Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Coleridge’s fluency and vivacity had in any case an inspiring effect upon his colleague. Wordsworth wrote much between November 1797 and June 1798, with the peak of his powers manifest between March and May. The poems he composed concerned the plight of the poor and the progress of the poet’s mind. In April 1798, he wrote to a prospective publisher that ‘I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry.’ This was to include many of the poems that eventually found their place in Lyrical Ballads (1798). At a later date in Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge explained that in their conversation on the proposed new volume they determined upon poetry of two sorts. In the first ‘the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural’. Thus the inclusion of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But for the second sort ‘subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity’. The egalitarian fury of the revolution had subsided but their feelings for equality and democracy, for shared human experience and shared human values, had found a safer haven.

  They had found it, in part, in language. If the intention was to choose incidents and situations ‘from common life’, the instinctive medium had to be ‘a selection of language really used by men’. The tone could be discursive and colloquial but, equally, it could partake of the street ballads and Scottish ballads that were popular; on no account, however, could it seem to be artificial. Poetic diction and periphrasis were the ornaments of sheer habit and custom. They were the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake condemned.

  With the chastened language came new meanings. The ‘Advertisement’ of the book promised ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. This was not necessarily a new experiment or daring innovation; the poetry of the 1790s had sought a ballad-like simplicity in tales of mad mothers or idiot boys. What was new (and understood by some as such) was the vividness of tone and feeling. The key was simplicity, not of a naïve or unconsidered kind but well pondered and conceived so that it became more powerfully evocative of the belief in ‘a motion and a spirit’ which ‘rolls through all things’. There is even a tone of inward uncertainty that deepens the language, rendering it a vehicle for associations and preoccupations that are more powerful than the ostensible subject. The two poets were relocating dignity in the commonplace, restoring grace and simplicity to ordinary lives where saints and sinners walked unannounced and unknown. This was real liberty, equality and fraternity. That is why Francis Jeffrey, in an acerbic notice in the Edinburgh Review, compared Lyrical Ballads with Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man.

  So in the autumn of 1798 appeared a volume of 210 pages at the price of 5 shillings. Of the twenty-four poems, nineteen were composed by Wordsworth. But his fellow poet had opened the collection with ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a decision which Wordsworth later deemed to be a mistake. Yet Coleridge considered the poems to be ‘one work, in kind, tho’ not in degree’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ itself could in fact be conceived of as an example of the Wordsworthian sublime, for example, concerned with the intrinsic power of human sympathy in an uncaring world; the old mariner himself was obliged to live for ever as an outcast, the solitary wanderer of the Romantic vision, but the aspiration of the poem is towards benevolence and human community.

  Lyrical Ballads concluded with ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’, a powerful meditation in blank verse that opened the way to the great poems of Wordsworth’s maturity such as The Prelude and The Excursion. ‘Tintern Abbey’ in particular helped to change the understanding of landscape and of nature which, for many, took on the sacred vesture of natural religion. They had once been considered picturesque but now they conveyed a spiritual or supernatural force. By means of Wordsworth’s poetry nature was granted religious significance as the nurse of piety and wisdom. It was a moral agent, an agent for good and benevolent change in the human heart. Coleridge and Wordsworth were described as representing ‘the modern school of poets’ and when Wordsworth eventually moved to the Lake District in 1799 they were known as ‘the Lake school’. Pilgrims began to travel to that neighbourhood and Wordsworth wrote a guidebook for these new spiritual travellers.

  So even if the little book was not a popular success on its first appearance, it had an abiding significance. Over the course of years it became the source and fountain of what became known as the Romantic sensibility of the early nineteenth century in England, part of a movement of taste which stretched across France and Germany, Russia and Italy and Spain.

  Yet a strange light appeared on the fringes of the distant clouds. By the late nineteenth century the imperatives of the Romantic movement had been transformed into an appeal for state ‘benevolence’ and ‘human community’ to oppose the tyranny of laissez-faire. That is material for another volume.

  32

  Pleasures of peace

  In the summer of 1802 Napoleon had been appointed as ‘first consul for life’ after a national referendum that apparently gave him 99 per cent of the vote. The ideals of the revolution were now effectively dead; the tree of liberty had been torn from its roots, and equality was now honoured only in name. Jacobin republicanism of the English variety had lost its purpose. ‘Jacobinism is killed and gone,’ Sheridan said, ‘and by whom? By him who can no longer be called the child and champion of Jacobinism – by Buonaparte . . . he gave it a true fraternal hug and strangled it.’ The days of the champions of liberty and democracy were over, and in 1801 William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and himself once a fervent Jacobin, noted that ‘even the starving labourer in the alehouse is become a champion of aristocracy’.

