It was Napoleon himself who was to startle the Austrian and Russian courts out of lumbering negotiations and into wholehearted alliance with Britain. His annexation of Genoa in early June along with the granting of Lucca as a fiefdom to his sister, and his assumption of the title of King of Italy, all spoke more powerfully of the need for a new alliance than any entreaties by Pitt. Yet it would be September before signatures were in place and armies beginning to move, and even then Prussia remained tantalisingly indecisive. Pitt therefore had nothing concrete to tell the Commons before they rose for the summer in July, although he did take the precaution of asking for authority to pay out £3.5 million in foreign subsidies.
Necessarily kept in the dark about foreign affairs, the Commons busied itself with domestic acrimony. Melville gave a two-hour defence of his conduct at the Bar of the House of Commons, insisting that the money in question had never been used to provide him with a personal profit. As with Warren Hastings nearly twenty years before, the Commons was unimpressed by a defiant defence, in this case of something it had already censured. In some confusion, MPs voted against impeaching Melville but in favour of his prosecution, a verdict overturned two weeks later in favour of impeachment. Pitt was relieved that Melville would be tried by his peers rather than in the courts, but the process of arriving at this conclusion had ruptured once and for all his political association with Sidmouth. Sidmouth had favoured the harder line of prosecution, and his brother Hiley and other acolytes had spoken for it publicly in vengeful terms. To Pitt, this made it impossible to reward Sidmouth’s supporters with the promised places in the government, and to Sidmouth in turn this meant that it was impossible to remain in the Cabinet.
By this stage, the parliamentary session had only days to run, and Pitt could afford to lose Sidmouth and his followers if he could broaden his government in other ways during the recess. His mind had turned back to what he had wanted in the first place: the incorporation of the Grenville and Fox parties into the ministry. Canning told his wife that he had urged, and Pitt had promised, ‘expedition in making overtures’.19 Having made use of Sidmouth for six months, Pitt was happy to discard him, as Sidmouth himself ascertained perfectly easily after a fruitless meeting with Pitt instigated by the King: ‘It is evident to me that he has a connection with opposition in his view, and that he is desirous of maintaining that sort of relation with me and my friends, which without hampering him in any way, may be very convenient for the purpose of negotiation.’20
Pitt knew he was prepared to lose Sidmouth, but he could not know for sure that he could construct an alternative coalition, however meticulously he prepared for it. In both military affairs and domestic politics he would increasingly be operating throughout the rest of 1805 on a wing and a prayer, despatching forces to Europe in the expectation of an alliance with Prussia but without its confirmation, and failing to take any steps to win the continued support of Sidmouth even though there was far from any certainty that Grenville and Fox could be recruited. In his ambition and optimism he remained the man he had been when he first became Prime Minister, when he had incurred serious defeats on parliamentary reform and the Irish propositions because he could envisage and design his eventual objective but not be sure of winning sufficient support to get there. What is more, the fulfilment of one hope became dependent on the other, since Pitt believed that the creation of a European alliance which included Prussia would be so much in accordance with Grenville’s views that it would be possible to bring at least his part of the opposition into the government.
With Pitt unwilling to promote any of Sidmouth’s adherents, and additionally and provocatively unwilling to express any regrets about that position, Sidmouth resigned from the government after a further conversation with Pitt on 4 July 1805. Sidmouth left office offended by Pitt’s haughty and distant attitude and mystified by his parting remarks. He recorded that when he asked Pitt if his conduct had been in any way improper, ‘the latter holding out his hand, replied, with tears in his eyes: “Never: I have nothing to acknowledge from you but the most generous and honourable conduct, and I grieve that we are to part!”’21 Such a remark probably reflected a mixture of sincerity and calculation: Pitt’s real anger was directed at Sidmouth’s friends, and additionally he did not want him to go out into automatic opposition. Fox thought it was typically incompetent of Sidmouth to resign too late in the session to make any immediate difference in Parliament, but hoped that the resignation ‘may do great good, as furnishing evidence of the impossibility of Pitt’s going on with any set of Ministers who are not his own mere creatures and tools’.22
Pitt made up for the resignations of Sidmouth and Buckinghamshire by shuffling the chairs in his existing Cabinet in order to have sufficient placemen available for dismissal in the event of his being able to recruit the more talented Ministers he had in mind. Camden became President of the Council, Castlereagh took on the War Department as well as the Board of Control, and Harrowby came back from his illness to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Pitt was prepared to offer six places in the Cabinet to the opposition, and Canning found him in July to be fully intent on creating a broader government, and that ‘nothing ever was more cordial & comfortable than P. He really seems to have shaken a weight off his mind, & to have a pleasure in opening himself fully on all subjects.’23
Events would prove, however, that Pitt had let Sidmouth go too easily, and that the broader government he sought would come up against precisely the same obstacles against which it had foundered in May of the previous year. Grenville now felt bound to Fox, and to the principle of all the most talented figures in the country being invited to join the government, and on this point rebuffed Pitt’s initial approaches through their mutual friend Bathurst. While Fox renewed his disclaimer of office if the rest of the opposition wished to go in without him, his colleagues did not find this acceptable, and he was not prepared to serve in a government with Pitt at the head of it. The positions of Fox and Pitt in 1805 were therefore identical to the ones they had adopted in 1784: Pitt would only have Fox in a subsidiary capacity, and Fox could only serve with Pitt on an equal basis. What really made the project a hopeless one was that George III also held to his position of 1784: on no account did he want Fox in the government at all, and he was now happy to extend this veto to Grenville.
It was late September when George III finally dashed any hopes Pitt might have had of creating a broad coalition. Pitt had waited until he had the opportunity to talk to the King at length and in person, visiting him at his summer residence in Weymouth. He had no doubt hoped to have some more constructive signals from the opposition by this point, and he was conscious of the need to tread carefully with a King who was not only mentally fragile but also failing physically, steadily going blind and already without the use of one eye. When Rose arrived in Weymouth and spoke to the King on 22 September, it was clear that Pitt would not get his way:
His Majesty then told me that Mr. Pitt had made very strong representations to him of the necessity of strengthening his government by the accession of persons from the parties of Lord Grenville and Mr. Fox, but that he was persuaded there existed no necessity whatever for such a junction; that we did very well in the last session, and he was confident we should not be worse in the ensuing one; that affairs on the Continent wore a good appearance, and that, at least, it was desirable to see how they would turn out … I observed to his Majesty that there would be an unavoidable necessity in the next session of Parliament to resort to new and extraordinary measures of taxation, which would put our force in the House of Commons to a very different test from anything that had passed in the last session … I was perfectly convinced, if Mr. Pitt should be confined by the gout, or any other complaint, for only two or three weeks, there would be an end of us … I had not the good fortune, however, to make any impression whatever on His Majesty.24
All in all, George III had formed a ‘positive determination … against admitting a single man from the Opposit
ion into Government’.25 Pitt was very disappointed, notwithstanding the immense difficulties of creating a coalition even had the King been agreeable. In despair for the prospects of the government a few months later he would say to Melville: ‘I wish the King may not live to repent, and sooner than he thinks, the rejection of the advice which I pressed on him at Weymouth.’26 Yet, as ever, he was prepared to carry on if necessary, despite the lack of allies and his failing health. He had evidently had a ‘violent cold and rheumatism’27 in early July, and when he generously called on Sidmouth on 29 September to sympathise over the severe illness of his young son Henry, Sidmouth wrote that ‘Pitt looked tolerably well, but had been otherwise.’28 Whatever his physical state, Pitt was left placing his hopes for parliamentary survival on showing clear progress in the war. In a letter to Harrowby he said that the government simply had to ‘prepare to fight the Battle as well as We can’.29 And as it happened, some of the most decisive battles of history were now only weeks away.
