It has been called ‘The Battle of the Three Emperors’ and on this occasion Tsar Alexander I of Russia and the last Holy Roman emperor, Francis II, left the field in confusion and dismay. Their forces fled. One observer declared that ‘there were no longer regiments or army corps, there were only disorderly bands of marauders’. The Austrians and Russians lost approximately 26,000 men, while the French army forfeited 7,000. Alexander agreed to withdraw his forces behind his frontier, while Francis was obliged to accept humiliating terms of peace. Napoleon was finally the master of Europe.
It was said that the news of Austerlitz effectively killed Pitt. For days and weeks after he wore what was called an ‘Austerlitz face’ of deep sorrow. One Whig peer, Lord Auckland, said that the event involved ‘not only the well-being but the very existence of the British Empire’. The joy over Trafalgar now seemed premature.
Napoleon returned in triumph to Paris after Austerlitz. He made one of his brothers, Joseph, king of Naples; another brother, Louis, was announced as king of Holland. His old adversary, William Pitt, was now facing death. Pitt’s private secretary, Dacre Adams, wrote later that his eyes were ‘almost lifeless’ and his voice was ‘hollow’; he could not eat without vomiting, and survived on raw egg mixed with brandy. He told his doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar, that ‘when in conversation with persons upon important business, I felt suddenly as if I had been cut in two’. It might have been his liver, his kidneys, or his stomach.
When he lay on his deathbed in the first month of 1806 he sometimes muttered ‘Hear! Hear!’, as if he were listening to a debate in the Commons; then on the night of 22 January he called out, according to different reports, ‘How I love my country’ or ‘How I leave my country’. He died early on the following morning at the age of forty-six. For twenty-five years he had been the guiding star of Westminster. Now the star had faded and there was, according to Fox, ‘something missing in the world’.
The group of politicians, known as ‘Mr Pitt’s friends’, had been in a state of some confusion; all were competent but none was pre-eminent, and when the king asked the surviving ministers if they could continue under a new leader they declined the opportunity. They could not agree to raise any one man above the others. When the king realized that they would not be able to form an administration he had turned to William Grenville as a possible successor; Grenville’s father had been first minister, and he himself had been foreign secretary as well as a first cousin of Pitt’s. He was a pillar of the political world but he was by no means, in the jargon of the day, a ‘Pittite’ or anything close to Pitt himself.
He in turn reached out towards Charles James Fox and his Whig supporters. The eventual administration was known, perhaps sarcastically, as ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’, and it included Fox as foreign secretary. What were then known as Grenvillites, Foxites, Windhamites, Lansdownites, Sidmouthites and Addingtonians had also joined the ministry, an indication that Whig policies had largely given way to personalities in the great Westminster game. Grenville himself had decided to adopt the role of chairman of the board, exhorting and guiding various independent managers. It was not the most stable of positions, and the government itself lasted for little more than a year. One ardent Whig, John Cam Hobhouse, wrote that ‘the odium affixed to that coalition survived their short-lived power’. They were accused of nepotism and corruption which came under the all-encompassing description of ‘jobbing’. It was not a good year for the Whigs.
Fox himself had now to expedite negotiations with Buonaparte and his agents. It had been Fox who had celebrated the revolution with fervour and had embraced the French cause long after other devotees had abandoned it. But he was now in the uncomfortable position of realizing that his erstwhile hero, Napoleon Buonaparte, was as perfidious and as dangerous as any ordinary politician. His abortive negotiations with the French minister, Talleyrand, convinced him that peace was not to be achieved at any reasonable cost. The French were still bent upon aggression and territorial conquest. Fox noted to his nephew, Lord Holland, ‘the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me they are playing a false game’. Yet some believed that Fox, once the ardent francophile, would conclude a peace on whatever terms; the young Palmerston wrote that ‘I cannot see how at present peace can bring us anything but dishonour and defeat’. Fox did not have to bear his own dismay and disillusion for very long, as he died in the autumn of the year.
Napoleon’s recalcitrance had been well founded. At the beginning of August 1806, several principalities and kingdoms of south Germany formally seceded from the Holy Roman Empire, which now came to its long-awaited end, and accepted Buonaparte’s protection as head of their new confederation. In the month after Fox’s death, October 1806, the French army met the Prussian forces at Jena and inflicted a resounding defeat. The Prussian army had once been feared for its military skills and redoubtable leadership but its chain of command had become arthritic and its mobility therefore weakened. The legacy of Frederick the Great had been broken. Hegel considered the battle to mark ‘the end of history’, by which he meant that he foresaw the end of nation-states in the wake of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.
As if on cue the French armies invaded Prussia, taking Berlin in their path, and the king Frederick William III fled east with his family to enjoy the protection of the tsar. Mirabeau, one of the early revolutionaries, had said that ‘the Prussian monarchy is so constituted that it could not bear up under any calamity’. And so it proved. Napoleon’s thoughts, too, were turning east with territorial longings greater than ever before. The victory over Prussia provoked jubilation in France where one French minister of state, Pasquier, remarked that ‘nothing could have appeared so incredible’. Yet the joy of the French was tempered by the desire for the palpable fruits of victory, the greatest of which was peace.