  The parlous state of Jacobinism was revealed in an inept conspiracy of certain so-called revolutionaries led by Colonel Despard. He and his associates had formed a secret society which migrated from tavern to tavern in London, from The Two Bells in Whitechapel to The Bleeding Heart in Holborn, with the express purpose of ‘an equalization of civic, political and religious rights’; the authorities, alerted by informers and police spies, arrested Despard. Forty of his followers were seized at The Oakley Arms in Lambeth. At the subsequent trial it was alleged that they had conspired in a coup d’état in which the Bank of England and the Tower would be captured, the prisons thrown open, and the king killed or taken prisoner. Despard was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn.

  The drift to war continued at an ever-accelerating speed, as soon as it became clear that Napoleon had no intention of abiding by the principles of the treaty of Amiens. Yet Britain was also at fault; it had not evacuated Malta and returned it to the Knights of St John, as it had agreed to do in the treaty. At a reception in the Tuileries on 13 March 1803, Buonaparte admonished the English ambassador, Lord Whitworth, in front of other diplomats. ‘It is you who are determined to make war against us; you want to drive me to it.’ Buonaparte was not the one to shirk any challenge and told Whitworth that ‘you will be the first to draw the sword; I shall be the last to sheathe it. Woe to those who show no respect for treaties!’ The last sword was not put back in its scabbard for thirteen more years.

  The first consul had already made preparations for conflict. French ships in the Mediterranean had embarked men, and French troops in Belgium had been moved towards Dunkirk and Le Havre. A message from George III to parliament urged the need for action; more men were to be enlisted in the fleet by means of bounties and, if further persuasion were needed, a ‘hot press’ was to be instituted in the streets and taverns of London.

  It soon became clear that Henry Addington was not equal to the task of first minister imposed upon him. His acceptance of what was considered to be an ignominious and ill-considered treaty did not help his reputation, but he was in any case believed to be too weak and indecisive; his preferred policy in the face of Napoleonic threat was inaction. The man about to become home secretary, Charles Yorke, told his brother that Addington ‘is not equal to the crisis in which we stand. In truth I think there is but on
e man among us who is; I mean Pitt.’ Yet Pitt was not ready to replace his successor; he believed Addington to be ‘a stupider fellow than he had thought him’ but he was not ready to defy the king’s wishes.

  The current administration’s position was rendered more precarious by its ill-considered and ill-managed attempt to call up volunteers for the army to confront Napoleon. The response was very encouraging but it soon became clear that there were no instructors to train them and no arms to furnish them; the local officials were obliged to give orders to discourage further recruitment and then to abandon it altogether. Any central authority was thrown into doubt. Where Buonaparte had the will and genius to create a force armée, the English equivalent was in disarray.

  On 16 May 1803 George III ordered the seizure of all French shipping and, on 18 May, war between France and England was formally declared. The British fleet under the command of Cornwallis sailed towards Brest, and a force was dispatched against the French in San Domingo. Buonaparte in turn was now making active preparations for the invasion of England. An armed camp was set up at Boulogne, as close to the coast of England as possible, and it had been calculated that a flotilla of small ships would be able to cross the Channel in a single night. An atmosphere close to panic now descended upon England; despite the early discouragement in organizing volunteers, it was estimated that approximately half a million men were now under arms. The south coast was fortified with beacons and the new Martello towers. Yet in fact the French fleet did nothing at all. Its flotilla of boats would not be able to master the English navy and, for the time being, Buonaparte lost all interest in an invasion.

  On the day that war was formally declared, Pitt finally took over office from Addington. But he was weaker now, in body and in spirit, and he was forced to patch together an administration from several different elements. He had become more erratic and less business-like, refusing to write letters or to deal with affairs after dinner; he also had a greater tendency to weep in public, which did not endear him to his less tender colleagues who were already cultivating a mid-nineteenth-century gravitas and sobriety.

  At the end of 1804 Buonaparte was graciously pleased to allow himself to be crowned emperor of the French as Napoleon I. As emperor, rather than king, he was outflanking the Bourbon dynasty and claiming for himself the mantle of Charlemagne as absolute ruler of Europe in the west. Pope Pius VII had been invited to Paris in order to preside over the official coronation, but Napoleon took the crown from the pontiff’s hands and placed it on his own head. The Prussians, the Russians and the Austrians looked on with disquiet.

  On 2 January 1805, the new emperor addressed an apparently fraternal letter to George III in which he outlined the pleasures of peace. Was there no way of coming to an agreement after seven years of war? ‘Should this moment be lost, what limits can be set to a war that all my efforts could not bring to an end?’ The letter was such a breach of protocol that it could not be answered – George considered it to be ‘much below my attention’ – but the message itself was received with some interest. The perfidy and self-interest of Buonaparte, who believed all treaties and concordats to be so many pieces of paper, may have dictated its content; but it was perhaps also an intimation that the French did not fully believe that they could stand against any future ‘confederacy’ of Europe or the financial and naval power of the British. To the Commons Pitt quoted a speech by Cicero to the Roman senate in condemnation of Mark Antony. ‘Why therefore do I refuse peace? Because it is ignoble, because it is dangerous and because it cannot be.’ He might have added, however, Cicero’s caution that ‘the sinews of war are infinite money’.

