Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  Major-General Edward Paget, 24th January, 1806.

  " If England gets out of the many difficulties that now press on her, she will be the greatest nation in the world."

  Capt. Thomas Fremantle, 25th May, 1806.

  M

  R. PITT died this morning!" "Mr. Pitt died this morning at half-past four!" The news spread through the awakening streets of the capital in widening circles. " Pitt is no more!" "Mr. Pitt is dead!" Arthur Young recorded in his journal. For twenty-three years this man, still only on the threshold of middle age, had been the greatest figure in England, and for all but three of those years Prime Minister. Never again would his countrymen see the eager, gaunt, imperious face and hear those deep, bell-like tones, embodying, for all his errors, the very front and voice of England. "Now all is void and blank," wrote Lord Aberdeen, "in whom can we put our trust?" "Shocked?" declared his rival, Fox; "it feels as if something was missing in the world."1

  The moment of Pitt's passing was one of unrelieved defeat. By the Treaty of Pressburg, signed three weeks after Austerlitz, Austria had not only surrendered Istria and Dalmatia to Napoleon and the Tyrol and Suabia to his clients, Bavaria and Baden, but had acknowledged his right to the throne of Italy and the disposal of Germany. The thousand-year-old polity of the Holy Roman Empire was at an end. A few days earlier the terrified Haugwitz had committed Prussia to a French alliance for which the reward—and price—was the occupation of her ally's possession, Hanover. Only the mad King of Sweden and the Czar, now withdrawn in deep gloom to his remote snow-bound capital, continued the fight. In a few months England had lost her greatest seaman, her most famous soldier,

  1Granville, II, 163; see also Two Duchesses, 266-7; Horner 1, 328; Colchester, II, 28; Wynne, in, 244; Young, 424; Aberdeen, I, 40; Auckland, IV, 269.

  Lord Cornwallis—dead at Ghazipore at the outset of his second term as Governor-General of India—and now her greatest statesman. "Had'st thou but lived," wrote Walter Scott,

  " though stripp'd of power,

  A watchman on the lonely tower,

  Thy thrilling trump had rous'd the land

  When fraud or danger were at hand."

  He who had stood " between the dead, and the living and stayed the plague with which the French Revolution had infected the world" had died at the very moment that it had broken out with renewed fury. The very secret of how to combat it seemed to have passed with him.

  "Unless something extraordinary happens," Lord Sheffield had written, "I shall consider the game as lost." Yet, though in the tide of defeat everyone had forgotten it, something extraordinary had happened. Trafalgar had been fought. At the very hour of Pitt's eclipse the first fruits of the great sea victory with which his name is linked were being gathered. Though his north German expedition was forced to return in haste, leaving Hanover in Prussian hands, the smaller force he had sent in the spring to Malta—the first herald of a liberating army—had begun its work. The expulsion of the enemy from Italy, originally designed, was far beyond its present power; the defeat of Mack, the march on Vienna, the hurried retreat of the Archduke Charles from Venetia had left the peninsula at the mercy of the French and robbed the British-Russo landing at Naples in November of all apparent significance. It seemed merely the automatic action of a limb of Pitt's Continental Coalition after the brain had been shot through. By the New Year of 1806, 35,000 French troops were closing in on Naples. General Lascy, the Russian Commander-in-Chief—a very old gentleman of Irish extraction whose unfailing rule it was to give battle on all occasions regardless of the chances of victory—was all for fighting and dying in the Calabrian peninsula. But Lieutenant-General Craig, without transport, surrounded by panic-stricken Neapolitans and aware that the Russians were without supplies and must live on the Italian peasantry, held fast to his orders to secure Sicily. He insisted on retiring there while there was time. In the month of Pitt's death 7000 British troops landed at Messina, while the Russians withdrew to Corfu.

  Thus the prize for which Trafalgar was fought passed into British keeping. The King of the Two Sicilies, with all his mainland possessions save the fortress of Gaeta in French hands and his throne declared forfeit by Napoleon, took up his residence at Palermo. The presence of a British garrison alone prevented the enemy from following him across the Straits of Messina.1 Through sea power and Pitt's amphibious use of her slender military resources, England had secured the most important island in the Mediterranean as a base for her Fleet and a barrier to Napoleon's designs on the Orient. Just as the great dictator seemed to have established his military hegemony of one Continent, his adversary tightened the grip which kept him from every other. Only through the trackless spaces of Russia could he break out of it.

  By his victory Nelson had won all the ends for which he had striven in his harsh life of effort and endurance. Fie had, in Fouche's angry phrase, " completed the security of England." The Combined Fleet which he had chased so far was reduced to a few shattered hulls in Cadiz harbour. The close blockades of the French and Spanish naval ports which had worn out his frail body and strained to breaking point the timbers of the British Fleet were now needless. Only Brest and Cartagena required serious watching and, with 104 capital ships in commission, the Navy neutralised any threat by its immense superiority. Egypt, and with it the overland route to India, were safe. So were the West Indies.

  Little more than a week after Trafalgar Barham instructed his Admirals to loosen the blockades. Thanks to Nelson's creed of annihilation, the Battle Fleet' could henceforward ride out the Atlantic gales in Torbay and Plymouth Sound instead of in the desolate reaches off Ushant. "It is to little purpose now," the First Lord wrote, "to wear out our ships in a fruitless blockade during the winter." Small flying squadrons were to deal with commerce raiding; the surviving units of the enemy's fleet were to be left free to escape only to be destroyed wherever they appeared.

  The effects of this change were soon seen. On December 13th, 1805, a few days before Allemand, with his pursuers closing in on him, ran for shelter to Rochefort, half the Brest fleet bolted to sea. Six of its battleships under Rear-Admiral Willa&mez stood for the south Atlantic to harry the trade route between the Cape and St. Helena. Five more under Rear-Admiral Leissegues made for the West Indies. The flying squadrons of Sir John Borlase Warren and Sir Richard Strachan were at once sent in pursuit. Meanwhile Vice-Admiral Sir John Duckworth, watching the remnants of the Combined Fleet in Cadiz, received news of an enemy force in the neighbourhood of

  1 Almost in the same boats, as the British Second-in-Command phrased it. Fortescue, V, 3301.

  Madeira. Imagining it to be Allemand, he raised the blockade and, giving chase, only just missed Willaumez. Still following what he supposed to be Allemand, he crossed the Atlantic and joined Cochrane at St. Kitts in the West Indies. Here he learnt that five French battleships had arrived at San Domingo. It was Leissegues who, having reached his cruising station, was refitting after a gale. Without hesitation Duckworth sailed for Occa Bay and on February 6th, though outgunned by three to two, not only attacked the French but in the space of two hours destroyed or drove ashore their entire line of battle. The Nelson touch was becoming a habit. " It puts us out of all fear from another predatory war in the West Indies," wrote Barham. The victory brought the total French and Spanish battleships captured or destroyed during his nine months at the Admiralty to thirty-one. Pitt's last Ministry—now being lamented as a time of unbroken calamity—had surpassed in naval glory the greatest days of Chatham.

  Like his father too, Pitt had laid the foundations of a new British nation overseas. The Commonwealth of Australia was begotten in his first Ministry; the Union of South Africa in his second. The expedition which he had sent out with such courage to secure the Cape and the sea route to India had sighted Table Mountain on January 3rd, 1806. Under cover of Sir Home Popham's broadsides, 6000 redcoats had disembarked from sixty transports at a cost of thirty-six drowned in the surf and one killed by the enemy's fire. A week later, led
by the Highland Brigade, the British army marched into Cape Town, the Dutch Governor formally surrendering the colony five days before Pitt's death. "The bells are ringing," wrote Charles Lamb on March ist, " for the taking of the Cape of Good Hope."

  The French squadron sent to harry the South Atlantic trade routes achieved nothing. In the end it was dispersed by a storm and forced to fly for refuge to France. Instead Linois, the French Commander-in-Chief in the Indian Ocean, was taken by-Sir Borlase Warren's flying squadron. With his capture, all danger of French intervention in India was at an end. The military and imperial policy of Lord Wellesley was reversed,1 pacts were signed with native princes, and peace and retrenchment became the order of the

  1 On the day after Lord Cornwallis arrived at Calcutta William Hickey met the new Governor-General taking the air in a phaeton behind a pair of steady old jog-trot hacks instead of in the escorted coach-and-six affected by his brilliant predecessor. At his landing the old soldier had been much startled by the viceregal cavalcade awaiting him. "What! What! What is all this, Robinson, hey?" he asked. "Too many people. I don't want them, don't want one of them, I have not yet lost the use of my legs, Robinson, hey? Thank God I can walk, walk very well, Robinson, hey? don't want a score of carriages to convey me a quarter of a mile." Hickey, 318-21.

  day. Unlike Napoleon the British, secure in their sea power, knew how to be moderate in conquest. They preferred to consolidate their gains and turn them to permanent advantage. Within a few months of the end of the Mahratta Wars their statesmen were discussing the possibility of garrisoning other parts of the Empire with Sepoy troops voluntarily recruited by the East India Company. This also Pitt and Nelson had made possible.

  To eyes riveted on the old Europe of the eighteenth century these things, still hidden behind the mists of the outer oceans and the future, were invisible. Pitt, as one of his adherents said, had failed through his inability to make Mack a general acid-Francis a rational being.1 His Government did not survive his death. No one among his rather undistinguished followers could hope to maintain a majority in a critical and rebellious House. Hawkesbury was plainly inadequate, Castlereagh a poor debater and unpopular in the country, Perceval almost unknown, and Canning—the one obvious genius among the Tories—far too erratic to be trusted. A " masterless man," as he now called himself, he carried with him an unhappy aura of his own making—of satirical epigrams, clever squibs and ill-timed violence. He was still unthinkable as Leader of the House or Prime Minister.2

  The only statesman who appealed to the imagination of the country was Fox. But he, for all his unmistakable stature, was tarred with the brush of the pacifist and defeatist. Sidmouth, the obvious stopgap, was ill and in any case regarded as a turncoat: "a mean, shuffling, interested man," as old Lady Stafford called him, "not fit for anything but a shop." 3

  Gradually a coalition of Pitt's critics emerged from the contending welter. Even Tories saw it as the only immediate solution. "I will never," wrote Lord Wellesley, "lend my hand to sustain any system of administration evidently inadequate to the difficulties and dangers of the crisis." The Grenvilles and Foxites, Windham, Spencer and Minto—the new Whigs and the old—joined under the lead of Lord Grenville with the followers of Sidmouth to form a national administration. One of its members described it as a combination of "all the talents, wisdom and ability of the nation." Only Pitt's friends were left outside.

  On January 27th Grenville saw the King. He made it plain that

  1 Scott, I, 278.

  'Auckland, IV, 269; Bland-Burgess, 319; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 339; Fcsting, 106; Glenbervie, I, 209; Granville, II, 55, 166, 177.

  '"The Lord," wrote one indignant Pittite, "deliver us from Mr. Addington!" Paget Papers, II, 270. See also Cornwallis-West, 504; Wynne, III, 244; Granville, II, 92, 160.

  he would form no administration which did not include Fox. What George III had refused to Pitt, he therefore yielded to Pitt's cousin. Grenville became First Lord of the Treasury and Fox Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the Commons. Lord Spencer took the Home Office, Windham the joint War and Colonial Office and Charles Grey the Admiralty. Fitzwilliam became Lord President, young Lord Henry Petty Chancellor of the Exchequer, Erskine Lord Chancellor, and Moira Master-General of the Ordnance. Sidmouth, with the old family following, took the Privy Seal; every one, said Canning, had to have him once like the measles.1 It was a heterogeneous collection: "Grey First Lord of the Admiralty!" wrote Arthur Young, "is it possible?" But as it suggested strength, the country, after the first shock, accepted it; at Trinity, Cambridge, the Combination Room was soon drinking Fox's health with the same regularity with which it had drunk Pitt's for twenty years. Even royalty put a good face on it. "The Queen's civility to me to-day was quite marked," wrote Fox, "especially as it is the first time she spoke to me since 1788."

  From the first the real leader of the Government was Fox. This giant of a man—the "incomparable Charley" to his devoted followers2—was still anathema to half the nation. "I could name you," wrote Fancis Horner, "gentlemen with good coats on and good sense in their own affairs who believe that Fox did actually send information to the enemy in America and is actually in the pay of France." Yet during the worst days of that terrible autumn Lady Bessborough found him the one person who could comfort her; things were bad, he said, but so long as the Government remained stout, all was not lost.

