Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (44 page)

Faced by an impasse and divided among themselves, the Ministers dropped the Bill. But they informed their Sovereign that they reserved the right to express their views on the Catholic claims in Parliament. The old man thereupon on March 18th dismissed them. Sheridan, himself a member of the Government, remarked that he had heard of people knocking their heads against a wall but had never before known anyone who collected the bricks and built the wall for the express purpose of knocking out his brains on it.

Though its final act was one of the most beneficent ever passed by a British Government—the aboli
tion of the African slave trade
—the Ministry's fall was little regretted.
¹
Its successor, a purely Tory administration under the aged Duke of Portland—"all Mr. Pitt's friends without Pitt," as Sir John Moore put it—might not look inspiring, but no one doubted that its heart was in the war. Its first act was to conclude an agreement with Russia and Prussia, supplementing the Convention of Bartenstein: its next to order transports. It sent Pitt's old Ambassador at St. Petersburg, Lord Granville Gower, hurrying off to Memel, and Sir Arthur Paget to the Aegean to end if possible the Turkish imbroglio and free British and Russian forces for operations against the real enemy.
²
Though unable to offer a sufficiently large contingent to influence the main summer campaign or even, as proposed by Allied headquarters, to relieve Danzig, the new government promised an early expedition to the Baltic and a Prussian subsidy of two and a half millions. By midsummer it had scraped together 34,000 British and Hanoverian troops for a joint diversion with a Swedish force from Stralsund against Napoleon's communications.

It was too late. Refusing to despair after his reverses and calling on France for a further levy of conscripts—the third in a year— Napoleon gathered together nearly 300,000 men and, as the sun returned to the frozen North, took the offensive. The Russians, who had failed to make the same use of time, saw their advantage slipping away. Impatience for help from the West became an obsession: it was openly proclaimed that if the Allies were forced to make a separate peace it would be England's fault. The news that Gower was on his way caused a temporary revival of hope; but a British agent reported that, if he brought no more than consolatory assurances, it might lead to consequences of which he dreaded to think." It was not easy for Russians and Prussians, fighting for bare existence against Napoleon, to understand the ramifications and delays of the parliamentary system. "You English," Haugwitz told Francis Jackson, "are always two months too late!"

On June 14th, 1807, two days before the first British contingent sailed from Yarmouth, the armies met at Friedland. By nightfall the Russians were in retreat with the loss of half their force. The fate of Europe was decided. The demand for peace throughout a starving and disorganised Russia could no longer be resisted. The Czar was

¹
Gillray depicted " the Pigs possessed or the Broad-Bottomed Litter rushing headlong into the Sea of Perdition" with Farmer George giving th
e ungrateful, Pope-ridden grunte
rs a speeding poke with his pitchfork.

²
", . , When the one great danger with which Europe and the world are threatened from the overbearing greatness and insatiable ambition of France."—Canning to Sir
a.
Paget,
16th
May,
1807.
Paget Papers,
II,
293.

warned
by
his officers that his life would
be
in danger
if
he persisted in further resistance. The suppressed exasperation
of
months broke out against the proud western ally who had failed to send aid in Russia
's
need.
¹

To Napoleon victory was only
a
stage
on
the road to London. He
at
once sought out the vanquished and offered peace—on his own terms. On June 25th the two Emperors met on a raft in the Niemen, while the King of Prussia waited in the rain
on
the Russian bank. When three hours later they parted, they continued waving to one another as long as their boats were in sight. "I hate the English
as
much
as
you do," the Czar was
reported to have said. "In that case," Napoleon replied, "peace is made!"

A fortnight later,
on
July
7th,
a
formal treaty was signed at Tilsit. The young Czar abandoned his quixotic dream
of
liberating Europe and, embracing Napoleon's friendship, fell back on the traditional Russian policy
of
expansion towards the south-east. Napoleon threw over his ally, Turkey, and promised to enforce peace in the Balkans unless the Turks-accepted Russia
's
terms within three months. Swedish Finland and part of Prussian Poland were also to
go
to Russia. In return the Czar recognised
all
Napoleon
'
s
conquests and his paramountcy over western and central Europe. Henceforward France and Russia were to rule the world between 'them. The English—the
r
estless
moneylenders and trouble-makers who had divided the Continent and sucked its blood and betrayed all who trusted them—were to
be
excluded from Europe and their trade outlawed. By
a
secret clause Russia was to join the crusade against them by November ist unless they first accepted Napoleon
'
s
terms. Denmark, Portugal and Austria were
to be
coerced into joining the common cause and agreat Northern
fleet
to be assembled in the Baltic
to
regain command of the sea.

Prussia had no part
in all
this save for her obligation
to
close her ports against England. Her continued existence was only permitted
as a
special favour to the Czar and
a
grudging mark of grace
to
her beautiful and unhappy Queen, Louisa. Frederick William—
"
a
man utterly ruined,"
as
Napoleon called him, " without character and without means"—was deprived of
all
his dominions save Brandenburg, East Prussia, Silesia and Prussian Pomerania. His western territories were taken to form
a
Westphalian Kingdom for Napoleon
'
s
brother, Jerome, his Polish provinces reconstituted
as
the grand Duchy
of
Warsaw and given
to
the puppet King
of
Saxony, Danzig was declared
a
free city, and
a
military corridor was cut

¹
"A month ago no epithet was too bad for Bonaparte. . . . Now our turn is come, and certainly we are not spared."—Jackson, II,
160.
See also
Paget Papers,
II,
239.

across Lower Silesia to link Poland with Saxony. A crushing indemnity was imposed on his country and her soil was to be permanently occupied by a French army. Her own armed forces were reduced to a skeleton.

No intimation of these changes was made to England by her allies. The news of Friedland reached London on June 30th, that of the meeting on the Niemen on July 16th, the day on which Lieu-tenant-General Lord Cathcart landed at Riigen with the advance guard of the British expeditionary force. But the existence of a secret Russian understanding with France was at once suspected. As early as June 7th Crabb Robinson, residing at Altona, had heard that Napoleon was about to invade Holstein, enlist the Maritime Powers of the North against England and close the Sound, thus cutting off her naval supplies from the Baltic and the retreat of Lord Cathcart's troops. " We may see another attempt at a Northern Neutrality," wrote Francis Jackson a month later, "which I hope and trust another Nelson may arise to destroy." The lesson of 1801 had not been forgotten.

The new Ministers felt themselves its repositories. They were the disciples of Mr. Pitt. Canning wa
s at the Foreign Office, Castle
reagh at the War Department, Chatham at the Ordnance, Perceval at the Exchequer, Mulgrave—"that complete John Bull" who "gloried in Nelson and seemed to have an immortal hatred of Napoleon"
¹
—at the Admiralty. Their hands had just been strengthened by a General Election in which their opponents, submerged by the rising flood of loyalty to Church and Throne, had lost nearly two hundred seats. Mediocrities and Party hacks though they seemed, the Tories embodied the mood of the average Briton towards the war, and in this lay their strength. They represented-all who held that victory was the only salvation for the country. "France must be beaten and dreadfully beaten," wrote Lord Paget, "before there can be any peace or happiness in Europe. Whether under Bonaparte or Bourbon, her wings must be clipped close. Pray stick to that f
or ever!"

They were the views of His Majesty's Ministers, who showed no inclination to turn the other cheek to those who had deceived them. Instead they guarded themselves, without scruple or nicety, against future dangers. Receiving intelligence—false, as it turned out—that the Danish Fleet was ready for sea and anticipating a French invasion of Holstein, they resolved to send an immediate expedition to occupy the island of Zealand and snatch the coveted

¹
Kaydon, 68.

ships from the enemy's grasp. They ordered
Admiral Lord Gambier to the Sou
nd with seventeen sail-of-the-line, directed transports and troops to Yarmouth and sent instructions to Cathcart to withdraw his army
from its exposed position at Rü
gen and join the Fleet off Copenhagen. On July 18th Francis Jackson, summoned at one in the morning from his bed in Northamptonshire, was despatched at twelve hours' notice on a special mission to Kiel. Here he was to demand from the Crown Prince of Denmark the immediate surrender of the Danish Fleet in return for a British
alliance and a yearly rent of
£100,000. His ultimat
um was to be supported by Gambie
r's broadsides and 30,000 men.

It was a stifling summer; down in Buckinghamshire the haymakers fainted from heat in the fields. In London the public crowded to see the new panorama of Trafalgar and the picture which young Mr. Turner had painted of the battle. The air was full of rumours; "poor Charles was hurried off suddenly and unexpectedly to Yarmouth Roads instead of the Channel Fleet," wrote Lady Uxbridge; "orders are issued for a great infantry force to be in readiness to embark." But no hint of it was allowed to reach France, for a strict embargo was placed on all ships. On the 26th Gambier sailed for the Baltic: on the 29th transports bearing 18,000 troops—"the expedition that is gone God knows where"—slipped away from Yarmouth ten days after Castlereagh had first issued orders for their departure. Not since the days of Chatham had England moved with such expedition. Pitt's pupils had improved on their master.

On July 31st, the day the Fleet anchored off the Skaw, Napoleon ordered Talleyrand to tell the Danish Minister that his country must choose between war or military alliance with France. Immediately afterwards he ordered 30,000 troops to assemble at Hamburg under Marshal Bernadotte for the invasion of Denmark. He never guessed that the stupid islanders had forestalled him.

A week later the Francophil
e
Crown Prince of Denmark rejected Jackson's demand for the surrender of the fleet. He knew too well, he said, what an alliance with England involved. Like most of the smaller European rulers he was convinced that- France must win. In Copenhagen the newspapers were proclaiming that England's last hour had struck when her battleships were already anchored in Elsinore Roads. On August 8th the transports from Yarmouth arrived, on the 12th those from Rugen. And at five o'clock on the morning of the 16th the fir
st troops under Sir Arthur Welle
sley began to swarm ashore at Vedboek, pushing into the pine-woods under protection of the Fleet's guns "like a pack of foxhounds dashing into cover." For
the second time since Trafalgar
a British army had landed with impunity on Napoleon's forbidden Continent.
¹

There was little effective resistance. The Cabinet had acted so swiftly that the Danish Militia was unmobilised and the French too far away. The invaders pushed rapidly towards Copenhagen. On the 29th the defending levies—"miserable wretches, fit for nothing but the plough" with "long, lank hair and wild, rugged features"
²
—were routed
by Wellesley's division at Kioge
. Lord Cathcart, a slow and kindly man, and his second-in-command, an old Guardsman named Sir Harry Burrard, delayed opening fire on the defiant city as long as they could in the hope that a timely surrender might release them from their orders. On the evening of September 2nd the decision could no longer be postponed and the word was passed to the batteries. Within five minutes the Danish capital, pounded by hundreds of redhot shells and Congreve's flaming rockets, was ablaze; a Foreign Office agent, crossing the Sound from Landskrona to the Fleet, found the night-sky five miles away as bright as day, while his vessel shook with the reverberation of the guns. For three nights the Danes bore their ordeal; then at seven o'clock on the evening of the 7th, as the cannonade again opened, they surrendered.