Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  On 28 July, three weeks after the battle of Wagram, the British sent an expedition to destroy the French naval base at Antwerp. This was the port where Napoleon was assembling a new fleet. It was a welcome opportunity for the British navy to crush an incipient maritime threat. A fleet was assembled off the coast of the South Downs and sailed to Walcheren, an island in the mouth of the Scheldt estuary within reach of the port of Antwerp. Yet here they met an enemy as deadly as it was unexpected. The island was full of malaria, and the English very quickly succumbed; 4,000 died, and 12,000 were unable to fight. By the end of the year ‘Walcheren fever’ had incapacitated half the British troops, and on 23 December the remnant sailed home. The campaign had become a disaster, to a universal chorus of indignation at home. It had resulted in a wanton loss of men and a vast waste of money.

  The failure further unsettled an already weak administration. The betrayal at Sintra in the previous summer, when the French were allowed to leave Portugal with their arms intact, had begun the process of breaking an administration where quarrels and dissensions in the cabinet were already wounding its effectiveness. By the spring of 1809 Portland’s health had deteriorated so badly that the chance for a successor looked promising. George Canning, the foreign secretary, aspired to the office but he saw a rival in Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for war and the colonies. Canning pressed for his dismissal, citing his supposed incompetence in the management of the war, and reached a secret pact with Portland that Castlereagh would be removed from his post as soon as practicable. Castlereagh, however, became aware of these negotiations, and rightly sensed betrayal. In the autumn of the year he challenged Canning to a duel on Putney Heath. Castlereagh was a good shot, but Canning had never used a pistol before in his life; when Canning was wounded in the thigh, both men felt obliged to resign from the high posts which their juvenile or old-fashioned behaviour had damaged. Lord Portland, with a broken cabinet, left office soon after.

  The surviving ministers looked at one another with a wild surmise, and soon proceeded with what Canning called ‘constant meetings and co-jobberations’. Canning himself still held ambitions for the highest office, even though his recent conduct had effectively disqualified him; he wrote that he was ‘still not wholly out, yet not altogether in office’. The other members of the cabinet in any case considered it bad form on his part to enter into a secret pact with Portland against a colleague.

  The king chose as the safest option the chancellor of the exchequer, Spencer Perceval; Perceval was a devout evangelical who had gathered an informal network of friends and families advocating moral and social reform. A man of the old stamp, Perceval was solid, reliable and principled. Henry Grattan, the Irish campaigner and parliamentarian, surmised that ‘he is not a ship of the line, but he carries many guns, is tight built, and is out in all weathers’. He was small, spare and energetic. He took office just three weeks before the death of Portland himself.

  It was not at first considered to be a viable administration. We may continue with the naval metaphors that were so popular in this era. When the Honourable Frederick Robinson turned down the relative minor post of an under-secretary he wrote that ‘by embarking in a crazy vessel, I may chance to go to the bottom with the rest’. Yet it defied the odds, and sailed on.

  There were, however, storm conditions ahead. The British people seem to have become weary of a war against Napoleon that had lasted, with infrequent intervals, for seven years. The discontent was exacerbated by the economic conditions of 1808 and 1809 when wartime privations led to a deterioration in export trade and, eventually, a general ‘slump’. By 1811 many county banks were forced to close, tightening even more the lines of credit that sustained the country. The cotton spinners of Manchester, and the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire, were among the groups who demanded a return to peace and prosperity.

  The measure of discontent may be seen in the sporadic but intense rioting that unbalanced the capital. When in 1810 Sir Francis Burdett wrote to his constituents of Westminster – in a letter published by William Cobbett’s radical Political Register – against an alleged breach of privilege by the House of Commons, his letter was deemed to be libellous and worthy of imprisonment in the Tower. When the warrant for his arrest had been issued the crowds of London arose and virtually took control of the city. Burdett refused to leave his house in Piccadilly and the centre of London became a cockpit for the mobs and the militia. Burdett was finally confined, but Wellington wrote that ‘the government and country are going to the Devil as far as possible; and I expect every day to hear that the mob of London are masters of the country’. Burdett himself was celebrated as a national hero standing up against the ‘rats of the nation’.

  Such was the hot temper of the capital that another riot had already taken place over the relatively innocuous question of the price of tickets to the Covent Garden Theatre. When in the autumn of 1809 the theatre reopened after a fire, the managers had increased the price of tickets and constructed more private boxes. This was considered as an affront to the ordinary citizens, and a dedicated group of protests disrupted performances nightly and managed to close the theatre for ten days at the end of September.

  This was the inflamed atmosphere when in the autumn of 1810 the king succumbed once more to the babbling condition, akin to madness, induced by porphyria. On this occasion there would be no recovery. He held imaginary conversations with dead friends, and reviewed imaginary troops.

  At the beginning of the following year the prince of Wales was declared to be prince regent whose powers would be curtailed for one year in case his father suddenly grew well again. But George III was for long periods strapped in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened room. The regent was king in all but name. It had been confidently believed that he would turn to his old Whig friends to form an administration but, as he had grown older, he had grown more conservative. He liked Spencer Perceval, perhaps because the strict sabbatarian was of so opposite a character; we admire those whom we cannot hope to emulate. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation, as was the regent, and he was bold and resolute in matters of war. When confirmed in office, he would have to be equally resolute in matters domestic.

