Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (61 page)

For, in Europe as in Spain, the exercise of the new Charlemagne's will was so vehement and unscrupulous that he invariably drove those opposed to it to desperation. It was this that Talleyrand feared. It was impossible for Napoleon to leave his conquests alone; he had perpetually to re-mould them to his will. He had found Germany divided, politically unconscious, and ready to subscribe to the revolutionary ideology of the Revolution. Yet within a year of his victory over Prussia, his incessant interference, extortion and military tyranny were already creating a dangerous German nationalism round a single point—hatred of himself and France. In June, 1807 Crabb Robinson, who five years before had witnessed the dawn of radical idealism in middle-class Germany, could scarcely discover a partisan of Napoleon. His foremost admirers were now rabidly opposed to him. Typical was Beethoven, who re-dedicated his Eroica Symphony to the
memory
of a great man, and Fichte whose cosmopolitan indifference was transformed by the shooting of a Nuremberg bookseller into a fiery patriotism. The latter's " Addresses to the German People," delivered in Berlin during the winter of

¹
Jackson, II,
360-1.

1807-8, touched chords of feeling throughout the long-divided Reich.

In Prussia, where Frederick William III had entrusted the government of a ruined State to the liberal administrator, Stein, Napoleon had been quick to stamp out—as he supposed—the reviving flame of patriotism. In December, 1808, Stein, proscribed by imperial decree as "an enemy to France and the Confederation of the Rhine," was forced to fly to Austria. Here, like other apostles of a German revival, he found what seemed at the time the only focus for the latent nationalism of his race. The Court of Vienna might be frivolous, hidebound and incurably inefficient. Yet, despite two defeats in the past thirteen years Austria, was still a great Power. For centuries the rampart of Christendom against the Turk, compounded of half a dozen fighting races—Teutons, Magyars, Tyrolese, Croats, Czechs, Poles—she could put an army of more than 300,000 well-trained men into the field. After Austerlitz she had played a waiting part, watching the Russian campaign in Poland with what seemed to Englishmen a craven neutrality and participating in the outward forms of Napoleon's New Order. She had accepted his Continental System, closed her ports to Britain's trade and even declared war on her. Yet all the while she was secretly preparing for a renewal of a struggle which she knew to be inevitable. In the summer of 1808, encouraged by the news from Spain, she had established a National Landwehr, embodying the French conception of a nation in arms. Under the direction of the Archduke Charles—the ablest soldier in central Europe—her arsenals were being replenished, her artillery re-horsed and her army reorganised in
corps d'armee
on the Revolutionary model. And while they continued to return soft answers to Napoleon's remonstrances, the young Emperor Francis and his Minister, Count Stadion, patiently prepared for war. After the fall of the Spanish Bourbons it seemed their only hope. In the autumn of 1808 they opened secret negotiations with England.

It was this circumstance, prematurely alluded to in London a month before Corunna, that brought matters to a head. It had been the chief reason that had sent Napoleon hurrying back from Spain to Paris. Once more the old protagonists, Teuton and Gaul, were moving into the lists, and it was to England's interest to ensure if not to precipitate the clash. Though her statesmen, grown cautious, refused Austria's request for another subsidy on the ground of prior commitments in Spain, they made it plain that they would assist a war against the common enemy with all their forces.

For, where his idol Pitt had thrice
failed, Canning saw his chance
to overthrow the Revolution militant by a fourth and final coalition. Though Russia and Prussia still dallied in the tyrant's camp, Austrian blows in the Danube and British constancy in the Peninsula might again reanimate Europe. For this reason the Foreign Secretary, resenting Moore's retreat to Galicia, had wanted to ignore his demand for empty transports and send them out filled with troops to hold Corunna. Later he had persuaded his colleagues to hurry away a division to Cadiz to serve as the focus of a new offensive in Andalusia. But this had shipwrecked on the Spaniards invincible suspicion of the heretic "
rubios"
as they called the British, from their fancied resemblance to Judas Iscariot.
¹
After waiting five weeks cooped up in their transports while the Governor of Cadiz and the Supreme Junta made excuses to keep them out of the port, the troops were recalled to Lisbon.