In the summer of 1805, the naval war became fast-moving and dangerous. Nelson’s anxious search for the French fleet which had entered the Atlantic in April took him to the West Indies and back on a journey of over 6,600 miles in a little over two months. The French ships, reinforced by the Spanish, eventually ended up back in port at Ferrol, but the anxiety of the British at this pattern of events was nothing compared to the coming rage of Napoleon. The French plan had been for a much larger force, including the French warships blockaded in Brest, to congregate in the West Indies, draw in that direction as many British forces as possible, and then descend on the English Channel to cover the full-scale French invasion of England. But by the time the French Admiral Villeneuve arrived at Ferrol, Nelson was on his way back from the West Indies, and the ships at Brest had never got out at all. Ordered by Napoleon to nonetheless make for Brest and create a powerful combined fleet, Villeneuve found a British squadron in the way and sailed back to Ferrol and then to Cadiz. This move wrecked all prospect of threatening British command of the Channel that summer and left Napoleon in a fury. Pacing up and down at Boulogne on 13 August, he denounced ‘that bloody fool Villeneuve’ and tore into the apparently useless condition of his navy.
Abandoning the invasion plan he had cherished for over two years, Napoleon prepared instead to turn the full force of his military power and strategic ability against the Austrians who were now mobilising in the east. It was not, of course, immediately apparent in Britain that the French army at Boulogne was marching away, and in any case it was necessary to neutralise the large force of French and Spanish warships now concentrated at Cadiz. Nelson, who had returned briefly to Britain, was instructed to resume the Mediterranean command, with the objective of seeking battle with the French and Spanish fleet. During his brief stay in London he made arrangements for his name to be engraved on his coffin lid (made from the timbers of L’Orient, the French flagship destroyed at the Nile), and also called on Pitt at Downing Street. Six weeks before the Battle of Trafalgar, and both nearing the end of their lives, the long-serving Prime Minister and the renowned Admiral sat together and discussed how to defeat the enemy force at Cadiz. Nelson promised Pitt a victory not merely ‘honourable to the parties concerned’, but one that would ‘bring Buonaparte to his marrow bones’.30 Afterwards he told his family that ‘Mr. Pitt paid me a compliment which, I believe, he would not have paid to a Prince of the Blood. When I rose to go, he left the room with me and attended me to the carriage.’31
Nelson left Portsmouth on HMS Victory on 16 September, by which time Napoleon, conducting one of the most dramatic of his legendary forced marches, was about to cross the Rhine with almost 200,000 men. His objective was simple: to shatter the Third Coalition almost the moment it was formed.
If the forces were set down on paper, the French, as so often in the 1790s, were at a serious disadvantage. French aggression and ‘Pitt’s gold’ had brought Russia, Austria and Sweden into alliance with Britain, with Prussia still open to offers. Some 400,000 allied troops were stirring into action from the Adriatic to the Baltic. The French would be, Pitt noted, ‘attacked in all Quarters from Italy to the Elbe’.32 There would be a major Austrian offensive in northern Italy, and on their right an Austro-Russian army would proceed down the Danube, through southern Germany and into France. Additional Russian forces would advance further north, link up with Swedish forces in Pomerania and also unite with a small British force in Corfu to secure southern Italy. With the exception of this small Mediterranean expedition, and an army of six thousand men sent to recapture the Cape of Good Hope, Pitt and the Cabinet decided to concentrate all other available British forces on a landing in north Germany of up to 65,000 men. Pitt was no doubt conscious that the many British colonial conquests in the 1790s had failed to bring France to her knees; he would now concentrate as much of a land force as Britain could muster on joining in a series of decisive blows against France itself. A large British army in Germany would have the added benefits of encouraging Prussian participation in the war, and directly helping to free Hanover and Holland from French control, both of which were prime British objectives. In October, Harrowby would be despatched by Pitt to Berlin with an offer of £2.5 million in return for active Prussian participation in the war, without which there would be a big hole in the plan. But by the end of October a Prussian declaration of war against France was regarded as ‘almost inevitable’.33
Pitt’s strategy has been criticised for faults similar to those which hamstrung his previous efforts to defeat the French. The British army was still undermanned for what was being asked of it, since Pitt’s recruiting measures initiated the previous summer had been no more successful than those of the Addington ministry, and it was in any case more difficult to transport such a large force to north Germany than the plans assumed it to be. More seriously, some historians have considered the small size of the force sent to the Mediterranean as evidence of Pitt’s ‘incurable fault of frittering away his military force in small detachments’.34 It is true that, once again, Pitt was to some extent disposing of his forces in order to bring allies into play. Yet it is also true that those allies were essential, and that the strategy adopted in 1805 envisaged a far stronger concentration of force than Pitt had employed before. It is highly doubtful that a much larger army operating in the Mediterranean would have had any decisive effect, and it would of course have been exposed to attack en route by the powerful enemy naval force with which Nelson was hoping to deal. A fair conclusion must be that Pitt showed in 1805 that he had learnt some important strategic lessons; the weak points in the Third Coalition were the continued indecision in Berlin and the perennial difficulty of coordinating disparate forces spread around Europe against an enemy who could move between them at remarkable speed.
