The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  The pursuit of such a peace became the Government's main concern in the new year. After a tussle with the King,2 who foretold that any overtures would be met with a humiliating rejection, feelers were put out through the British agent in Switzerland. The King's prediction was exactly fulfilled. Britain was rudely reminded that the new Constitution had incorporated all France's conquests, and that return of the Netherlands to Austria or Savoy to Piedmont

  1 Windham Papers, I, 302 : II, 2-3 ; H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 149.

  2 The old gentleman had the last word, assuring Grenville : "I always choose to act on simple principles; Italian politics are too complicated paths for my understanding."—King to Grenville, 9th Feb., 1796. H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 174.

  was out of the question. To crown the indignity the Directory, in defiance of diplomatic manners, published the correspondence.

  What Pitt failed to see was that the new rulers of France no more wanted peace than the old. They were not high-minded patriots absorbed in the economic well-being of their country: they were only concerned with what happened to themselves. They were fraudulent contractors, debauchees, even murderers, who had stolen power and were now enjoying its fruits. They could not afford to let it go lest those they had wronged should avenge themselves. Peace was their nightmare; as Sieyes put it: " We shall all be destroyed if peace is made." The slightest turn of the roulette of terror which had brought them to the top would sink them.

  Even had they been altruistic patriots, longing to give their countrymen peace, it is hard to see how they could have done so. The two inescapable facts in French life in 1796 were bankruptcy and the army. The latter's pay was years in arrears: it could only exist by living on a civilian population. No Frenchman wanted it to live on that of France. To disband it would mean chaos. Its only future was conquest, which also seemed the one way to lighten the Republic's burden of debt. The only alternative to a vista of drab poverty was victory.

  In all ages statesmen have found it hard to understand the psychology of revolutionary governments bound to the wheel of armaments and debts. For it is a cycle that cannot be reversed. It can only be broken or its pace accelerated. Pitt, in his touching belief in the inevitable triumph of financial integrity, could never realise the explosive force of the evil thing against which he was contending. That guest of Wilberforce was wiser who, hearing how the Prime Minister said he would calculate to a day the coming collapse of France, asked if any one could tell him who was Chancellor of the Exchequer to Attila?

  For to Pitt's hopes of quietly strangling the Republic with the strings of a money-bag, the Directors' answer was conquest. Belgium and Holland, with their treasuries, had already been swallowed exhausted. There remained Italy—with its fertile plains, very rich cities, its corrupt governments and effete peoples. Nelson said, a gold mine that, once entered, was without the means of resistance. So far French attempts to invade it had been stopped by the immense barriers of the Alps and Apennines. But the victory of Loano had given the Republic possession of the Ligurian Passes. And in Paris the young General who had saved the Directorate from the mob of Thermidor was ceaselessly pointing out how that possession might be used.

  Carnot resolved to give him his chance. " Behind the door lies abundance," he wrote to Bonaparte, " it is for you to break it down." The all-powerful Barras was agreeable. His cynical price for the appointment—a job, as it seemed to him—was that the Commander-in-Chief elect of the Army of Italy should marry his cast-off mistress, the widow-by-the-guillotine, Josephine de Beauharnais. As Bonaparte—distinguished in that dissolute society by his absurd austerity—had fallen head over heels in love with the fascinating Creole, there was no difficulty. On March nth, at the age of 26, the Corsican, with his commission in his pocket and his great forehead bulging with plans, set out for the south through a listless and down-at-heels France.

  It was Bonaparte's belief that to daring everything was possible.

  " He who stays in his entrenchments is beaten," was one of his sayings. He had immense will power, inexhaustible energy, lightning perception, unbounded ambition. There was genius in every inch of his Tom Thumb frame. He arrived at Nice on March'26th, 1796, to find the army starving, despondent and in rags. Within a few days he had inspired it with something of his own dazzling faith and vitality. Then on April 10th, while far away in England farmers grumbled at the " cold, barren, growless weather," the young eagle struck. For just under a fortnight the struggle in the mountain passes continued, Bonaparte making untold demands on his men and taking enormous risks. Had the British been able, as Nelson urged, to land even a small force on the Corniche Road in his rear, his army might have been annihilated, for his tenuous communications were the Achilles heel of his plan. But though he broke all the rules, in six battles against divided forces of twice his strength he drove a wedge between the Austrians and Piedmontese. On the 23rd, with the Alps turned and Turin threatened, the terrified House of Savoy sought an armistice. The victor gave them a few hours to accept terms which reduced Piedmont to a cipher for a generation. Then, with his flank secured, he poured into Lombardy.

  The war had suddenly come to life. While Nelson's letter, describing the stalemate between the struggling armies in the snow-clad hills above Ceva, was still on its way to his friend Collingwood, Bonaparte's men were marching at unprecedented speed eastwards along the south bank of the Po, seeking for a crossing to cut old Beaulieu off from his bases. On May 6th, having covered 44 miles in 36 hours, they found it in the small neutral town of Piacenza. Without formality they held its rulers to ransom and crossed the river. Three days later they flung back a bewildered Austrian army from the bridge of Lodi and drove on to Milan. On the 15 th the conqueror entered the Lombard capital, the inhabitants, feminine in their worship of success, strewing flowers in his path. " People of Italy! " they were told, " the Army of France has broken your chains: the People of France is the friend of all other Peoples! Come to greet it! "

  Their joy vanished when the young hero presented them with his bill. An immediate contribution of twenty million francs, vast stores of provisions and thousands of horses were demanded as the price of French protection. A hundred of the finest carriage horses in the province were dispatched across the Alps to grace the coaches of the Directors. The Grand Duke of Parma, who had been slower to acclaim the liberator than the fickle Milanese, had to yield twenty of the best pictures in his gallery and a crushing tribute. And when the people of Pavia contested Bonaparte's requisitions, they were quickly enlightened as to the conditions of Italian emancipation. The magistrates and leading inhabitants were shot, the city sacked and all who resisted massacred. A few weeks later a village near Bologna was burnt to the ground and the entire population murdered to strike fear through Italy. For Bonaparte, once a follower of Robespierre, did not believe in terror for its own sake but only as an instrument of policy.

  Before the end. of May he had resumed his eastward march across the richest plain in Europe. On the 30th he forced the Mincio and laid siege to Mantua. Around this great marsh fortress the failing fortunes of the old Europe turned during the next few months, while the Austrians from the Alpine passes to the north made attempt after attempt to relieve it and regain control of their lost province. Meanwhile the rest of the peninsula lay at the conqueror's mercy. As the fame of the French triumphs flashed down its mountain spine to its corrupt courts and cities, prince after prince sought to make his peace with the terrible Republic.

  Within a few weeks the Mediterranean situation had been transformed. At the end of June, having sworn eternal peace to its Grand Duke, Bonaparte sent his most brilliant cavalry officer, Joachim Murat—the 29-year-old son of a Gascon innkeeper—on a flying raid into Tuscany to seize Leghorn and the goods of its British merchants. For one English girl the sudden scamper of the British colony to Nelson's waiting frigates brought romance; the clean, beautiful ship, the attentive officers who gave up their cabins, the calm, efficient assurance and friendliness of it all set Bet
sey Wynne's heart in a whirl of love for its fiery dark-eyed captain.1

  The unconscious Captain Fremantle and his Commodore— " old " Nelson, as 17-year-old Betsey called him—had preoccupations which they courteously did not betray to their guests. For their position had suddenly become intensely grave. The whole of Italy had turned stony and hostile, and with " the flesh kettles " of Leghorn cut off and Gibraltar nearly a thousand miles away, only barren Corsica remained open to their ships. It did not look as though even Corsica would do so long. For not only was the island inhabited, in Admiral Jervis's words, by " infernal miscreants " seething with unrest, but the garrison was quite inadequate to protect its coastline from French landings. Appeals for reinforcements had met with little response from England: the Secretary of State, raising his ducal spectacles with infinite slowness from his nose to his forehead, had written to remind the Viceroy that his countrymen were not foreign politicians and had no interest in their expensive Mediterranean possession.2 And it was only too plain from Bonaparte's preparations at Leghorn and Genoa that he was contemplating invasion.

