For Napoleon—in his moments of frankness with himself—was beginning to see that everything depended ultimately on this.
If the tide of French conquest which had flowed to the ramparts of Lisbon could be held there till the British tired of their purpose and came away, the liquidation of Spanish resistance would follow and, with the west of Europe finally subdued, he would be able to turn his full forces against the still unconquered East. But, if the British remained, the war in the Peninsula would continue to consume his armies, until once more he was forced to fight on two fronts". For, owing to the blockade and the Continental System by which he sought to break it, the Emperor's relations with the Czar were steadily deteriorating. "I shall have war with Russia," he told Metternich in September, "on grounds that lie beyond human possibilities, because they are rooted in the cause itself." In October, at a moment when he still believed that his troops were marching into Lisbon, he had requested Alexander to seize six hundred ships trading in his ports under American and other neutral flags but carrying goods of suspected British origin. And the Czar, yielding to the pressure of his merchants and relying on Napoleon's preoccupation in the Peninsula, had refused.
A close student as ever of the British newspapers and of'British politics, whose libertarian vagaries he continued both to misunderstand and to try to exploit, Napoleon had therefore redoubled his efforts to tip the scales against the Tory Administration in London. His reports told him—rightly—that the workless poor in the manufacturing districts of the North were starving, that radical criticism of aristocratic privilege and speculation was growing, that many merchants were ruined by the cessation of direct trade with the Continent and that the Opposition was loud in complaints against the cost, mismanagement and waste of life in the Peninsula. Fie was particularly heartened by the readiness with which Whig leaders and journalists broadcast French accounts of engagements in Portugal and quoted cooked figures of British losses taken from the Moniteur to discredit Wellington and the Government. To strengthen such demands for an immediate evacuation the Emperor tried every device to excite public clamour and frighten the English into deflecting their limited military resources elsewhere. In September he attempted, though in vain, to seize Sicily from the Italian mainland, and at the same time renewed his preparations on the Channel shore, announcing an impending crossing with 200,000 men. He also talked of an invasion of the Channel Islands and a rising of the 70,000 French prisoners held in British fortresses and prison-hulks. Lady Holland—the great Whig hostess—was full that autumn of such rumours.
But they failed to intimidate a Government and country now heartened by the news of Bussaco. After seventeen years of war Mr. Pitt's disciples in office had learnt their lesson and could not be induced to disperse their forces. They had been taught by their dead master that the best defence for England was to attack the enemy where he was weakest. Like their military Commander in the Peninsula, they refused to dance at his bidding. They preferred to make him dance at theirs. They had gained, however, imperceptibly, the initiative and they meant to keep it.
Nor were Ministers to be intimidated in the domestic field. They faced their difficulties with surprising resolution. The economic storm and stress of the long war was telling on the home front. New and perplexing phenomena, created by the coming of machine production, had been gravely aggravated by the Continental System. The causes of unemployment, of commercial boom and slump and monetary instability were not yet understood. But their social consequences had to be faced by those in authority. The old polity of closed franchise, pocket borough and Treasury sinecure was wearing a little thin under the pressure of new needs and unrepresented classes. The rising men of the commercial towns and the younger generation of social reformers were turning from the old labels of Whig and Tory towards what seemed a new and alarming radicalism. "A blunted indifference," wrote Plumer Ward, "seems to prevail in regard to all Administrations, and Jacobinism has free scope." There was a growing belief that, though the present reign might end quietly on account of the old King's popularity, the profligacy and unpopularity of his successor, together with financial stringency and the spread of Methodism, would produce disaster.1
This feeling of unrest had come to a head in the spring of 1810 when Wellington was awaiting Napoleon's attack on Portugal. A rich radical Member of Parliament, Sir Francis Burdett, challenged the right of the House to imprison a seditious printer and was himself committed to the Tower for breach of parliamentary privilege. Instead of going quietly, he barricaded himself in his Piccadilly house and called on the mob to protect the liberties of England. For four days the West End was in a ferment, with huge crowds lobbing brickbats at constables and Life Guards. The Opposition was in favour of yielding to the clamour,2 but the Government, seeing the issue as a clash between parliamentary rule and mob law, refused to withdraw. On April 9th a strong force of horse, foot and artillery surrounded Burdett's mansion and enabled the Speaker's Messenger to make the arrest just as the recalcitrant member was dramatically making his Etonian son translate Magna Charta. As is usually the way in, England when Government uses its constitutional power with courage, the agitation quickly died away and the affair ended
1Creevey, I, 113.
2 Windham, 503. See also Young, 450-1.
in a little harmless hooting by the mob and some rather foolish official persecution of leading agitators.1
Therefore, though Wellington complained of Opposition journals which kept " the people of England in a state of constant alarm and agitation," and urged the Government to take counter-measures to prevent every news-writer from running away with the public mind, their effect on policy was negligible. Ministers continued to support their General in Portugal, and the solider part of the public, preferring anything to the Grenvilles, stood by them and prayed for a victory before Lisbon and a continuance of the campaign.- "We are waiting," wrote Dorothy Wordsworth to Crabb Robinson, "with the utmost anxiety for the issue of that battle which you arranged so nicely by Charles Lamb's fireside." It was only a faction, not the nation, that demanded an evacuation.
