The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 Costello, 142; Grattan, 293. 2 Bell, I, 182.

  hands laid over me!" She had saved, as her auditor told her, a good man for herself and the army.

  To Wellington—and to England when the news of the retreat and its sufferings arrived—it seemed like a defeat. Those four days of famine and cold had temporarily reduced a victorious army to an assemblage of famished tramps. Though food in plenty was waiting on the Agueda, it was long before the hospitals could restore to the ranks the thousands laid low by typhus, enteric and ague. Until the end of January the death-rate averaged five hundred a week, and a third of Wellington's force was on the sick-list. So shaken was he by the transformation of his army that he drafted an impatient Order denouncing the failure of regimental officers to maintain discipline. When this document, addressed to senior officers, became known, it caused deep resentment; it was even whispered that the strain of the past few weeks had been too much for the Commander-in-Chief's mind. "The officers asked each other," one of them wrote, "how or in what manner they were to blame for the privations the army had endured. Their business was to keep their men together and, if possible, to keep up with their men on the march. Many were mere lads, badly clothed and without a boot to their feet, some attacked with dysentery, others with ague, others with a burning fever raging through their system; they had scarcely strength to hobble on in company with their more hardy comrades, the soldiers. Nothing but a high sense of honour could have sustained them."1

  Wellington was not alone that November in having to retreat across a desert. After waiting five weeks in a burnt-out Moscow for a Russian surrender that never came, Napoleon had set out on October 18th for Kaluga and the warmer lands of the Ukraine with 115,000 fighting troops, 20,000 sick in wagons and 40,000 camp-followers. But the Russian army under Kutusof, heartened by the news of Wellington's liberation of Madrid,2 had barred his way at Malo-Jaroslavitz, and, after a bitter fight, had forced him back on the more northerly route by which he had come. Here the countryside had been completely stripped by his advance—one of the most destructive even in the annals of Revolutionary war—and partisans

  1 Grattan, 307. See idem 311-12; Simmons, 265; Bell, I, 73-4, 77; Costello, 144; Fortescue, IX, 100; Larpent, I, 6, 19, 54, 74, 127; Oman, VI, 181.

  2 Chambray, 303-7.

  from the forests were already harrying the long lines of communication. Apart from what it carried, there was nothing for the Grande Armee to eat until it reached its advance magazines at Smolensk, two hundred miles to the west.

  As the starving host retraced its steps through charred villages, the immensity and savage gloom of the Russian landscape struck a chill in every heart. The germs of typhus were already in men's veins; near the battlefields of Borodino, where thousands of corpses lay un-buried, gangrenous cripples from the hospitals, fearful of Russian vengeance, fought for places on the plunder-laden wagons. Vast numbers, unable to obtain food, fell by the wayside; hundreds of baggage-carts and ammunition wagons were left abandoned with the horses dead at the shafts.

  On November 5th, when they were still a few days short of Smolensk, the first cold set in. Prisoners had warned the French that when it came their nails would drop from their fingers and the muskets from their hands. A deadening and penetrating fog rose from the ground; then out of the darkness the snow began to fall. As it did so a terrible wind swept out of the north, howling through the forests and piling the snow in the path of the blinded invaders. Famished and exhausted, the vast predatory army lost hope and cohesion, began to disintegrate and dissolve.

  From November 9th to 14th, while Wellington was awaiting the French attack at Salamanca, Napoleon was at Smolensk. He had already lost 40,000 men since leaving Moscow. But he was forced to resume the retreat, for the supplies in the town were insufficient to feed the survivors. On the 14th, with 40,000 fighting men and 30,000 followers, he set out westwards. In the next four days, while the British were retreating to the Agueda, the Grand Army suffered an unparalleled disaster. As the long procession of famished ghosts struggled through the snow, the Russians, almost as severely decimated by the rigours of that terrible climate, took the offensive at Krasnoi. In three days' fighting, 10,000 of the invaders were killed, 26,000 taken prisoner and more than two hundred guns captured. Only the Emperor's resolution and the discipline of the Imperial Guard prevented the destruction of the entire army. By the 19th scarcely 12,000 men remained with the colours.