By this time Ministers had resolved to concentrate their effort in Portugal. To this they were persuaded by Castlereagh's persistent advocacy of a report drawn up by Sir Arthur Wellesley. Its thesis was that, with a Portuguese army disciplined by British officers and drill sergeants, 20,000 or at the most 30,000 British troops could hold Lisbon against anything up to 100,000 French. What particularly commended this plan to the Government was its modest demand on man-power; indeed its author stated that any larger force would at present be out of question since everything it needed would have to come from England—arms, ammunition, ordnance, clothing, accoutrements, even flour and oats.

Apart from reluctance to commit the country's entire striking force for a second time to so unpopular a theatre of war, the Government had an additional reason for wishing to husband the Army. With European hostilities imminent, it needed men elsewhere. On the one hand the agents of Austria and the German patriots were pressing for a British diversion on the Dutch or Friesian coast to draw off forces that would otherwise be used on the Danube and Elbe. On the other the Admiralty had been issuing repeated warnings that Napoleon was planning an invasion of England or Ireland from Antwerp. Ever since Canning had blighted his Baltic design the revengeful Corsican had been building a battlefleet in the Scheldt, whose new dockyards he vaunted as a pistol pointed at the head of England. It was a quarter from which England was far more vulnerable than from the shallow harbours of the Channel and the storm-bound ports of the Bay of Biscay.

The moment offered an opportunity that might never recur for

¹
Always depicted in Spanish ecclesiastical art with red hair. "We had this additional claim to be called
rubios,"
wrote Wellesley, "that we wore red coats."—Stanhope,
Conversations,
104.

nipping such a project in the bud. There were ten French ships of the line already in service in the Scheldt, ten more building at Antwerp and Flushing and several more believed to be on the stocks. On March 24th, 1809, Sir David Dundas, the new Commander-in-Chief, was summoned to the Cabinet and asked if he could furnish 16,000 troops for an immediate attack on Walcheren and Flushing. The stiff old Scots martinet, however, was not encouraging; several more months, he held, would be needed before the first-line battalions had recovered from Corunna. Like Pitt and Melville before them, Portland and his colleagues still found the country's military forces too small for her opportunities. For nearly two years Castlereagh had been doing everything possible—within the limits of a stubbornly libertarian system—to increase the strength of the Army. But the casualties of the campaign of 1808 had been heavy, and at the New Year the total of effectives stood at only 200,000, of whom 22,000 were serving in the Mediterranean and 63,000 more beyond the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.
¹

The Government, therefore, decided to abandon the idea of a sudden raid and prepare for a major expedition at midsummer. By that time the Corunna veterans would be ready for the field and at least 16,000 militiamen recruited to the Line by a recent Act of Castlereagh's. By then, too, it was hoped that Austrian victories, a rising in Germany and a successful British campaign in Portugal would be making such inroads on French reserves that the defence of Antwerp against a large force would be impracticable.

The situation was further complicated by the French fleet's escape from Brest. For some days fears were felt for Ireland; then the missing vessels were located under the batteries of Aix Roads close to the Spanish frontier. The Channel Fleet under Lord Gambier followed and resumed its watch, but the enemy's presence in that exposed spot was disturbing. For his ships, which included ten of the line, constituted a threat not only to communications with Portugal but also to the West Indies, where an offensive had just opened against the French colonies. In the middle of March England had learnt that Lieutenant-General Beckwith with 10,000 troops from Barbados had captured Martinique. Further expeditions were known to be preparing against the neighbouring islands, and great importance was attached to them in the City which, since the closing of the Continent, had grown increasingly dependent on the West Indian trade and correspondingly sensitive to privateers. Any reinforcement of the islands which harboured the latter would be certain to have unfortunate repercussions.

¹
Fortescue, VII,
33-5.

