The calm, the moderation and the sanity of the despised island-shopkeepers proved a stronger force in the end than the fierce enthusiasm of Revolutionary France, and a better rallying-ground for mankind.

For the British people also drew strength from outside, which
enabled them to overcome their mortal imperfections, hesitations and fears. Pitt and Nelson, Moore and Wellington were not weaker in courage and endurance than Napoleon. Nor were their followers than his. Like their descendants to-day they derived their inspiration, not from the worship of Reason or Race or from the love of Glory and Conquest, but from an innate sense of personal duty which was the unifying force of their freedom-loving land. It derived from what one of their poets called " pure religion breathing household laws." They learnt it at their mothers' knees. To understand why England defeated Napoleon one should study Wordsworth. In her hour of need she expected every man to do his duty. It was not Napoleon alone who shipwrecked on that rock. It was seen again among the surging waters of the world's turmoil in 1940. To the end of time Churchill's signal will fly with Nelson's.

It remains to thank those who have so generously given me their help, amid the many tasks, distractions and trials of war-time existence. To Milton Waldman, my constant and sternest critic; to Colonel Alfred Burne of the Royal Artillery and Commander John Owen, R.N., who have unreservedly placed at my disposal their time and great military and naval lore: to H. J. Massingham, Lord Queenborough and Colonel James Neville, who have read and amended the book in manuscript; to Henry Newnham, who has once more found time to read my proofs, and to the Tuan Muda of Sarawak and Herbert van Thai, who have performed the same kind office; to Major R. G. L. Rivis, Keeper of the Records of the Inns of Court Regiment, who has given me valuable information about the Volunte
er Movement of
1803-5: to Eric Gillett, who has allowed me the use of the unpublished Ham MS; and, above all, to my wife who must have typed every word of these pages at least half a dozen times.

Not least, I owe a debt to my predecessors: in particular to the late Professor John Holland Rose and the late Sir Julian Corbett, to Sir Charles Oman for his great
History of the Peninsula War
and to the late Sir John Fortescue for his
History of the British Army
—one of the noblest epics of our race and langauge.

Because of the need to save paper I have again omitted a bibliography and appendix of references, and confined myself to a list of abbreviated titles used in the footnotes.

Arthur Bryant.

September,
1944.

CHAPTER
ONE

Glimpse of a Grand Nation

"No government has exploited so systematically the national thirst for military glory. None has appealed more successfully to the material passions, or has presumed with such hardihood and success upon the administrative timidity of the French, part inertia, part egotism, which is content to surrender the conduct of affairs in exchange for a quiet life."

H. A. L. Fisher, Bonapartism.

An accursed thing it is to gaze

On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye."

Wordsworth.

The s
ummer of 1802 saw England relaxing in the
sunshine of the Amiens agreement.
W
earied by nine years of strife,
crushing taxation and starvation prices, the masses rejoiced at the return of peace and plenty. A popular cartoonist depicted John Bull making merry with long-absent friends—Old Stout, Best Wheaten Bread, Excellent Fresh
Butter, Prime Hops and Jamaica
Rum. Lord Grenville, pacing the Olympian lawns of Stowe, might speak of "unnecessary and degrading concessions" and derisive aristocrats compare the Treaty with "the peace that passeth understanding." Such implacables were little regarded. The average man was merely angered or amused by Windham's jeremiads that appeasers had signed England's death warrant and by Canning's demands for the recall of his old leader Pitt to surmount storms winch nobody but he believed existed.

After all their costly blunders and splendid victories the proud islanders were ready to let bygones be bygones. They wanted to turn their backs on an ungrateful Continent and resume their normal pursuits and amusements. Once the fight (in which they had given as good as they took) was called off, they ceased to feel jealousy of the young conqueror of Au
stria and Italy and good-humoure
dly took him at his own valuation as the man who had saved France and Europe from the Jacobin violence and lawlessness they had themselves so long opposed. They even accepted the incorporation in his dominions of the Austrian Netherlands and his control of the Dutch coast for which they had gone to
war. For, imagining that every
one else felt as they did, they believed that the world was on the threshold of a new age of international goodwill and expanding commercial opportunity.

It was, perhaps, because of these things that Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, walking home to Grassmere over Kirkstone Pass that spring and seeing the lakeland woods beyond Gorbarrow full of daffodils, felt a more than usual impulse of hope and joy. Even the gloomy Windham,
¹
in his regret for the fallen Bourbon cause, could not suppress his pleasure at the sight of the holiday crowds in the Mall: they gave him, he noted in his diary, a pleasant feeling like former times. And all who during the siege years had longed for the delights of foreign travel and could afford it thronged the Dover Road in crested coach and carriage on their way to the Continent. At the Kentish port the York Hotel and its rival, the City of London, were crowded with rank and fashion. " Have you," wrote Charles Lamb wistfully from his London desk to a friend in Paris, "seen a man guillotined: is it as good as a hanging? Are
all
the women painted and the men
all
monkeys... . Are you and the First Consul thick?"