  The great comet that streaked across the night sky in 1811 might have been considered to be a harbinger of more woe; the bad winters of 1811 and 1812 contributed to Napoleon’s blockade and resulted in acute shortages of food. Over 45,000 inhabitants of Spitalfields petitioned to be allowed into the workhouses for want of bread. This was the prelude to protest on a much larger scale against what was known as ‘The Thing’ or ‘Old Corruption’, a movement encouraged by radical periodicals such as Pig’s Meat, Black Dwarf and Axe to the Root. The cotton weavers of Bolton declared in February 1811: ‘Oh misery and wretchedness when will ye cease to torment the industrious artisan?’ A petition for help came from 40,000 Mancunians.

  The most serious and sustained threat came from those who became known as ‘Luddites’. In the spring of 1811 the framework knitters of Nottinghamshire were in dispute with their employers over low wages and the use of unskilled workers. The breaking of frames then became part of their industrial tactics, and their example was followed in parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Over a period of eleven months 1,000 frames were destroyed as a result of approximately a hundred incidents. An army captain, Francis Raynes, explained that ‘the Luddites attained a military style of operation, and held their meetings upon commons and moors for the purpose of drilling etcetera’.

  When the disturbances spread to Yorkshire with arson and attempted assassination as part of their operation, the militia was called out and the assizes began their work. Seventeen of the operatives were hanged. The employers also fought back, opening fire on any protesters who threatened their factories. Two hundred protesters marched through Bolton with ‘a man of straw’ at their head – the name of Jack Straw, the rebel leader of the late fourteenth century, may not have been forgotten – representing as the Leeds Mercur
y said ‘the renowned General Ludd’. What had started as industrial action, therefore, had burgeoned into social and political protest. In 1813, 30,000 people in Lancashire and Yorkshire signed a petition for parliamentary reform. Industrial and political unrest could not in this period be cleanly divided.

  There never was a ‘Ned Ludd’ or ‘Captain Ludd’ or ‘General Ludd’. The protesters did not need any titular hero. They were led by solid grievances over the price of provisions, over the conditions of employment, over the breaking-up of traditional practices and over the unpopularity of war. The movement could only be countered with state force. A mass trial was held at York in which sixty defendants were sentenced to hanging or to penal transportation, and when a parliamentary bill was passed to render frame-breaking a capital crime, Lord Byron, in his maiden speech, was moved to declare that ‘when a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences’.

  At the height of the disturbances, in May 1812, Spencer Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by a deranged merchant called Bellingham. His death was seen by the Luddites and strikers as a great victory of liberty against an oppressive administration. A local newspaper reported that in the Potteries ‘a man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat around his head, and shouting with frantic joy: “Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’

  Whatever the jubilation outside Westminster, anxiety and consternation reigned within. Once more the question of suitable leadership arose. It was thought that Wellington’s brother, Henry Wellesley, might be the candidate for first minister; but several ministers refused to serve under him. Eventually the chalice, golden or poisoned according to taste, was passed to Lord Liverpool. He was a practical leader, cautiously moving forward when opportunity allowed, and his administration was to last until his death fifteen years later. The final victory over Napoleon, and the success of the European allies, sealed his ascendancy.

  The French emperor was now actively and seriously considering the invasion of Russia. The tsar, Alexander I, had withdrawn from Napoleon’s blockade of Britain; Buonaparte’s purpose seems to have been to engage the Russian army in one climactic battle and force the Russians to accede to his demands. He had also hoped for a short campaign, perhaps just within the borders of the invaded country. He probably never imagined a deep penetration of the icy and wintry realm, but the grand duchy of Muscovy led him ineluctably forward. It was his date with doom.

  With an army of approximately 600,000 men he crossed the River Neman in the early summer of 1812; it was reported to be the largest army ever assembled but, in the words of the emperor himself, ‘a man like me troubles himself little about the lives of a million men’. All seemed to be going well as the huge force made its way through western Russia, but its supply lines were growing steadily weaker. Buonaparte’s troops were thwarted on their advance to St Petersburg and all their power was now directed upon Moscow. At the battle of Borodino, on 7 September, the two sides fought themselves into deadlock; the French took the battlefield, but the Russian army had not been defeated. The Russians could always muster fresh recruits, but the French were on their own. A week later Napoleon entered Moscow, to find scorched earth and forced evacuation. There was nowhere to go, a hazard enhanced by the possibility of epidemic sickness. The winter was closing in, with the threat of blizzards and swollen rivers impossible to cross. Frost, and ice, and falling snow, became the enemy.