  The dying agony of the great host lasted another three weeks. The dwindling column struggling to reach Europe was joined by division after division summoned from the lines of communications and rear areas. All suffered the same fate. On the Beresina in the last days of November two Russian armies, closing in from north and south, barred the retreat. The Emperor broke through, but left another 12,000 drowned in the river and 18,000 more in Russian hands. On December 5th he abandoned the survivors and set out by sleigh for Warsaw. "All that has happened is nothing," he explained on his arrival, "it is the effect of the climate, and that is all. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. ... I am going to raise 300,000 men. In six months I shall be again on the Niemen." A week later he reached France for the second time in his career without the army with which he had set out to conquer the east. About the same time ten thousand typhus-ridden cripples—all that remained of half a million men—staggered across the bridge at Konigsberg into Prussia.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Neptune's General

  "He rode a knowing-looking thorough-bred horse, and wore a grey overcoat, Hessian boots and a large cocked hat."

  Gronow

  T

  HE news from Russia did not begin to reach England until the second week of December. There had always been a few far-sighted Britons, as well as some very romantic ones like the Prince Regent and Walter Scott, who had seen in their adversary's eastern adventure a chance that he might get himself into a scrape. Among the former was the commissariat-minded Wellington, who had written that, if the Czar was prudent and his Russians would fight, Bonaparte could not succeed.1 But most Englishmen had seen too many countries succumb to believe it. The Government, while rejecting a peace offer that would have enabled Napoleon to concentrate his entire force in the east, had so little faith in Russia that it refused her a loan and warned the Czar that, if he chose to resist, it must be at his own risk. "I cannot have one particle of hope for Russia,” wrote the Secretary of War as late as August 31st. The long Russian retreat, the news of the French victories at Smolensk and Borodino, the capture of Moscow, had had the usual effect. The average British reaction was typified by David Wilkie's remark: "Ah! but he has got there!"

  For it had become almost impossible for Britons not to despair of the Continent. The difficulties from which they suffered as a result of its enforced unification under Napoleon were too great. The last two years had been the worst of the war: as the tyrant's grip on the European ports tightened, British warehouses and quays became bogged with unexportable goods. The social economy

  1 Gurwood, July 25th, 1812. "I trust in God," wrote Walter Scott in August, "that all will go well and Europe will yet see peace before the present generation are in their graves." Scott, III, 153. See also Dudley, 159; Ashton, I, 143-4; Two Duchesses, 349-50'

  of the industrial districts had momentarily been disrupted. Those whom the demand for British goods and the paper money created to finance their manufacture had drawn into the factory towns found themselves without livelihood or alternative employment.

  Early in 1811 the United States struck Britain a further blow. By an act forbidding commercial intercourse with her to prevent incidents arising from the Continental Blockade, she deprived the Lancashire mills of raw cotton, reduced British exports to North America from .£11,000,000 to under .£2,000,000 and forced the British Government—since it could no longer pay with goods—to expend its dwindling reserves of bullion on American corn for Wellington's army. This harsh measure of the young Republic did not even have the preventative
effect intended. In the summer of 1812 popular clamour against the blockade and the seizure of British naval deserters from American vessels and, above all, the American backwoodsman's desire for the fertile, empty country beyond the Canadian frontier, tempted Congress, hopeful of a quick victory, into declaring war against England. It did so at the very moment that the Foreign Secretary was announcing in Parliament the repeal of the Orders in Council to appease American opinion.