Travellers were at first agreeably impressed. The ragged rabble of Calais and Dieppe, who shouted and gesticulated on the quayside and so alarmed returning Emigres, stretched out civil, dirty hands to help the English milords down the landing-ladders and accompanied them with cheerful salutations to their inn. Those who, fearing an unmitigated diet of frogs; had prudently secreted home-' cured hams among their luggage, discovered that the new France lived not worse but better than the old. Instead of the villainous
sansculottes
and blood-stained scenes of Gilray's cartoons, there were everywhere friendly faces, clean streets and orderly citizens. A people till recently given over to gloomy savagery were fast coming round to order and civility. The women in their red camlet jackets and high aprons, the long flying lappets to their caps, the wooden sabots with scarlet tufts that clattered perpetually on the cobbles, the sound of all the world talking at once, the gaily painted eggs on the market stalls, the tang of garlic, the huge, uncouth diligences by the roadside, the coffee, boiled milk and long crisp rolls were all delightful to long starved senses.

The journey south confirmed these impressions. The fields were better cultivated than under the old dispensation, there was no waste land, the peasant women and children looked ruddy and well-fed. The postilions and people along the road were good-natured and

¹
Windham Diary,
439. Lord Guilford remarked that he could never see Windham without picturing Don Quixote with a barber's basin on his head.—Glenbervie, I, 266
.

obliging; at Montreuil a charming girl, with a most interesting countenance, dressed
en paysanne
and wearing ringlets,waited on tourists. Only in the towns and in the neighbourhood of former religious houses and chateaux were there signs of revolutionary destruction. At Abbeville the larger houses were shut up and the streets were full of beggars: the castle at Chantilly was in ruins and its beautiful garden laid waste. And everywhere the churches, now timidly reopening, were desolate: the tombs desecrated, the stones torn up and the windows smashed.

But it was in the capital that the "grand nation" could be seen in its glory and triumph. The new approach through the squalid suburbs was most imposing: the Norman Barrier with massive Doric pillars, the long quadruple avenue of elms,-and beyond the Place de la Concorde the Consular palace of the Tuileries. Behind this splendid facade clustered the Paris of beauty and pleasure, the corrupt, glittering profiteers' bauble that had miraculously risen out of the reeking miasma of the Terror; the gardens, dance halls and restaurants that graced the palaces of the former nobility; the Tivoli and Frascati; the Bois with its horses and carriages; the great new shops with their silks and trimmings, fashionable mahogany and ormulu furniture, bronzes and china; the Palais Royal, mecca of debauchees, where all the women wore draperies of woven hair and hair anointed with scented oil in the Grecian mode. For the classical style had become the rage in Consular Paris.

The first goal of Englishmen in the Revolutionary capital was the Louvre. Here, with the sun streaming through the windows of its glorious gallery, were crowded the finest pictures and sculptures of Italy—the plunder of a hundred battles and sieges. British painters like Opie and Benjamin West sat entranced for hours before the treasures of medieval monasteries and Renaissance palaces: even Miss Berry, who having known France under the
ancien regime
was always regretting its vanished graces, was impressed. But of the other wonders of Paris which delighted so many of her countrymen, she took a less favourable view. The great shops in the mansions of the former nobility might be imposing but they lacked taste; the dancing at the theatres was wonderful and the declamation resounding, but the effect was ruined by slovenly fellows—auditors who smoked and spat and failed to offer their seats to ladies. And even visitors as little like Miss Berry as the far from prim Lady Bess-borough were shocked by the gauze-like garments of the fair
Parisiennes.
The rubicund gentry from the English shires, however, showed a greater appreciation of these cl
assical displays. When Madame Ré
camier at the height of her own ball retired, as was her wont, to her elegant Grecian bedroom, they gallantly crowded round the famous gold and muslin curtains to view her beautiful white shoulders exposed,
citoyenne
like, to the public gaze.

But if the
haut
ton
of the new Paris seemed glittering and grating to those who had
known the old—a world of showy
parvenus who loaded themselves with jewels and finery but did not know how to dress, in which there was scarcely a well-cut coat, a gentlewoman or a man of breeding—the French capital offered one spectacle with an almost universal appeal. The minority who remembered the
ancien regime
might peer, shuddering deliciously, at the guillotine with its slanting axe and gaping wicker basket in the former Place de la Revolution, visit desecrated convents with gaping roofs, flapping hangings and torn-up vaults, or day-dream among the squalid decay of deserted palaces and weedy royal gardens. Some like little Emma Edgcumbe might even catch a glimpse in the Styx-like exile of a provincial town of the odious Barras, " with his ignoble figure and lowering, bad countenance, always alone and looking as if he felt that every one knew who he was and what he was." But these ghostly echoes of the past were drowned by the cheerful pomp and blare of the present. Miss Berry, who remembered Versailles in the old days, declared she had never seen such magnificence as in the First Consul's apartments in the Tuileries. The hundreds of footmen in their green and gold liveries, the gorgeously be-gilt peace officers who paraded the ante-chambers, the pages with their gold chains and medallions and the uniforms of the aides-de-camp dazzled even those most used to courtly splendour.
¹

Before this background moved the minute but dominating figure of the First Consul. It was only a few months since the English had seen him drawn by their cartoonists as an unshaven scaramouche from a Corsican hovel, looting, burning and murdering. Now they saw him the greatest man in Europe, taking the salute of his troops, the immense arena of the Carrousel crowded with all the pomp and splendour of royalty and half the nations of the world doing him homage. Riding a horse that had belonged to the late King of France, he passed along the lines with cropped hair, high nose and intent, searching eyes, attended by brilliant generals and Mameluke orderlies. It was like a dream, wrote young Augustus Foster, to see him at the head of the conquerors of Italy and Germany. The extreme simplicity of his garb, set against that glittering throng, enhanced the effect: