Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  The news of the first British capture at sea—of two French ships on May 18th—threw the First Consul into a towering rage. He at once ordered the arrest of all British travellers in France. Ten thousand civilians were seized, some like Sir Ralph Abercromby's son as they embarked at Calais, others as they landed on French soil. One infatuated baronet immolated himself for eleven years by delaying a few hours to enjoy the favours of a fair Parisienne; a future Duke of Argyle only escaped across the Swiss-German frontier by disguising himself as a chambermaid. Such internment of civilians was contrary to all civilised precedent, and made the English more convinced than ever that they were dealing with an untamed savage. But it brought the war home to the British ruling classes, on whom Bonaparte was determined to avenge himself.

  Simultaneously he closed the Continent to their ships. In Italy his troops poured into the puppet kingdom of Etruria and seized their property at Leghorn. Others marched through the Papal States to occupy Calabria and the harbours of Brindisi and Taranto. The King of the Two Sicilies feebly protested,, but opposition was out of the question. Another French army invaded Hanover which, after a token resistance, capitulated at the beginning of June. Thence, defying international law, it occupied the free towns of Hamburg and Bremen, shutting the Elbe and Weser to British trade. The Continental nations silently acquiesced. They were far too frightened to do anything else.

  Yet nothing but a blow at Britain's heart could satisfy the Corsican's craving for vengeance. A race of insolent shopkeepers barred his path to world dominion. Since they had thwarted his project to destroy them with their own weapons, he must destroy them with his. He must conquer the sea by the land. On his ability to cross the strip- of water between Calais and Dover depended his dream of world empire and his revenge. " They want us to jump the ditch," he cried, "and we will jump it!"

  The challenge roused his titanic energy and powers of concentration. The vulgarity and petulant vanity of his character became dwarfed by the intensity of his purpose. " His habits changed," wrote a contemporary; " his genius, which had appeared to slumber, woke full of courage and daring. He raised himself to the height of the formidable circumstances which our eternal enemies had created, and soared above them. From that time began a new life, of action, of combat, given up to the hardest labours, to dangers of every kind, to the boldest conceptions; a life from which no diversion was allowed to deflect his mind even for a moment."

  For Napoleon's wrath was a terrible thing. He embodied the revolutionary belief that to those who willed, all things were possible. He had already ordered the construction of several hundred invasion barges and gunboats. He now mobilised every French seaport and inland river town for building vessels to carry an army to England. Two thousand were to be ready by the autumn, when the tricolour was to be planted on the ruins of London. "Since it can be done," he wrote to his Minister of Marine, " it must be done!" " Try to get double," he ordered, " there will be no lack of money.... Remember that hours are precious."

  Behind Napoleon was a people who shared his belief in the conquest of the impossible. He appealed to them for a programme unprecedented in marine construction. The jealous islanders, who had so often stirred up trouble, had once more plunged Europe into war to crush the nascent commerce of France. This time they should learn their lesson. Brushing aside their untrained mercenaries, the veterans of Lombardy and the Danube would march at resistless speed to London, plunder its usurious counting-houses and leave only St. Paul's to mark the site of the modern Carthage. The Irish and the British peasants and workers would rise against the aristocrats and money-mongers who exploited them. Thereafter England should be governed as nature intended: as an appendage of France.1 'Her commerce and the mastery of the waves would pass to a people who would know how to use them.

  Lord Whitworth's prediction that on the outbreak of war the French people would overturn the tyrant who had duped them was not fulfilled. Every shipyard resounded with hammering, and the cost of equipping the invasion was met by an appeal to Corporations and private citizens. It was an article of faith with the French that their leader could achieve the impossible. He had done it before and would do it again. When, taking with him the Bayeux tapestry as an exhibit, he set out to view the work of the northern ports, he was greeted in every beflagged and laurelled town with torrents of eloquence. "Let the English," cried the Prefect of the Somme, " betrayed by the weakness of their Ministers and the folly of their orators, see with terror the hero of France advancing to punish perjury, to force the yoke of peace on the pirates of the sea and proclaim on the ruins of Albion the commercial independence of Europe 1" At a State dinner at Calais toasts were drunk to the first barrack-master to billet troops at Dover and to the review of the Grande Annie in St. James' Park.