The collision of immense forces was now inevitable. The Emperor Francis of Austria and Tsar Alexander of Russia were themselves taking the field at the head of huge armies to fight Napoleon. In late October, Pitt was ‘in great spirits’ as he continued to hope for Prussian involvement. Having set all the wheels of war in motion, and with Parliament in recess, he was able to make short visits to Walmer and to Lord Bathurst’s house in Gloucestershire.
Since these were the last occasions on which he was observed at ease, many of those who spent time with him subsequently recorded their impressions. Almost incredibly, he seems to have retained the sanguine temper and pleasant disposition of his youth. Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, saw Pitt twice that autumn and remarked that he was ‘extremely lively, and in good spirits’, riding up to twenty miles a day, ‘but it was at that time the fashion to sup, and he … took a great deal of port-wine and water’.35 Lord Fitzharris, who was with Pitt in Gloucestershire, remembered that ‘nothing could be more playful, and, at the same time, more instructive, than Pitt’s conversation on a variety of subjects while sitting in the library at Cirencester. You never would have guessed that the man before you was Prime Minister of the country, and one of the gr
eatest that ever filled that situation. His style and manner were quite those of an accomplished idler.’36 William Dacres Adams remarked that even with ‘almost the whole weight of the government on his own Shoulders – so delightful was his temper, that … no hard word or look ever escaped him, but all towards me was kindness and indulgence’,37 and Lord Eldon, who asked Pitt whether he thought men in general were honourable or corrupt, received the answer ‘that he had a favourable opinion of mankind upon the whole, and that he believed that the majority was really actuated by fair meaning and intention’.38
Such freedom from bitterness would now be put to its final test.
When Malmesbury dined with Pitt on 2 November 1805 he found him unwilling to give credit to reports of the surrender of an entire Austrian army to Napoleon. As Malmesbury put it: ‘I clearly perceived he disbelieved it more from the dread of its being true, than from any well grounded cause. He … almost peevishly said, “don’t believe a word of it, it is all a fiction,”’ and ‘in so loud a voice as to be heard by all who were near us’.39 But the following day Mulgrave and Pitt came to Malmesbury with a Dutch newspaper of which, it being a Sunday, they could not obtain a translation. It was therefore Malmesbury who broke the terrible news: Napoleon’s rapid advance had surprised and isolated the army of General Mack, who had not only suffered heavy losses but also surrendered at Ulm with 30,000 troops. The road to Vienna was now open to the French. To Malmesbury, Pitt’s reaction ‘left an indelible impression on my mind, as his manner and look were not his own, and gave me, in spite of myself, a foreboding of the loss with which we were threatened’.40
It was a sharp setback, and by mid-November Napoleon was residing in the Habsburg Palace at Schönbrunn. Yet Napoleon had taken a strategic risk, trespassing on Prussian territory in order to accelerate his march to the east, and leaving extended lines of communication at the mercy of massive allied armies if Prussia were to join the war. In the meantime, the Tsar had arrived in Berlin to an enthusiastic welcome, with Russia and Prussia signing an agreement which would bring Prussia into the war against France by the middle of December if mediation did not succeed. For Britain, the vexing problem of Hanover remained, since its acquisition by Prussia was part and parcel of the deal with the Tsar, but Napoleon nevertheless faced the prospect of an encircling ring of enemies with 180,000 Prussian troops about to join the opposing camp.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 65