In like spirit England, lighted by the flame of Wilberforce's conscience, strove to secure the universal abolition of the Slave Trade, sacrificing territory and money to her allies and even her enemies to establish this fundamental canon of human equality. To those who did not understand the law of her being, the abolition of the Slave Trade—from which so many of her individual traders had profited in the past—appeared only as the hobby-horse of a little coterie of humanitarian cranks. Yet it was fought for as strenuously by British statesmen in Paris and Vienna as by the "saints" of Clapham and Kensington Gore, and was supported by the entire public opinion of the country.2 The repudiation by mankind of what Wilberforce described as the "traffic in the person of our fellow-creatures" was the one trophy which all Englishmen insisted their representatives should bring back from the Congress. On February 8th, 1815, before leaving Vienna, Castlereagh obtained a joint declaration, signed by the eight convening Powers, condemning the Trade as repugnant to the principles of civilisation and morality, and calling for its universal abolition at the earliest possible moment.
For with its free system and tradition of toleration England could
1 The burning of the capital of Upper Canada in mid-winter by an undisciplined American army had led to the destruction of the uninhabited public buildings of Washington, though this retributory act—so stigmatised by a posterity which has forgotten its cause—was rightly deplored by many Englishmen, including the Prince Regent.
* "I believe," wrote Castlereagh, "there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it." Castlereagh, X, 73. See Webster, Castlereagh, I, 413-24.
not close the door on the human future. "It is impossible," wrote the conservative Castlereagh, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation." It was only his fear that the transition might be too sudden to ripen as yet "into anything likely to make the world better or happier," that caused him to mark time and align himself with the static Metternich. It was the essence of his country's politics that he could not commit her for long to such a policy. Already in Parliament and in the clubs and newspapers, English voices, though still only in a minority, were being raised in passionate protest against the settlement he had made. "Here we are," wrote Lord Byron, "retrograding to the full, stupid old system—balance of Europe—posing straws upon Kings' noses, instead of wringing them off." To him, as to other young Englishmen, the rulers of Austria, Russia and Prussia were "three stupid, legitimate old-dynasty boobies of regular-bred Sovereigns."1 Within a week of the Polish settlement the Leader of the Opposition was demanding that the Government should be arraigned for "public brigandage," while Sheridan, rousing himself from his vinous declension to the grave, spoke of crowned scoundrels cutting up Europe like carcass-butchers and England's conscience being silenced by the dirty bribe of a crown for Hanover. The transfer of Norway to Sweden, of the former Genoese Republic to Piedmont, of Saxons to Prussia and Poles to their former conquerors were all laid by British idealists at Castlereagh's door. So alarming did these parliamentary diatribes against him become that he had to hurry home in February to defend his policy in the Commons, leaving the Duke of Wellington to complete his work at Vienna.
With the general principles of a European settlement agreed between the Powers, the adjustment of frontiers was left to committees appointed by the convening States. The most important were the German Committee, and the Statistical Committee to ascertain the populations of the territories to be transferred. The former's duty was to draft a federal constitution to take the place of the defunct Holy Roman Empire and the French-controlled
1 Just as when a male child was born, every woman in the house looked an inch higher? Lord Holland complained that, when a legitimate King was restored, every sprig of royalty in Europe became more insolent and insufferable. Creevey Papers, I, 206. See Moore, Byron, 201, 216; Broughton, I, 206; Lord Coleridge, 243.
Confederations which had succeeded it. Consisting of representatives of Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Hanover—now elevated into a Kingdom—it was dominated from the start by the negative idealism of Metternich. Not wishing to unite Germany himself, he was determined that no one else should, neither a militarist Prussia nor a parliament of bourgeois doctrinaires—a class for which he had a high aristocratic disdain. He supported the separatist claims of the German sovereigns and ignored the rather heady patriotic fervour of their younger subjects. The Tugendbund had been well enough for recruiting a partisan army to overthrow Napoleon, but its windy aspirations could have no place in the Europe Metternich was seeking to restore. The Germany he loved was not the tribal Valhalla of nascent Teutonic legend, but the diversified and localised Christian polity of the Middle Ages, with princes and prelates in their castles and pious peasants toiling in the fields or chanting psalms as they rowed in Sabbath gala under the rocks of the Drachenfels. The wayside shrines and chapels which he loved to draw in the margin of his papers in committee were the symbols of that Germany.1 Unfortunately they were not the kind of symbols that guaranteed the bourgeoisie against the conquering, plundering armies of the French. For this, Prussian guns and bayonets were more appropriate.
The Committee's solution of a titular German Federal Diet composed of the representatives of seventeen loosely allied but completely independent sovereign States or groups, though it pleased the hereditary rulers, was a bitter disappointment to the young patriots who had taken arms to liberate their fatherland. It also disappointed the Prussian generals and bureaucrats, who had little use for intellectuals and visionaries but hoped to see Prussia the recruiting fulcrum of a centralised northern Germany. But it pleased England, whose ruler was a German sovereign and whose merchants required the pacification of their principal Continental market, and it was less displeasing to Talleyrand than a closer German union. Viewed as an essay in staying, if not putting back, the hand of time—the art in which Metternich excelled—it seemed an admirable expedient.
So, too, in Italy the old barriers, dynastic, military and economic, which divided Italian from Italian, were carefully re-erected by
1 For a charming picture of this Germany as it still survived in 1814 see Stanley, 188: Brownlow, 139-40.
statesmen in powdered wigs and silk-covered calves who were now once more living—in their imaginations at least—in the mannered, candle-lit world of the eighteenth century. The music of an almost unceasing succession of balls, concerts, tableaux vivants and masques attended by princely delegates of every description and their lovely ladies—or other people's—was the symphonie fantastique to which the ancien regime buried the still-born child of Italian nationalism. Sunk in dismal poverty, with flocks of famished sheep grazing off nettles in the Roman streets and verminous beggars swarming in every church and piazza, Italy with her beauty, sunshine and artistic, wealth was the mecca of European nations. All, esteeming her the cradle of their culture, felt a keen interest in making her conform to their purposes: Revolutionary France seeing her as a forcing-ground for cisalpine military republics, Britain as a market and an academy of taste for her wealthy dilettantes and sun-starved artists, Austria as a preserve for her solemn, well-meaning bureaucracy. Spain, which a century earlier had been the paramount Power in the peninsula, was no longer of importance; only in Naples, where a branch of the Spanish Bourbons still lingered, and in little Lucca did any link remain with the Iberian hegemony of the past.
When the young Bonaparte had crossed into Italy like another Caesar from Gaul, the ideal of Italian unity had seemed about to become a reality. But it had soon become clear that he regarded Italians like everyone else as persons to be exploited in the service of his destiny. He had fined, plundered and conscripted and, on occasion, shot them, with such vigour that their enthusiasm for him quickly waned. None the less, though the government of the French militarists was more oppressive than any that had gone before, it had shaken Italians out of their age-long apathy and subservience. For though Bonap
arte might manure the Spanish sierras and Russian plains with their bodies, his very existence proved that the men of Italy could rule as well as cringe. Even the poorest began to feel the shame of seeing his country partitioned by alien princes; though Napoleon had carefully redivided the country between his jealous satraps, a new feeling of unity had been engendered, especially among die young. When the Germans rose against the French, many Englishmen believed that the Italians would follow suit; in the spring of 1814 the British Commander-in-Chief in Sicily, Lord William Bentinck, went so far as to proclaim a national rising. But, except for the hardy mountaineers of Piedmont, the Italians were a gentle race. They refused as yet to fight for their liberties.