  For Fox was too big for political definition ; too full and whole a man, as Home Tooke said, to be consistent, and too content and wise to be a failure. At one moment he would enrage opponents and antagonise moderate men by his partisanship, at another outrage his own followers by some spontaneous act of magnanimity. Whatever he did, he did with his whole heart ; so impetuous was he that, when he went shooting, he frequently put the shot into his gun before the powder.. "What," asked a child hearing him speak in Parliament, " is that fat gentleman in such a passion about ?" Campbell, dining at the same table, noted that in a conversation of eighteen persons nothing escaped his eager notice. Yet, with all his vitality, he could be more idle than any man: at his home at St. Anne's Hill he would lie for hours on a sunny bank against a wall

  1 Granville, n, 180.

  2 "My political creed was very simple—it was Devotion to Fox!"—Creevey, I, 22.

  covered with fruit trees, doing nothing. "Ah, Mr. Fox," a friend said to him, "how delightful it must be to loll along in the sun at your ease with a book in your hand." "Why the book? why the book?" was the reply.1

  In his middle age this former rou6 and gambler had scandalised an easy-going society by marrying the mistress with whom he had lived for years. His unexpected domesticity was the wonder of his contemporaries. "You would be perfectly astonished," wrote Creevey, " at the vigour of body, the energy of mind, the innocent playfulness and happiness of Fox. The contrast between him and his old associates is the most marvellous thing I ever saw—they have all the air of shattered debauchees, of passing gaming, drinking, sleepless nights, whereas the old leader of the gang might pass for the pattern and the effect of domestic good order." A few weeks before he assumed office Minto met him with Mrs. Fox buying cheap china.

  It was from this many-sidedness—this ability to live fully and cheerfully at half a dozen different levels—that Fox derived his surprising good-humour and tolerance. Fie never bothered to read what his enemies wrote about him and so was not annoyed by it. "No, no," he said, "that is what they want me to do, but I won't." From the same cause, too, came his power of detachment; Lady Bessborough once found him during a national crisis playing chess and consigning the Politics of Europe to the bottom of the sea and all the politicians with them! He took important business in his stride with a lightness of touch that puzzled and sometimes appalled colleagues. As befitted a classical scholar and a considerable reader, he was a great patron of letters and learned men; the young poet Campbell, finding himself pacing the salon at Holland House arm in arm with the Demosthenes of his age and discoursing on Virgil, scarcel
y knew whether he was standing on his head or Ins feet. Even learned political opponents benefited by Fox's liberality; Scott wrote that, though his principles made him abhor his views, he was "proud of his approbation in a literary sense."

  Above all, Fox was a champion of generous causes. Fie loved liberty and he loved peace, because he wished all men to be as happy, free and easy as himself. This gave him an' appeal to millions of ordinary men and women who were repelled by Pitt's outward austerity and official correctitude, and to whom the name of the recluse, Grenville, meant nothing. For years Fox had been the hero and champion of all who hoped for a speedy end to the European conflict. It was of him that Captain Codrington was thinking when

  1 Albemarle, I, 244-8; Campbell, II, 84; Broughton, I, 203.

  he wrote from Cartagena that February: " If there be a new Ministry formed of all the abilities of the country . . . perhaps we may yet have a cessation of this horrid, gloomy din of war."

  For with the autumn's hopes dashed, the struggle which had now gone on with one brief interval for thirteen years seemed never-ending. "I can't hear anything more of the death of Bonaparte," mourned Captain Fremantle; "I think if that dog was gone we might have a prospect of peace. How I should enjoy my jolly Swan-bourne!" But far from being dead, he was more formidable than ever; the world, the Bishop of Norwich noted sadly, seemed made for Caesar.

  This attitude was loudly voiced by the Opposition leaders now in office. For, whether drawn from the little Englanders who followed Fox or from the disgruntled seceders who had once taken their stand under Burke's uncompromising banner, they were pessimists about military affairs. They thought, like the faint-hearted Auckland, that Napoleon was too much for Europe's statesmen and generals. " If," wrote Fox to Grenville, " Bonaparte does not by an attempt at invasion or some other great impudence give us an advantage, I cannot but think this country inevitably and irretrievable ruined. To be Ministers at a moment when the country is falling and all Europe sinking is a dreadful situation."