The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  With these thoughts the young conqueror addressed a flamboyant proclamation to his troops. "France," he told them, "is separated from us by the mountains; but should it be necessary you will traverse them with the speed of an eagle to maintain the Constitution, to defend Liberty and to protect the Government and Republic." This document he had circulated through France, where it made a great impression. For though the war-weary, faction-torn country longed for peace, it longed for a saviour even more, and the romantic hero of Lodi and Rivoli seemed the one

  man who could rescue it from a swarm of thieving, inglorious politicians. " The deputies ought to be put in a wood," was a popular saying of the time, " and the wood set on fire." The General was the obvious man to light it.

  As Bonaparte—heir of the Revolution—knew better than any man, nothing could be achieved without force. Realist that he was, he sent the rough Augereau from his camp to Paris to command the troops who were to take the place of the Jacobin mob and keep the Revolution in being. The coup d'etat of Fructidor on September 3 rd was a repetition of a familiar theme, with soldiers playing the part of the roughs of the " glorious Faubourg." Barras, defying the majority in the Council because he was secure of the armed majority without, screamed across the Chamber to Carnot, once the organiser of victory, " There is not a louse on your body but has the right to spit in your face!" The Triumvirate of "Jacobin" Directors called in the military to disperse the Councils and by a savage proscription sentenced several hundred of their chief opponents— deputies, newspaper proprietors, editors, priests—to perpetual banishment in the swamps of Guiana and Cayenne. Carnot and a few others contrived to escape: the rest perished as miserably of fever under the " dry guillotine " as their predecessors had done under its bloodier counterpart.

  This was the end of the peace negotiations. " This cursed revolution," wrote Canning, " has baffled our good intentions." The Jacobins had triumphed again, and there was no peace to be had with Jacobins. New French negotiators who arrived at Lille in place of the old at once requested that all former French, Spanish and Dutch possessions should be restored without demur as a preliminary to further conversations. The final terms, according to French Foreign Office archives, were to include the surrender of the Channel Islands, Canada, Newfoundland, Gibraltar and British India.1 On refusing Malmesbury was ordered to leave within twenty-four hours. He was pursued by dark hints as to the possibility of bribing the new Directors. For a sum of £1,200,000 to be privately divided between Barras and Rewbell, Britain would be allowed to keep Dutch Ceylon, and for another £800,000 the Cape. So desperate was the state of affairs—" Europe abandoned," as Grenville wrote, " without

  1 Lecky, IV, 162.

  defence of any kind to these monsters "—that Pitt even played with the idea of effecting something by these dubious means. But they came to nothing and appeared to be inspired only by French politicians trying to speculate in British stocks and shares.

  " If this country could but be brought to think so it would be ten thousand times safer to face the storm than to shrink from it." 1 So wrote the Foreign Secretary on October 8th. Two days later Windham echoed him: " What are called prudent counsels are the most replete with danger." 2 The French had overstepped themselves. By the Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria they gained Belgium, the Rhine boundary, Savoy, Corfu and the Ionian Islands, and unchallenged control of Holland and Italy. The "natural frontiers" of France had been achieved and the war on the Continent liquidated. And Britain after pouring out her blood and treasure for four and a half years had offered to return Martinique, St. Lucia, Tobago, the French part of Santo Domingo, the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, Pondicherry, Chandernagore and all the French trading factories in the East. In all her history, even in the days of the Grand Monarch, France had never been able to command such terms. And she had spurned them.

  That refusal opened the country's eyes. It was not only victory the Republic wanted: it was the domination of the world and the elimination of Britain as a nation. Peace, however much desired, was not to be had with such adversaries. Collingwood when he heard the news summed up the real issue. " The question is not merely who shall be conqueror with the acquisition of some island or colony ceded by a treaty . . . but whether we shall any longer be a people—whether Britain is still to be enrolled among the list of European nations—whether the name of Englishman is to continue an appellation of honour, conveying the idea of every quality which makes human nature respectable, or a term of reproach and infamy, the designation of beggars and of slaves." 3 As for the claim that the Republic was fighting for liberty, that pretence was exposed for the nauseating hypocrisy it was by the bloodstained clique in power. In the spirit of their own General Bonaparte's cynical " I have shot the municipality of Pavia," they

  1 H. M. C. Dropmore, III, 379.

  a J. W. Fortescue, Statesmen of the Great War (1911), 125.

  3 Collingwood, 63-4.

  had brutally seized all who dared to oppose them and huddled them off to the in tropical concentration camps. Here, Pitt told the House, " was a system of tyranny the most galling, the most horrible, the most undisguised in all its parts and attributes that has stained the page of history or disgraced the annals of the world." 1 Set against it, and stigmatised as an anachronistic despotism by sordid tyrants who had just annulled the elections in forty-nine Departments and sent two thousand apolitical opponents to the galleys, was a mild constitutional monarchy whose worst offence against civil liberty during a year in which the very foundations of its existence had been threatened was the sentencing of a Lincolnshire blacksmith to a few months' solitary confinement for damning the King.