  The effect on industry was calamitous. In Glasgow the average weekly wage of hand-loom weavers fell from 17s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. All but six of Manchester's thirty-eight mills had to close, and a fifth of the population of urban Lancashire was driven on to the rates.1 The rise of the latter further aggravated the deflationary situation. By the beginning of 1812, in part of Nottinghamshire alone 15,000 frame-workers were in receipt of poor relief. The most alarming feature was that, while wages fell and unemployment increased, the price of food —which could not be multiplied by machinery—tended to rise. In 1811 after a wet summer the harvest failed and a famine was only averted by a purchase of French, Italian and Polish corn which Napoleon allowed to be exported in order to drain England of bullion, on the assumption that a hungry nation needed gold more than corn. Even with this aid from the enemy, food-prices in 1812 were 87 per cent above pre-war level. The cost of potatoes and oatmeal, the staple food of many workers, was almost trebled.2

  1 Leeds Mercury, Feb. 22nd, 1812.

  2 Mathieson, 135-6; Porter, II, 188; Felkin, 231; Lilian Knowles, 336; Darvall, 20-46, 53-6; Colchester, II, 408.

  The ruling classes, immersed in the life-and-death struggle with France, had no remedy. Their sole cure for economic stresses and strains was to leave them to the laws of supply and demand; the Home Secretary's advice to a delegation of unemployed Stockport weavers was to be patient. To starving workers unaware of the teachings of economic philosophers, such a policy seemed heartless inertia. Illiterate and helpless, they turned in their anger on their employers—the only representatives of power with whom they were acquainted—and against the machines which had brought wealth and opportunity to these ambitious men and ruin to themselves. Napoleon's decrees and American policy were outside their cognisance. But the machines, which did the work of ten men for the wages of one, were within their reach.

  Towards the end of 1811 riots broke out in Nottinghamshire, where unemployment had been aggravated by the collapse of a speculative market in revolutionary South America. Mobs of starving framework-knitters, calling themselves Luddites, openly assembled in every village to break the machines which robbed them of their livelihood. When the Government to restrain them sent down a brigade of dragoons—urgently needed in the Peninsula— they continued their operations by night. The trouble spread to the neighbouring counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. By the spring of 1812 to conservative minds the whole of the manufacturing districts of the North and Midlands seemed engaged in a gigantic conspiracy. Men with blackened faces handed anonymous threats to machine-owners, factories were gutted, arms seized from householders and militia depots. While Wellington's men were storming Badajoz, their countrymen in the West Riding and Lancashire were engaged, with axes, hammers and muskets, in battering down the doors of moor-side mills under the fire of their equally pugnacious and stubborn owners.

  To all this society's only answer was repression. A military camp was formed in Sherwood Forest, the yeomanry were called out, watch committees were set up and special constables enrolled. More troops were used that spring to hold down the manufacturing districts than had been sent in the original expeditionary force to Portugal. Cavalry patrolled the disaffected districts night and day, spies were employed to track down the ringleaders, and Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence.1 More than forty rioters were sentenced to death at special Assizes and as many transported.

  Yet any weakness might have been fatal. But for the Government's firmness England could easily have failed its army in the hot, restless summer of Salamanca. While the country was at war with a militant revolution that had overthrown every State in Europe, a rough and illiterate populace, rendered desperate by suffering, had taken the law into its own hands. The reports of the Home Office spies were full of allusions to mysterious agitators, midnight drillings, and sanguinary Jacobin resolutions. There was no police force, and even the loyalty of the Militia was uncertain. On May nth, 1812, the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the House of Commons. Though it subsequently turned out that his murder had nothing to do with industrial unrest, the savage joy with which it was greeted by the hungry workers of the North terrified the rest of the nation.2 In the new manufacturing towns—a neglected, nightmare world cut off from the ancient civic and rural polity of England —the ruling classes had become intensely unpopular.

