Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (79 page)

¹
Creevey, I,
113.

²
Windham,
503.
See also Young,
450-1.

in a little harmless hooting by the mob and some rather foolish official persecution of leading agitators.
¹

Therefore, though Wellington complained of Opposition journals which kept " the people of England in a state of constant alarm and agitation," and urged the Government to take counter-measures to prevent every news-writer from running away with the public mind, their effect on policy was negligible. Ministers continued to support their General in Portugal, and the solider part of the public, preferring anything to the Grenvilles, stood by them and prayed for a victory before Lisbon and a continuance of the campaign.- "We are waiting," wrote Dorothy Wordsworth to Crabb Robinson, "with the utmost anxiety for the issue of that battle which you arranged so nicely by Charles Lamb's fireside." It was only a faction, not the nation
, that demanded an evacuation.

So the tide of French conquest remained held and then, unable to advance farther, began, as is the way with tides, to recede. Though no one knew it, except perhaps Wellington, its flood days were over for ever. Henceforward it was to ebb, at first slowly but with ever
-
growing momentum. For a month Massena clung to the waterlogged, wind-swept fields in front of Wellington's lines while his men grew daily more ravenous and his pack and draught animals died in thousands. The British, fed from their ships and snug in their entrenchments, were so sorry for the starving French sentries that they tossed them biscuits from the points of their bayonets and secretly traded them surplus rations and tobacco in return for brandy.
²
But, though the spirits of his men were high and reinforcements flowed into Lisbon both from England and the Spanish armies south of the Tagus, Wellington refused to at
tack. He knew the skill of Masse
na and the tenacity of the French, and he was not going to waste lives needlessly. "I could lick those fellows any day," he remarked, "but it would cost me 10,000 men and, as this is the last army England has got, we must take care of it."
³

On the morning of November 1
5th
the British outposts noticed that the haggard sentinels in front of their lines had grown strangely stiff: closer examination showed that they were dummies made of straw. The French had withdrawn during the night under cover of a fog. For the next four days the allies followed them northwards along the Tagus. "This retreat," wrote a soldier of the 71st

¹
The two years' sentence of imprisonment passed on William Cobbett, the editor of the "Political Register," created, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton said, a Jacobin out of the best anti-Jacobin of his age.

2
Costello,
56 ;
Journal of a Soldier,
98.

³
Fortescue
, VII,
555.

Highlanders, "brought to my mind the Corunna race. We could not advance a hundred yards without seeing dead soldiers of the enemy. . . . The retreat resembled more that of famished wolves than men. Murder and devastation marked their way; every house was a sepulchre, a cabin of horrors!"
¹
Those who had evaded Wellington's
orders to evacuate their homes
had paid dear for their disobedience.

On November 18th the French halted in front of the riverside town of Santarem, thirty miles north of the li
nes of Torres Vedras. Here Masse
na, in the hope that Wellington would throw aside his caution and attack him, had prepared a strong position and concentrated the bulk of his army. But the British Commander, restraining Craufurd from a frontal attack with the Light Division, persisted in his "safe game." He was at the head, he explained, of the only army remaining in being in the Peninsula or in Europe able to
contend with the French, and he was not going to lose a man of it without the clearest necessity. Four months of winter had still to go, and during that time Massena should have only two alternatives: to stay where he was and starve, or to face the horrors of a midwinter retreat over the mountains.

Of the two evils for the French, Wellington regarded the latter as the lesser. "I am convinced," he wrote to the Secretary of State, " that there is no man in his senses who has ever passed a winter in Portugal who would not recommend them to go now." Yet Massena did not go. Something might yet turn up to cause Wellington to weaken or disperse his forces. Concentrated in a strongly defended triangle b
etween Santarem, Thomar and Pun
chete, he waited with his savage, hungry men for a false move on the part of his opponent and a chance to get between him and Lisbon.

There was a further reason for Massena's stand. The British Government was now facing a new threat to its existence. At the beginning of the winter of 1810 the cloud of madness had returned to the old King's mind. It had been brought on by the death on November 2nd of his favourite daughter, the Princess Amelia. This time the darkness was impenetrable. The King seemed to be in some perpetual waking dream, now fancying himself hunting and hallooing with hounds, now commanding an army and leading it to battle, now talking with visionary objects—"perhaps, poor man," wrote Lady Bessborough, "the cold, the faithless and the dead."

Early in November Parliament met to consider the situation. The Opposition was jubilant. The roulette of parliamentary fortune

1
Journal of a Soldier,
100.
See also Smith, I,
37;
Simmons,
121;
Leach,
Journal,
179.

had suddenly swung violently in its favour. Looming in front of the Government and all its hopes, political and military, was the immense, grotesque, flouncing figure of the Prince of Wales. Nothing could now avert a Regency, and nothing, the Wings believed, their own immediate elevation to power by their old crony and protege.

On December 19th a Regency Bill was introduced, for the Government, unable to pass a single measure, could not administer the country without it. In it Perceval inserted the same constitutional limitations and safeguards for his master's prerogatives that had all but shipwrecked Pitt twenty years before. This was the Ministerial dilemma on which the Whigs counted; the Government could not out of common decency abandon the restrictions, and the childlike, touchy Prince of Wales would never, it was felt, tolerate them. His first action after the passage of the Bill would be the dismissal of the Ministers who
had clipped his rights. "By God!
" he was heard to exclaim on the day the Bill was introduced, " they shall not remain an hour!"

