Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (45 page)

Thus, at a cost of less than two hundred casualties a British expedition removed from harm's way fifteen Danish battleships and thirty smaller vessels. The high-handed act was vehemently attacked by the Opposition and even by some of the Government's supporters; "we have done a deed," wrote Sidmouth, "which will make our name hereafter quoted in competition with all ill ones." But Ministers could plead that the national extremity had justified extreme measures and congratulate themselves on the speed with which they had grasped the nettle. They had met the intimidation of a neutral from the land by which Napoleon planned their ruin by an intimidation equally direct from the sea, so confronting the wavering Danes with what Canning called "a balance of opposite dangers." "There never was," wrote Castlereagh's secretary proudly, "an expedition of such magnitude so quickly got up, so secretly sent off and which was conducted from the beginning to its termination with greater ability or success." The country as a whole agreed. Cobbett's commonsense verdict was that if Ministers did not deserve to be impeached for doing what they had done, they would have deserved impeachment for not doing it.
³

1
Colchester, II,
130-1;
Auckland, IV,
313, 315;
C. F. P., I,
364;
Holland Rose,
Napole
on,
II,
218-19;
Granville, II,
283, 292, 295.

2
Jackson, II,
192-3, 204;
Fortescue, VI,
64-5;
Harris,
11-12.
³
Jackson, II,
208.

If proof
was
needed that they had acted wisely, it was afforded by Napoleon. Fouche afterwards recorded that he had never seen him so angry. He broke into frantic threats to assemble 100,000 men at Boulogne in a fortnight and sent his Minister of Marine posthaste to inspect the Channel ports. But menaces to invade were in vain: the harbours had silted up with sand and only three hundred of the long-neglected barges were seaworthy. Only by persistence in a slow course of strangulation could Napoleon hope to injure England, and, when his passion had subsided, he knew it. "If the English go on in this way," he wrote to
Talleyrand
,
"we must close all the ports of Europe, even those of Austria, against them, drive every British Minister from the Continent and even arrest all individual Englishmen."

On September 23rd, a few days after the news from Copenhagen reached him, Napoleon gave one of his famous displays of temper at a Diplomatic Reception. "If Portugal does not do what I wish," he shouted at the Portuguese Minister, " the House of Braganza will not be reigning in Europe in two months! I will no longer tolerate an English Ambassador in Europe. I will declare war on any Power who receives one after two months from this time! I have 300,000 Russians at my disposal, and with that powerful ally I can do everything. The English declare they will no longer respect neutrals on the sea; I will no longer recognise them on land!" With eastern Europe and Russia in his pocket, Napoleon was free to concentrate his entire force against the last remaining corner of the Continent where English merchants had a foothold. The Iberian peninsula, trackless and remote though it might be, was now at his mercy.

Immediately afterwards the French and Spanish Ambassadors quitted Lisbon. The Portuguese Regent was in a quandary. England was his oldest ally and her Fleet could paralyse his country's trade and cut her off from her colonies. The British Ambassador, Lord Strangford, representing Canning's virile policy, was urging him to defy Napoleon and, by transferring his Court to Brazil, to continue the war by England's side. A weak man, sunk in luxury, Prince John had hoped that it might somehow be possible to steer
a
middle course until the two adversaries had made peace. But it was now plain that a decision must be made. Early in October it became known that a French army under General Junot had assembled at Bayonne and was about to cross the Bidassoa and march on Lisbon.

As was to be expected, the unhappy man made promises to both sides. After vainly begging the
English to allow him to accept
Napoleon's terms while making secret reservations in their favour, he agreed, in the event of being forced to close his ports, to send his fleet to Brazil, grant England special trade concessions in that country and lease her Madeira. But during October it was learnt that a British General had suffered a disastrous reverse under the walls of Buenos Ayres and had signed a capitulation relinquishing all his country's designs on Spanish South America. England's stock had never fallen so low. On November 8th, terrified by the speed of Junot's advance, the Portuguese Regent announced that he must "adhere to the cause of the Continent." He accompanied his
volte-face
by bitter reproaches against England for trying to sacrifice his kingdom to her trade.

But he was too late to save his throne. On November 13th an intimation appeared in the Paris
Moniteur
that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign—"a new proof of how inevitable is the ruin of all who attach themselves to England." Having signed a secret Convention with Spain by which Portugal was to be partitioned between the two countries, Napoleon had sent orders to Junot to press over the Portuguese mountains at once with every man who could make the pace, and so make sure of capturing the fleet at Lisbon before it could be removed by the English. A Russian squadron from the Mediterranean was expected there, he was informed, and the eight or ten battleships so assembled might be of immense value. To avoid delay he was to declare himself the friend of Portugal; it would be time enough to throw off the mask when he arrived.

On the last day of November, 1807, Junot, having marched three hundred miles in a fortnight over the rain-deluged hills, straggled into Lisbon with less than 2000 of his original 30,000 men. The Portuguese army made no resistance. But the Court and Fleet had gone. Two days before, Strangford, strengthened by the appearance of Sir Sidney Smith and a battle squadron in the Tagus, had gone ashore and by almost superhuman efforts had persuaded the terrified Regent to fly the country. On the 29th, taking his treasure and family with him, Prince John had embarked in his flagship and, escorted by British warships, sailed for Rio de Janeiro. Three.weeks later Major-General Beresford landed with 4000 British troops at Madeira and took control of the island in his name.

· · ·
· · ·
· ·

It was a timely reprieve, and at a dark hour. An angry Denmark had rejected England's invitation to join an Anglo-Scandinavian League to keep open the Baltic and,
on the withdrawal of Cathcart'
troops, had declared war. Russia, following the rejection of her offer of mediation,, had announced her adhesion to the Continental System and closed her ports. "It only remains for Russia to go to war with us," wrote Lady Bessborough, "and we shall justify the title of the old farce—Little England against the world!" The whole Continent from the Baltic to the Hellespont was closed to her ships. And the hopes formed of securing the South American market through the liberation of the Spanish colonies had been dashed by the disaster at Buenos Ayres. It seemed that the British commander, Lieutenant-General Whitelocke, appalled by his losses in the bullet-swept streets, had thrown in his hand at the very moment when victory was within his grasp. Coming on top of reverses in Egypt and the failure of the Turkish expedition, Buenos Ayres marked the nadir of British military prowess. The shame of the capitulation struck deep; one of Whitelocke's men, a private soldier, visiting his sister, the maid of a great lady, flung down his cap and trampled it under foot in their presence at the mention of his commander's name.
¹

The closing at such a moment of the Brazilian coast by a pro-French Portugal would have been a shattering blow for British commerce; following the surrender of the hard-won foothold in the River Plate, it might- have had disastrous consequences in the City. England could not afford to lose markets in the New World when Napoleon had closed so many in the Old. In two years her exports to northern Europe ha
d fallen from £10,000,000 to £
2,000,000; her warehouses were bursting with manufactured goods and colonial products for which there was no outlet. Her merchants had to find alternative markets or repudiate their debts and mortgages. Already there was grave unrest in the industrial towns where mills and factories were closing down. The Berlin Decrees were having their effect; England was feeling the pinch.

That November the Cabinet, besieged by merchants demanding retaliatory measures against neutral shipowners who had usurped their trade, was forced to intensify the economic blockade of the Continent. The Orders in Council of January, 1807, having failed to make Napoleon withdraw his illegal Decrees, there seemed nothing for it but to increase the British stranglehold on Europe. If he used his control of the Continental seaboard to prohibit all trade with Britain, the latter could use her sea power to deny Europe any

¹
Granville, II,
308, 310.
"How the Devil such a man as this could have been appointed to such a command," wrote his fellow general, Lord Paget, "has been the subject of amazement to the whole Army, for, independent of his manners which are coarse and brutal to the most insupportable degree, he is notoriously known to have the greatest antipathy to the smell of gunpowder."—
Paget Papers,
II,
276.

other trade. All ports from which the British flag was excluded were now declared automatically blockaded and neutral ships were only to be allowed to use them if they touched at a British port and paid a reshipment duty on their freights.