  The little group of Pitt's disciples, who under Perceval and his successor, Lord Liverpool, were carrying on the Administration, made up in courage and common sense for what they lacked in brilliance. They were practical men who loved their country and, though they had made mistakes, learnt from them. They both dealt firmly with violence and refused to be stampeded into defeatist economic measures which, though agreeable to the theories of pedants and most of their own class, might have destroyed England's ability to wage war. When a Parliamentary Committee on currency reform, presided over by the Whig Horner, attributed the country's economic plight, not to the closing of Europe's and America's ports, but to the inconvertibility of her enlarged paper money, and proposed as remedy a deflationary resumption of cash payments, Castle-reagh, as Leader of the Commons, and Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, refused to accept it. Had they done so the run on the country's dwindling gold might have brought trade to a standstill and even forced the recall of Wellington's army from Spain. It was

  1 Hansard, XXI, 603, et seq. Byron made his maiden speech in the Lords against the measure. "Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons?" he asked. "Will you erect a gibbet in every field and hang up men like scarecrows?" Moore, Byron, 157.

  2 Wilberforce, IV, 29. See also Two Duchesses, 364; Colchester, II, 394-4035 Dyott, I, 299; Scott, III, 112; H. M. C. Bathurst, 188; Dudley, 151-2; Lord Coleridge, 201; Bury, I, 92; II, 285; Shelley, I, 8-9. At the execution of his murderer, the hangman was pelted. Alderson, 20.

  not the first time that Ministers, in their resolve for victory, had defied economic theory to keep the wheels of industry turning. When the first wave of bankruptcy was sweeping the industrial areas, they had boldly resisted the growing restriction of currency by advancing six million pounds free of interest to embarrassed traders.

  The opening of the ports of Russia and of her ally, Sweden, brought about a resumption of exports in the nick of time. So long as the French were advancing on Moscow and St. Petersburg this revival of trade was precarious, but when in October it became known that the Russians were fighting on and the French were in retreat, it was as though a great weight had been lifted. "Glorious news from the north," wrote Walter Scott on December 10th, "pereat iste" Men could not at first believe it. When Napoleon's flight to Paris and the destruction of his army became known at Cambridge, the Fellows of Trinity leapt on the tables, danced, sang and hugged one another; "you never saw such a scene," Adam Sedgwick told Montague Butler many years afterwards, "and you never will!" A grateful Parliament and country joined in voting funds and subscribing to the Russian National Relief Fund; even Wellington's veterans in their cantonments along the Portuguese border contributed their pennies and celebrated by impromptu dancing to the strains of "The Downfall of Paris,"1

  With the Baltic open and a prospect of Europe liberating itself England once more put forth her full strength.. By the spring of 1813 the export entries at the Leith Customs were higher than ever in their history. That year, with a population of less than 13 millions in the United Kingdom and 5 millions in Ireland, Britain subsidised the armies of every State in Europe willing to rise against Napoleon. Her
expenditure rose to £118,000,000—nearly five times its prewar figure—£68,000,000 of it raised out of current taxation.

  And after twenty years of war her Government knew how to use her strength. Composed of men whom clever folk regarded as mediocre, it represented the nation's continuing resolve to win. All but two of them still in their forties, they were Pitt's pupils. To his

  1 "Bravo Russians!" wrote Simmons of the Rifles. "They are worthy of the country they inhabit!" Simmons, 270, 278. See Bury, I, 102; Costello, 158; Dudley, 179, 183; Gomm, 291; Tomkinson, 291; Letter to Times by J. P. Bidder, Jan. 20th, 1943; Colchester, II, 413-14; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, 222; Paget Brothers, 252; Peel, I, 41.

  inflexible will they had added, through bitter experience, a tough horse-sense and a knowledge of the fundamental rules of war. They had learnt to concentrate. "Bonaparte has conquered the greatest part of Europe by doing but one thing at a time," wrote the Master-General of the Ordnance to the Secretary for War, "and doing that with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his strength. If you succeed in the Peninsula, nothing of yours will go on ill elsewhere; if you fail, nothing will go on at all anywhere else."1 As the news of Napoleon's Russian disaster spread across the world, Ministers staked everything on success in Spain. Disregarding the possibility of invasion, they kept back only 25,000 regulars to guard the British Isles.