  Napoleon ordered his army to retreat to Smolensk on 17 October before crossing the River Berezina towards the end of November. One observer reported that ‘it looked like a caravan, a wandering nation’. The food had all gone. The cold was intense, disease rampant, the horses slipped and died on the ice; the Russian peasantry took their own vengeance on the departing enemy, burning or burying them alive, or beating out their brains with hoes and shovels. Typhus and dysentery helped to complete their work. An army that had numbered many hundreds of thousands was now reduced to less than 30,000. At Smorgoni, on 5 December, the emperor left his army with the plea that he had to be in Paris to fight his other enemies there. He left in disguise with only a small escort. It had been a total, humiliating disaster. When he returned to Paris, he ordered a round of balls and masquerades but everybody knew that his adventure was coming to an end.

  Jubilation among the British at the humiliating conclusion of the emperor’s Russian expedition was heightened by the fact that Viscount Wellington had successfully entered Madrid in the summer of 1812 and had ousted the emperor’s brother from the imperial throne. At the subsequent battle of Vittoria, in the summer of the following year, he chased the French out of Spain altogether. It was a signal moment in European history, when the balance of power finally shifted against the French. A Te Deum was sung in the cathedral of St Petersburg, and Beethoven composed Wellington’s Victory in honour of the event.

  A temporary truce in the summer of 1813 lasted only from June to August, and it seemed inevitable that there would be one last battle between France and its multiple enemies, including Prussia, Russia, England, Sweden and Austria. That is why it became known as ‘the battle of the nations’ or, perhaps more accurately, the battle of Leipzig. Over the course of four days Napoleon was roundly defeated, and emerged from the mayhem with only 80,000 troops. He had lost the military war. Lord Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that ‘the deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand’. It seemed that ‘the ogre’ had finally been smashed and the defeat inflicted infinite damage upon Napoleon’s military reputation; he was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The news of Leipzig had thoroughly alarmed the French and the prefect of police in Paris, Étienne-Denis Pasquier, wrote that ‘there was no longer any hope in anything: every illusion had been destroyed’.

  In the early days of 1814 Napoleon was on the defensive but once again his audacity, cunning and strategic skills renewed his confidence. In February he launched what became known as the ‘six day campaign’ in which he brilliantly out-manoeuvred the opposing forces and with an army of only 30,000 men achieved a number of small victories. They were not enough, in the face of the overwhelming numbers of his enemies. In a treaty signed at the beginning of March the allies strengthened their purpose by agreeing to a formal alliance. Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain were now recognized to be the four ‘great powers’ of Europe, a political and geographical fact that changed the face of the continent.

  Napoleon, in the face of rebellion at home and defeat abroad, saw the end of days coming. At the close of March the armies of Russia and Prussia reached the outskirts of Paris, and on 31 March the French surrendered. No foreign army had entered the capital for 400 years. Napoleon, struggling to reach the beleaguered city, was two days too late. He had no wish to sign a treaty of surrender, but his marshals forced the issue. ‘The army will obey me’, he told them. To which came the answer that ‘the army will obey its chiefs’. The game was up.

  On 6 April 1814 the emperor signed the document of abdication in which he stated that ‘the emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy’. Three weeks later he went on board HMS Undaunted and sailed to Elba under escort. A few days later Louis XVIII entered Paris, to no very warm reception. Yet peace was infectious and the capital had become, in the words of Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, ‘a great, vast, beautiful madhouse’. Every sovereign and politician in Europe seemed to be participating in an endless round of balls, assemblies and receptions. It was here, at the end of May, that a further treaty reduced the territory of France to its borders of November 1792, before the newly revolutionized citizen army had poured over Europe.

  All was then detailed, finely divided and eventually drawn up, at a congress held in Vienna in September 1814. The globe was carved up by the parti
cipants in a series of negotiations that continued from that early autumn to June 1815; it was one of the most significant conferences in modern history, mapping out the nation-states that were to survive for a century while all the time recognizing the authority of the ‘four great powers’. Mistrust, fear, intrigue and suspicion were of course the dominant motifs, as each ‘power’ tried to ensure that it was not being out-manoeuvred by the others. Castlereagh sought what he called a ‘just equilibrium’ between the various parties which, by subtly negotiating the demands of the participants, he eventually achieved. Austria and Prussia agreed to a loose confederation of German states, while the territorial ambitions of Tsar Alexander were reined back. The nations pledged to maintain a general peace and make no attempt, as Buonaparte had done, to dominate the continent. France remained a strong nation, but it had lost its commanding position for ever.

  But then all seemed in peril. A telegraph reached Louis XVIII on 4 March 1815; he opened the envelope, read the message and sat with his head in his hands. ‘Do you know what this telegraph contains?’ he asked a minister.

  ‘No, sir, I do not.’

  ‘Well, I will tell you. It is revolution once more. Buonaparte has landed on the coast of Provence.’

  Napoleon had escaped from the island of Elba to which he had been consigned by the victors. The ogre was back, and at once assumed an air of natural command. He told his small retinue: ‘I will arrive in Paris without firing a shot.’ And so it proved. On his slow trek to the capital by way of the Alpes Basses, any sign of opposition disappeared with cries of ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Louis XVIII fled to the Belgian border and, on 20 March, Napoleon entered Paris to wild acclamation. The great powers at once denounced him as an outlaw and prepared for a necessary and inevitable war to extirpate him. Napoleon was not for a moment daunted.