Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  From this time the public began to question the Doctor's prescription of Peace and Plenty. It was not they did not want peace but that they doubted his ability to preserve it. "The miserable and insulting experiment of governing without talents" was losing its charm. The sudden essay at crossing swords with the First Consul had exposed the inherent weakness of what Lady Malmesbury called the "Dumplin' Ministry" and Canning the " Goose Administration."

  1 "I begin most cordially to wish for the apotheosis of Bonaparte," wrote Auckland "He is too much for modern mortals."—Auckland, IV, 174.

  2 We have had enough of war and its direst calamities."—Pellew, II, 162.

  It was hard after that to feel any confidence in the complacent Addington and his lugubrious Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury —the " Stinkingson" of Lord Wellesley's contemptuous phrase.1

  The prosy, platitudes of Addington, so suited to the summer mood of 1802 when the country, tired like the King of the " confounded men of genius," had welcomed a Government of mediocrities, sounded perilously thin against the rumble of French guns on the Swiss cobblestones. The Prime Minister's constant references to the state of the revenue, his deplorable habit of being " too candid on his legs,"2 his feeble oratorical riddles of "Never venture to foretell" and "To doubt is to decide" aroused contempt. "What a damned decided fellow this," observed one, "he is always doubting!" "Those on whom our salvation rests," wrote another, "are weak in sense, in spirit, in character and in conduct. Would you trust the island of Nevis, the smallest of our possessions, to be fought for, to be argued for, to be played at push-pin for between Bonaparte and Addington ?" It was not only yesterday's " fallen warmongers" who now asked such questions. Even the unpopular Grenvilles—those uncompromising aristocrats from the frigid shades of Stowe and Dropmore—and the pushing, theatrical Canning who had derisively given the Doctor's Peace six months, found auditors at last. For events across the Channel were proving their unpalatable opinions right.3

  Yet it was not to Opposition frondeurs that men turned for an antidote to an appeasing Premier. "Whether Pitt will save us," Canning had written in the spring, "I do not know; but surely he is the only man that can" Since his resignation in Addington's favour nineteen months before, the great Minister had shown little interest in politics. He seemed to prefer lounging through the streets of a morning—"generally by himself and seeming not to have anything to do."—and spent most of his time at Walmer Castle planting fruit-trees and growing corn which since the famine of 1801 he prescribed as the first duty of a patriot. In September he was ill; gossip had it through over-indulgence in port. Later he took a cure at Bath where, he confided to his friend, Lord Bathurst, the regimen did not permit him to speak in terms of a bottle.

  But though he now confessed in private his disappointment in Addington and the decay of his hopes that the dictator's insatiable

  1 The Jenkinson of the past, and Lord Liverpool of the future. "Fit to roast pigeons and the longest neck in England. ... He looked as he always looked—as if he had been on the rack three times and saw the wheel preparing for a fourth."—Granville, 1,329,345,

  2 Wcllcslcy, I, 140.

  3 Festing,'o9,Granville, I, 325, 269; Pellew, II, 45, 76, 99-100, 110; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 112-14, 123; Malmesbury, IV, 74, 132-3; Minto, HI, 263-4; Plumer Ward, 76-9, 106-7; Campbell, I, 388.

  ambition could be satisfied peaceably, he continued to support his uninspiring protege and to lend his Administration the prestige of his name. In vain Canning chidcd his leader's inveterate prudence, dubbed him as tame as a chaplain and asked how much longer he would cherish the sheep of his hand. Pitt had not been a parliamentary leader for twenty years without learning to wait on events. When Canning assembled a thousand partisans at a public banquet to celebrate his birthday and bellow, with much' rapping of hands, feet and knives, the provocative chorus he had written for the occasion,

  —"And O! if again the rude whirlwind should rise, The dawning of peace should fresh darkness deform, The regrets of the good and the fears of the wise Shall turn to the pilot that weathered the storm"—

  the pilot was missing.

