Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  It was less an unconscious realisation of this than a desire to be rid of an intolerable strain that had prompted the peacemakers. Summoned two years before to succeed his friend and patron, Pitt, as Prime Minister, Henry Addington—"that mass of conciliation and clemency" as his enemies called him—had staked everything on giving his exhausted country peace. Since every other nation had

  1 Wynne, HI, 126. 23

  abandoned the fight and since France under her new ruler had apparently liquidated the Revolution, there had seemed to him and his lanky Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, no purpose in further bloodshed. They had therefore used Nelson's victory at Copenhagen and Abercromby's invasion of Egypt to open negotiations with the young dictator in Paris. To prove their pacific intentions they had sacrificed all Britain's colonial conquests except Ceylon and Trinidad, and returned to France her West Indian, African and Indian colonies, to Spain Minorca, and to the puppet Dutch Republic the Cape, Demerara, Berbice, Malacca and the Spice Islands. They had also agreed, subject to some vague safeguards, to restore Egypt and Malta to their former owners, Turkey and the Knights of St. John. All they had asked of the First Consul as an equivalent was the preservation of the European status quo.

  On the assumption that they had secured it they had disarmed at almost indecent speed. Ten days after the signature of peace Addington in his first budget had abolished Pitt's income tax. With its yield mortgaged for many years and the national debt standing at double its pre-war figure, such a concession was only possible at the cost of drastic reductions in the armed forces. While Bonaparte continued to maintain vast armaments and used the raising of the blockade to replenish his empty dockyards, Great Britain disbanded the Volunteers and halved her Army. In conformity with national precedent the Grand Fleet at Torbay was broken up, the Sea Fencibles abolished and the line-of-battle ships in commission reduced from over a hundred to less than forty. Within a few months 40,000 sailors were discharged and hundreds of experienced officers relegated to half-pay.

  It was symptomatic of the general desire for peace that one of the leading advocates of disarmament should have been the great sailor who had saved England at Cape St. Vincent and by his blockade forced the First Consul to terms.1 Lord St. Vincent, the one member of the. Government in whom the country felt complete confidence, used his immense prestige to secure drastic economies in naval administration. Angered by the time-honoured corruptions of the dockyards, he forced a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry on his colleagues, silencing their feeble protests with the same unyielding sternness with which he had dealt with mutiny in the Fleet. While every ship cried out for repairs after long war, the country was shaken by revelations about fraudulent contractors, embezzling ropemakers and peculating shipwrights. Under the old First Lord's uncompromising policy of "brushing away the spiders," dockyard

  1 Napoleon himself admitted this a year after the armistice.

  hands were dismissed, contracts with private yards withdrawn and surplus stores sold off—in some cases to French agents. And this at a time when the greatest military Power the world had ever seen remained mobilised on the other side of the Channel!1

  Unlike the English, Bonaparte had not made peace because his people wanted liberty to trade. What he wanted was liberty to re-plan the world. For that he needed obedience to his will. Except for a remote and half barbarous Russia and the moribund dominion of the Turks, he had already secured it throughout the Continent. But the English with their chaotic notions of individual rights still resisted him. And since their selfish stranglehold on the sea prevented him from overcoming them in battle, he had sought peace as the only means of relaxing it. Before he could renew the struggle he needed oceanic trading bases from which to revive France's industries and time to replenish his naval arsenals. His adversaries in their folly had allowed him both.

  It was his plan to use the breathing space that had been given him to build twenty-five battleships annually. In six or seven years, with two hundred sail-of-the-line, he would be as invincible on sea as on land.2 Into the corrupt and indolent administration of the French marine—stagnant since the liquidation of its officers by the Terror— he would infuse the discipline, enthusiasm and efficiency that had made his armies the terror of the world. He would transform into impregnable fortresses the colonies and trading factories England had restored. Behind him a nation of more than thirty millions, drunk with military glory and avid for new conquests, was acclaiming him as the new Charlemagne and erecting in the Place Vendome a pillar like the column of Trajan to commemorate his victories.

