Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Buonaparte had meanwhile sailed into another sea of troubles. By the early spring of 1798 he had abandoned his apparent attempt at invasion and sailed towards Egypt. It turned out to be a rash decision but, on the face of it, that province of the Ottoman Empire was tempting; it might provide a land route to India, the reputed home of treasure, and immeasurably increase the amount of French trade. ‘Soldiers!’ Napoleon told his army as it sailed from Toulon. ‘The eyes of Europe are upon you! You have great destinies to fulfil.’

  Admiral Nelson, who now enters this history for the first time with a predictable flourish, chased after him. He had a sense of destiny, and a flair for self-projection, equal to that of Napoleon; he crossed and recrossed parts of the Mediterranean looking for his quarry. Buonaparte had taken Malta, but had then gone eastward. Nelson sailed to Alexandria but found no sign of him; he scoured the Levant and then sailed west to Sicily. There was still no sign. Finally, after weeks, of searching, he found Napoleon’s ships at Aboukir Bay beside Alexandria to which the French had secretly returned. The signal was given for battle. ‘Before this time tomorrow,’ Nelson said in his usual vain and magnificent manner, ‘I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’

  In the subsequent battle of the Nile, at the beginning of August, the French fleet was overwhelmed; only four ships escaped Nelson’s onslaught. Three and a half thousand French sailors were taken prisoner, and 2,000 were killed. No British ships were destroyed. Napoleon himself was now stranded in Egypt without a fleet, without reinforcements and without supplies. The British navy was once more in charge of the Mediterranean, and the victory at Aboukir prompted Turkey to enter the war against France. The news was greeted in England with predictable jubilation. A British official, George Pretyman, wrote to his wife: ‘Mr Pitt is confident that Buonaparte must be destroyed. Oh my Love, what joy!’

  An uneasy peace held for eighteen months until the forces against Buonaparte entered what was called a second coalition, a band of armies that included those of Russia and Austria as well as England. The British under the grand old duke of York arrived in Holland in the late summer of 1799, marched about a bit, and then returned home in November. Their allies did not fare any better. The Austrians and the Russians were embroiled in internal conflicts, and the tsar left the coalition in October. The Austrians were defeated decisively in the following year. Much of the French success may be credited to Napoleon who, abandoning his army in Egypt, made his way back to Paris and named himself First Consul. To the stranded army in Egypt it seemed like an act of betrayal. One of his generals, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, told his colleagues: ‘That bastard has left us with his breeches full of shit. We will go back to Europe and rub them in his face.’ But for Buonaparte matters of private honour and fidelity were of no consequence in his relentless pursuit of victory and glory.

  If war was to be sustained by England against him, it required the maintenance of discipline at home. In the summer of 1799 William Pitt introduced the Workmen’s Combination Bill which forbade any working men to come together for the purpose of seeking higher wages or shorter hours, with a minimum penalty of three months’ imprisonment or two months of hard labour. ‘Combination’ was already illegal, but it was believed necessary to suppress anything that resembled political agitation. It might compromise the war effort.

  It is significant that these prohibitions were maintained against workmen in general and not against any particular craft or trade; this added to the sense of injustice and oppression experienced primarily in the manufacturing areas. ‘Secret’ unions sprang up, however, among workers in cotton and wool which played some part in the outbreak of the Luddite protests of the next century. As early as 1799 the shearmen of Wiltshire sent threatening letters to those who were intent upon harnessing new machinery. ‘We shall keep some people to watch you about with loaded blunderbuss or pistol.’ Yet as always the practical implementation of the Combination Act was muddled and uncertain, with magistrates of the different regions varying greatly in their response. Like much legislation from Westminster, it probably made very little difference in the end.

  The spirit of unrest was stirred further by another season of dearth. In the spring of 1800 an official wrote to the Home Office from Birmingham that ‘many thousands, especially children, are all but starved’. It was recognized that conditions near to famine would gravely destabilize the nation already at war. Pitt wrote in the autumn that ‘the question of peace or war is not in itself half so formidable as the scarcity with which it is necessarily combined, and for the evils and growing dangers of which I see no adequate remedy’. He wrote at a time of riot. In September 1800, the corn exchange in Mark Lane, London, was stormed after some handbills were posted on the Monument, proclaiming that ‘Bread will be sixpence the quarter if the people will assemble at the corn market on Monday.’ On the following day some bakers’ shops in Whitechapel were attacked by a mob; on the day after that, a handbill was addressed to ‘starved fellow creatures’ asking them to meet on St George’s Fields ‘to defend your rights. Never mind the blood-thirsty soldiers. We shall put them to flight . . .’ Riots erupted in all parts of the country, and Matthew Boulton said that there were so many soldiers in Birmingham that it resembled an armed camp.

  The policy of the administration itself was in disarray. The coalition against Napoleon was not holding; Prussia and Russia, Russia and Austria, Austria and Prussia, were all quarrelling over control of various parts of the continent. England itself could not be attacked, but neither could it strike. Some members of the cabinet preferred a return of the Bourbon dynasty in Paris, a policy which seemed to hold out little chance of success; others believed that there was no point in negotiating with Buonaparte, while certain colleagues argued that negotiation was the only way forward. Disagreements arose also about the role of the allies in any peace talks; should they be allowed to participate or should Britain stand on its own?

  The general sentiment, however, was in favour of peace. This seems to have been the overwhelming desire of the people who were thoroughly weary of a war that had already endured for more than seven years. This desire was further intensified by the resurgence of the enemy. It was Buonaparte who took his armies over the Alps, in the spring of 1800, and defeated the Austrians at Marengo. At the subsequent treaty of Lunéville on 9 February 1801, he gained the German districts on the left bank of the Rhine, Belgium and Luxemburg as well as large swathes of Italy. Buonaparte had not conquered the enemy, one strategist wrote, but rendered it harmless. Britain was once more on its own.

  This was the moment when William Pitt decided to resign his office, just five days before the signing of the treaty. His departure came as a surprise to the political world, however, and was for a while considered as suspicious – as a ‘juggle’ somehow to further Pitt’s interest. It was said that he did not want to be the legislator who would be forced to broker a peace with Napoleon. It was surmised that he was exhausted; he was in bad health; he was unnerved by the scale of famine and of riot; he was tired of holding the balance between opposing interests. But in truth it had nothing to do with the war or famine. It had to do with Ireland.

  In his negotiations over the Act of Union – during which Henry Grattan had lamented the sleeping beauty of his country – Pitt suggested, or intimated, or let it be known, that the emancipation of the majority Catholic population would duly follow and that they would be able to hold legal and political office. But he had not reckoned with the king, who regarded any such concession to be against the spirit and letter of his coronation oath in which he had pledged to defend the Church of England. He could not countenance a country in which there was more than one established religion. George III could be stubborn as well as principled, and on this matter he was adamant. He went over to one of Pitt’s allies, Henry Dundas, at a royal levee and questioned him in a voice loud enough to be overheard by many of those present. ‘What is the question you are all about to force on me? What is this Catholic emancipation . .
. I will tell you that I shall look on every man as my personal enemy who proposes that question to me. I hope all my friends will not desert me.’

  Pitt was aware of the exchange within a matter of minutes. He, who treasured his reputation more than anything else, then felt obliged to resign. The king, knowing that he had an alternative administration in waiting, accepted the first minister’s wish. Pitt left office and gave way for Henry Addington, who was what might be called a ‘solid’ choice, dependable, hard-working and honest. He also had the advantage, for the king, of being opposed to Catholic emancipation. Unfortunately none of these qualities was enough in itself to guarantee pre-eminence and in a cruel rhyme spread by a young minister, George Canning, it was said that ‘Pitt is to Addington what London is to Paddington’. The new prime minister was also known as ‘the Doctor’, since he had practised for some years as a physician for the wealthier and unhealthier portion of society. His father had also been an eminent physician who in fact had numbered Pitt’s father, the earl of Chatham, among his patients. The Doctor was no great orator and found it difficult to exert his authority over the Commons, let alone the nation.

  The king, in a state of excitement close to hysteria, now began to suffer once more from his old malady – or, as some put it, his old madness. He himself blamed Pitt and the Catholic question for his relapse, and Pitt had felt obliged to promise him that he would never raise the matter again. Within a month the king recovered. Pitt had fallen, but no party had gone with him. He was but one man, and many of his ministers agreed to serve under Addington. A few chairs had been arranged in a different fashion, but nothing further. Yet there was one significant change that would affect the political world in succeeding years. Without Pitt’s personal hegemony the various parties that had comprised his administration now began to fall apart. Pitt sat on the treasury benches but at a distance from the members of the new administration; he did nothing, however, to oppose it. He felt it his duty, in fact to support it as the visible representative of the king’s wishes.

  It became clear enough that Addington desired peace at almost any price. The nation desired it. The finances of the country required it. It no longer seemed to be a symbolic clash of ideologies but, rather, a more familiar contest over the balance of power on the continent. By the beginning of October the government announced the preliminary terms of a treaty. The depth of public approval became evident when a London crowd dragged the coach of the French envoy through the streets crying out ‘Long live Buonaparte!’

  But the governing class was not so happy. It was believed that Addington, weak as he was, had purchased peace at too high a price. All Britain’s wartime conquests in the Mediterranean and outside Europe were to be returned; the acquisitions in the East Indies, the West Indies and South America (with the exception of Ceylon and Trinidad) would all be relinquished. The French would retain control of the Netherlands, Switzerland and parts of northern Italy. The treaty, when it was eventually signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802, confirmed that France had been allowed to expand to what it termed its ‘natural frontiers’ without making any parallel concessions of its own. Addington declared that ‘this is no ordinary peace but a genuine reconciliation between the two first nations of the world’. Others were not so sure. Food was still dear; commerce was in disarray; the dreadful income tax was not abolished.

