The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  At long last the first meeting of the Estates-General since 1614 was called at Versailles in order to raise taxes. What the king had not appreciated was how widespread and urgent was the French people’s desire for reform. With the force of a dam breaking, they created a new body called the National Assembly, the French nobility themselves voted to jettison their ancient privileges and together they proclaimed a brand new constitution based on the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man on 26 August 1789. This was influenced by the American Declaration of Independence, with its insistence on liberty, equality and man’s natural rights, which had enthused the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the revolution’s early leaders. But above all it was coloured by that classic Enlightenment document, the Social Contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like Locke, Rousseau held that government was a contract between the people and their rulers, though most crucial to the course of the Revolution was his belief in what he called the General Will of the People.

  But who was to identify this was precisely the problem. From the first, the French Revolution was accompanied by mob violence. So strong were English feelings about ending tyranny that the storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, notorious as a symbol of the ancien régime and the lettres de cachet, that Fox spoke for many when he hailed it as the greatest event ‘that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ The young poet William Wordsworth would reflect the feelings of a host of other young Romantics when he exclaimed that it was ‘bliss’ to be alive at such a time in the history of the world. Most English people felt a natural sympathy for the cause of individual freedom; they rejoiced that liberty was flourishing in a land which since the days of Louis XIV had been a byword for repression.

  But the Declaration of the Rights of Man was followed by more extreme behaviour when a mob forced the king and queen out of the Palace of Versailles and took them back to Paris and to what was captivity in all but name. Lafayette had to raise a regiment of middle-class national guards to restore order to a Paris where the army had looked on as the mob rampaged. When the new Constituent Assembly made Louis XVI a constitutional monarch, Pitt and the English government remained sympathetic to this curtailment of the tyranny of the absolutist Bourbon dynasty. A French constitutional monarchy would give the two nations facing one another across the Channel more in common. But what began with noble speeches about universal rights soon degenerated into terror and mob rule.

  In October 1790 by every boat refugees of the wealthier sort began to flee France with only the clothes they stood up in, warning that there was no making terms with the revolutionaries. They revealed how the furious peasants were paying no heed to what lawyers were doing in Paris–whether it was separating powers or establishing the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Centuries of being treated like beasts had at last provoked them and their Parisian counterparts, the Sansculottes, into behaving like beasts. The starving peasantry had started to go berserk: they were burning the châteaux where their forefathers had worked since time immemorial. They were looting castles, seizing gold, killing their masters indiscriminately, regardless of how well they had been treated.

  In Paris the constitutional monarchy with an Assembly became a revolutionary government which was continuously reinventing itself, but which ultimately depended on violence. Though Louis XVI remained king in name, by 1792 he, the queen and their two children had been made prisoners, and their friends feared the worst. As one observer related there soon became ‘reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn each of her children’.

  As the Revolution raged on, idealistically attempting to put right centuries of wrongs, disestablishing the Church, then getting rid of God and putting the more logical Cult of the Supreme Being in His place, renaming the months in a more descriptive way, no leader of the Assembly ever lasted for very long. After a few months he was always arrested for undefined crimes against ‘the People’. The real power in Paris was in the radical political association called the Jacobin Club. There the most advanced revolutionary thinkers, such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre, hammered out a Republic of Virtue which aimed to destroy all human traditions which got in the way of logic and their interpretation of the Will of the People. These leaders were fast becoming dictators under the cloak of the great revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.

  Of all the English contemporaries the reaction of Edmund Burke, mentor of the Rockingham Whigs, was both the most pessimistic and the most accurate. He who had been such a supporter of liberty in the past turned into a Conservative overnight. His famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France, written only a year after the storming of the Bastille, presciently foretold chaos. Then, he wrote, ‘Some popular general will establish a military dictatorship in place of anarchy.’ The appalled Burke now believed that it was not possible for mankind to tear up the past: human institutions needed to develop slowly. So strong were his views that, to Fox’s anguish, he publicly repudiated his old friend in the House of Commons.

  The French revolutionaries’ treatment of the royal family plunged Europe into war. Queen Marie Antoinette was the aunt of the Habsburg emperor and when the news got abroad that the king and queen were prisoners Austrian and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick were moved across the frontier to save them. But the mob responded to this threat to the Revolution with the September Massacres, a mindless slaughter of prisoners. In three days the people of Paris killed 6,000 royalist prisoners, bursting into the jails and murdering them where they stood. The heads of ordinary criminals joined those of friends of the royal family on pikes, to be paraded through the streets. All that autumn of 1792 the sound of the tocsin called the city and the citizens to arms. To shouts of ‘À la lanterne!’, which meant string them up on the streetlamps, the citizens of Paris complied.

  And then, to the horror of Europe, when the revolutionary committees summoned every French citizen to join the army in a levée en masse, this revolutionary army managed to defeat the Prussians. This news had an effect similar to the British defeat at Saratoga. It had never been imagined that raw recruits, untrained and untried in battle, though 50,000 strong and burning with desire to protect their homeland, would defeat the renowned Prussian troops at the Battle of Valmy. But they had, and they had driven them back across the French frontier.