  It was Bonaparte's belief that the English, seduced by his policy of recoiling to spring, would succumb without a struggle. In their individual greed and sloth they displayed a disregard for their aggregate interests so infatuate that their doom seemed only a question of time.3 And in the unthinking summer of 1802, it was easy for a foreigner to suppose that pleasure, moneymaking, social display and faction monopolised the English mind. Wordsworth, passing through London, described a society dressed only for show, "glittering like a brook in the open sunshine":

  1Minto, III, 257-8; Markham, 173, 178, 186-90; Barrow, 256, 276; Tucker, II, 144-62; Sherrard, 192 et set/.; Barbam, III, 17-21, 68-72.

  2 Las Cases, IV, 8. "

  3 Even Nelson, happy at last with his beloved Hamiltons at Merton, wrote complacently that all the world was at peace except Lord Grenville and his friends.

  "The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more."

  Balls and masquerades succeeded each other nightly, fine ladies with feathers crowded on to the stage to hear Mrs. Billington sing at the ( Opera, health-seekers listened to the music on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, the Gentlemen of the Marylebone Cricket Club played a match against the Gentlemen of Hampstead and Highgate for five hundred guineas, and in the West Country hungry clothworkers rioted against the new machines that robbed them of their hereditary livelihood. Meanwhile Parliament, after debating Sir Richard Hill's Bill for abolishing bull-baiting, dissolved in search of the suffrages of an indifferent country. Thereafter for several weeks the shops of Brentford were-shut, and an idle, cheering, rioting crowd blocked the Exeter Road and treated passers-by to that astonishing spectacle of disorder and tumult which was libertarian England's peculiar contribution to the art of human governance. And all the while Bonaparte went quietly on with his plans for subjugating the world.

  Yet in their individual capacities the islanders still gave him trouble. They seemed to suppose that by signing a Peace they had secured the right to trade wherever they chose in his dominions. When they discovered that he had refused to allow their Government to insert any trade agreement in the peace treaty, and that their ships and goods were still liable to seizure in French ports, many of them became extremely angry. Moreover the First Consul kept finding new evidences of their incorrigible itch for intrigue and meddling in other people's business. He even accused them of plotting his assassination with the Royalist and Republican refugees whom they sheltered. For like most despots who have risen suddenly, Bonaparte was inordinately suspicious. The very gullibility of the English made him suspect them of sinister designs.

  He had a more tangible grievance. He was not in the habit of being publicly criticised; in France the excesses of Revolutionary licence had been succeeded by a censorship more rigid than that of the Bourbons. It was difficult for Bonaparte to conceive of a newspaper not being subject to police supervision. Yet, in England-, Opposition and refugee journals published the most outrageous things about him without the Government stirring a finger. He used to lie in his bath every morning and have them read by an interpreter ; at any particularly outrageous passage he would bang the side of the bath with the guide rope and shout furiously " Il en a menti !"1

  This made for friction. The British Ministers, who suffered, poor men, from libels themselves,2 list
ened with sympathy to Bonaparte's protests but pointed out that they were debarred by the Constitution from interference. This failed to satisfy Ins logical Latin mind, since under that Constitution any Government with a parliamentary majority was apparently all-powerful. He therefore demanded the suppression of the more offensive newspapers and the punishment of their writers, naming Cobbett, the editor of Windham's intemperate Porcupine, and Peltier, a particularly offensive emigre journalist. In its anxiety to appease him the Government consulted its law officers and, after one more than usually gross breach of international good manners, instituted criminal libel proceedings against Peltier. The Prime Minister also personally circularised outraged newspaper proprietors on the need for restraint. But, as Bonaparte capped every libel by dictating some still more scurrilous passage for the official French Press, the flow of " reciprocal Billingsgate," as Fox called it, grew rather than diminished.3

