Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (9 page)

Castlereagh wished to avoid war as much as any man: But he saw that, though no present help could be looked for from Europe, his country must make a stand before long or face disaster. To delay until the cowed nations of the Continent were ready to fight would be to allow France to build up overwhelming strength. Everything pointed to what hitherto only a few had seen: that Napoleon had made peace only to secure a better position for waging war. Any further demand on his part must be resisted. If the country would only support the Government, Britain might sustain the struggle alone for three, four, or perhaps even ten years, until Europe awoke.
¹

For Castlereagh's judgment was informed by a sober and practical optimism very different from the by now almost hysterical pessimism of the Windhams and Grenvilles. He saw the country's peril* as clearly as they, but he also saw her strength. Whatever Britain in her search for peace had yielded, she had not abdicated the source of her power. She had the tireless valour and tenacity of her people, the first Navy in the world and an inexhaustible Merchant Marine

¹
Castlereagh, V, 29-38.
.

based on expanding global trade. Provided that public spirit was aroused—a work which Bonaparte was fast performing—all might be saved. But not an inch more ground must be given up. " What I desire," Castlereagh wrote, "is that France should feel that Great Britain cannot be trifled with."

Thus the First Consul, having won all the early rounds of the diplomatic game and tricked Britain at every turn, was confronted with a belated and most irritating display of obstinacy. A few weeks previously the Addington Administration, meekly repudiating three centuries of English history, was apparently willing to abandon Europe to the rule of a single nation, while the islanders, "loose, incoherent atoms,"
¹
seemed sunk beyond recall in greed, torpor and apathy. Now they had unaccountably jibbed. In his instructions, issued in November, the new British Ambassador to Paris, Lord Whitworth, was directed to insist on his country's right to intervene in the affairs of the Continent. Without making a formal demand, he opened his mission by hinting at her right to compensation for breaches of the
status quo.

The British decision to stand came at an inconvenient time for Bonaparte. He was not yet ready to resume war. His dockyards were only partially re-provisioned after the blockade, the ocean bases which he needed for future operations were not in his hands, and such of his fleet as was seaworthy was on the far side of the Atlantic suppressing negro republicans in San Domingo. News had just reached him that the treachery by which his expedition had overwhelmed the black Republic had been matched by the treachery of the climate. Within a few weeks the victors, like the British before them, had been decimated by yellow fever. With the resources of the French ports being strained to breaking point to retrieve the situation, war with the first naval power in the world would have been gravely inconvenient.

He, therefore, tried to temporise while tricking or scaring the English out of their defiant mood. He was not successful. His attempts to please no longer carried conviction. Though he bestowed his most fascinating smiles on English visitors and talked ostentatiously of projects for reviving French trade, he failed to make any impression in responsible* quarters. When, fishing for the goodwill of the Prince of Wales, he spoke at a Levee of the interest he took in his affairs, his gracious message was only regarded at Carlton House as insolence. Moreover, try as he might to play the international philanthropist, the old Adam of Jacobinism kept breaking through.

¹
Minto, III, 271.

A North Country baronet, who applied to him for the return of some pictures seized in Venice, was met with a jocular assurance that they were far too fine to be parted with and an offer to show them to him at St. Cloud.
¹

On the main point on which Bonaparte required satisfaction, the British remained immovably obstinate. When, to offset their claims to compensation in Europe for the violated
status quo
,
he demanded the early evacuation of Malta in accordance with the Treaty, he encountered a rock. Over Egypt they made no difficulty; the delay in the departure of their troops, Whitworth explained, had been purely technical and was at an end. But to withdraw from Malta while every condition on which they had agreed to surrender it remained unfulfilled, they politely but firmly refused. For despite repeated applications, neither the revenues from Spain, France and Italy which were to have supported the restored Order of St. John nor the guarantees of the island's independence by the European Powers stipulated for in the Treaty, had been forthcoming. To hand it over without these to a penniless and corrupt Order, they explained, would be to place it at Napoleon's mercy.

Malta was a barren rock offering little in itself either to England or France. The fortifications of its capital, Valetta—long the terror of Tunisian and Algerian pirates—could add nothing to the First Consul's control of the Continent. Yet, if he was again to carry his conquests eastwards, it was vital for him to deny its anchorage to the British Fleet. It was for this that he had seized it from the Knights of St. John on his voyage to Egypt in '98; to expel him the British had besieged Valetta for two years. They had only agreed to restore it to its former owners on condition that Bonaparte withdrew from Southern Italy and the Ionian Isles. Now that he was again edging towards the Levant and had secured a potential stranglehold on the overseas passage to India by the return of the Cape to the Dutch, they dared not relinquish the one remaining obstacle to a new French drive on Egypt and the overland route to the East. Though they admitted the two thousand Neapolitans who, under the Treaty, were to garrison the island for a year, their redcoats remained in the fortifications. Their resolve was confirmed when, on the election of an independent Grand Master for the reconstituted Order of St. John, the messenger carrying the news to the Papal nominee in England was stopped in Paris by the First Consul, who substituted a message of his own ordering him to hasten to his Court and on no account to communicate with the British Government.

¹
Malmesbury, IV, 195-6; Argyll, I, 35; Plumcr Ward, 70; Browning, 98-9, 103-5, 107; Minto,
in,
273.

So long as there was a chance for his projects in the West, Malta was not vital to Bonaparte's plans for world dominion. The earth was round and he could shatter the flimsy British commercial web as easily in one hemisphere as the other. His West Indian colonies had been restored, Spain with her transatlantic Empire was his dependent, and his secret treaty with her had secured him the hinterland of Louisiana. Already he and his ally owned nearly twice as much American soil as Britain and her revolted colonies. In a few years of peaceful development his inexhaustible energy might create a new France across the Atlantic far more powerful than the haphazard, commercial empire of the English. With this and the fleet he planned to build it would be easy to wrest their sceptre of sea power and world trade.

For a few weeks, therefore, in the Christmastide of 1802, the First Consul trifled with the idea of letting the British keep Malta in return for a free hand in Europe. But with the New Year disastrous tidings arrived from San Domingo. Twenty-five thousand French troops were dead of yellow fever, including their commander, Bonaparte
's brother-in-law, General Lecle
rc. Still more fatal to his Western project was the alarm of the United States at the threat to the Gulf of New Orleans. The bare rumour of restrictive measures in the Mississippi valley had roused a hornet's nest. Talleyrand's plan to stretch a French belt from the Caribbean to the Pacific and enclose the Americans " within the limits which nature seemed to have traced out for them" broke on the rough, unyielding surface of American character. Faced by a threat to his dreams of the future peace and unity of the western Hemisphere, the pacific President Jefferson prepared for war and sent James Monroe to Paris to urge the immediate resale of West Florida and New Orleans to the young Republic.
¹

Bonaparte might tame freemen with the bayonet in Switzerland but he could scarcely do so across three thousand miles of ocean with the British Navy on his flank. He saw that he was beaten and, like the great man he was, cut his losses. For a few weeks at the beginning of 1803 he pretended to fit out a new Western expedition, causing the British Ambassador to write jubilant letters about efforts to achieve the impossible. But in an interview in his bathroom with his brothers, Joseph and Lucien, who favoured pacific expansion in America in preference to a clash with England, he announced his intention of selling Louisiana. When they suggested that the Legislature might oppose such a sacrifice, he sprang into the air

¹
The American Minister in Paris told Whitworth that the transfer of Louisiana to France would unite every American in Britain's cause.—Browning. 37.

with a peal of scornful laughter and drenched his" brethren to the skin.

· ·······

From this moment all Bonaparte's plans turned on the destruction of England in the East. On January 15th he issued secret instructions to General Decaen, an ambitious young Anglophobe, to proceed as Captain-General to Pondicherry, taking counsel
en route
with the newly-restored Dutch authorities at the Cape. In India he was to open negotiations with the native princes for the expulsion of the British. Should war break out before September, 1804, he was to fall back on some
point d’
appui,
such as Mauritius, which could be held against a hostile fleet-In the meantime, as part of the grand design for securing stepping-stones to the East while the French fleet was being re-built, it was necessary to get the British out of Malta. Since they could not be coaxed, they must be bullied. Napoleon wasted no time. At the end of January, 1803 he showed his strength. On the 29th he made a threatening speech to the Swiss delegates in Paris; sooner than allow the English to meddle in their affairs, he told them, he would sacrifice a hundred thousand men. Next day he published in the
Moniteur
a report on the state of Egypt by Colonel Scbastiani, a young swashbuckler who had just returned from a pretended "trade" mission in North Africa and the Levant. The Report, which only mentioned trade incidentally, was couched in arrogant and provocative terms. It stated that the Arab, Greek and Mameluke subjects of the Turkish Empire were longing for deliverance, that the departing British troops at Alexandria were weak and disorganised and that
Egypt was ripe for immediate re
conquest.

But though, as Bonaparte had anticipated, publication of this document diverted French opinion from the West Indian disaster, its effect in London was the exact opposite of what he intended. Instead of terrorising the Cabinet, the Sebastiani Report stiffened its resistance. British fears for Egypt and the Ottoman Empire were now confirmed by the First Consul's official journel. Some new annexation, dressed up in the usual tinsel of Republican philanthropy, would doubtless follow. To yield what Whitworth called " the rock of Malta" now would be insanity. To Bonaparte's demand for the Treaty and nothing but the Treaty, Ministers replied by demanding the vanished
status quo
on which it had been based. Nothing, they instructed their Ambassador, would induce them to leave Malta till they had received restitution for its violation.
¹
When Bonaparte learnt of his failure to intimidate London he

¹
C. H. F. P.,
I, 316-17; Browning, 56-7, 61-3, 66-8; Castlereagh, V, 75.

sent for Lord Whitworth. Seating himself at the other side of a table on which he placed both elbows, he warned him that he must make his views clear. His sacrifices for peace, he declared, had been in vain: the Treaty of Amiens had produced nothing but mistrust. The English had repaid his efforts by libels in the Press and warmongering speeches in Parliament. They had offered a refuge to his enemies and had allowed them to revile him in their newspapers and plot his assassination. And now they had the effrontery to refuse to evacuate Malta—a breach of treaty which no consideration could make him condone. He would sooner see them in possession of the Faubourg St. Antoine! Every wind from across the Channel brought enmity and hatred. His patience was exhausted.

He then spoke of Egypt. British alarms at his intentions were unwarrantable: had he had the slighest inclination to seize it he could have done so at any time, and in the face of their puny and now departed garrison. Egypt must inevitably be his in the end. But it was not worth his while to go to war for it. He had nothing to gain by war. He knew that invasion—the only means he had of disciplining England—would be a dangerous enterprise. Why, then, after raising himself from little more than a common soldier to the summit of the greatest State in Europe, should he risk all in such a gamble ? None the less, if forced to it by English obstinacy, he would not hesitate and would place himself at the head of his troops. Such was their spirit—and here Whitworth's mind recurred to the five or six swashbuckling generals loitering in the ante-chamber—that army after army would be found ready for the attempt.