The Cabinet therefore adopted drastic measures. On April
3rd
Captain Lord Cochrane of the
Imperieuse
frigate arrived in the Basque Roads with a special mission from the First Lord to drive the French battleships from their anchorage with fireships and explosion vessels. Thereafter events followed one another at dramatic speed. On the 8th the Archduke Charles issued a proclamation to the German people announcing that his army was marching to secure their liberties and inviting them to repudiate their puppet rulers. At the same time the Tyrolese mountaineers rose against the pro-French monarchy of Bavaria and, renouncing the laws imposed upon them since the Peace of Pressburg, reaffirmed their ancient allegiance to the Hapsburgs. Within a few days they had compelled the surrender of 6000 French and Bavarians.

On the night the Austrians crossed the Inn Cochrane launched his explosion vessels and fireships against the French. Since his arrival in the Fleet words had passed between him and Gambier, who bitterly resented the younger officer's presence and the extraordinar
y mission on which Lord Mulgrave
had sent him. The Commander-in-Chief not only felt deeply affronted, but he deplored the form of warfare which the Cabinet had adopted. He was a man of deep and—as some felt—misdirected religious feelings,
¹
which had already been outraged by the part he had been forced to play in the bombardment of Copenhagen. To destroy an anchored fleet at night with infernal machines struck him as diabolical. What he disliked even more was the proposal to use battleships against shore defences in shoal water at the instance of a subordinate; it outraged all his notions of naval strategy and discipline.

The night of April nth was black and stormy. Cochrane with a lieutenant and four seamen manned the leading vessel in which fifteen hundred barrels of gunpowder had been cased with logs topped by thousands of grenades and shells. Behind her came another explosion vessel and nineteen fireships. As they approached the formidable boom which guarded the French fleet, their crews lit the fuses and swarmed into the boats to begin their long, hazardous pull back against gale and tide to the
Imperieuse.
Only a few of the fireships reached the enemy's line, but their moral effect, as Cochrane had foreseen, was terrific. Cutting their cables to escape the surge of flame and explosion, the French battleships drifted helplessly away from the protection of the Fort Aix batteries on to the Palles shoal. By the morning of the 12th all but two were aground.

¹
Too much of a psalm-singing man." Lady Elizabeth to Augustus Foster,
17th
April,
1809.
Two Duchesses,
324.

But the British Fleet, a dozen miles distant, never moved. Instead of going in to engage, it remained aloof and unconcerned on the horizon. All morning Cochrane kept signalling that the enemy was at its mercy. At last, as the French flagship was being re-floated, he went in to engage with his solitary frigate and, destroying one stranded giant himself, by dint of distress signals stung the angry Gambier into dispatching three battleships which finished off three more. The fight was then called off by the Admiral's orders.

Thus—though the country hailed it as a victory and Gambier was honourably acquitted by the Court Martial which the indignant Cochrane demanded, and even received the thanks of Parliament—a chance was missed of inflicting a more shattering blow to Napoleon's hopes than any to be expected from the large and costly army now being laboriously assembled. The weapon of sea power, so potent in the hands of genius, lost its edge when wielded by the unimaginative and irresolute. Like Duckworth in the Dardanelles, Gambier—a brave and capable officer in subordinate station—proved unworthy of Nelson's heritage. With the latter's death and the retirement of Cornwallis, Barham and St. Vincent, something seemed to have passed from the great Service. Yet its basic power remained—the stranglehold round Europe's coasts behind which Britain's growing trade and armies continued to move freely and unmolested.

Less than a week after that fiery night in Aix Roads Sir Arthur Wellesley crossed the Bay on Ins way to Portugal. Officially exonerated by the Court of Enquiry on the Cintra Convention, he had been appointed
Do
the command of the expeditionary force after a tussle in the Cabinet. The clamour of the mob and the threat of the halter had not shaken his nerve, and he remained the same cool customer he had always been. Sailing from Portsmouth on April 15th he was warned on the first night at sea that his ship was in danger of foundering. " Oh, in that case," he remarked,
"I
shall not take off my boots!"