  Behind the scenes battle was now joined for Pitt's support. The protagonists were his former followers; those who had resigned rather than serve without him and those who at his request had taken office under Addington to continue his policy. The latter had made the peace and the former had denounced it. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the "outs," who included all the most brilliant orators of the former national party, were resentful at their replacement by duller men. This lent gall to their tongues. When they spoke of Addington they did so with a bitterness which was not easily forgotten. They had as spokesman the wittiest, most brilliant and least discreet of all the younger politicians. George Canning viewed the retirement of Pitt as a personal injury to his promising parliamentary career. He poured the vials of his wrath not on the leader he loved but on his napless successor. It became a point of honour with him to get the latter out of Downing Street at all costs. He perpetually ridiculed his political prescriptions, his "wretched, pusillanimous, toadeating Administration," the sinecures with which he endowed his relations, above all his ill-starred peace:

  " 'Tis thro' Addington's Peace that fair plenty is ours; Peace brightens the sunshine, Peace softens the showers; What yellow'd the cornfields ? what ripen'd the hay ? But the Peace that was settled last Michaelmas Day?

  " And shall not such statues to Addington rise For service most timely—for warning most wise—

  For a treaty which snatch'd us from ruin away, When sign'd with a quill from the Bird of To-day.

  "Long may Addington live to keep peace thro5 our borders— May each House still be true to its forms and its orders— So shall Britain, tho' destined by Gaul for her prey Be saved as old Rome by the Bird of To-day !"

  Since Pitt refused to countenance a coalition to oust the man he had sworn to support and since the Grenvilles with their pro-Catholic, views were far too unpopular to stand alone, the only alternative Prime Minister was Fox—a contingency which seemed to sober patriots past contemplation. For ten years "old Charley," as his doting followers called him, had opposed the war and praised and excused the French. At a dinner to celebrate the Peace he had publicly avowed his satisfaction that Britain had not achieved her war aims.1- And, though his visit to Paris and the extinction of Swiss liberty had robbed him of illusions about Bonaparte, he continued with irresponsible cheerfulness to pooh-pooh the idea of .war. His policy of defending the appeasing Ministers whom he despised— "a judicious dandling of the Doctor," as the delighted Creevey called it—shocked even staunch adherents like Sheridan and Tierney. In his almost fanatic hatred of war and all forms of constraint, the great Whig took the line that, as there was to be no more freedom in the world, Bonaparte was the fittest man to be master. The only sensible thing to do, he argued, was to avoid provocation and continental alliances and comply with the Treaty. He did not believe that the First Consul wanted war, for he could see nothing to be gained by war.2

  The political confusion was baffling. On the one hand was an appeasing Government that announced simultaneously its confidence in peace and its eleventh-hour resolve to rearm as a precautionary measure3; on the other a chaos of divergent factions—the Foxite Whigs unashamedly pacifist, the ultra-patriotic Grenvilles and Windhams demanding instant war, a small camarilla of younger Tories under Canning ready to employ any intrigue to bring about

  1 The triumph of the French government over the English," he had written in October, 1801, "does, in fact, afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise."—Fox, III, 349.

  2 Fox, III, 344-5, 349, 372, 387; Stanhope, III, 357; Hary-O, 17; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, in; Creevey, I, 8-10; Windham, II, 198-9; Granville, I, 369; Minto, III, 260.

  3 Mr. Addington observed that there were some gentlemen who were in the habit of making exaggerated statements and using language tending to war; others, on the contrary, seemed ready t
o make any sacrifices for the maintenance of peace. Ministers would not follow the advice of either."—Pellew,99-100.

  the return of Pitt, and the more moderate section of Pitt's adherents patiently awaiting a lead from their idol. All the genius and eloquence were on the Opposition benches, but the Ministry was sustained by the mutual jealousy of its opponents, the voting power of the Treasury place-holders and the continued goodwill of the King and the stolider country gentry. The poor, who associated Pitt and war with rising prices and taxes, on the whole still supported the humdrum Government which had given them peace. " I am afraid nothing can save us," wrote Windham, "w.e appear to be every day to be more past help." Canning doubted if England would survive the next session of Parliament as an independent country.1.

