Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  With forty millions and the Revolutionary dynamic at his back

  Napoleon could sooner or later leave England high and dry. No colonial acquisitions in the under-inhabited outer Continents could avail so small a nation unless she could find allies and bases nearer home; indeed the conquest of malarial sugar islands only drained still further her supplies of trained man-power. In the end even her Navy might be outbuilt by an adversary with a larger population and coast-line. Keeping the seas in all weathers, its ships were constantly exposed to tempest and strain and its dockyards to a burden of repair which restricted new construction. Napoleon's ships, on the other hand, remained in harbour, so that, once arrears in maintenance had been made good, his yards could be employed wholly on new construction.

  There was a further defect in the British blockade. To make it effective an island moored across the trade routes of western Europe had to extend its naval stranglehold across the Mediterranean. Only by sealing the southern shores of the Continent could she deny her foe a bridgehead into Asia and Africa. But the island bases on which she had hitherto depended for this—Corsica, Elba, Minorca—had been relinquished at the Peace or before, and, though she held Gibraltar and Malta, neither was of much use against the French arsenal at Toulon.1 Only Nelson's inexhaustible resource enabled Britain to maintain her Mediterranean blockade at all. Dependent for supplies on the neutral islands of Sardinia and Sicily—neither of which was safe from French attack—and on a Spain which, lying athwart his communications, might at any moment enter the war against him, the British Admiral's position was one of growing jeopardy. The whole Italian mainland was under French control, with St. Cyr's army waiting in Calabria to pounce on Sicily, Greece or Egypt.

  From his first arrival, therefore, Nelson repeatedly appealed to London for troops to protect Sicily and Sardinia. "I have made up my mind," he told Lady Hamilton, " that it is part of the plan of that Corsican scoundrel to conquer the Kingdom of Naples. ... If the poor King remonstrates, he will call it a war and declare a conquest." The only certain remedy was to forestall him by occupying Messina. But the Government was too concerned with securing England against invasion to spare the troops. It even recalled from Malta the last remnants of the small but well-trained army with which Abercromby had conquered Egypt two years before.2

  1 "Malta and Toulon arc entirely different services; when I am forced to send a ship there I never see her under two months."—Mahan, Nelson, II, 195.

  2 Nicolas, V, 82-3, 85, 96-7, 108-n, 13147, 174, 193.

  Beyond Sicily was the Levant and the misgoverned provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Here was a vacuum at the point where Europe opened on to Asia. In the course of nature a vacuum has to be filled, and it was plain that Napoleon meant to fill it. Though his sea passage to the Levant was barred by Nelson's fleet, there was an alternative route along the shores of the Adriatic and Aegean. With Austria's neutrality secured, a Franco-Russian partition of the Balkans might turn the whole British position in the Orient. "I cannot help thinking," wrote Nelson, " that Russia and France understand each other about the Turkish dominions. If so, Egypt will be the price."1 And Egypt, guarding the door to Africa and the overland route to India, Napoleon had once described as the most important country in the world.

  At heart, even though they could not see its dangers, the British people were tiring of the defensive. Whatever the temper of their politicians, their natural instinct was to attack. Under the right leaders they always did so. Commodore Hood and his "Centaurs," finding that the barren and precipitous Diamond Rock interfered with their blockade of Martinique, hoisted guns up its supposedly inaccessible cliffs*2 and used it to impede the' main channel to the principal port of the French Antilles. Held by a young lieutenant and a hundred seamen and officially rated in the Navy List as His Majesty's sloop Diamond Rock, it defied for more than two years every attempt to reduce it. At the other side of the world twenty-seven English merchantmen, sailing towards the Malacca Straits from China, encountered a French battleship and four cruisers off the island of Pulo Aor. Unescorted and armed only with 18-pounders, they formed line of battle at the senior captain's signal, and behaved so aggressively that the raiders, fearing a trap, turned tail and left them to pursue their way unmolested. It was characteristic of British practice that when the victorious ships anchored in the Downs after a six months' voyage, though their leader was knighted and given a pension by the East India Company, their crews were pressed as a matter of course into the Royal Navy.3

  To such a people a purely passive role was demoralising. Once they had awoken from the Volunteer Colonel's dream of a speedy

  1 To Addington, 16th July, 1803. Nicholas, V, 136. Young Lord Aberdeen, who was in the Morea that autumn, snared these suspicions—a fact which many years later may have helped to bring about the Crimean War, See C. F. P., I, 330.

