The course of the war was still in the balance that autumn. For the moment the French had recovered their position but still faced numerically superior opponents as well as suffering from exhaustion with war. On Christmas Day, 1799, Napoleon wrote personal letters to the Emperor Francis II of Austria and to George III, proposing an end to the war. He did not put forward specific proposals, but his letters were full of enlightened arguments for peace and, ironically in the light of his subsequent career, rejected ‘ideas of vain greatness’.
It was a measure of French weakness that Napoleon made such an overture, and it was largely seen as such in allied capitals. While Tsar Paul I would have nothing more to do with the Austrians, both St Petersburg and Vienna seemed to remain committed to the war. In London, the Cabinet had been clear after the setback in Holland that the war must go on. Dundas, who made clear his wish to resign when Pitt would let him from November 1799, was all the more adamant that British forces should stay clear of the Continent, but he remained isolated in the Cabinet. All through the autumn of 1799 options for the invasion of France in 1800 were discussed in London, while British messengers fanned out across Europe in vain attempts to create Austro – Russian cooperation.
It was against this background of uncertain strategy, political resolve, and confidence that the condition of France was weak and her government in a state of flux, that the overture from Napoleon was judged. In hindsight, it may seem strange that a Prime Minister who was so determined on peace in the failed negotiations of 1796 and 1797 was so ready to reject a peace feeler at the end of 1799, but Pitt was quite clear, as he noted for a parliamentary debate a few weeks later, that there was a ‘difference from state when We Negotiated’.24 This included matters such as ‘Diminution of French Armies and Want of military Supplies’ and ‘State of Finances – Bankruptcies’. The advantage therefore lay with the allies. In addition, Pitt considered on the basis of past experience and the seeming fragility of Napoleon’s power that ‘Perfidy’ and ‘Want of Stability’ meant that any peace agreement could swiftly be revoked. Given the rise of royalist sentiment in parts of France and the creation of a consular dictatorship, there was a trend towards monarchy which Britain should encourage in setting out the conditions for peace, while not excluding peace with the current French government if it proved to be stable and reliable.
This was Pitt’s consistent view through the winter of 1799–1800, and it enjoyed fairly solid political support with the exception of the Foxites, even in the end among waverers such as Wilberforce. Pitt had set out his views to Canning in November, saying that Britain could fight ‘One or Two Campaigns more’, or, if the coalition collapsed, a ‘defensive War by ourselves’.25 He could not make peace with a ‘Revolutionary Jacobin government’. On New Year’s Eve, 1799, he wrote from Downing Street to Dundas in Scotland on receipt of the French overture:
I think we can have nothing to do but to decline all negotiation at the present moment, on the ground that the actual situation of France does not as yet hold out any solid security to be derived from negotiation, taking care, at the same time, to express strongly the eagerness with which we should embrace any opening for general peace whenever such solid security shall appear attainable. This may, I think, be so expressed as to convey to the people of France that the shortest road to peace is by effecting the restoration of Royalty, and thereby to increase the chance of that most desirable of all issues to the war; but at the same time so as in no degree to preclude us from treating even with the present Government, if it should prevail and be able to establish itself firmly.26
The Cabinet met in the first week of January 1800, and approved a response which was probably too haughty to win friends in France: it was sent from Grenville to the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand as a calculated snub to Napoleon. A further attempt by Talleyrand to open negotiations later that month was also rebuffed.
The government’s rejection of the peace overtures occasioned a fierce parliamentary debate on 3 February 1800, Fox reappearing in the Commons for that day only to ask why the government had not put Bonaparte’s statement of peaceful intentions to the test. Pitt responded with an extremely lengthy speech, describing the French Revolution as ‘the severest trial which the visitation of Providence has ever yet inflicted upon the nations of the earth’,27 and cataloguing its outrages: ‘The all-searching eye of the French revolution looks to every part of Europe, and every quarter of the world, in which can be found an object either of acquisition or plunder. Nothing is too great for the temerity of its ambition, nothing too small or insignificant for the grasp of its rapacity.’28 He attacked the personal character and conduct of Napoleon, saying that no reliance could be placed on his disposition or principles. Peace could only be made with a stable government, and ‘is then military despotism that which we are accustomed to consider as a stable form of government?’29 He said he had wished for peace, and laboured for it, but the circumstances had now changed because the enemy was unreliable and the war could be won: ‘When we consider the resources and the spirit of the country, can any man doubt that if adequate security is not now to be obtained by treaty, we have the means of prosecuting the contest without material difficulty or danger, and with a reasonable prospect of completely attaining our object?’30
Fox, by contrast, thought Napoleon sincere: ‘Peace & Peace upon good terms might be had nobody now doubts.’31 Within months he would regard Napoleon as having ‘surpassed … Alexander & Caesar, not to mention the great advantage he has over them in the Cause he fights in’.32
Two weeks later Pitt had another fierce clash with Tierney, who challenged him to state the object of the war in one word, without any ‘ifs and buts’. Pitt responded: ‘I can tell him that it is security: security against a danger, the greatest that ever threatened the world. It is Security against a danger which never existed in any past period of society.’33 He then went on to turn the ‘ifs and buts’ against his opponent in a legendary demonstration of his debating ability.
He says that any attempt at explanation upon this subject is the mere ambiguous unintelligible language of ifs and buts, and of special pleading. Now, Sir, I never had much liking to special pleading; and if ever I had any, it is by this time almost entirely gone. He has besides so abridged me of the use of particles, that though I am not particularly attached to the sound of an if or a but, I would be much obliged to the honourable gentleman if he would give me some others to supply their places. Is this, however, a light matter, that it should be treated in so light a manner? The restoration of the French monarchy, I will still tell the honourable gentleman, I consider as a most desirable object, because I think that it would afford the strongest and best security to this country and to Europe. But this object may not be attainable; and if it be not attainable, we must be satisfied with the best security which we can find independent of it. Peace is most desirable to this country; but negociation may be attended with greater evils than could be counterbalanced by any benefits which would result from it. And if this be found to be the case; if it afford no prospect of security; if it threaten all the evils which we have been struggling to avert; if the prosecution of the war afford the prospect of attaining complete security; and if it may be prosecuted with increasing commerce, with increasing means, and with increasing prosperity, except what may result from the visitations of the seasons; then I say, that it is prudent in us not to negociate at the present moment. These are my buts and my ifs. This is my plea, and on no other do I wish to be tried, by God and my country.34
Pitt’s analysis that Napoleon could not be trusted was certainly correct; he was also correct in thinking that France was moving back to monarchy, although he would have been astounded at this point to learn that it would be through the person of Napoleon himself. On the information available to him, his judgement in carrying on the war when the enemy seemed to be weakening and attempting a manoeuvre to find a breathing space or divide the allies was sound. Yet if he could only have seen a few
months ahead, he might very well have reverted to his more pacific stance of 1797. For the Second Coalition was on its way to the most calamitous dissension and defeat.
Alongside the affirmation of the war’s objectives and consideration of how to pursue them, the project of ramming the Union through the Dublin Parliament was gathering pace. The specific plan involved adding one hundred seats to the 558 in the British House of Commons, paying £7,500 per seat to the proprietors and patrons of the abolished Irish boroughs. This and every other form of eighteenth-century persuasion was applied to the final debates of the Irish House of Commons. Votes were said to change hands at four thousand guineas apiece, while later that year twenty-one new peerages or elevations in the peerage involving those who had voted on the measure revealed the liberal deployment of patronage. Recently published evidence suggests that some £30,000 of secret-service money was deployed to promote the Union in 1799 and 1800, and that part of it was used to provide secret annuities for Irish MPs.35 While the Protestant legislators were bribed to support the Union, Catholic opposition was neutralised by the implication (but not specific commitment) that their emancipation would inevitably result. How this was to be accomplished, given the intensity of the opposition to it, was not clear: George III had minuted Cornwallis on 31 January 1800: ‘though a strong friend to the Union of the two Kingdoms, I should become an Enemy to the movement if I thought a change of the Situation of the Roman Catholics would attend this measure’.36
Catholic emancipation remained the unspoken companion of the Union. By July George III was hailing ‘the happiest event of my reign’37 as the session in Westminster closed with the Act of Union passed in both Dublin and Westminster. Once the Irish Parliament had been dealt with, Pitt had taken the lead in pushing the necessary Bill through the Commons from April onwards. His speech of 21 April included a section on the importance of maintaining the British constituencies untouched while the hundred Irish seats were added to them. His open admission of an alteration in his previous views on the merits of parliamentary reform suggests that the years of war had indeed changed his political outlook: ‘I have not forgotten what I have myself formerly said and sincerely felt upon this subject; but I know that all opinions must necessarily be subservient to times and circumstances; and that man who talks of his consistency merely because he holds the same opinion for ten or fifteen years, when the circumstances under which that opinion was originally formed are totally changed, is a slave to the most idle vanity.’ Seeing now the consequences of changes to other constitutions and the strength of the British one in the face of all its challenges, Pitt felt the form of representation should not ‘be idly and wantonly disturbed from any love of experiment, or any predilection for theory … I think it right to declare my most decided opinion, that, even if the times were proper for experiments, any, even the slightest change in such a constitution must be considered as an evil.’38
Experience had indeed hardened him against the ideals of his youth. And the experiences of the next few months were to be some of the hardest of all. The price of wheat continued to rise steeply. Poor spring weather and torrential rain in mid-summer raised the prospect of the second bad harvest in a row. The link between food prices and public disorder would be reaffirmed by riots that autumn; in the meantime the returning atmosphere of domestic insecurity was added to when the King was shot at in the Drury Lane Theatre (the culprit then spent forty years in the mental asylum of Bedlam). At the same time, Pitt’s financial calculations were going awry. Income tax had produced less than £2 million in 1799 instead of the expected £6.5 million. The Commons baulked at a measure presented by Pitt in April obliging taxpayers to itemise their income in an attempt to prevent evasion. He had to abandon the measure and substitute a far more moderate alternative.
Even so, he was raising far larger sums in tax than had ever been known before, yet still needed a loan of £18.5 million for 1800. The creation of income tax had been intended to pay for more of the war’s costs while it was actually in progress, rather than using taxes simply to fund the accumulating debt. But in effect, by 1800 Pitt was back to raising ever larger loans. His parliamentary workload that summer was heavy: the Union and financial issues coincided with the need to defend the government’s renunciation of the Convention of El Arish, in which Sydney Smith, after his heroic defence at Acre, had overseen a Franco—Turkish agreement that the French army would be taken home from Egypt in British ships.
All these issues added to the pressures on Pitt that summer, but none was so great as the difficulty of contending with the strains of the coalition and sharp disagreements between his two long-standing lieutenants over the course of the war. By March 1800 the unpredictable Tsar Paul I had tired of criticism of his troops and the lack of Austrian support for his army the previous year, and communicated to London his withdrawal from the coalition, despite the offer of a massive £3.5 million subsidy. This development threw a reluctant Grenville back into the arms of Austria and diminished the military resources available to attack France, further complicating British decision-making.
In a memorandum at the end of March Dundas argued cogently that it was time to switch wholeheartedly to a naval strategy which would clear the Spanish from a good deal of their empire and open up the South American market for British trade. He wished to capture New Orleans, Tenerife, Concepción in Chile and sites on the Rivers Plate and Orinoco. This was in sharp conflict with the Cabinet’s already decided intention of sending the army into the Mediterranean to strike at France from the south. Other plans, variously abandoned and resurrected through the early months of 1800, included the occupation of Belleisle off the coast of northern France or Walcheren off the coast of Holland. With Dundas preferring this option to a Mediterranean expedition, and Grenville preferring to attack the Bordeaux region, sharp notes were exchanged between them, Grenville telling Dundas: ‘Do this, or anything else that you prefer, but for God’s sake, for your own honour, and for the cause in which we are engaged, do not let us, after having by immense exertions collected a fine army, leave it unemployed, gaping after messengers from Genoa, Augsburg, and Vienna, till the moment for acting is irrecoverably past by. For this can lead to nothing but disgrace.’39
For any party leader or Prime Minister, sustained disagreement with or between senior colleagues is the most wearying and time-consuming of difficulties. Not only were Pitt’s principal Secretaries of State at loggerheads, but Dundas, the one closest to him, was begging to leave office. His nights had become sleepless, his health was deteriorating and his wife was pressing him to retire from the front line of politics. But Pitt was adamant, and may well have suggested that he himself could not go on without his right-hand man. He lectured Dundas about his duty: ‘It is impossible for any consideration to reconcile my mind to the measure you propose … Let me therefore entreat you for all our sakes, to abandon wholly this idea, and to reconcile yourself to a duty which however difficult and painful, you are really at the moment not at liberty to relinquish.’40 In the end, Dundas bowed to Pitt’s will and even promised he would not leave before the end of the war.
Still more serious was the consequence of Cabinet indecision and disagreement, which led to the British army being put to no effective use throughout a crucial year of war. An expedition did eventually sail to the Mediterranean, but arrived in Minorca too late to affect the fighting on the Continent between the Austrians and the French. Storms and the strength of the French defences prevented any landing being made at Belleisle. Other small landings got nowhere, and an eventual attempt to seize the Spanish naval port of Cadiz was cancelled in bad weather. Cornwallis wrote of ‘twenty-two thousand men floating round the greater part of Europe, the scorn and laughing stock of friends and foes’.41
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the pressure of parliamentary, ministerial and international events in the summer of 1800 was too much for Pitt’s weakened constitution. He still did an enormous amount: he held his government together,
secured the passage of the Act of Union, obtained funding for the war and maintained the wider political resolve to see it through. But he could no longer do everything. Disagreements among colleagues, and the lack of any obvious course of action for what might be the last throw of the war, left him uncertain, exercising too little grip, and prone to his long-standing vices of procrastination and the readiness to grasp at the latest encouraging news. In early June he changed his mind on military plans on two consecutive days. Nearly seventeen years into his premiership, and perhaps for the first time in his life, William Pitt did not know what to do.
And then the hammer-blow fell. On 6 May Napoleon had left Paris and moved an army with his customary rapid speed through Switzerland to Milan. South-west of Milan on the morning of 14 June he divided his forces to prevent the Austrians escaping, but soon found himself under full-scale Austrian attack. The battle, known to history as Marengo, was, as Wellington would later say of Waterloo, ‘a damned close run thing’. By the time Napoleon managed to recall the forces he had sent away the French were almost done for, but General Desaix is said to have commented on arrival, ‘The battle is completely lost; but it is only two o’clock, and we still have enough time to win another battle before the day is done.’42 He did not survive the day, joining some 6,500 French and seven thousand Austrian casualties. But at the end of the day the French held the field and Napoleon, albeit narrowly, had cemented his personal power in Paris and decisively repulsed the Austrian army. It was ‘the baptism of Napoleon’s personal power’.43
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