But Napoleon was not in a peaceful mood. Ensconced in the newly captured city of Berlin, according to Pasquier, he ‘affected the language and attitude of a sovereign who commands his subjects’. The Prussians were no longer the enemy but a band of rebels, and the nobles of that country were no more than petty courtiers to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. His preoccupation now was with Russia, and he began to march further east into Poland which might once have sufficed as a barrier state between France and Russia; he occupied Warsaw and then rested, having driven the Russians 50 miles east of that city. He came in the apparent role of liberator, since that country had been partitioned over the years by Russia, Prussia and Austria. He said that ‘it is a dead body to which life must be restored before anything can be made of it’. So some Poles welcomed him as a deliverer. He even created an independent state, to be known as the duchy of Warsaw, but it did not survive.
While in Berlin his thoughts had turned again to his old enemy. If he could not assault Britain by sea or land, he could attack her by means of commerce. Trade was the key to Britain’s success; if that could be cut off or curtailed then the country would greatly suffer. If she were reduced to commercial isolation, then she might be induced to surrender. That at least was his intention.
The Berlin Decrees, issued from that city in November 1806, declared that the British Isles were subject to total blockade; no country should trade with Britain, and no foreign ports should be open to her. All her foreign markets were forthwith to be closed. It sounds like a draconian decree but in truth the Continental System, as it became known, had no permanent effect. Britain was too rich, and too productive, to be permanently cowed; the continent of Europe could not command enough resources to survive. Even Napoleon’s soldiers were clothed with textiles made in northern England. There was a crisis in trade in 1808, and then again in 1811, and there was for a time the phantom of famine, but the economic order soon stabilized. The regulations were either ignored or thwarted across vast swathes of Napoleon’s empire, and a black market in prohibited goods was established. It became clear that Napoleon had to fight more battles, and plan more campaigns, to ensure that the Continental
System was being obeyed.
In retaliation the British issued Orders in Council at the beginning of 1807 which were designed to mount a blockade against France; no neutral ships were permitted to enter French ports, and the greater efficiency of the British navy ensured that this barrier was not one to be crossed with impunity. Coffee, tobacco and other commodities became rare in the French capital.
In the winter of 1806 Napoleon was still on the march. The weather was terrible, the winds sharp and the snow treacherous, but ‘impossible’ was not a word to utter to the emperor. With the hostile forces of Russia, Prussia and Sweden about him, and Austria threatening in the rear, his army moved eastward; it was checked at Eylau, in a particularly bloody and inconclusive battle, but then advanced still further until it crushed the Russian army at the battle of Friedland. By the summer of 1807 the tsar was forced to come to terms with the emperor on a raft in the middle of the River Neman at Tilsit. A separate treaty with Prussia was signed two days later, by the terms of which that country was effectively dismembered. It had now been confirmed to all the protagonists that Napoleon was the undisputed master of Europe and, with Russia by his side, he might hope eventually to destroy an isolated Britain. The Russian commander noted that ‘the two emperors have shaken hands. Europe has cause to tremble.’ George III himself was convinced that some kind of accommodation would have to be made with Napoleon.
What was everyone really talking about in the autumn of 1807? Lady Bessborough, lover of Sheridan and mother to Lady Caroline Lamb, wrote to the British envoy in St Petersburg about the news of the day. ‘War with Russia? Nothing like it. America? Still less. What can occasion such a ferment in every house, in every street, in every shop, in every garret about London? It is the Light and Heat company . . . That strong light that has lit up Pall Mall for this year past has all at once blaz’d up like a comet.’ The streets of London were now illuminated by gas, and seemed to any stranger to be paved with gold.
The unfortunate Ministry of All the Talents had already resigned, in the spring of the year. William Grenville had fallen not so much as a result of Napoleon’s victories but from the continuing struggle between the king and his ministers over Ireland; the government wished to make concessions to the majority Catholic population, but the king demurred. When George insisted that all the members of the cabinet should sign a pledge to renounce any further attempt at Catholic emancipation, they resigned in protest. Gillray published a cartoon entitled ‘The Pigs Possessed or the Broad bottom’d Litter running headlong into ye Sea of Perdition’. George, portrayed as a farmer, denounces the pigs as they jump over the cliff: ‘Oh you cursed ungrateful brutes!’ ‘Broad bottom’ was the name given to a cross-party administration.
The Ministry of All the Talents had achieved one notable feat, however, in the abolition of the slave trade. Its moment had come. In the spring of 1807 the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed the Commons by a majority of 283 votes to 16 votes, a victory that surprised even William Wilberforce who ascribed it to Providence. Slavery itself, as opposed to the trade, was not abolished until twenty-six years later.