So the tide of French conquest remained held and then, unable to advance farther, began, as is the way with tides, to recede. Though no one knew it, except perhaps Wellington, its flood days were over for ever. Henceforward it was to ebb, at first slowly but with ever-growing momentum. For a month Massena clung to the waterlogged, wind-swept fields in front of Wellington's lines while his men grew daily more ravenous and his pack and draught animals died in thousands. The British, fed from their ships and snug in their entrenchments, were so sorry for the starving French sentries that they tossed them biscuits from the points of their bayonets and secretly traded them surplus rations and tobacco in return for brandy.2 But, though the spirits of his men were high and reinforcements flowed into Lisbon both from England and the Spanish armies south of the Tagus, Wellington refused to attack. He knew the skill of Massena and the tenacity of the French, and he was not going to waste lives needlessly. "I could lick those fellows any day," he remarked, "but it would cost me 10,000 men and, as this is the last army England has got, we must take care of it."3
On the morning of November 15th the British outposts noticed that the haggard sentinels in front of their lines had grown strangely stiff: closer examination showed that they were dummies made of straw. The French had withdrawn during the night under cover of a fog. For the next four days the allies followed them northwards along the Tagus. "This retreat," wrote a soldier of the 71st
1 The two years' sentence of imprisonment passed on William Cobbett, the editor of the "Political Register," created, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton said, a Jacobin out of the best anti-Jacobin of his age.
2 Costello, 56 ; Journal of a Soldier, 98.
3 Fortescue, VII, 555.
Highlanders, "brought to my mind the Corunna race. We could not advance a hundred yards without seeing dead soldiers of the enemy. . . . The retreat resembled more that of famished wolves than men. Murder and dev
astation marked their way; every house was a sepulchre, a cabin of horrors!"1 Those who had evaded Wellington's orders to evacuate their homes had paid dear for their disobedience.
On November 18th the French halted in front of the riverside town of Santarem, thirty miles north of the lines of Torres Vedras. Here Massena, in the hope that Wellington would throw aside his caution and attack him, had prepared a strong position and concentrated the bulk of his army. But the British Commander, restraining Craufurd from a frontal attack with the Light Division, persisted in his "safe game." He was at the head, he explained, of the only army remaining in being in the Peninsula or in Europe able to contend with the French, and he was not going to lose a man of it without the clearest necessity. Four months of winter had still to go, and during that time Massena should have only two alternatives: to stay where he was and starve, or to face the horrors of a midwinter retreat over the mountains.
Of the two evils for the French, Wellington regarded the latter as the lesser. "I am convinced," he wrote to the Secretary of State, " that there is no man in his senses who has ever passed a winter in Portugal who would not recommend them to go now." Yet Massena did not go. Something might yet turn up to cause Wellington to weaken or disperse his forces. Concentrated in a strongly defended triangle between Santarem, Thomar and Punchete, he waited with his savage, hungry men for a false move on the part of his opponent and a chance to get between him and Lisbon.
There was a further reason for Massena's stand. The British Government was now facing a new threat to its existence. At the beginning of the winter of 1810 the cloud of madness had returned to the old King's mind. It had been brought on by the death on November 2nd of his favourite daughter, the Princess Amelia. This time the darkness was impenetrable. The King seemed to be in some perpetual waking dream, now fancying himself hunting and hallooing with hounds, now commanding an army and leading it to battle, now talking with visionary objects—"perhaps, poor man," wrote Lady Bessborough, "the cold, the faithless and the dead."
Early in November Parliament met to consider the situation. The Opposition was jubilant. The roulette of parliamentary fortune
1 Journal of a Soldier, 100. See also Smith, I, 37; Simmons, 121; Leach, Journal, 179.
had suddenly swung violently in its favour. Looming in front of the Government and all its hopes, political and military, was the immense, grotesque, flouncing figure of the Prince of Wales. Nothing could now avert a Regency, and nothing, the Wings believed, their own immediate elevation to power by their old crony and protege.
On December 19th a Regency Bill was introduced, for the Government, unable to pass a single measure, could not administer the country without it. In it Perceval inserted the same constitutional limitations and safeguards for his master's prerogatives that had all but shipwrecked Pitt twenty years before. This was the Ministerial dilemma on which the Whigs counted; the Government could not out of common decency abandon the restrictions, and the childlike, touchy Prince of Wales would never, it was felt, tolerate them. His first action after the passage of the Bill would be the dismissal of the Ministers who had clipped his rights. "By God!" he was heard to exclaim on the day the Bill was introduced, " they shall not remain an hour!"
But Perceval never faltered. His duty was plain and he was resolved to go through with it, whether it cost him his office or not. It was precisely the kind of situation in which he was at his best. On a test of character he was invincible. The Whigs, wishing to gain favour with Carlton House, fought the Bill at every stage, and Perceval, almost single-handed in the long, wearing debates, carried it through with patience, persistence and imperturbable good-humour. Even the Opposition admitted that he had shown himself game and fought like a gentleman.1 The country, which admired such qualities above all others, was delighted. For the first time in his life the courageous little man found himself a public hero.
But the issue was now beyond the arbitrament of the ordinary citizen. The Government could not hope to retain office once the Prince assumed power. "We are all, I think," wrote Lord Palmerston, the young Secretary-at-War, "on the kick and go!" The Whigs were already in conclave allocating offices: Whitbread, it was said, was to be Foreign Secretary and to negotiate a peace.2 Napoleon, following the debates in Paris, was beside himself with joy. " If the Prince of Wales is put at the head of affairs," he announced, " Wellington's army will be recalled!"
Yet, just when the long frost of the Whig exclusion seemed about to break, the warming rays from Carlton House were withdrawn.
1 Plumer Ward, 300, 330, 336; Dudley, 123. 2 Plumcr Ward, 298-9."
Those who had put their trust in princes found their trust misplaced. The Regency Bill was due to become law on February 5th, 1811. Four days before, when the Grenvilles and their followers were in the very act of forming their Administration, a messenger arrived at the house where they were assembled. He was informed that they could not be disturbed, but he insisted that he must disturb them, for he came from the Prince. They replied that it was for the Prince that they were at work, for they were making a Government. Whereupon the messenger told them to spare themselves further trouble, for no Government was to be made. The Prince had decided to retain his father's advisers.1
Thus it came about that Napoleon's hoped were dashed. " Prinny" had turned round short upon his friends. A chance whim—the influence, some thought of the reigning mistress, Lady Hertford, or resentment, according to others, at the Grenvilles' patronising ways, or, as some believed, a spasm of genuine filial feeling—had kept the King's Ministers in power. At the opening of the new Session on February 12th, .the Speech from the Throne reaffirmed the nation's resolve to persist in Portugal and referred in glowing terms to Wellington whom the Whigs had been denouncing as an incorrigible blunderer.2
The Regency's first public act was to commit itself to the war in the Peninsula. On the following day the City was raised into sudden joy by the news of the surrender of the Mauritius—the principal French base in the Indian Seas and the last of Napoleon's colonies. The Government, which Wellington had predicted could not last six months, was showing a surprising resilience. Though no man alive could have foreseen it, it was to last for twenty years.
While Perceval held the lines at Westminster, Wellington kept his around the French position at Santarem and watched his enemy growing daily weaker. He made no attempt to snatch a victory, for he knew that hunger and disease would do his work as quickly and far more cheaply than guns and bayonets. Nor did he Seek by any showy triumph to draw Massena's selfish, sluggish colleagues from Andalusia and northern Spain to his aid. It was only necessary to wait patiently for everything to be added. "If we can only hold out," he wrote, "we shall yet see the world relieved."
1 Plumer Ward, 376-7, 383; Dudley, 125.
2 Lord Carlisle at Christmas assured old Lady Spencer that "Massena had not retreated but taken a better position and placed us in a worse; that Lord Wellington was no general at all, but fell from one blunder to another, and the most we had to hope for was his being able to embark quietly and bring his troops in safety back to England, which he thought very doubtful."—Granville, II, 372.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Turn of the Tide
" In the War in which we are engaged, no man can pretend to say how long it will last."
Wellington.
T
HE fourth French offensive against Portugal had failed. Lisbon still survived and the British retained their hold on the Tagus. By an inflexible exercise of will and sound judgment Wellington had done precisely what he had said he would do, though a few months before scarcely a man in England or even in his own army had thought it possible. "Being embarked," he had written, "in a course of military operations of which I hope to see the successful termination, I shall continue to carry them on to their end."1
Yet, though he had defeated the enemy's offensive, he had made no attempt to take it himself. His plan did not admit of risks, and he would not deviate from it by a hair's
breath. So long as his adversary chose to remain entrenched among the hills and marshes around Santarem—one of the strongest positions in Portugal—time and hunger were on Wellington's side. He did not intend to give the wily victor of Zurich the slightest opportunity. He preferred, he told Ministers, the sure game and the one in which he was likely to lose the fewest men.
Massena clung on manfully. In a starving match in which the dice were loaded against him, he persisted where almost any other commander would have despaired. He wrung sustenance—of a sort —out of the very rocks and fed his men on roots and garbage; it could scarcely, wrote the British General, be called subsisting. Where the latter had given his foe a month in which to starve, the old Marshal held out for three. It was an astonishing example of what a French army could do.
At the back of Massena's mind lay the hope that sooner or later one of his fellow Marshals would relieve him and enable him to resume the offensive. He knew that Soult, with his 70,000 troops and his viceroyalty at Seville, had little love for him, but he believed that Napoleon would force him to act. Though the guerrillas in the mountains had cut off all normal communication between Santarem
1 To Charles Stuart, 6th Oct., 1810. Gurwood.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 55