It was the extension into the commercial sphere of Canning's doctrine of a balance of opposite dangers. "The principle," wrote the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "is that trade in British produce and manufactures
...
is to be protected as much as possible. For this purpose all the countries where French influence prevails to exclude the British flag shall have no trade but to and from this country and its allies. . . . Either those, countries will have no trade or they must be content to accept it through us."
¹
It was hard on neutrals and, like the French Decrees, an infringement of international law. But in no other way could the British carrying trade —the nursery of the Navy—be preserved or British merchants be protected from the unfair rivalry of neutrals who did not have to carry the overheads of smuggling goods past Napoleon's growing army of
douaniers.

Napoleon was quick to retaliate. He also was feeling the severity of the economic war he had begun. It spelt ruin to thousands of his subjects. An American travelling through France in 1807 reported that her commercial towns were half deserted and her highways without traffic.
²
There was no outlet for surplus production; taxation, rising in a time of declining consumption, was crushing, and beggars swarmed the streets. Only in the fields, whence the young men had been taken by the conscriptions, was there full employment. And everywhere in the new Europe the middle classes were clamouring for the sugar and coffee, the silks, cottons, dyes, spices and tobacco to which British colonial enterprise had accustomed them. Napoleon himself, to raise revenue, was forced to wink at smuggling and, on occasion, to take a surreptitious hand in it himself. Only by doing so had he been able to supply his frozen army in Poland with 50,000 West Riding overcoats and 200,000 pairs of Northampton boots. For nothing less than the manufacturing power of England could sustain war on the scale on which Napoleon waged it.

Yet the Emperor would not abandon his blockade. It seemed the only way to force the English to make peace and accept his New Order. What was only a temporary inconvenience to a vast military Empire under a rigid, centralised discipline must spell ruin and extinction to a community of traders, bankers and shipowners. In

¹
Colchester, II,
134-5.
²
Frischaue
r,
181.

December, 1807, while on a State progress through his Italian dominions, Napoleon, therefore, issued from Milan a series of Decrees outlawing all neutral vessels which submitted to British search or touched at British ports. Those who did so were to be deemed lawful prizes for French privateers. The latter were to be encouraged by every means; two hundred were already operating from the creeks of
Haiti
and Cuba against the West Indies, while others, based on Mauritius, were harrying Calcutta merchantmen in the Indian Ocean. The maritime peoples of the subjugated Continental seaboard were constantly exhorted by the imperial newspapers. "Do not suffer yourselves to be excluded with impunity from the empire of the seas," the Dutch were told; "fit out privateers to wrest the prey from the enemy. It is in his ships that you should seek for your lost colonies!"

Yet damaging as these attacks were—that winter underwriters ceased to quote for voyages between British ports and the Continent, and the insurance rates of even American ships t
rading with England rose from 2
to
3
per cent—they could not alter the fact of sea power. British trade might be harassed, but French and European seaborne trade, outside the Black Sea and Baltic, had ceased to exist. Collingwood, writing from the Mediterranean in the spring of 1808, remarked that there was hot a trading ship upon the seas—"nothing but ourselves: it is lamentable," he wrote, "to see what a desert the waters are become." And behind that immense and solitary no-man's land the Royal Navy continued to gather in the lesser fruits of Trafalgar. During 1807 England added new islands
from the Dutch and Danish West
Indian possessions to her already immense spoils. Their rising trade and revenues were a steady, if at first unperceived offset to lost markets in Europe.