It was not in Bonaparte's nature to be thwarted. He represented the embodied will of an invincible Revolution. By her mastery of
1Fortescuey IV, 798.
2 Mahan, Sea Power, II, 67.
the sea Britain was thwarting the consummation of that Revolution. Since for the moment his fleet could not challenge that mastery, he would choose another way: by expelling the islanders from every port in Europe, he would ruin their trade and force them to make peace. That, at least, lay within his power.
Though the uneasy armistice with Austria still held for the moment, Bonaparte was free to move against the smaller clients of the failing Coahtion. On October 15th his troops poured into the capital of Tuscany. At Leghorn he seized forty-six English ships, close on a million quintals of wheat, barley and dried vegetables, and every penny of British capital in the town. Meanwhile at the other end of Europe he prepared an unexpected blow.
Since the French flag had been driven from the seas, the maritime neutrals had had a growing incentive to run the gauntlet of the blockade and gain the Republic's carrying trade. To Denmark, Sweden and the United States—the chief of these—the First Consul offered in the summer and fall of 1800 the most advantageous terms. Reversing the harsh pohcy of his predecessors, he raised the embargo on their ships—-impounded for carrying British merchandise under Jacobin decrees—waived the customary rights of blockade and invited them to come and go as they chose. He had almost everything to gain by doing so, nothing to lose. If, in contrast to his liberal pohcy, England continued to use her ancient international rights of search and confiscation—her only remaining weapon against France—she would incur the odium of mankind.
Once before during the American war, when Britain was contending single-handed against the chief naval Powers of Europe, the Baltic States had combined to claim a novel immunity from the rights of search. The flag, they maintained, covered cargo: neutral ships sailing under convoy were immune from inspection and capture. In her then extremity Britain had been unable to do more than protest. Since that time, however, all the contracting Powers had either themselves enforced the customary rights of search in their own wars or expressly renounced their unwarrantable claim in friendly treaties with England. But during the early part of 1800, encouraged by France and impelled by commercial cupidity, Denmark had revived it. In July one of her frigates, attempting to protect a convoy, was fired on in the Channel and carried into the Downs.
This time Britain, all-powerful at sea, did not hesitate. She sent to Copenhagen an Ambassador backed by the guns of a powerful naval squadron. While the defences of the Danish capital were still incomplete, she extracted a recognition of her ancient rights pending full consideration of the matter at a conference to be held in London after the war. The Danes abandoned their claim to convoy ships to France and admitted their liability to search, while Britain undertook to repair the damaged frigate.
But at this point Bonaparte intervened. Ever since his accession to power he had been carefully courting the crazy autocrat of Russia. To inflame him against his former allies he offered to hand over Malta to his troops. Later, affecting immense indignation at a somewhat ungenerous British refusal to exchange French prisoners in England for Russians taken in Holland, he had sent the latter back to Russia in new uniforms accompanied by a flowery letter. This display of chivalrous sentiment was perfectly calculated to arouse the childlike enthusiasm of the Tsar, already full of venom towards the cowardly, selfish English and Austrians who had caused his invincible soldiers to be defeated.
The news of the capture of Malta—which Paul now viewed as his private property—and of the British expedition to the Sound set a match to the train which the First Consul had so carefully prepared. On November 7th in a fit of homicidal rage the Tsar placed an embargo on all British ships in Russian ports. When some succeeded in escaping, he had a number of the others burnt and marched their crews in chains into the interior.
Bonaparte's project was taking shape. With Muscovite aid the decision of Nelson's guns in Aboukir Bay could be reversed, the position in the eastern Mediterranean transformed and a new road to the Orient opened through Persia. On December 2nd Dundas sent warning to Keith and Abercromby to be prepared to repel an attack from Russia—still nominally Britain's ally—through the Dardanelles. On every horizon on which the Cabinet in London looked out that autumn of 1800, storms were rising. The Tsar's embargo, followed by his impetuous approach to Sweden, Denmark and Prussia to revive the Armed Neutrality of the North, threatened both to break the blockade of France and to close the Baltic to British trade. Already in November Prussia, angered by the seizure of one of her ships carrying contraband, had marched
into Cuxhaven, a port of the free city of Hamburg and one of the chief channels of British commerce with central Europe. The First Consul's purpose was plain. It was to make the sea useless to the country which ruled it.
Similar threats had been made against England before. But they had done her little harm because, as long as the Baltic, with its all-important trade in grain, timber and naval stores, remained open to her ships, the closure of the remainder of the European coastline hurt Europe more than it injured Britain. Controlling the ocean routes, she could deny the colonial produce of the New World and the East to her foes while extending her own imports and supporting her elaborate structure of usury through trade with the Hanseatic and Scandinavian towns. On this basis the long war, which many had thought would be her ruin, had actually enriched her. So soon as she had established complete command of the seas over the combined fleets of France, Spain and Holland, her wealth and financial power, instead of contracting, had expanded. " Our trade," Pitt told the House of Commons in the summer of 1799, two years after Cape St. Vincent and Camperdown, " has never been in a more flourishing situation." By the turn of the century British exports had reached a declared annual value of nearly forty millions, or half as much again as at the outbreak of war, while imports had doubled. Despite privateers the tonnage cleared from Great Britain to North Germany in the same period had trebled. The destructive effect of the war and Revolution on the Continent was making Britain the manufactory as well as the warehouse of the world.