  It was Napoleon who resolved the confusion in the British mind. He had already awoken widespread apprehension. Nelson, a strong Addingtonian, seconding the Address in the Lords on November 23rd, spoke for many when he declared that no considerations of peace and prosperity should be allowed to hazard the traditional faith, honour, generous sympathies and diplomatic influence of England. "I rejoice therefore," he declared, "that his Majesty has signified his intention to pay due regard to the connection between the interests of Europe and the liberties of this country." The Foreign Secretary might take a Member of Parliament to task for speaking slightingly of France, but week by week the confidence of Englishmen in her bona fides was declining. Events were teaching them that the peace they had so eagerly sought was not to be had. Those chameleons of the future, the young poets who had pleaded for an understanding with France and her great experiment, were among the first now to grasp the impossibility of obtaining it. Coleridge, to whom the name of Pitt was anathema, became an uncompromising opponent of Jacobinism; Southey asked why those who formerly had gazed east to worship liberty failed to turn their faces now that the sun had moved. Wordsworth, back among his native lakes after his abortive visit to France, ominously studied Milton's political poems and mourned Switzerland's lost liberty in an indignant sonnet. More ordinary folk compared the First Consul's pretences to be "pacifying" and "settling" his neighbours with the sordid trickery he used, shook their heads over the decline of British prestige and contrasted Addington's threats with his meagre actions. Men did not want war but they could not remain quiescent in the face of danger; the racial instinct for self-preservation was awakening. An English child, hurrying home with her parents from the Rhine, watched on a November morning the First Consul reviewing his troops on the Place du Carrousel; his stern face,.as he passed and

  1H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 124; Festing, 92.

  repassed before the Tuileries' windows with his train of glittering aides and Mamelukes, fascinated her like a rattlesnake.1

  The great man did not fail to give the English more tangible reasons for their fears. Wherever they had established their tentacles of trade they were confronted by Gallic enmity and intrigue. Their Ambassador at Naples wrote that the French were surveying the Adriatic coast from Ancona to Taranto: "this," he reported, "may be very useful to them and facilitate their progress eastwards, the idea of which they have never abandoned any more than they have forgotten for a moment their views upon Italy." French Colonels travelling on mysterious missions in Algiers and the Ionian Islands were watched by British agents; Lord Keith, commanding the Mediterranean Fleet, felt it necessary to guard against a French reoccupation of Corfu and stationed a ship off the Maddalena Islands to save Sardinia from sudden rape. Napoleon's design to draw Russia into a conspiracy to partition the dissolving Ottoman Empire might still pass unnoticed in London, but it was ceaselessly canvassed by the British colony in Constantinople and Alexandria. From the banks of the Euphrates the British Consul wrote of intrigues in Persia and Afghanistan, while in Calcutta the Governor-General noted the arrival at the Courts of native princes of mysterious * officers from Paris with plans."to chase the English from Bengal."2

  From every land such reports found their way to London and began to act, slowly but surely, on English opinion. They threw sudden shafts of light upon the drab and obscure political amphitheatre at Westminster where, before a backcloth of national inertia and apathy, a dull, "flat" Parliament debated Addington's encomiums on the national finances, and the Chairman of the Board of Control laboriously quoted trade statistics as though, wrote the indignant Canning, they were the sum total of political existence. They even invaded the trustful privacy of Brooks', where the buffs and blues were threatened by a second split of their sacred but dwindling ranks by those who had hopefully gone to gaze on the First Consul with their own eyes and had come back scared by what they had seen. In December the unpredictable Sheridan electrified the House by a speech blazing with patriotism in which he ridiculed his leader's belief that the only cause of rivalry between the two colintries was commercial. "I see in the physical situation and composition of the power of Bonaparte," he declared, "a physical

  1 Brownlow, 8-9; Granville, 1,321; Minto, III, 256-8; Auckland, IV, 172-3; Fremantle, I, 33-4; Nicolas, V, 32; · de Selincourt, Early Letters, 312; Campbell, I, 405.