  Some considered it to be the best of bad alternatives. The Morning Chronicle, which spoke for Fox and his liberal Whig allies, stated that ‘the country has been degraded by the peace, though it is necessary’. Some of Pitt’s old ministers, who had left office with him, were less ambiguous. William Windham said that ‘the country has received its death blow’; George Grenville stated that ‘all confidence in the present government is completely and irretrievably destroyed’. Henry Dundas was more circumspect, telling Pitt that ‘the only wise and friendly thing I can do is to impose upon myself silence’. Pitt himself, despite private reservations, continued publicly to support the government. The treaty of Amiens was widely regarded as a truce, a time to recuperate so that the two countries might be able to resume the fight at a later date. Buonaparte was himself already busy with the plans for new wars, eager to gain mastery over the entire continent. In the autumn of 1802 he marched his armies into Switzerland, to which blatant abrogation of the treaty Addington made only the mildest of protests. The era known as that of the ‘Napoleonic wars’ had truly begun.

  31

  A Romantic tale

  On 5 June 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field, by which he cut off an angle’. So William Wordsworth recalled one of the first meetings between himself and the fellow poet who together with him would help to change the language of expression and inaugurate what would become known as the ‘Romantic movement’ in poetry. They already had much in common. They were both engaged in blank verse tragedies, but Coleridge’s Osorio and Wordsworth’s The Borderers did not find favour with theatrical managers. Each man had written two slim volumes of poetry – Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were published in 1793, while Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects and Poems were presented to the world in 1796 and 1797. But they had already encountered one another at the house of a sugar merchant in Bristol. Coleridge had been impressed by what he called Wordsworth’s ‘novel imagery’ and ‘vivid colouring’, and in turn Wordsworth remarked that Coleridge’s ‘talent appears to me very great’. Wordsworth was twenty-seven, and Coleridge three years his junior.

  Eight years before, at a most impressionable age, they had woken up in Year One of the French Revolution. They had celebrated the death of tyranny, the breaking of the idols of Church and King, of tradition and authority. Anything was possible. Everything was possible. Coleridge, still at school, composed a celebratory poem called ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’. Wordsworth had gone to France, tasted some of the excitement, and then retreated, leaving an illegitimate daughter behind. He still mingled with what were known as ‘the friends of liberty’, however, and in the early months of 1793 wrote an open or public letter, never published, in which he refers to himself as ‘a republican’; in the following year he wrote to a friend that ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats’.

  Yet the Terror in the late months of 1793 and the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 had a chastening effect upon the erstwhile enthusiasts of revolution. Coleridge had vowed to put down ‘my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition’, and gone back to the springs of Unitarian theology where ‘Truth is Christ’. Wordsworth went on a walking tour before settling with his sister in Dorset. The flame of the revolution was now only flickering as he was vouchsafed glimpses of the pantheistic vision that would support his later poetry.

  They already shared an enthusiasm, even reverence, for a poet of Bristol. William Wordsworth had been introduced to Thomas Chatterton’s Miscellanies by his schoolmaster; in 1802, in ‘Resolution and Independence’ he referred to Chatterton as the ‘marvellous Boy’. Coleridge wrote and rewrote a ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ from the age of thirteen to the time of his own death. Thomas Chatterton was the Romantic avatar in an age of false taste, a status which his early demise had only confirmed. It was believed that at the age of seventeen he had committed suicide by arsenic poison in his little garret on Brooke Street in Holborn; it was widely surmised that he had died of poverty and starvation in the unequal struggle to find an audience for his fervid poetry which had conjured up the spirit of an antique age. His verses were supposed to be the work of a medieval monk, Thomas Rowley, who had chronicled the heroic and martial world of the Middle Ages. The verses opened up a world of wonder and delight. They stirred the two young men like a trumpet. Here was a genuine entry into a lost world of imagination, of supernatural event and superhuman courage. The fact that they were fakes mattered not at all; they were still authentic.

  Chatterton’s apparent suicide was then considered to be t
he sublime death of a genius cast aside by the world; in the words of Keats, another avid devotee, a ‘dear child of sorrow – son of misery!’ In due course his life, and his death as depicted in a painting by Henry Wallis, became the paradigm of the Romantic sensibility. Chatterton’s ‘solemn agony’, in the phrase of Shelley, was the first intimation of Romantic suffering which in the early decades of the nineteenth century became the sensibility of Europe. Chatterton was the solitary genius in excelsis.

  But solitariness and genius were not then vital principles for Wordsworth and Coleridge. By 1797 they were unsettled and undecided about their futures, in need of money or of patrons. What is more, they seemed to need one another. They engaged in long walks through the countryside of Somerset in which they had both eventually settled, Coleridge with his wife and son and Wordsworth with his sister. Wordsworth walked in a straight line, while Coleridge was divagatory. They considered an epic poem entitled ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, but it came to nothing. Two weeks after that failure, on a walking tour along the Bristol Channel in November, they devised the plan of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But even as they started work upon the joint project Wordsworth realized that their writing was incompatible and that he could only be a ‘clog’ on Coleridge’s vividly realized narrative. As he said, ‘we pulled different ways’. Dorothy Wordsworth was the catalyst between them. Her watchful interest in, and enthusiasm for, the workings of the natural world helped to recreate the landscape in which they walked together; the intimate simplicity of her journals, begun on 20 January 1798, was a token of the world of feeling in which the young poets flourished.