  2 "Were you to see how along a dire and, I had almost said, a perpendicular acclivity the sailors hang in clusters hauling up a four-and-twenty pounder by hawsers, you would wonder. They appear like mice hauling up a little sausage. . . . Believe me, I shall never take my hat oft" for anything less than a British seaman."—Naval Chronicle, XII, 205.

  3 Farrington, II, 272.

  invasion, culminating in Bonaparte's death in a Kentish meadow and a triumphant peace, their talent for grumbling and faction reasserted itself. Already Fox—"turning his huge understanding loose,"—was deploring the war and pooh-poohing the invasion.

  A timorous self-interest was not enough to inspire the English. Like their own St. George they needed a dragon to assail. It was because he understood this that Pitt was destined to lead them through the impending crisis of the war. He embodied the national will to the offensive. Unlike Addington, who at one moment expected invasion and the next the automatic collapse of France, he saw England's task not as "how to avoid defeat but how to inflict it."1 Taught by the humiliations and evacuations of the First Coalition, he understood the overriding importance of the initiative. With his friend, Lord Melville—the Harry Dundas of old days—he stood for the Chatham tradition: of an England striking across oceans and inspiring and sustaining a Grand Alliance to free Europe.

  Though Pitt exercising his Kentish Volunteers was, as Melville said, "very usefully and creditably employed," it was scarcely in the way his countrymen wished. Few after nine months of war any longer believed in "happy Britain's guardian gander," as Canning called the Prime Minister. Gillray caricatured him with cocked hat and toy sword trembling like a jelly at the sight of Bonaparte, and even his followers now rocked with laughter whenever he rose in the House.2 The Grenvilles, Cannings, Windhams and Foxites, forgetting their differences, were always denouncing the torpor, timidity and complacency of the King's Ministers. The latter's proposal to defend the Thames with blockhouses evoked Canning's sprightliest verse:

  " If blocks can a nation deliver, Two places are safe from the French: The one is the mouth of the river, The other the Treasury Bench!"

  Yet few were prepared to put the Opposition leaders into power. "Neither Mr. Fox's principles nor Lord Grenville's .manners are popular," wrote Auckland. Their unnatural union inspired no confidence. Only one man had the power to break the solid Tory majority. So long as Pitt held himself bound by his old promise to Addington and remained at Walmer, the Government was safe. And as Addington enjoyed the King's favour and was sustained by

  1 Corbett, 26. 2 Paget Papers, II, 97. 91

  an invincible belief in his own integrity, Canning feared the Administration would hobble on and outlive the country.

  From this impasse England was rescued by a domestic calamity. The old King, catching a chill while inspecting Volunteers in the rain, went off his head. For some time he had been showing signs of growing eccentricity; his attendants had only with difficulty prevented him from opening Parliament with the words, " My Lords and Peacocks!"1 In February, 1804, his malady took a graver turn, and for a few days his life was despaired of. Visions of a new reign or at best a Regency
floated before a horrified country. No one save a few irresponsible Frondeurs at Brooks's cared to contemplate the accession of the fat, bloated, disreputable occupant of Carlton House. The comic hero of Gargantuan drinking bouts, astronomically in debt, separated from his legal wife and living with a Roman Catholic whom he had morganatically married, and at daggers drawn with his own brothers and father, the forty-one-year-old Prince of Wales was a national menace.

  It was at this point that Pitt came to the conclusion that the Government must be replaced. Private reports reaching him of the state of the Fleet and Army were increasingly disquieting. The reins could no-longer be left in the Prime Minister's flaccid hands. A strong Government had become an urgent necessity. To return to office meant Pitt's repudiation not only of his pledge to Addington but of his championship of the Irish Catholic cause for which he had resigned. Yet it was a sacrifice of honour he could no longer refuse. The royal insanity that had attended his resignation now enforced his return.