  1 "Nature made her as much one of our islands as Corsica or Oleron."—Napoleon at St. Helena—Las Cases.

  It was not only Frenchmen who were to enjoy these salutary triumphs. Other and humbler Europeans were to share them—in a subordinate capacity. The Dutch were ordered to provide, at their own cost, five ships of the line, a hundred gunboats and two hundred and fifty barges; they were also to maintain 18,000 French troops and 16,000 of their own. As their share of the plunder they were to recover Ceylon, which the First Consul had so mistakenly permitted the perfidious English to keep at the Peace. Spain, coerced by an army of observation on the Garonne, was to pay six million francs a month and open her dockyards to French warships. More active Spanish participation in the crusade against the Anglo-Saxon was not at present called for lest it should provoke Nelson to seize Minorca as a base for blockading Toulon. The forests of the Rhine-land and Germany, the arsenals of Hanover, the shipyards of the Ligurian Republic were all to play their part. Even the Swiss in their mountain fastnesses were permitted to contribute 28,000 soldiers and their upkeep.

  At first the doomed islanders watched these preparations with detachment. They were not in the habit of being invaded, and it took a little while to accustom themselves to the idea. No people in the world were so sure of their capacity to defend themselves. When at the height of the peace fever of the previous summer, Nelson visited Birmingham, he had been drawn through the streets and acclaimed at the theatre with the refrain:

  " We'll shake hands and be friends; if they won't, why, what then ? We'll send our brave Nelson to thrash 'em again!"1

  Deep in their hearts the insular British despised the French. "They are all so!" the King barked at Benjamin West who had spoken of an art-dealer as an "intriguing Frenchman," "there is no depending upon them!"2 "I'll tell you what, Mr. Boneypartee," growled John Bull in Gillray's cartoon, " when you come to a little spot I have in my eye, it will stick in your throat and choke you!"

  The response to the declaration of war was spontaneous. Whatever the islanders' differences, they were united in their resolve to resist. Windham encountering Sheridan in the House took his arm and, forgetting a decade of bitterness, asked if old friends could not meet and try to do something for the country. As the latter had said in one of his speeches, Bonaparte had proved " an instrument in the hands of Providence to make the English love their constitution

  1 Macready's Reminiscences (ed. Sir F. Pollock), 1875, 4-5. 2 Farington, II,

  better." A few eccentrics like the Duchess of Bedford might rave about his greatness,1 and deplore the war. But the nation as a whole saw that every effort had been made to preserve peace. It was no longer progressive ideas that England was fighting but undisguised tyranny and aggression.

  Yet if the people felt confidence in their cause and themselves, they felt little in their Government. "Upon my soul!" wrote Creevey, "it is too shocking to think of the wretched destiny of mankind in being placed in the hands of such pitiful, squirting politicians as this accursed apothecary and his family and friends." Even the most wholehearted supporter of the Administration doubted its ability to conduct a war. The ordinary Briton turned instinctively to the great Minister who had weathered the perils of
the past. " I want to know," wrote Lady Stafford, when war became inevitable, "that Lord Whitworth is in London and that Mr. Pitt is where Providence meant he should be!"

  For a few weeks in April it had looked as though he soon would be. Rumours that the Ministry was to be reconstituted had been followed by news that Lord Melville—the former Dundas—had visited Walmer Castle with proposals from Downing Street that Pitt should return to the leadership of the country. But it had all come to nothing. Some said that Pitt was insulted by the offer of a subordinate office;2 others that, suborned by Canning and the implacable Grenvilles, he had insisted on the recall of those who had reviled the Peace as the work of traitors: a humiliation too great even for the Doctor to stomach. The anti-Jacobin Party which had saved England in the dark days of '97 and '98 was hopelessly split by eighteen months of intemperate recriminations. The Addingtonians remained in office while the Grenvilles, Windhams and Cannings continued to sit in uneasy juxtaposition with the Foxites.