It thus came about that with the fall of France, Italians, in Wordsworth's angry words, were "transferred to Austria, to the King of Sardinia and the rest of those vile tyrants."1 The hated tedesci re-occupied Lombardy, and transferred their patronage from the unreliable Murat to the exiled Bourbons on the understanding that when they returned to Naples they should look for guidance, not to London or Madrid, but to Vienna. The Austrian Emperor's daughter, Napoleon's grass-widow, received the Grand Duchy of Parma. Modena and Reggio went to an Austrian satellite; Tuscany returned to the mild rule of its former Dukes. Corsica remained French. The centre of the peninsula, including the capital, was restored to the Pope and the slothful, old-maidish despotism of the Roman priesthood. The extinguished republican oligarchies of Venice and Genoa, the only genuine Italian States of the recent past, were absorbed in Austria and Piedmont. Only in the mountainous north-west, where the House of Savoy ruled over martial Piedmont and Sardinia, was there a State which could be called wholly Italian.
There was one aspect of the Italian problem which everyone had forgotten. The diplomats overlooked, in their debates, the existence of the one great Italian of the age. While they had been talking and masquerading, the little Caesar at Elba kept a sharp eye on the Continent they were reshaping. His hope of a breach between them had been averted by Castlereagh; but Talleyrand's diplomatic victories in the drawing-room of Vienna had still to salve the vanity of defeated France. The wounds of her humiliation at the hands of her former victims were too deep: the spectacle of her inglorious Court could not be stomached by those who had so recently dictated to Europe. The possessors of national lands were scared by the foolish talk of the emigres, the State's creditors irritated by the petty economies of an empty Treasury, the Army angered by popinjays in white feathers and laced uniforms who barred the democratic road to promotion and slighted the pride of the veterans of Austerlitz and Jena. A few months before, Napoleon had been reviled as the cause of all France's defeats and sufferings. Now the old moustache, home in his native village, quaffed the ashes of the eagles and muttered bloodcurdling oaths against the fat coquin in the Tuileries and the foreigners who
1 De Selincourt, Middle Years, 650.
had put him there. The Emperor, brave men whispered hoarsely, would return in the spring with the violets. And, as the hereditary boobies in Vienna undid his life's work and the London crowds queued outside the Panorama in Leicester Square to see the model representation of his island cage, the little man in the garden at Porto Ferrajo, with his telescope fixed on every passing sail, saw his opportunity. That February an English traveller was informed that Leghorn Jews were shipping eagled buttons to Elba.1 The British Commissioner in the island sent a warning to London that something was afoot, the French Government pleaded nervously for the Emperor's removal to St. Helena. But at Vienna, where the tinkling sleigh parties drove nightly home from the Wienerwald, the Congress was too busy to listen.
On the night of March 7th a great ball was to be held in the Austrian capital. That afternoon the Czar laid a wager with a lady as to who could dress most quickly. At a signal both left the room by different doors, the one returning reclad in a minute and a quarter, the other in a minute and fifty seconds. During the evening a courier arrived at Metternich's house with dispatches from Genoa. The Chancellor was tired from too much business by day and revelry by night. After resting for a while on his couch he opened the dispatch. Napoleon had escaped. In its well-bred inefficiency the ancien regime had let out the Corsican ogre.
Thereafter events moved at a terrible speed. On March 10th Napoleon, evading all attempts by the authorities to arrest him, appeared at Lyons, announcing that he had come to save the French from degradation and that his eagles, once more on the wing, would soon alight on the spires of Notre Dame. Unit after unit of the Bourbon army went out to stop him, and, on meeting that familiar, grey-coated figure at the head of his daring few, threw down their arms and welcomed him in a tempest of emotion. On the 14th he was joined by Marshal Ney, who had promised King Louis that he would bring him back to Paris in a cage. Six days later he reached Fontainebleau, where less than a year before he had abdicated and bade a last farewell to his veterans. That night he slept at the Tuileries, the King with a handful of courtiers tearfully
1 Brougham, II, 63-4. Holland, Journal, I, 232.
scampering before him across the Flemish frontier. France had gone about again and the Revolution Militant was once more enthroned.1 In Italy the impetuous Murat put Ins army in motion and the Pope and his Cardinals fled from Rome. So, except for a few fastidious Whig aristocrats, did most of the English tourists.