  In the spring of 1804, therefore, Pitt returned to town and joined with Fox and Grenville in the attack on the Administration. On St. George's Day he rose after his lifelong rival to ridicule the Army of Reserve Suspension Bill with which Ministers were trying to patch up their military policy. Under Ins "high indignant stare" and that bitter freezing sarcasm which contemporaries thought his highest parliamentary talent the Government collapsed. It scarcely troubled to defend itself, and the Attorney-General in reply almost openly confessed that he wished Pitt in Addington's place. Two days later Pitt soared above the petty details of parish rota and ballot to focus the attention of the House on the real issue. "We are come to a new era in the history of nations; we arc called to struggle for the destiny, not of this country alone but of the civilised world. We must remember that it is not only for ourselves that we submit to unexampled privations. We have for ourselves the great duty of

  1 Glenbervie, I, 384.

  self-preservation to perform; but the duty of the people of England now is of a nobler and higher order. . . . Amid the wreck and the misery of nations it is our just exultation that we have continued superior to all that ambition or that despotism could effect; and bur still higher exultation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the iron yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of a free people can effect."1

  Next day Addington resigned. The King, slowly recovering his mental health, struggled for a few days to save his favourite: then on May 7th sent for Pitt. For a moment it looked as though the impossible was about to happen, and that, in the hour of the nation's need, the talents of all Parties were to be welded under its first statesman.

  But the old King's crazed mind and conscience spoilt all. Nothing would induce him to receive his bugbear, Fox, into the Cabinet. The dream of a " large comprehensive Administration" vanished at his touch. Pitt had no alternative but to acquiesce, for persistence might have precipitated a royal relapse and a Regency. Though Fox generously promised the new Government his support, his followers and the Grenvilles refused to join on the ground that it was based on "exclusion." Pitt was left to take office alone, with a Cabinet of Tory mediocrities.

  On the day that Pitt resumed his seat as Prime Minister, Napoleon was declared Emperor of the French by a Senatus Consultum. The immediate cause of his elevation was an assassination plot, in which the Addington Administration had rashly implicated itself. Like all governments with a weak head, its right hand never knew what its left was doing, and, while it gave official encouragement to a projected Royalist-Republican rising, certain of the Under-Secretaries became privy to a far more disreputable plan to murder the First Consul. From the start the tangled threads of this dual conspiracy were held, not by Downing Street but by Fouche, who retained in his pay one of the principal conspirators. This creature, a notorious agent provocateur, imposed without difficulty on the garrulous emigres and their English patrons. In the course of the denouement two famous Republican generals, Moreau and Pichegru, were arrested, the latter and the Breton chief, Georges Cadoudal, paying the forfeit with their lives. The complicity of Downing Street was proved by the seizure—on neutral soil—of the papers of an indiscreet British agent.

  1 Coupland, 332-3.

  By giving the affair the widest possible publicity, Napoleon won over the Republican elements who had hitherto opposed his craving for hereditary honours. Realisation of the slender thread on which his life hung re-awoke fears of a Bourbon restoration. All who had lands or heads to lose, particularly the Regicides, became convinced that their only safety lay in making the Consulship hereditary. Under Fouchc's skilful hand petitions to assume the crown poured in on the First Consul. On April 23rd the Tribunate voted the adoption of the hereditary principle, Carnot alone protesting. Four weeks later the Ajaccio lawyer's son assumed the purple. A plebiscite confirmed his apotheosis. "I came to give France a King," said the dying Cadoudal, "and I have given her an Emperor!"

  There could hardly have been a greater contrast than that between the two national leaders. On the one side was the frail, tired Minister who took over Addington's neglected estate with a precarious majority in the Commons and a discredited foreign policy. On the other was the absolute master of France at the height of his mental and physical powers, served by the greatest army in the world. The one was the servant of a half-crazed monarch, a divided Parliament and a stubborn, liberty-loving people. The other could do unreservedly what he chose with his own.