Another pig popped up, in the shape of the duke of Portland, as all the talents sank beneath the waves. When Grenville was obliged to resign, therefore, he was replaced by a sixty-nine-year-old man who was crippled with bad health and with an addiction to laudanum; the duke of Portland could not have controlled a crèche let alone a cabinet. He was soon incapable of political business, unable either to read long dispatches or engage in lengthy conversations. The stone consigned him to long periods of continual pain, and it was said that he was generally asleep or silent. This left him essentially as a figurehead, supposedly controlling a cabinet that contained rival personalities and principles. The conglomeration of them, plotting and planning against each other, became known as ‘The Ins and Outs’.
This was not perhaps the best administration to continue the fight against Napoleon. At the opening of parliament, on 28 January 1808, George III readied the people for the struggle yet to come. In an official ‘Note’ published in the Moniteur twelve days later Buonaparte pledged that peace would come only after England had been stripped of her overseas possessions which were ‘the principal source of her wealth’.
The war had in any case assumed a different aspect when Napoleon was obliged to look to his southern flank. The Iberian peninsula had become dangerous. In the spring of 1808 the emperor had decreed that his older brother, Joseph, should assume the monarchy of Spain as part of the French imperium; the Spanish were not willing to have a foreign ruler imposed upon them and fomented a nationalist rebellion. Six delegates from Asturias sailed to England and, having arrived at Falmouth, beseeched aid from the British government. The response could not have been more enthusiastic. Here was the opportunity to open another front against the French, with a line of command and communication that relied upon the sea. Nothing could have been more promising. Ten thousand men were dispatched to the peninsula under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley.
Portugal was also in rebellion against the French who had occupied Lisbon the year before. Napoleon had decided that his blockade of Britain would have a better chance of success if all the Portuguese ports were closed, a decision in which the Portuguese themselves did not concur. The emperor believed that it would be relatively easy to dominate the Iberian peninsula with an army, but he mistook the nature of the terrain and the spirit of the inhabitants. The people, most notably the peasants and the clergy, rose up against the foreign oppressors and created havoc with guerrilla attacks, shooting and banditry which could be neither anticipated nor controlled. Local forces, in this and other contests, were more than a match for a foreign army.
Wellesley landed in the early summer of 1808 at Oporto, where his army was enlarged by reinforcements and by Portuguese troops. At the battle of Vimeiro, in the middle of August, the French forces were heavily defeated. But the British negotiators, under the command of Sir Hew Dalrymple, conceded too much; the French were obliged to leave the country but they were permitted to take with them all their arms and equipment. When news of the treaty reached London there was disgust and dismay at such an inadequate response. George III was said to be ‘extremely angry’, and a special Gazette reported that ‘the public indignation this day is at its height . . . the people seem quite wild’. The British had bungled a great opportunity. It was widely believed and asserted that the expedition to Portugal had turned from triumph into disaster. A court of inquiry was held later in the year. Wellesley was exonerated, but Dalrymple never held another command.
The French, however, were no more successful in Spain than in Portugal; after a particularly galling defeat at Bailen, where 20,000 French soldiers were obliged to surrender to a Spanish army, Buonaparte decided that his presence was necessary on the ground. The British had sent Sir John Moore to parry the imperial thrust, and by the winter of 1808 Moore was close to Salamanca, but at this point the emperor burst through Spanish defences and occupied Madrid; Moore could not complete his mission but he was able to divert the attention of Buonaparte by marching north-west through the mountains of Galicia towards the port at Corunna where, with heroic and indeed fatal rearguard action, he managed to embark the majority of his men. He had significantly delayed Napoleon, who lost the opportunity of recapturing Portugal or finally of subduing Spain, and this interruption helped eventually to determine the struggle for the Iberian peninsula. It was to prove a costly adventure, both in men and money, for the emperor who found himself distracted by this second front which he had no realistic possibility of overcoming. It had become an open pit, swallowing up arms and armies. The day after the battle of Corunna – 17 January 1809 – Napoleon left Spain, never to return.
Yet the British came back; if for Napoleon the Iberian peninsula was at first a peripheral issue, in comparison with his great plans for European dominion, it was for his enemy a vital component of the armed struggle which provided a direct link to the European contin
ent through the ports of Lisbon and Oporto. Its dominance in the region also gave Britain a more powerful voice in later negotiations. Wellesley returned to the peninsula in the spring of 1809 and, as commander of the allied forces, defeated the French in two significant battles. As the victor in the battle of Talavera, south-west of Madrid, he was created Viscount Wellington.
Napoleon had finally committed 350,000 troops to Spain, but they were not enough. They were diverted and dispersed by the guerrillas, and slowly worn down by Wellington in his methodical and practical logistics. He would often conceal his troops in suitable terrain before unleashing them on the unsuspecting enemy in a ‘long red wall’. Buonaparte always underestimated him, calling him merely a ‘sepoy general’ as a consequence of his service in India, but Wellington, more than any other general, brought down the French army.
The war news further north was not so good. At the beginning of 1809 a ‘fifth coalition’, that between England and Austria, had been made ready to engage Buonaparte. A victory by Archduke Charles of Austria in the battle of Aspern delivered a fatal blow to the myth of Buonaparte’s invincibility, but the subsequent defeat of the Austrians at Wagram tempered any false optimism.
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 41