  2Paget Papers, II, 43, 68; Mahan, Nelson, II, 184; Browning, 16-17, 33"» Castlereagh, V, 161, 172,175-6, 178^9; C. H. B. E., II, 89; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 86-7; Wellesley, I, 148-9; Auckland, IV, 169-70; Pellew, II, 80, 82; Fortescue, V, 142.

  necessity for him to go on in this barter with his subjects and to promise to make them the masters of the world if they will consent to be his slaves." He could only do so by conquering England. " This is the first vision that breaks upon him through the gleam of morning; that is his last prayer at night, to whatever deity he may address it, whether to Jupiter or to Mahomet, to the Goddess of Battles or to the Goddess of Reason."

  For though a despairing Canning asked if mind would ever have its share in politics again, Parliament was growing realist. The damned Doctor, as Creevey observed, was being " bullied out of his pacific disposition." Bonaparte might be advancing with Tarquin's ravishing strides, but they were observed in Downing Street. At the end of October Lord Castlereagh joined the Cabinet. Chairman since the summer of the Board of Control which supervised the political affairs of India, this able young Ulsterman quickly made himself Dundas's successor as watchdog of Empire and Pitt's unofficial mouthpiece. He was far nearer the latter's prescient and prudent temper than the brilliant, impulsive Canning, who hated him for it. He was no orator—his long-winded, laborious speeches were a joy to the Opposition wits—nor, after his early services to the Tories in * the unappeasable strifes of his native land, was he without bitter enemies. But he had character, shrewdness and an instinctive understanding of foreign affairs. His influence on his weak and uncertain colleagues quickly became a major factor in policy.

  Castlereagh wished to avoid war as much as any man: But he saw that, though no present help could be looked for from Europe, his country must make a stand before long or face disaster. To delay until the cowed nations of the Continent were ready to fight would be to allow France to build up overwhelming strength. Everything pointed to what hitherto only a few had seen: that Napoleon had made peace only to secure a better position for waging war. Any further demand on his part must be resisted. If the country would only support the Government, Britain might sustain the struggle alone for three, four, or perhaps even ten years, until Europe awoke.1

  For Castlereagh's judgment was informed by a sober and practical optimism very different from the by now almost hysterical pessimism of the Windhams and Grenvilles. He saw the country's peril* as clearly as they, but he also saw her strength. Whatever Britain in her search for peace had yielded, she had not abdicated the source of her power. She had the tireless valour and tenacity of her people, the first Navy in the world and an inexhaustible Merchant Marine

  1 Castlereagh, V, 29-38. .

  based on expanding global trade. Provided that public spirit was aroused—a work which Bonaparte was fast performing—all might be saved. But not an inch more ground must be given
up. " What I desire," Castlereagh wrote, "is that France should feel that Great Britain cannot be trifled with."

  Thus the First Consul, having won all the early rounds of the diplomatic game and tricked Britain at every turn, was confronted with a belated and most irritating display of obstinacy. A few weeks previously the Addington Administration, meekly repudiating three centuries of English history, was apparently willing to abandon Europe to the rule of a single nation, while the islanders, "loose, incoherent atoms,"1 seemed sunk beyond recall in greed, torpor and apathy. Now they had unaccountably jibbed. In his instructions, issued in November, the new British Ambassador to Paris, Lord Whitworth, was directed to insist on his country's right to intervene in the affairs of the Continent. Without making a formal demand, he opened his mission by hinting at her right to compensation for breaches of the status quo.

  The British decision to stand came at an inconvenient time for Bonaparte. He was not yet ready to resume war. His dockyards were only partially re-provisioned after the blockade, the ocean bases which he needed for future operations were not in his hands, and such of his fleet as was seaworthy was on the far side of the Atlantic suppressing negro republicans in San Domingo. News had just reached him that the treachery by which his expedition had overwhelmed the black Republic had been matched by the treachery of the climate. Within a few weeks the victors, like the British before them, had been decimated by yellow fever. With the resources of the French ports being strained to breaking point to retrieve the situation, war with the first naval power in the world would have been gravely inconvenient.