These increases were reflected in the revenue returns, which, notwithstanding the vast sums sunk in free loans and subsidies to the Allies, remained as buoyant, as the Prime Minister's spirits. By 1800 the nation was raising thirty-six millions a year on an estimated trade of between seventy and eighty millions. The conquest of the French, Spanish and Dutch islands in the West and East Indies had raised the Custom receipts by as much as fifty per cent. "If," Pitt proudly declared, " we compare this year of war with former years of peace, we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable and astonishing."
But there was one flaw in the imposing structure of British commercial supremacy, and Bonaparte saw it. Owing to the national passion for individual liberty and the utter inadequacy of the antiquated administrative machine, the prosperity of the populace had not kept pace with the country's expanding trade. The war had enriched the wealthy and enabled them to bear its financial burdens with comparative ease. But though it had increased the purchasing power of the landed and commercial classes, it had only as yet indirectly and very partially raised that of the peasant and labourer. The rise in prices far outran the rise in wages: a Suffolk labourer earning 5s. a week in 1750, and 9s. a week plus 6s. from the parish in 1800, needed £1 6s. 5d. in 1800 to buy the equivalent of 5s. worth in 1750.1 And by restricting the flow of certain essential commodities, the war had created shortages in real wealth which had fallen almost exclusively on the poor. By further contracting vital imports by an extension of his continental blockade to the Baltic, Bonaparte intended to strike at the stubborn rulers of England through the bellies of the poor. He would bring the Revolution home to them hi the form they most feared.
It seemed in the autumn of 1800 as though the heavens were fighti
ng on his side. The terrible rains of the previous summer had been followed by a black season of high prices and food shortage. In July wheat, which had averaged 45s. a quarter before the war, touched 134s. Parliamentary Acts, compelling bread to be baked twenty-four hours before sale and establishing a wholemeal loaf, failed to alleviate the scarcity. At Dorking Fanny D'Arblay reported that respectable journeymen's children were begging from door to door for halfpence, and at the other end of the country Dorothy Wordsworth at Rydale noted the same alarming phenomenon.2
A prolonged midsummer drought and a charming August had been followed by a sudden downpour just when the harvest was beginning. For the second year in succession the crops were ruined. By October the people in many districts were literally starving. A succession of bread riots, aggravated by the repressive measures of narrow-minded " anti-Jacobin " magistrates and judges, brought home the danger in the situation. To keep order in the industrial towns troops had to be recalled in November from Portugal.
1 Mathieson, 87.
2 Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (ed. W. Knight, 1934), 32.
So far as the state of educated opinion in economic matters permitted, the Government did its best. A special emergency session of Parliament was called and large additional bounties were offered for imports of wheat. But though the country had the wherewithal to buy, the markets from which it could do so were perilously narrow. The value of wheat imports for the year touched the record figure of £2,675,000, nearly three times the pre-war normal. But the population of the British Isles had risen since 1791 from thirteen to fifteen and a half millions—an increase in mouths which even the farming improvements brought about by enclosures could not meet. Indeed, by reducing that individual attention to the lesser fruits of good husbandry which the family holding stimulates in times of scarcity, enclosures aggravated rather than solved the immediate problem.
Thus Bonaparte's threat to conquer the sea by the land was a very real one for the rulers of England in the closing months of 1800. In the villages at their park gates and in the towns through which they passed they saw men and women starving. The Tsar's embargo and the impending stoppage of the Baltic grain fleets placed them in a terrible dilemma. On December 16th Russia and Sweden signed a treaty of alliance by which they bound themselves to revive the heretical maritime code of the Armed Neutrality and to enforce their claims against any dissenting belligerent by naval action. A few days later Prussia and Denmark, despite her recent treaty with Britain, gave their adherence to the " League of the Armed Neutrals."
Before this was known in London, Britain had lost her last effective allies. On November 28th, 1800, the French armistice with Austria expired. Within less than a week the Imperial field army in southern Germany had been destroyed. With incredible folly the Aulic Council had deprived the Archduke Charles of his command in favour of an inexperienced boy. As a result the one fighting force in Europe capable of checking the French Army had been exposed to Moreau's counter-attack in the snow-clad forest of Hohenlinden. Thereafter, though the great Archduke was hastily recalled to his former command, nothing could withstand the French advance. On Christmas Day an armistice was signed at Steyer, less than a hundred miles from Vienna. Thugut, his policy shattered, resigned, and the reacceptance by a defeated Austria of the terms of Campo Formio became inevitable.