  In response to the foreigners’ invasion, the revolutionaries announced that the monarchy no longer existed. In its place a republic was declared. Then, in October, the Revolution which Mirabeau and Robespierre had vowed would not be exported, crossed the frontier. Fighting battle after battle the levée en masse streamed across the continent, seizing several German towns, then Basel in Switzerland where they proclaimed another republic. Finally, having inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Austrians at the Battle of Jemappes, the French took Brussels and Antwerp. If the ragged masses who died in droves for their country were alarming–when one lay down another twenty patriots sprang up behind him–still more frightening to the governments of Europe were the Decrees of November 1792, which announced that the French armies would help all people wanting to recover their liberty. The thirty-one-year-old Madame Roland, the wife of one of the Assembly’s deputies, executed for no apparent reason, summed up the bewilderment of her contemporaries at what was happening to them with the words she uttered on the scaffold: ‘Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’

  Only a year before, Pitt had cut taxes and reduced British expenditure on arms because he was optimistic about the new constitutional French monarchy. He still thought Europe had never had more reason to expect peace. But events now followed one another so rapidly that even he was unprepared. In January 1793 the French king had received a hasty trial by committee, which bore no relation to a proper legal process. He was executed by that perfect eighteenth-century invention, the logical and efficient guillotine, which made executions faster and more humane.

  News of Louis XVI’s execution was greeted
with widespread revulsion in Britain. The British government’s reaction was immediate. To their surprise, the suave French ambassador Chauvelin and the special envoy, the elegant Bishop Talleyrand, the future prince, were told in no uncertain terms to leave the country within the week. In the House of Commons Pitt publicly deplored the fate of the king as an outrage against religion, justice and humanity. Unlike Britain, he said, where no man was too rich or too grand to be above the reach of the laws, and no man was so poor or unimportant as to escape their protection, the death of Louis XVI showed that in France neither applied.

  Pitt still refused to go to war immediately, as Burke urged him to. He could not see it as part of the British government’s job to launch a moral crusade purely on the ground that the French were ‘the enemies of God and man’, even though he felt it to be true. But he gave the French a stern warning. If France wanted to remain at peace with England, he told the Commons, she must show that she had renounced aggression and was going to stay within her borders, ‘without insulting other governments, without disturbing their tranquillity, without violating their rights. And unless she consent to these terms, whatever may be our wishes for peace, the final issue must be war.’ Unlike his father Chatham, Pitt the Younger believed in peace. But it had to be a peace that was real and solid, consistent with the interests of Britain and the general security of Europe.

  It had been growing fairly inevitable that Britain would go to war. The Revolution’s foreign policy threatened monarchies all over Europe by its mere existence. However, it was only after the revolutionaries had declared that ‘the Laws of Nature’ meant the important Scheldt estuary was open to all shipping that Britain was forced into the conflict. France had threatened the neutrality of Holland, which Britain was bound by treaty to defend. There was nothing for it. Reluctantly Pitt steeled himself to put an end to the peace and progress that he had pursued for ten years.

  But Pitt was pre-empted. The same day that he was speaking in the House of Commons, the men battling for power within France agreed to declare war on England and Holland. It was a war that would engulf Europe for the next twenty-three years and would not end until the Battle of Waterloo.

  The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815)

  During the next two decades of almost continuous war with France, the tolerant political climate of Great Britain underwent a dramatic change. Pitt had originally declared that this was not to be a war against ‘armed opinions’. It was to protect British commerce, which was threatened by French ships on the Scheldt. However, it soon became clear that fighting ‘armed opinions’ had to be its objective, since the French government had vowed to help all nations which rose against their rulers. Just as ‘Jacobite’ had been a catch-all phrase in England denoting an enemy of the state for half the eighteenth century, so the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ was to be in that century’s last decade and the first decades of the nineteenth.

  Only a few years after celebrating the Glorious Revolution’s hundredth anniversary, for the English the word ‘revolution’ had taken on the most fearful connotations. Apart from a short-lived ministry of 1806–7 during which they abolished slavery, the Whigs and their ideas were as firmly out of office and out of fashion as the Tories had been for two generations. Political conservatism was in vogue, and more to the point was in office. In the face of war and the threat to British institutions posed by sympathizers with the French Revolution, the rational liberal convictions of Pitt and of most of the political classes vanished so absolutely that it was hard to recognize the former friend of reform in the young prime minister.

  Even before the war Pitt had become alarmed by support for the Revolution. When a pamphlet entitled The Rights of Man, written by the radical Tom Paine and proposing an English republic, sold 200,000 copies in 1792, all further ‘seditious writing’ was forbidden by law. Paine was prosecuted and had to flee to France, escaping arrest by an hour thanks to a warning from the poet William Blake, who had had a prophetic dream about him. He was later elected to the French Convention. Once war commenced, a regime of complete repression was instituted. Pitt closed down the enthusiastic Corresponding Societies which had sprung up all over the country since the Revolution as a means of obtaining information about the great political experiment in France. In the new mood of suspicion most political clubs were considered nests of revolutionaries. If they would not abolish themselves, their members were imprisoned.