  The task for Pitt was therefore to confront the emperor on as broad a basis as ever, and he set about constructing a new coalition of allies who were united in their fear of Napoleon rather than upon any overall continental policy. In April 1805, Austria and Russia joined forces; when in the following month Napoleon was crowned king of Italy, with Genoa and Savoy as the immediate spoils, they formed a new alliance with England. The third coalition comprised England, Austria, Russia, Sweden and, finally, Prussia; but like its predecessors it was not destined to endure. Within a year it had been broken apart by the emperor of the French.

  While creating the alliance Pitt decided to engage in sudden strikes that would deter Buonaparte from his threatened invasion of England and, in the autumn of the year, the English commander seized the bullion carried by a Spanish convoy and sank the ships. It was an open provocation to Spain to declare war, but Pitt already knew that the Spaniards had taken the side of France; he was only helping himself to a little of their gold.

  In the course of these preparations the two great protagonists of sea and land, Admiral Nelson and Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, soon to become Viscount Wellington and, later, duke, met accidentally in an ante-room at the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Wellington later recalled that ‘he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody.’ Nelson left the room for a moment, to ascertain the identity of his unwilling companion. When he returned ‘all that I thought a charlatan style had vanished and he talked . . . with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; he talked like an officer and a statesman’.

  Here we have a convincing portrait of the mercurial admiral, often vain and silly, but also informed and persuasive. He was ambitious but he was also determined. Wellington shared his determination and decisiveness but he was less flamboyant; he had been trained in the hard school of India, and was reserved to the point of reticence. Yet both of them knew how to outwit Napoleon.

  The central purpose of the third coalition was to drive Buonaparte behind the frontiers of France as they had existed in 1791; this meant that its members had to expel France from Hanover, Holland, northern Germany, Switzerland, Naples and northern Italy. This mighty undertaking was not helped by the different purposes and sensibilities of the participants. England was simply opposed to Buonaparte’s aspirations, while Austria deemed him and his ‘empire’ to be a shocking affront to its imperial presence. Tsar Alexander seems to have been motivated by simple jealousy of his rival, but of course private feelings can change in different circumstances.

  The war on land did not go well for those opposing the French. Napoleon had decided to destroy the Austrian army before its Russian allies had time to reach it; so he made a rapid advance with almost 200,000 troops from the Rhine to the Danube, where they surrounded the Austrian forces who surrendered at Ulm on 20 October 1805. The speed and efficiency of the grande armée were confirmed when Napoleon led them up the valley of the Danube before capturing Vienna. Its ‘great turn’, when it wheeled right from the Rhine to the Danube, was one of the outstanding military movements of the war.

  This French victory was, at least in English eyes, overshadowed by the news at sea. Nelson in the Victory had joined his fleet outside Cadiz at the end of September, where his excitement and enthusiasm reduced some of his officers to tears. He wished to achieve ‘not victory, but annihilation’. He planned to lure the French out of Cadiz towards Gibraltar, with the steep cliffs of Cape Trafalgar to the east. On 21 October, he relayed his final orders with the famous phrase ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ He gave one other order just as the firing began. ‘Engage more closely!’ The French were in a loose crescent line while the English came up in two columns, Nelson to the left in the Victory and Collingwood to the right in the Royal Sovereign. Thick clouds of smoke drifted across the scene of war, but the English ships sailed straight against the French and broke their line apart.

  One by one the French vessels surrendered, but the losses were not all one side. Nelson himself was struck by a stray bullet a
nd fell mortally wounded onto the deck. He is supposed to have said ‘They have done for me at last.’ He lingered for more than two hours, until three in the afternoon, and by five the battle was concluded with the blowing-up of a French ship of the line, the Achille. The superior skills of the British crews, and the superior acumen of the British commanders, had prevailed.

  Seventeen of the French and Spanish vessels, out of a total of thirty-three, were captured or destroyed. No British ship had been lost. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy of the British, and from this time forward there was no talk of a French invasion across the Channel. At the Lord Mayor’s banquet in the following month, Pitt was toasted as the ‘saviour of Europe’. He replied, modestly enough, that ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’

  The victory of Trafalgar was soon glorified in national memory and naval legend. Napoleon, deep in Europe, did not learn of the outcome for some days; on hearing the result he is said to have leaped up from the table exclaiming, ‘I cannot be everywhere!’ He was in any case about to launch a final and mortal attack upon the Russian and Austrian armies. On 13 November he entered Vienna, where he began to reorganize the affairs of the archduchy, but by the end of the month he was advancing against the combined forces of the enemy. He moved swiftly and at nine in the morning on 2 December confronted them between the towns of Brno and Austerlitz, where in a series of manoeuvres he succeeded in cutting the allied armies in two. ‘One sharp blow,’ he said, ‘and the war is over.’ He had feigned indecision to lure them forwards and, when they counter-attacked, he sent forward reinforcements concealed in fog. Several cavalry charges, in which 10,000 horse were involved, guaranteed French victory.