  At the outbreak of war Pitt returned to the House. On May 20th, 1803, he took his seat for the first time since the General Election. Creevey who hated all he stood for rejoiced to see him cold-shouldered by Ministers. His face, formerly ruddy, was sallow, his looks dejected, and every now and then he gave a hollow cough: "princes of the blood passing him without speaking to him and an universal sentiment in those around him that he was done." But two days later Creevey had a rude awakening. During the debate on the Address Pitt made a speech which excelled the greatest oration in the oldest Member's memory. In the rush to the galleries the reporters were

  1 "If it would not give her too much consequence, she ought to be sent to the Tower." —Lord Malmesbury to J. H. Frere, 27th May, 1803. Festing, 152.

  8 "Really," he was reported to have told Wilberforce, "I had not the curiosity to ask what it was to be!"—Wilberforce, III, 219.

  crowded out and his words were not recorded. But their effect was prodigious. Fox declared that, if Demosthenes had been present, he must have admired and envied. That night Creevey described the scene: "the great fiend bewitching a breathless House, the elevation of his tone of mind and composition, the infinite energy of his style, the miraculous perspicuity and fluency of his periods. . . . Never, to be sure, was there such an exhibition, its effect was dreadful. He spoke nearly two hours—and all for war, and for war without end!"1

  But though the war party moved a vote of censure on the Government for its want of vigilance, and Pitt, while refusing to condemn his former associates openly, made it plain that he could support them no longer, neither the King nor the Tory majority were ready to exchange the Doctor's easy yoke for the peremptory ways of his predecessor. The lolling benches might titter when some wag, "duly attending to the decorum of professional expression," spoke of the Prime Minister giving the House nine "motions," moved for papers on the "evacuation" of the Cape, or described the Administration as the " Medici" family. But they continued to afford the latter solid if unenthusiastic majorities. Nor was its basis broadened. No man of talent save Sheridan was prepared to join it, and Sheridan was by now too habitually drunk—"bosky," as his friends called it— to lend lustre to even the dimmest administration. The only new recruit was the stout Hibernian, Tierney, who in June became Treasurer of the "Navy. After all the talk of a combination of all the talents under Pitt, the solitary appointment made the Government appear only the more ridiculous.

  It was the fate of Addington to follow—at a weak and obstinate man's uneasy pace—where others led. He had followed Bonaparte during the peace negotiations, and his own outraged countrymen when they insisted on resistance. Now once again he followed Bonaparte. Alarmed by his threats, he became obsessed with the idea that he would have to contend with the conqueror of Marengo on English soil. The prospect naturally unnerved him. Farington was told that, lacking courage for his situation, the poor man had taken to drinking a dozen glasses of wine at dinner every night to invigorate himself before facing the House.

  To such a Minister the defensive seemed the only attitude. His one idea was to get as many men as possible into uniform at the earliest moment to hold Bonaparte in Sussex and Kent. With their capacity to make offensive war he was not concerned.

  1 Creevey, I, 14-15; Colchester, 1,420; Minto, III, 287; Pellew, II, 105; Malmesbury, IV, 256; Horner, I, 221.

  All he sought was numbers.

  It took many months to train Regular soldiers: it was only a matter of weeks to enrol Militiamen or Volunteers. The latter, too— and this made a strong appeal to the Treasury—were far cheaper. Regulars had to be wooed to the Colours by State bounties. Volunteers were to be had gratis by an appeal to patriotism, and Militiamen could be raised by compulsory ballot. Yet as every man balloted could avoid service by paying a fine or hiring a substitute, any increase in the Militia was automatically followed by a scramble for substitutes. These were drawn from the same class of thirsty ne'er-do-wells as the ranks of the professional Army. The effect was to dry up recruiting for the Regular Forces at the very moment when they were most needed.

  Even before the outbreak of war the Government had begun to embody the Militia—the traditional home-defence levy of provincial England. An Act of the previous year—passed during the Swiss crisis—had authorised the balloting of 51,000 militiamen for five years' service; on March nth, 1803, this force was called out by Proclamation. As soon as war broke out the Government embodied a further 25,000, so sending the price of substitutes up to £30 a head and hopelessly outbidding the Regular recruiting-sergeants who could only offer £7 12s. 6d. A few weeks later Napoleon's preparations caused resort to the old feudal expedient of calling on the whole nation to help repel invasion. Yet, in their haste to pluck the flower safety out of the nettle danger, Ministers passed a Defence Act exempting from the impending levee-en-masse and all other forms of military service all between the ages of fifteen and sixty who volunteered for home defence before June 16th. Thus they deprived the Crown of its ancient prerogative of embodying every able-bodied subject for the defence of the realm on its own terms. For the Volunteers, who in the nature of things comprised all the most patriotic, healthy and educated elements in the nation, were allowed to enrol in any kind of local corps or Association under any kind of conditions they chose to frame.