But Perceval never faltered. His duty was plain and he was resolved to go through with it, whether it cost him his office or not. It was precisely the kind of situation in which he was at his best. On a test of character he was invincible. The Whigs, wishing to gain favour with Carlton House, fought the Bill at every stage, and Perceval, almost single-handed in the long, wearing debates, carried it through with patience, persistence and imperturbable good-humour. Even the Opposition admitted that he had shown himself game and fought like a gentleman.
¹
The country, which admired such qualities above all others, was delighted. For the first time in his life the courageous little man found himself a public hero.

But the issue was now beyond the arbitrament of the ordinary citizen. The Government could not hope to retain office once the Prince assumed power. "We are a
ll, I think," wrote Lord Palmer
ston, the young Secretary-at-War, "on the kick and go!" The Whigs were already in conclave allocating offices: Whitbread, it was said, was to be Foreign Secretary and to negotiate a peace.
²
Napoleon, following the debates in Paris, was beside himself with joy. " If the Prince of Wales is put at the head of affairs," he announced, " Wellington's army will be recalled!"

Yet, just when the long frost of the Whig exclusion seemed about
to
break, the warming rays from Carlton House were withdrawn.

¹
Plumer Ward,
300, 330, 336;
Dudley,
123.
²
Plumcr Ward,
298-9."

Those who had put their trust in princes found their trust misplaced. The Regency Bill was due to become law on February 5th, 1811. Four days before, when the Grenvilles and their followers were in the very act of forming their Administration, a messenger arrived at the house where they were assembled. He was informed that they could not be disturbed, but he insisted that he must disturb them, for he came from the Prince. They replied that it was for the Prince that they were at work, for they were making a Government. Whereupon the messenger told them to spare themselves further trouble, for no Government was to be made. The Prince had decided to retain his father's advisers.
¹

Thus it came about that Napoleon's hoped were dashed. " Prinny" had turned round short upon his friends. A chance whim—the influence, some thought of the reigning mistress, Lady Hertford, or resentment, according to others, at the Grenvilles' patronising ways, or, as some believed, a spasm of genuine filial feeling—had kept the King's Ministers in power. At the opening of the new Session on February 12th, .the Speech from the Throne reaffirmed the nation's resolve to persist in Portugal and referred in glowing terms to Wellington whom the Whigs had been denouncing as an incorrigible blunderer.
²

The Regency's
first public act was to commit
itself to the war in the Peninsula. On the following day the City was raised into sudden joy by the news of the surrender of the Mauritius—the principal French base in the Indian Seas and the last of Napoleon's colonies. The Government, which Wellington had predicted could not last six months, was showing a surprising resilience. Though no man alive could have foreseen it, it was to last for twenty years.

While Perceval held the lines at Westminster, Wellington kept his around the French position at Santarem and watched his enemy growing daily weaker. He made no attempt to snatch a victory, for he knew that hunger and disease would do his work as quickly and far more cheaply than guns and bayonets. Nor did he Seek by any showy triumph to draw Massena's selfish, sluggish colleagues from Andalusia and northern Spain to his aid. It was only
necessary to wait patiently for
everything to be added. "If we can only hold out," he wrote, "we shall yet see the world relieved."

¹
Plumer Ward,
376-7, 383;
Dudley,
125.

²
Lord Carlisle at Christmas assured old Lady Spencer that "Massena had not retreated but taken a better position and placed us in a worse; that Lord Wellington was no general at all, but fell from one blunder to another, and the most we had to hope for was his being able to embark quietly and bring his troops in safety back to England, which he thought very doubtful."—Granville, II,
372.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

The Turn of the Tide

" In the War
in which we are engaged, no man
can pretend to say how long it will last."

Wellington.

T

he
fourth French offensive against Portugal had failed. Lisbon still survived and the British retained their hold on the Tagus. By an inflexible exercise of will and sound judgment Wellington had done precisely what he had said he would do, though a few months before scarcely a man in England or even in his own army had thought it possible. "Being embarked," he had written, "in a course of military operations of which I hope to see the successful termination, I shall continue to carry them on to their end."
¹

Yet, though he had defeated the enemy's offensive
, he had made no attempt to tak
e it himself. His plan did not admit of risks, and he would not deviate from it by a hair's breath. So long as his adversary chose to re
main entrenched among the hills
and marshes around Santarem—one of the strongest positions in Portugal—time and hunger were on Wellington's side. He did not intend to give the wily victor of Zurich the slightest opportunity. He preferred, he told Ministers, the sure game and the one in which he was likely to lose the fewest men.

Massena clung on manfully. In a starving match in which the dice were loaded against him, he persisted where almost any other commander would have despaired. He wrung sustenance—of a sort —out of the very rocks and fed his men on roots and garbage; it could scarcely, wrote the British General, be called subsisting. Where the latter had given his foe a month in which to starve, the old Marshal held out for three. It was an astonishing example of what a French army could do.