  Fortunately the new Commander-in-Chief was a very different man from Hotham. Sir John Jervis, who had taken over the Mediterranean fleet at the end of the previous year, was worthy in his

  1 She subsequently married him, accompanied him on his voyages, nursed him and Nelson after their wounds at Tenerife, and, first seeing her native land in their company, became the ancestress of a line of English Admirals. —Wynne Diaries.

  2 See also Collingwood, 27.

  own element to cross swords with Bonaparte. " Old Jack," as the seamen called him, was a naval strategist of the first order. As a young officer he had piloted Wolfe on his last journey to the Heights of Abraham; in the present war he had won fame as the sailor who had helped Grey to reduce Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia in thirteen weeks. His arrival in the Mediterranean had been delayed by a scandalous vote of censure moved on him by West Indian financiers in the House of Commons for having levied a contribution on merchandise in Martinique: but for this, he always believed he could have prevented the Austrian defeat at Loano and so have saved Italy from Bonaparte.1 He was now 61. The child of poor parents, he had evolved through a stern, impecunious youth into a man of iron: a devotee of duty in its grimmest and most unyielding aspects. He had long steeled himself out of both moral and physical fear: none of the ordinary failings of men affected his cool judgment. With his long nose, heavy brows and thoughtful eyes, he was the picture of a disciplinarian. Yet he had unexpected streaks of warmth in his rock-like composition: a saturnine humour,2 great generosity to those who merited it and, when he could escape the effects of ill-health and a harsh dictatorial temper, a taste for unbending in congenial company. Betsey Wynne and her sisters when he entertained them on board the Victory found him a kind, gallant, friendly old man, without anything stiff or formal, who made them sing duets after dinner and thanked them for their trouble by a chaste embrace. " The old gentleman is very partial to kisses: he abuses all who do not salute the ladies and always obliges all the gentlemen that are present to kiss us." To Nelson he always showed the softer side of his character: the ardent,, sensitive, affectionate captain was happier under his command than he had been since Hood left the Mediterranean. For he felt that Jervis appreciated him.

  The issue which the Admiral had to face called for all his powers of judgment and fortitude. They were equal to the occasion. " Strong nerves and manly sense," he told the Admiralty, were superior in treating with barbarians to the finesse of the Corps Diplomatique. He applied them to the affairs of soudiern Europe.

  1 Spencer Papers, II, 400-1.

  2 It was a pleasantry of his when the weather was rough to summon the chaplains of the fleet for a conclave.

  In consultation with the Viceroy he ordered the blockade of Leghorn and the occupation of Elba—a small Tuscan island between the mainland and Corsica. On July 9th Nelson accordingly appeared off the capital, Porto Ferrajo, and landed troops without opposition from the authorities. Indeed, they seemed to welcome this unorthodox but masculine diplomacy.

  But the security of Corsica was the least of Jervis's worries. Expelled from the Italian mainland, cut off from all sources of fresh food and dangerously short of frigates and corvettes, the British fleet was now faced with a new danger. Ever since his craven surrender Godoy—since raised to almost royal dignity by the doting Queen under the fantastic tide of Prince of the Peace— had been playing with the idea of reviving the hundred-year-old family alliance between France and Spain. Many motives prompted him: personal vanity, hatred of the stiff-necked island ally he had betrayed, a natural sympathy towards those who like himself had overcome the disadvantages of mean birth. Though the old blood-link between the Bourbon Courts of Versailles and Madrid had been snapped, that between the peoples remained. Gallic victories on land might be matched by Iberian triumphs at sea, and the two great Latin nations of the west might together re-establish their ancient ascendancy over Saxons and Teutons. Spain had many old scores to settle with England: Gibraltar, the West Indies and two centuries of interloping by heretic freebooters. A great naval and imperial power with seventy-six ships of the line in her harbours and half the Americas as her private property, she had the strength to enforce her just pretensions.