Meanwhile the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seeking peace with the conqueror. After the occupation of Tuscany the Queen had hurried to St. Petersburg to beg the Tsar to intercede for her husband's throne. Bonaparte had gladly acceded to his new friend's request: it was his present policy to refuse him nothing. But he accompanied his forbearance with a servile treaty by which the Neapolitan Government bound itself to close its ports to British ships and merchandise, and to admit French garrisons to its fortresses. Save for Portugal, now once more in deadly peril from Spain, the proud island which eighteen months before had led all Europe in a triumphant crusade against France had not a friend in the world.
One resort only remained to Britain in the ruin of her hopes: her command of the sea. This still stood, dominating the angry winter waves beyond every rocky promontory of the Continent and setting bounds to the conqueror's dominion. Since St. Vincent had been appointed to the Channel Fleet a year before, it had become far more formidable. For in place of old Bridport's lax watch on Brest and the Atlantic ports, the new Admiral had imposed a rigid blockade of his own devising that spared neither man nor ship but allowed nothing that floated to enter or leave France's naval arsenals. In front of Brest, where the Combined Navies of France and Spain now lay an inert mass, the duty division of the blockading fleet was increased from the customary fifteen to thirty sail. During easterly winds five ships of the line were always anchored between the Black Rocks and Porquette Shoal, ten miles from the entrance to the harbour, and the frigates and cutters plied day and night in the opening of the Goulet. The main fleet rode well in with Ushant, seldom more than two or three leagues from the island. To prevent further escapes through the shoals to the south, a detachment of from two to four ships of the line was stationed permanently at the southern entrance of the Passage du Raz, while cruisers ranged the Bay of Biscay intercepting every attempt to move along the coast and making periodic cutting-out expeditions on French roadsteads.
The strain imposed by these methods on ships and seamen was terrific. Collingwood, wintering off that rocky coast with only
occasional spells in Cawsand Bay or lonely Torbay to break the monotony, complained bitterly to his wife of his irksome life and of a system which increased instead of softening the rigours of the sailor's unremitting service. Others of coarser clay murmured openly at the Admiral's attempt to apply the stern discipline of the Mediterranean to the Channel Fleet. But where the interests of his country were concerned, St. Vincent admitted neither humanity nor pity. " I am at my wits' end," he wrote, " to meet every shift, evasion and neglect of duty. Seven-eighths of the captains who compose this fleet are practising every subterfuge to get into liar-bour for the winter." They met with scant success. Even when driven by storms to Plymouth or Falmouth, no officer on blockade duty was allowed to sleep on shore or take his ship to the dockyards without leave from the Admiral. It was not surprising that the longing for peace among all ranks grew as their one hope of release from a life of slavery.
But the results justified the policy. The threat of the forty-eight battleships in Brest to Ireland and the West Indies diminished week by week as the shortage of naval stores and supplies in the congested port grew. The primitive and disorganised road services of western France were quite inadequate to take the place of the coastal carrying trade that St. Vincent's stranglehold had destroyed. Nothing could evade his unceasing vigilance. Repeated orders from the terrible First Consul for part of the French Fleet to put to sea—to relieve Egypt or to harry British commerce—were unavailing, for the fleet could not move. It had not even food enough for its crews.
Bonaparte's delight in the success of his plot to involve the Baltic Powers in the war can therefore be imagined. Between them they possessed 123 ships of the line with an immediate potential of 24 battleships and 25 frigates while the hulks in harbour were being fitted out. With such a force, operating from a semi-inland sea, the British blockade could be outflanked and broken in the spring; then with a combined fleet of perhaps a hundred sail of the line the threat to Ireland and of a direct invasion of England could be renewed. The shortage of naval stores which was crippling every effort to restore the French Marine would then be reversed. Faced, as always at the end of a long war, by a serious domestic timber shortage, Britain in her turn would lose the source of supply
from which five-sixths of her imported masts and timbers were derived. Her defeat would then be certain.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Bonaparte felt that his alliance with the Tsar far outweighed his victory over the Emperor. For it would enable him to " dominate England "; to do what had
E
roved impossibl
e after his earlier victory in '97 and without which e could not rule the world. His ascendancy over the mind of the autocrat of Russia was now complete. " Whenever I see a man," Paul addressed him, " who knows how to govern, my heart goes out to him. I write to you of my feelings about England—the country that champions the rights of all peoples yet is ruled only by greed and selfishness. I wish to ally myself with you to end that Government's injustices." His Ambassador paraded the scene o£ Suvorof's conquests with the French and Russian flags interlocked, announcing that the two great nations of the Continent should henceforward be eternally united for the peace of mankind. The Napoleonic myth was taking shape: of a heaven-born deliverer sent to re-unify Europe and save its civilisation from the perfidious dividing usurer of the seas.
The Years of Endurance Page 44