The Sovereigns of Europe assembled at Vienna refused to accept the outrageous fait accompli. On March 18th they proclaimed the escaped prisoner an outlaw and "disturber of the peace of the world." Thereafter they ordered an immediate mobilisation of the Continent's armies and appointed the Duke of Wellington to command the advance-guard in the Low Countries—the doorway to the plains of France—until the immense forces of Prussia, Austria and Russia could be mobilised. The flower of the British Peninsular Army —what remained of. it after demobilisation—was still in America or on the high seas returning from that country. But every man that could be raised was sent in haste to Flanders; even Ireland, despite the protests of Dublin Castle and young Robert Peel, was stripped of troops. Everywhere the trumpets were sounding again for war.
1 Cam Hobhouse was told during his visit to Paris that summer that the only change in the French capital after Napoleon's entry was that the newspapers and the pats of butter no longer had lilies printed on them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Waterloo
"The British infantry are the best in the world. Fortunately there are not many of them."
Marshal Bugeaud
"What a happy consummation of his glory it would be to put the last hand to the destruction of Buonaparte's power in direct conflict with Buonaparte himself."
Canning to Castlereagh, 28 April, 1815
DURING the afternoon of Sunday, June 18th, 1815, the city of Brussels was in a state of panic. Since three o'clock a stream of fugitives had been pouring in from the plain beyond the forest of Soignes where, twelve miles south of the capital, Wellington, with 21,000 British and 42,000 Germans and Netherlanders, was barring the way of a victorious French army of 70,000 veterans commanded by Napoleon. Most of the English visitors who had invaded the city in the wake of their army had already fled to the north and were crowding the roads and waterways to Antwerp, where, on Wellington's orders, a state of siege had been proclaimed and crowds waited all day in the rain for news. But hundreds more, unable to obtain transport in the panic—for everything on wheels had been requisitioned—remained in the city without hope of escape. Every few minutes fugitives from the battlefield kept galloping into the town shouting that all was lost and that the French were at their heels. Once a whole regiment of Hanoverian cavalry poured in through the Namur gate with swords drawn and foam-flecked horses and rode through the town towards the north, upsetting everything in the streets on their way. There were other fugitives with bloody and bandaged heads, and cartloads of wounded, and occasionally, towards evening, an officer of high rank, British or Belgian, extended upon a bier borne by soldiers. As the dreadful afternoon advanced and the d
istant camionade grew in intensity, the rumour spread—possibly circulated by French sympathisers, of whom there were said to be many—that Napoleon had promised his soldiery the sack of the city. Every woman knew what that meant. "I never saw such consternation," wrote Fanny Burney. "We could only gaze and tremble, listen and shudder."1
Yet three days earlier Brussels had seemed as securely held by British wealth and the martial power of united Europe as London. For weeks it had been a scene of gaiety and military pageantry, with the brilliant aristocracy of England flooding the city in the wake of her army and spending money with a profusion never matched by its successive Spanish, Austrian, French and now Dutch rulers. The nearest French vedettes had been forty miles away beyond the Sambre, and between them and the Belgian capital two great armies had guarded every road on a hundred-mile front, growing daily in strength and commanded by the two most famous soldiers of the European alliance that had defeated and dethroned Napoleon. The Prussian host of around 113,000 men—almost as numerous as the largest striking force Napoleon could be expected to raise from an exhausted and divided France—had entered Belgium under Blucher to hold the frontier from the Ardennes to Charleroi, while a smaller joint British, Netherlands, Hanoverian and Brunswick army had guarded it from Mons to the North Sea under the Duke of Wellington. Every week the young, under-strength battalions sent out in haste from England were being joined by the veteran regiments which had driven the French from Spain and which were now returning from America. Elsewhere more than half a million men, mobilised by the Sovereigns of Europe, were on the march, their vanguards already closing in on the French frontiers. The danger to Brussels and the Low Countries, so great three months before, seemed to have passed. Though no official state of war existed— Napoleon being merely treated as an outlaw under the new international system of collective security—it had been known that an invasion of France was to begin in July. It had even seemed likely that the French, republicans or royalists, would themselves throw out the usurper and so avoid the necessity of invasion. Napoleon's house, Wellington had told English visitors to the front, was tumbling about his ears.
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