  So Godoy argued, seeing himself as a second Alberoni, and wily Jacobin agents encouraged him in his dreams. Needing the Spanish fleet and harbours for use against Britain, they represented the presence of British troops in Corsica and Santo Domingo as an affront to Spain's dignity. Against such arguments, the British Ambassador, Lord Bute, pleaded in vain. The ramshackle Power, which a year before had withdrawn from alliance into neutrality now sank from alliance to non-belligerency. Early in 1796 the French squadron which had captured the British Levant convoy put into Cadiz with its prizes and began openly to refit in the royal dockyards. Nor could all Bute's representations remove them.

  French privateers used Spanish harbours to attack British

  shipping, and Spanish naval arsenals hummed with unwonted activity. " Spain," Nelson wrote in May, " is certainly going to war with somebody." There could be little doubt with whom.

  The Government, however, feeling that it had its hands full, did its best to ignore these provocations. It instructed an appeasing ambassador to do all in his power to preserve peace. Nor was Godoy in a hurry to bring matters to a head. He needed time to man his fleet and to see how the campaign in Italy went before finally committing himself. Even his ignorance and presumption could not blind him to the fact that past wars with England had proved expensive for his country.

  For these, as for reasons of even greater purport, the eyes of Spain and Britain became focused on the struggle in the Lombardy plain. Here Bonaparte was trying to reduce Mantua with a siege train of only half the gun-power of the fortress, while preventing the Austrian veteran, Wurmser, from relieving it through the Alpine passes. The struggle seemed uneven, for the Directors, now jealous of his fame, were secretly starving their youthful general of men and guns. With 40,000 men Bonaparte had simultaneously to contain 11,000 Austrians in Mantua and beat off 60,000 more from the north. Nelson, writing from his station off Leghorn, felt full confidence again: the French army had suffered terrible losses, the outraged Italian states were combining against the aggressor, Wurmser would soon be in Mantua, Naples would stand firm in her alliance.1

  At the end of July, 1796, Wurmser began to emerge from the mountain defiles, moving southwards along either shore of Lake Garda and driving Massena's covering troops before him. Hardly had he done so when the whirlwind struck him. With almost incredible speed Bonaparte abandoned the siege of Mantua and every other inessential and hurled his entire force on the Austrian columns before they had time to assemble south of the lake. In the first five days of August, in operations around Castiglione he defeated both halves of Wurmser's army in turn and flung him back northeastwards into the passes. "All our expected hopes," wrote Nelson to Jervis, " ar
e blasted. . . . Austria, I suppose, must make peace, and we shall, as usual, be left to fight it out." Britain would have to

  1 Nicolas, II, 212, 219.

  give up Corsica and withdraw from the Mediterranean. As for the Dons, they would pay for it, if they were fools enough to involve themselves in war.1

  On August 4th, the French raiders, refitted after their long stay at Cadiz, were escorted into the Atlantic by the Spanish fleet, Admiral Man's small observation squadron discreedy withdrawing. The news of Castiglione removed Godoy's last doubts. On August 19th he signed at San Udefonso a full offensive alliance with the Directory. By a secret clause Spain was later to cede Louisiana to France, while France was to assist Spain to conquer Gibraltar and Portugal. War was to be declared on Britain within a month, the King of Spain was to become Grand Admiral of the Republic, and the two Latin Powers, sinking ideological differences, were to advance together inexorably to the final overthrow of " the province of England." In view of French victories on land, Spanish geography and the joint naval strength of France, Spain and Holland —together nearly double that of Britain—it looked a safe gamble.