  When Windham objected that Ministers were raising a Militia, not an Army, the Secretary-at-War frankly admitted that this was their object; nothing else, he argued, could meet the emergency. They so far yielded to Opposition pressure, however, as to create on June 20th an entirely new force entitled the Army of Reserve, for which 50,000 men between the ages of 18 and 40 were to be raised by compulsory ballot for second or Depot battalions to the Regiments of the Line. Serving for five years in the United Kingdom only, they might subsequently be voluntarily enlisted by bounty into first-line battalions. This was an important administrative principle for which the Duke of York at the Horse Guards had long contended. But as the loophole for evading service by fine or substitution was retained, the only immediate result was to increase the already heavy demand for substitutes.1

  The confusion in the public mind, as well as in the state of recruiting, was by now indescribable. The local government system of England put a high premium on freedom but very little on efficiency. It almost completely broke down under the strain of simultaneously conducting three separate ballots and dealing with so many claims for exemption. Overwhelmed by the success of its appeal for Volunteers—more than 300,000 came forward in a few days—the Cabinet at the end of July suspended the levee-en-masse. The public, now thoroughly aroused to its peril, was naturally bewildered. "Is the Administration going stark staring mad ?" wrote one of Wilberforce's correspondents, "that they recall the bill for arming the nation and suspend its execution ?" The truth was that there were neither the arms nor the officers to train such a force at such short notice.2

  To complete the muddle the Government on August 18th issued a circular forbidding the enrolment of further Volunteers in al
l counties where their numbers exceeded six times those of the Militia. Having appealed to the nation to come forward under the slogan " one and all," it was now forced to damp down the patriotism it had aroused. Instead of giving the military authorities an Army, it had saddled them with«an immense, amorphous force of untrained, unarmed amateurs serving in a hotchpotch of self-governing units, each subject to rules of its own choosing and none under regular discipline. The confusion was the greater because Volunteers who joined before and after July 22nd were granted different scales of allowances. Everybody was asking for clear directions arid nobody in authority seemed able to give any. One indignant peer, hearing that his wife had encountered the Prime Minister in the street, blamed her that she had not run after him for an explanation of the contradictory circulars that kept arriving every day.3

  By this time the country was as conscious of the danger in which it stood as the Government.

  1Fortescue, V, 205, 211; Wheeler and Broadley, I, 54-5; Pcllew, n, 104; Minto, in, 291; Bunbury, 170; Wilberforce, I, 268-9. Among those drawn for the Army of Reserve was Walter Scott, who claimed exemption as a member of the Royal Midlothian Volunteer Cavalry.—Scott, I, 195.

  2 Wilberforce, I, 278; Fox, HI, 420; Fortescuc, V, 206, 209, 211; Ashton, 98; Wheeler and Broadley, I, 56; Colchester, I, 433; Farington, II, 124.

  3 Granville, I, 432.

  It was not so much appalled as enraged. In millions of hearts there blazed up that summer "a fierce, unenquiring, unappeasable detestation" of one man. For "that vile, proud, ambitious, hated villain," as old Lady Stafford called him, no calumny was now too great: every crime in his career, real or imagined, was magnified in press and pamphlet: his bombardment of the Paris mob, his massacre of the inhabitants of Pa via and Jaffa, his repudiation of Christianity in Egypt, his murder of his own sick in Palestine. He was described as assassin, ogre, renegade, toad, spider, and devil; as a minute, swarthy brigand with a squint and jaundice; as a pervert who seduced his sisters. In the cartoons that crowded the bookstalls the public were shown not a man "but a monster." It gloated over every malicious emigre" tale of his obscure origin: his great-grandfather a publican condemned to the galleys for robbery and murder, his grandfather a butcher, his father a pettifogging lawyer who betrayed his country, his mother a common trull. "God!" cried Mr. Elliston in the patriotic epilogue at the Haymarket theatre: