‘So,’ remarked Roger coldly, ‘you are a member of the Corresponding Society. As such, you would no doubt like to see the King dethroned and a bloody revolution here, similar to that there has been in France?’
Giffens eyed him angrily. ‘I’ve naught against King George, but I ’ave against gentry the like o’ you. To further your own fortune in some way you’ve a mind to go to France, an’ a word with others of your kidney is enough to ’ave a sloop-of-war bidden to land ye there. Yet what of us afore the mast who ’as the doin’ of it? Should we be taken by the Frenchies us will find ourselves slaves chained to an oar in them’s galleys.’
It was a point of view that Roger had never before had put to him. Had he heard it voiced in other circumstances he would have agreed that it was hard upon the common seaman that his lot, perhaps for years, should he be made a prisoner-of-war, would be the appalling one of a felon. On the other hand, the officers who ordered him into danger could count upon being treated fairly decently and were often, after only a few months of captivity, exchanged for enemy officers of equivalent rank.
But for some years past there had been serious unrest in England. Among the lower orders the doctrines of atheism and communism rampant in France had spread alarmingly. In Bristol, Norwich and numerous other cities troops had had to be used to suppress riots and defend property. In London mobs many thousands strong had publicly demanded the abolition of the Monarchy and the setting up of a People’s Republic. Mr. Pitt had found it necessary to suspend Habeas Corpus and had passed a law sentencing to transportation for life street agitators caught addressing more than four people. Such measures might appear harsh but, having witnessed the horrors of the French Terror, Roger felt that no severity against individual trouble-makers was too great, when only by such means could they be prevented from bringing about the destruction in a welter of blood and death of all that was best in Britain. By admitting to being a member of the revolutionary Corresponding Society, Giffens had virtually revealed himself as a potential sans-culotte; so Roger said to him sternly:
‘I go to France not for my own pleasure or profit, but upon the King’s business. And since you are now one of His Majesty’s seamen, however unwillingly, it is your duty to accept any risk there may be in doing your part to land me there.’
Giffens spat upon the deck, ‘Aye! Duty and weevily biscuits, that’s our lot. But you’re not one of my officers; so it’s not for you to preach duty to me.’
‘Speak to me again like that,’ Roger snapped, ‘and I’ll have the Captain order you strapped to a grating for six lashes of the “cat”.’ Then he swung on his heel and recommenced pacing the quarter-deck.
Within a few minutes he had dismissed Giffens from his mind and was thinking of his last conversation with Mr. Pitt. Together they had surveyed the international situation and, for Britain, it could hardly have been worse.
Between March ’96 and April ’97 Bonaparte’s victorious army had overrun Piedmont, the Duchies of Milan, Parma and Modena, the Republic of Genoa and an area as big as Switzerland in north-east Italy that had for centuries been subject to Venice. He had dethroned their rulers, set up People’s Governments and merged a great part of these territories into a new Cisalpine Republic. He had also invaded the Papal States and had blackmailed both the Pope and the Duke of Tuscany into making huge contributions to the cost of his campaign. As a result, the whole of northern Italy now lay under the heel of France.
Yet he had fallen short of achieving his great plan, as he had described it to Roger before setting out for Italy. It had been that he should fight his way up to the Tyrol while the French Army of the Rhine marched south to make junction with him there; then with this overwhelming force, he would thrust east and compel the Austrians to sign a peace treaty in Vienna. He had reached the Tyrol, but the Army of the Rhine had failed him; so, to give it further time, he had agreed to an armistice with the Austrians. For six months the plenipotentiaries had wrangled over peace terms at Leoben. By then autumn had come again, and the Army of the Rhine had made little progress. Although the great prize, Vienna, lay less than a hundred miles away, Bonaparte did not dare, with snow already falling in the mountains, resume his advance alone and risk a defeat so far from his base. Reluctantly he had come to terms and signed a peace treaty with the Austrians at Campo Formio on October 17th.
When making peace Austria had not consulted Britain, thus betraying the ally who had sent her many millions in subsidies to help her defend herself. Still worse, by the terms of the Treaty, she surrendered all claim to her Belgian territories. Her flat refusal to do so previously had been the stumbling block which Mr. Pitt had felt that he could not honourably ignore when he had had the opportunity to agree a general pacification with France some two years earlier.
Still earlier Prussia, too, had betrayed Britain by making a separate peace; and although Frederick William II had died in the previous November his successor, Frederick William III, as yet showed no inclination to re-enter the conflict against the Power that threatened every Monarchy in Europe.
Catherine of Russia had realised belatedly the danger, and had promised to send an Army against France. But she had died just a year before the King of Prussia, and her death had proved another blow to Britain. Her son, who succeeded her as Paul I, had detested his mother so intensely that he senselessly sought to be avenged upon her in her grave by reversing every policy she had favoured and, overnight, he tore up the agreement by which Russia was to join the Anglo-Austrian alliance.
Holland lay at the mercy of France, Portugal had signed a separate peace and Spain had gone over to the enemy. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies alone, owing to the influence of Queen Caroline, the sister of the martyred Marie Antoinette, pursued a neutrality strongly favourable to Britain, and would have entered the war again if she could have been supported. But she could not. The combination of the French and Spanish Fleets, after Spain had become the ally of France in ’96, gave them such superiority that Britain had been forced to withdraw her Fleet from the Mediterranean; so for the past two years Naples had remained cut off.
At sea in all other areas Britain had more than held her own. She had driven her enemies from every island in the West Indies, with the one exception of Guadeloupe, and in the previous October Admiral Duncan had inflicted a shattering defeat on the Dutch Fleet at Camperdown. This had proved more than a great naval victory, for the French had been using the Dutch Fleet to convoy a large body of troops to the Clyde, on the somewhat dubious assumption that an enemy landing there would force the British Government to withdraw troops from Ireland and thus enable the Irish malcontents to launch a successful rebellion.
For several years past the French had been sending agents to stir up trouble in Ireland. They had met with such a fervent response from the discontented elements there that the Directory had promised to send ten thousand troops to act as a spearhead of rebellion against the hated British. Had this force succeeded in landing, it might well have proved impossible for Britain, with her other commitments, to hold the sister island, in which case it would have become the base for a great French Army able to invade at will England, Scotland or Wales.
Even as things stood, the League of United Irishmen was thirty thousand strong and pledged, with or without French help, to rise and fight to the death for Irish independence at the signal of its leader, Wolfe Tone. So at any time unhappy Britain might find a bloody civil war forced upon her as a further drain on her desperately stretched resources.
Outside the Mediterranean the British Navy had proved more than a match for the combined Fleets of France and Spain. Just on a year before, Admiral Sir John Jervis, now Earl St. Vincent, had so thoroughly defeated the Spanish Fleet, off the Cape from which he had taken his title, that only a small remnant of it now remained. Great seaman as he was, he had also had the greatness of mind to give a large part of the credit for his victory to Commodore Nelson who, on his own initiative, had broken station to cut through the Spanish line of
battle, thus throwing the enemy Fleet into confusion.
Later that year this dashing junior officer had shown exceptional skill and gallantry in a series of attacks on the harbour of Cadiz. Then in July St. Vincent had given him command of a Squadron detached for the purpose of capturing the island of Tenerife. In that Nelson’s luck had failed him. The Military Commanders in Gibraltar and the Channel Isles both had considerable bodies of idle troops under their orders, but both refused to lend any part of them to St. Vincent for this expedition. On account of lack of troops Nelson had not sufficient men to land forces which could have surrounded the town and had to rely on his limited number of marines and his ‘tars’ to take it by direct assault.
On the night of July 22nd, when he launched his attack, many of the boats, owing to dense fog, failed to reach their landing points and others were driven off. Refusing to acknowledge defeat, Nelson decided to lead a second assault in person two nights later. The first attack had alerted the Spanish garrison and they were ready for him. It soon transpired, too, that the troops who garrisoned the Spanish colonies were of far finer mettle than those of their home Army.
Before Nelson even got ashore his right arm was shot away above the elbow by a cannon ball. But his men, most gallantly led by officers some of whom were later to become that famous ‘Band of Brothers’, his Captains, fought their way into the city and held a part of it for several hours. Their position was, however, so evidently untenable that the seriously wounded Commodore agreed with the chivalrous Spanish Governor to a cease-fire and an exchange of prisoners.
In spite of this defeat, there was something about Nelson that had already caused the British people to take him, although still a comparatively junior Commander, to their hearts; and on his return to England in September they had hailed him as a hero. Throughout the autumn his wound had caused him great pain, but by early in December the stump had healed; so he was now recovered and, report had it, pestering the life out of the Admiralty to be sent to sea again.
In France the ‘Five Kings’—as the members of the Directory which had taken over the Government after the fall of Robespierre were called—were still all-powerful. Under the new Constitution which had elevated them to office there were two Chambers: the Corps Législatif, popularly known as the Five Hundred, and the Anciens, which consisted of two hundred and fifty older statesmen elected from the former body. But the two Houses were no more than forums for debating proposed changes in the law. They had no executive power and Ministers were neither allowed to be members of either House nor were in any way responsible to them.
The Ministers were appointed by the Director and were little more than chief clerks of departments under them. The Directory also appointed all military officers of senior rank, all diplomatic representatives and all the principal civilian officials of the State. As the majority of the Directors were unscrupulous men, the patronage in their gift had led to a degree of bribery and corruption never known in any country before or since.
All five of the Directors had voted for the King’s death, so it was essential to their own safety that they should check the tide of reaction against the Terror that was sweeping France. To achieve this they secured agreement that one-third of the members of the new legislative body should consist of men who had sat in the old extremist Convention. Thus, against the will of the people, they ensured a majority which would refuse to pass any law which might bring retribution on themselves.
Paul de Barras, a man of noble birth and a soldier of some ability, was the acknowledged figurehead of the Directory. He was handsome, brave, gay, utterly corrupt and shamelessly licentious. Jean-François Rewbell was its strength and brain. A dyed-in-the-wool terrorist, he was foul-mouthed, brutal and dictatorial, but possessed a will of iron and an indefatigable appetitite for work. Larevellière-Lépeaux was a lawyer, deformed, ill-tempered and vain, with one all-absorbing passion — a positively demoniacal hatred of Christianity. These three had united to form a permanent majority unshakably determined to oppose the popular movement for a greater degree of liberty and tolerance under a truly representative Liberal government.
Nevertheless, the new Constitutional Movment, as it was called, had by the preceding year gained such momentum that it caused Barras and his cronies considerable alarm. They feared that General Pichegru was about to stage a coup d’état, and it was even rumoured that in the Club de Clichy, where the leaders of the Constitutional Party had their headquarters, a plot was being hatched to restore the Monarchy.
When news of the landslide in public opinion percolated to the Armies in the field they too became disturbed, for a high proportion of the soldiers were former sans-culottes. The Divisions of the Army of Italy drew up fiery proclamations which they sent to Paris, declaring that if the Corps Législaíif ‘betrayed the Revolution’ they would return and slaughter its members.
Bonaparte had also shown his old colours. As the war was at a stalemate owing to the armistice with Austria, he could have gone to Paris and organised a coup d’état, but he was too shrewd a politician to lead personally a movement in support of the unpopular Directors. Instead he sent General Augereau, a huge, swashbuckling bully of a man imbued with violently revolutionary opinions.
Augereau was not a man to take half-measures and on his arrival in Paris he immediately announced that he had come to kill the Royalists. Having concerted measures with Barras, he dealt with the Corps Législatif on 4th September—18th Fructidor, Year V, in the revolutionary calendar—much as Cromwell had dealt with the Long Parliament. Arriving at their Chamber with two thousand troops he overawed their guard, arrested the Constitutional leaders and dispersed the remainder of the members.
Generals Pichegru and Miranda and thirty-eight other prominent Constitutionalists were sentenced to the ‘dry guillotine’, as it was called, and transported to the fever-ridden swamps of Cayenne. The Corps Législatif was then purged of more than two hundred members, leaving a rump that was entirely subservient to the Directors.
The coup d’état of 18th Fructidor had also made infinitely more remote any possibility of Roger influencing some of the French leaders in favour of negotiating a peace. After five years of executions, street fighting, massacres, civil war in La Vendée and wars against half a dozen foreign nations, the French people were utterly sickened by blood-letting in all its forms. They longed for peace every bit as much as did the British. Had the Constitutionalists triumphed they would have given the people peace but, once again, as always happens at times of crisis, the Liberals, lacking the determination and ruthlessness of their extremist opponents, had been swept away. The Directory, on the other hand, was as determined as ever to carry the doctrines of the Revolution into every country in Europe, both by the thousands of agitators it sent abroad as secret agents and by force of arms. In consequence, Roger saw little hope of peace as long as the present rulers remained in power, and felt that he would be extremely lucky if he could succeed even in diverting some part of the French war effort from England.
Soon after four o’clock he was abruptly roused from his gloomy musings by a series of orders shouted from the after deck. Men tumbled up from below, others ran to the ropes and hauled on them. The vessel heeled over, the sails sagged and flapped noisily for a moment, then billowed out again as they refilled with wind. For most of the day the ship had been proceeding under a fair wind, east-south-east; now she had swung round to east by north.
At eight bells Lieutenant Formby had come up on deck to take his watch. With his telescope to his eye he had his back turned and was looking aft from the break of the low poop. Roger ran up the short ladder to it and asked him why he had changed course.
Formby frowned and pointed to the south-west. Hull-up on the horizon, but only just perceptible to the naked eye, lay a three-masted ship. ‘From this distance I can’t be certain,’ he said, ‘but she looks to me like a Frenchie. If so, she’s a frigate out of Cherbourg.’
Taking the glass the young Lieutenant offered, Roger
focussed it until he could see the ship quite clearly. ‘She is certainly a warship,’ he remarked, ‘but I am not sufficiently acquainted with such matters to give an opinion on her nationality.’
As Roger handed back the telescope, Formby went on, ‘Had we continued on course we’d have had to pass within a mile of her, and that’s a risk I dare not take.’
‘Stap me, no!’ Roger agreed emphatically. ‘We’d be completely at the mercy of a ship that size did she prove an enemy. Do you think she will have sighted us?’
‘I doubt it. This vessel being so much smaller, it would be harder to pick up. If she has, we can only pray that she did not observe our change of course.’
‘You mean that seeing us turn away would arouse her Captain’s suspicions that we are either up to no good or are British?’
‘Hell’s bells!’ Formby exclaimed, quickly putting up his telescope again. ‘She has sighted us. Even with the naked eye you can now discern that her three masts are merging into one. She is coming round, so intends to pursue us.’
Roger shrugged. ‘She is still miles away. Surely you can out-distance her with this sloop?’
Formby’s forehead was creased with a frown. ‘Should she crowd on all sail, I’d not wager on it.’
For the first time Roger felt a slight apprehension as he said, ‘At least, your ship is much more easily manoeuvrable. Unless she gets near enough to menace us with a broadside you have naught to fear except some balls from her bow-chaser. Visibility, thank God, is bad. By taking avoiding action, you should escape being hit until darkness closes down and we can get away under cover of it.’
‘I could, with luck, had I a first-rate crew,’ the Lieutenant replied bitterly. ‘But more than half my men were pressed and were landlubbers until a few months back. With such ham-handed swabs, and slow at that to obey orders, I’ll not be able to get the best out of her.’
Roger refrained from comment. From his father he knew only too well how, during the years of peace, half the ships of the Navy had been allowed to rot, while the men who had manned them either starved or settled into jobs ashore. During the past few years many new ships had been built and somehow crews had been got together for them, but nearly every ship in the Navy was undermanned and there was still a great shortage of trained seamen with long service.
The Sultan's Daughter Page 3