  Yet as Napoleon's genius was untrammelled, so were his weaknesses. Ambition, passion and arrogance were the defects of his marvellous energy and intellect. Success intoxicated him and made him mad. Then in his petulant anger he defied not only men but the gods: his cool, pellucid mind seemed to become the prey of some terrible daemon. Madame de Remusat, who was intimate with him, described how sooner or later every rule became a constraint and its breach an irresistible craving. He refused to submit for long to anything, even grammar. "He cannot dress himself," she wrote; "his valet dresses him as he would a child. When he unrobes himself at night, he snatches his clothes off impatiently and throws them on the floor as if they were an unaccustomed and useless weight." Visiting Fontainebleau ten years later, Haydon was immensely struck by a picture of Napoleon painted about this time: the yellow complexion, the tip of the nose tinged with red, the tight, resolute mouth and liquorish, glassy eyes staring without pity. The portrait," with its complete absence of mercy, breeding or high-mindedness," reminded Haydon of the reptile house at the Jardin des Plantes. This man, so superhuman in his powers, was almost sub-human in his maniacal egoism. It was the reverse of his dazzling genius.

  In the course of the exposure of the conspiracy that raised him to the throne Napoleon made a fatal blunder. Like his decision to invade England it was a mistake of temperament. Enraged by the clumsy plot against his life, he sent his cavalry on March 14th across the Rhine to seize on neutral soil the young Bourbon Due d'Enghien, then living with his bride in the Electorate of Baden. Finding no evidence against him, he had him summarily shot after a drumhead court-martial in tne Castle of Vincennes.

  D'Enghien's murder horrified Europe. It gave Pitt his opportunity. When the Continental cause seemed most lost and England in her resistance to tyranny most lonely, it suddenly played into his hands. It shattered the comfortable legend, flowering in servile, hothouse Courts, that the young conqueror was no Jacobin but a pious and law-abiding sovereign. At the very moment that he took his place among the crowned heads of Europe, he proved himself the untamed heir not only of the Revolution but of the Terror. The weak guilt of English bureaucrats as accessories before the fact of which he had made so much was condoned by his far more glaring guilt as principal in a more resounding crime. The English, he proclaimed, had tried to commit murder, and with the same breath he committed it himself in the face of all the world.

  To them—his implacable enemies—the crime of Ettenheim offered a gleam of hope. It scarcely seemed poss
ible that the European Powers would not be roused by the injuries of what Lord Paget called "the most savage Devil that ever disgraced human nature."1 Nelson thought that, if the young Emperors of Austria and Russia condoned this latest invasion of territory they had sworn to protect, they would deserve the worst that could happen. To the Czar Alexander in particular Napoleon's act was a direct insult, for not only had he guaranteed the new frontiers of the Reich, but Baden was his father-in-law's patrimony.

  For some time the few Englishmen who dared to look abroad had seen in Russia the last hope of the Continent—"a great Power destined to assume the part so clearly marked out for her and come forward to settle Europe and ensure the permanency of peace."2 But so long as Addington ruled in Downing Street and Hawkesbury with his " vacant grin" presided over the Foreign Office, there was little hope of co-operation from the proud, warlike barbarians of the North who, despising half-measures and half-men, would do business with greatness but never with mediocrity. Resentful of the British Government's attitude over Malta and its rejection of the Czar's offer of mediation, St. Petersburg had reverted to its traditional

  1 Paget Papers, II, 1-9.

  2 Malmesbury, IV, 241; sec also Browning, 117.

  defensive policy of suspicion and guile. It preserved friendly relations with Paris and was chillingly correct towards the Court of St. James's.1

  Yet in the long run there was no place for a Power so independent as Russia in Napoleon's scheme of things. So long as the British Navy hemmed him in to the north, west and south, there was only one direction in which he could expand. Sooner or later he was bound to turn east. For the moment his concentration on the Channel and Nelson's watch in the Mediterranean secured Russia from danger. Yet the very measures Napoleon took to hoodwink Nelson and make the British think he was aiming at the Orient instead of their own shores awoke Russian fears. The troops in the Calabrian ports threatening Sicily and the Morea, the sedulous talk of a new expedition to Egypt and the great armament fitting out in Toulon with so much ostentation, all pointed to a quarter which Russia regarded as her own.