  To make the authorities’ work easier, in May 1794, habeas corpus, the foundation stone of English liberties, was suspended. This measure, which allowed the government to hold citizens in prison indefinitely while they were investigated for unspecified crimes, was opposed by only thirty-nine votes in the House of Commons. Moreover, contact with France was forbidden as a treasonable act punishable by death. Had it not been for the example set by Fox’s continuing brave outspokenness, in which he was followed by his nephew Lord Holland, the playwright Richard Sheridan and the young nobleman Charles Grey, it might not have been opposed at all. Many Whigs were becoming increasingly uneasy about their leaders’ opposition to the war. By July 1794 a large number of them, headed by the Duke of Portland and Edmund Burke, had crossed the floor to join Pitt’s Tory party.

  The war against Revolutionary France opened with Britain as a partner in the First Coalition, formed as a result of Pitt’s efforts in 1793 and including Holland, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Portugal and Sardinia. Britain’s allotted role was to concentrate on what she did best, which meant exploiting her large fleet. She was the only European country not to have conscription–indeed her army’s very existence had to be approved by Parliament every year. The fleet, on the other hand, was that of a powerful maritime nation, and was successfully used to preserve the sea routes and seize enemy colonies. The route to India was saved when in 1795 the British captured the Cape of Good Hope from Dutch settlers. In India itself at Seringapatam prompt action by the governor, Marquis Wellesley, brother of the future Duke of Wellington, prevented Tipoo Sahib endangering the colony by stirring up trouble on behalf of the French. But the effect of concentrating on the colonies was that Britain’s interventions by her army in Europe were too limited to be successful. Attempts to bring aid to the pockets of French royalist resistance in the Vendée in the west and to Toulon in the south were failures, while an army to the Austrian Netherlands under the Duke of York was run out of the country.

  What Britain could do, however, thanks to the trade surpluses now mounting in the Treasury, was to pay for the armies on the continent after the fashion of Pitt the Elder. She had reached this position thanks to the application of Watt’s steam engine, which propelled British industrial development into a different league from other European countries. The strength of the British fleet meant that British manufacturing exports and imports of raw materials from the colonies were almost unaffected by the war, while British manufactures were stimulated by the demand for materials from uniforms to tents to cannon balls. In an already reactive and practical industrial culture, a shortage of labour drove the ironmasters and factory owners, who were daily pushing invention forward in their factories, to greater heights of mechanization.

  Since the Austrian armies alone consisted of perhaps 300,000 highly professional soldiers, Britain and her allies believed that the combination of so many countries against a rabble would prove irresistible, that France would soon be defeated and forced to retreat behind her old frontiers. But the French Revolutionary Wars showed that the world had reached a new stage. Fighting a war was no longer just a question of military science. Beliefs too could provide a secret weapon. Wherever France’s Armies of the Republic marched, their call for ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ found an emotional response from those living under more repressive regimes, and they were welcomed as liberators. Nor did the amateur leadership in the French military matter at all. The armies under the ex-lawyer Lazare Carnot were honed into a magnificent new fighting machine. Where they were not magnificent, their enor
mous numbers as ‘the nation in arms’ made up for their defects, and they swept all before them. In 1794 the French humiliatingly drove out the Austrians from the Netherlands and severed the Habsburgs’ 300-year link with that country for ever.

  And the efficiency of the coalition armies on the continent was undermined by the fact that Britain’s main allies, Austria and Prussia, were far more interested in carving up the weakened kingdom of Poland with Russia than in eradicating the threat the French armies posed to the world order. After two years of war Prussia made peace with France, abandoning the coalition in order to finish off the partition of Poland (Russia, Austria and Prussia vowing to extinguish the name of Poland), while a mere two alarming encounters with the French armies had been enough to persuade Spain to ally with France. In addition, Holland had become a French puppet-state, the Batavian Republic. But Pitt had high hopes of the Austrian army, which still held Italy, for it was the largest in the world. Pitt also had information that after four years of war not only were the French armies suffering from exhaustion and lack of supplies, but the inexperienced government in Paris was running out of money. A peace might be arranged. But these were not conventional times. By October 1797, in an astonishing, almost miraculous campaign in Italy under a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French had expelled the Austrian army from Italy and changed the shape of the war.

  The British had first encountered Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the war in 1793 when the masterly tactics of the twenty-three-year-old had defeated the British fleet’s attempt to help the royalist resistance in the south of France by seizing Toulon. Napoleon was a small, thin, sallow-skinned, shabbily dressed artillery officer affectionately known to his men as the Little Corporal. After the Italian campaign he captured the world’s imagination as one of history’s greatest generals. Bonaparte began to be compared to Caesar and Alexander the Great rolled into one; and he certainly shared their dreams of conquest. During the Italian campaign he had thrown the Austrian defences into chaos by the swiftness of his forays, winning a series of victories that enabled him to overrun the entire peninsula. The portrait of a long-haired, windswept Napoleon holding a standard at the Battle of Arcola as he turns to urge his men on is perhaps the best-known image of him as a young man.