  In more material matters the British gave little trouble. Throughout 1802 the First Consul was allowed to break one after another of the terms of the Peace. The status quo had been a fundamental condition of the armistice. Yet even before the definitive treaty was signed Bonaparte not only dispatched a force to the West Indies— ostensibly to subject the negro republicans of San Domingo to his rule—but claimed the American hinterland of Louisiana under a secret treaty with Spain. Simultaneously he embarked on a series of bloodless conquests in Europe as alarming as those made at the cannon's mouth. Ignoring his own guarantee of its independence, he partly dragooned, partly coaxed the delegates of the Cisalpine Republic to confer on him the Presidency of their puppet State, renaming it the Republic of Italy—an ominous hint to the remaining principalities in the peninsula. Thereafter his agents swarmed in every Italian capital, talking treaties and concessions, surveying forts and harbours and stirring up the populace to throw in their lot with their fellow-countrymen under the green, white and red

  1 Granville, I, 343-9; Farington, II, 38.

  2 One wag suggested that, as Ministers and the First Consul were equally calumniated, they should institute joint proceedings, it being the fate of greatness like theirs to be misunderstood by the vulgar.

  3Pellew, II, 75-6, 153-7; Castlereagh, I, 72-3; Auckland, rV, 160; Malmesbury, FV, 77. Lady Bessborough, a critic of the Government, wrote: "If Bonaparte choses to go to war for the newspapers a son loisir, we must fight through thick and thin; but do not let us imitate Le Moniteur and begin a war because the French newspapers are impertinent" —Granville, I, 345.

  tricolour of the Cisalpine Republic whose authorities encouraged an appearance of popular licence long suppressed in every other part of the French dominions. Yet it had been to secure the integrity of the Italian States that Britain had surrendered Minorca, and Porto Ferraro and agreed to evacuate Egypt and Malta.1

  By the autumn, intoxicated by a report from his agent in London that the accommodating Addington had agreed to abandon the Continent, Bonaparte ventured further. Having artificially separated the Canton of Valais from Switzerland in order to secure the exclusive use of the Great St. Bernard and Simplon passes for his armies, he suddenly incorporated Piedmont in his dominions to gain a similar control of the Mont Cenis. The only excuse he gave for this outrage was that it was not specifically forbidden by the Treaties of Luneville and Amiens. A few weeks later, on the death of its Grand Duke, he annexed Parma. Meanwhile, instead of withdrawing his troops from Holland as he had promised, he continued to quarter them on the Dutch, on the ground that English agents were stirring up disaffection against that country's Republican constitution.

  The British Government at first made no protest. Sunk in its summer dream of perpetual peace, it took its holidays by the sea. The King bathed and sailed in Weymouth Bay, legislators and their families on the Kentish coast admired the clear view of Calais in the September sunshine, and Pitt in the calm of Walmer Castle wrote to Addington, who was watering at Eastbourne, that since it seemed improbable that" the pacificator of Europe" would send over an army to avenge himself for a newspaper paragraph, he was about to exchange shooting for farming.

  Yet Bonaparte could not leave well alone. Having secured his position in North Italy and Holland at the beginning of October, he pounced on Switzerland. It had been a condition of the Treaty of Luneville, signed with Austria in the previous year, that he should withdraw his garrison from Switzerland. But with his usual adroitness he had used the occasion to stir up Swiss feeling against the bureaucratic constitution which Jacobin doctrinaires had imposed on the little Republic. When, relying on his encouragement, the peasants and petite noblesse of the mountain Cantons took up arms to overturn it, he promptly announced that his obligation to refrain from interference in Swiss affairs was at an end. Denouncing the

  1 Colonel Dyott, visiting Bologna and Turin, found swaggering ruffians wearing the Italian tricolour, trees of liberty and guillotines in the principal squares, the inns packed with French officers living free, the theatres full of filthy brawlers, the ballet "an obscene, bawdy display of naked women," the convents destroyed, the palaces and gardens devastated and "everything Frenchified according to the true bon patriot system."—Dyott, I, 227-9.

  federal patriots as counter-revolutionaries in English pay, he ordered General Ney to invade the country. The Helvetic Republic was ordered to submit or cease to exist. In an insolent proclamation from Lausanne General Rapp added insult to injury by telling the heirs of a thousand years of ordered liberty that their history showed they could not settle their affairs without the intervention of France.

  Before the French closed in, the Swiss appealed to England. That worthy Christian, Addington, was much moved ; the First Consul, he confided to a friend, had acted outrageously. The Cabinet met and, without considering the consequences, dispatched an agent to Switzerland with an offer of arms and money and a remonstrance to Paris. Couched in the time-honoured language dear, to British statesmen who, feeling the call to rebuke sin, lack the force to cast it out, this stated that his Majesty's Government must regard the exertions of the Swiss as the lawful efforts of a brave people to » recover their ancient laws and government. "The Cantons of Switzerland unquestionably possess in the same degree as every other independent State the right of regulating their own internal concerns . . . without the interposition of any foreign Powers."

  Nothing could have been better calculated to enrage the French dictator. For the British note raised the question which he claimed had been settled by the Peace—the exclusion of England from the Continent. In a furious temper he dictated a dispatch declaring that nothing would induce him to "deliver the Alps"—for so he described the independence of Switzerland—to a few hundred English mercenaries, and that, should these prating Ministers suggest that they had stopped him from doing anything, he would promptly do it. He also inserted a reminder in the Moniteur that Britain, not being a party to the Treaty of Luneville, could not appeal to its terms.

  The Government by its hasty action had placed itself in a dilemma. The independence of Switzerland could not be secured by the Navy or the capture of West Indian sugar islands. It depended on the joint action of the Continental Powers. Of such a coalition, for all Lord Hawkesbury's hurried dispatches to Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin, there was not the slightest sign. Bonaparte had taken the precaution of setting Europe by the ears over the affairs of Germany where a new Diet had met in August to "secularise," in other words confiscate, the ecclesiastical sovereignties of the Reich. By secretly promising advantages in turn to Prussia, Austria and the Teutonic clients of Russia and then encouraging them to wrangle over the spoils, he had so embroiled them with one another as to make concerted European action impossible.

  Isolated and confronted by overwhelming force and aware that a distant England was powerless to help them, the Swiss submitted. Their leader was thrown into the Castle of Chillon and a delegation waited on the conqueror for a new constitution. The "great little man in Paris" bestrode the world like a Colossus. There was nothing for the
Cabinet to do but to cancel the hasty orders sent to delay the evacuation of its garrisons fronibthe French and Dutch colonies and to inform Parliament that the cause of Switzerland had been abandoned. The "Doctor," as all the world called the Prime Minister, had only got a sore head for his warlike language.

  The British protest, though Addington privately boasted that he had caused the dictator to modify his pretensions, did nothing to stay Napoleon's outward march.' But it caused a grave split in British public opinion. During the crisis the country became divided between those who viewed the extinction of Swiss liberty with such horror that they wished to defend it as their own and those who argued that Britain, having made a treaty with France, had no right to go to war to make it better.1 On the one hand were enthusiasts like Windham who asserted that the Administration had in effect told the tyrant to go where he pleased so long as he kept his hands off England ; on the other were prudent lovers of peace like the evangelical Tory M.P. who wrote to the Prime Minister: "If Bonaparte chooses to interfere in the internal government of Switzerland, is it our duty or interest to try to prevent it? Were we not silent and neutral spectators at the partition of Poland ? Why should we break a peace which every friend to the country rejoices in?"2. The controversy parted even lovers. "Why do you hate and abuse the Swiss so much?" wrote Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower; "I do not know that they are a very polished and amiable people, but they certainly were the most hospitable and the happiest of any I ever saw." For some supporters of the Government, in their resentment of the growing fracas on the Continent, visited their resentment not on the dictator but on his victims.