  A fortnight after Malmesbury's hasty departure from Lille the Directory launched its attack. Throughout the summer Duncan had been holding grimly to his station off the Texel where Daendels' army was waiting to embark for Ireland. At one period in July the troops had actually boarded the transports, only to be driven ashore again by the prolonged spell of westerly winds which marked the critical summer of 1797. For six weeks, while Wolfe Tone blotted his diary with expletives, it blew steadily from the same quarter, as though Heaven were fighting for England. Meanwhile Brigadier John Moore, invalided from the West Indies, inspected the defences of Clacton beach, and young Walter Scott, Quartermaster of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, rose at five each summer morning to charge imaginary Frenchmen on Musselburgh sands before going to his legal labours in the Parliament House. And far away in Ireland Lake's dragoons went about their grim business of disarming the populace.

  In mid-August, the favourable season for invasion nearing its close, the Dutch abandoned the idea of a large-scale attack on Ireland for a raid on Scotland. A month later, on September 19th, Hoche, the one disinterested champion of Ireland's cause in France, died prematurely of consumption. Irish emancipation fell into the background at the very moment that Irish wrongs had made it the most deadly of all explosives with which to destroy the Republic's last enemy. The feeling was growing in Paris that, with Austria making her formal surrender at Campo Formio and the entire

  1 War Speeches, 204.

  resources of France and her allies available for a direct assault on England, an attempt on starving Ireland was no longer necessary. The victorious liberators of the Great Nation could not be expected to be bothered with a " levee-en-masse of potatoes."

  Early in October, 1797, the Dutch fleet at the Texel received orders to put to sea to disable the British North Sea squadron and so prepare the way for a raid on the English or Scottish coast. Equinoctial gales had driven Duncan back to Yarmouth to refit: the old man, who had long been anxious to retire with an Irish peerage, had recently complained that his flagship, the Venerable, was so unseaworthy that even his cabin was not dry when it rained. " When she has much motion she cracks as if she would go to pieces," he told Spencer.1 He was lying in Yarmouth Roads on the morning of the 9th when the sound of a lugger firing at the back of the sands gave the signal that the enemy were
at sea. Leaving many of his officers still ashore, he weighed anchor at once and was on his way back to the Dutch coast before noon. Early on the nth he sighted the enemy.

  The battle that followed showed the world that the resistance of Britain, which appeared to have been crumbling during the naval mutinies and the peace negotiations at Lille, was still a factor to be reckoned with. The memory of Camperdown was soon eclipsed by Nelson's more famous victories, but at the time it seemed—and was—a crowning deliverance. The two fleets were well matched— sixteen battleships against sixteen with a Dutch superiority in gun power—but the British were in an invincible mood. The men, who four months before had refused to follow their Admiral and hoisted the red flag, were on their mettle: resolved to re-establish their patriotism and worth in the eyes of their countrymen. And they knew that they were fighting literally for their country's existence; a defeat at that hour would have sealed her doom.

  Duncan, having the weather gauge, boldly endeavoured to put his fleet between the enemy and the shore to prevent their escape. Then flying the signal for close action, and not waiting to form line of battle, the stately old giant went in like a boxer set on victory. The spirit of the day was epitomised by the captain of the Belliqueux who, puzzled by the Admiral's signals, flung down the signal book with a " Damn it! up wi' the helium and gang into the

  1 7th Aug., 1797, Spencer Papers, II, 188.

  middle o't! " The Dutch fought with traditional stubbornness and skill: unlike the ill-disciplined French and Spaniards, firing low and doing great execution to the British hulls. The carnage in Duncan's flagship was so great that at one moment he and the pilot were the only men unwounded on the quarter-deck. But the British gunnery was transcendent. When after a three-hour duel Admiral de Winter struck his flag, he surrendered not so much a ship as a mortuary.

  Only seven Dutch vessels escaped. Ten others were taken, including seven ships of the line. They were too battered to be of much use to the victors. But their eclipse meant the end of the North Sea menace. Henceforward Britain could concentrate her main force against Brest and the Atlantic ports: the Dutch navy as a striking force was out of the war. For this, and still more for the needed fillip his victory gave to British spirits, his countrymen hailed Duncan as a saviour.1 Pitt, over his dinner at Walmer Castle, heard the news from a smuggler and broke into a boyish ecstasy: Dundas wrote joyously that an Irish peerage would no longer do for the brave old man now. Bonfires blazed in every city and village, and a public subscription in London for the families of fallen sailors reached £5000 in a day. Later a solemn thanksgiving for the victory was held in St. Paul's: in the centre of the royal procession through the City were three waggons guarded by seamen with cutlasses and adorned with captured French, Spanish and Dutch flags. Nor was it in Britain only that Camperdown was acclaimed. The Russian Ambassador wrote that all over the universe honest men rejoiced with the good people of England. For it was a portent that nations could still command their own destiny.

  It was some such thought that must have been passing through Pitt's mind when his old tutor, the Bishop of Lincoln, consulted him about the thanksgiving sermon. The Prime Minister agreed with the proposed text: " Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved," but went on to suggest its application. ‘Your sermon would be to prove that God who governs the world by his providence never interposes for the preservation of men or nations without their own exertions." After a pause, he added, " I really think with that text, it will be the best sermon ever preached."

  He preached it himself when he met the Commons on November

  1" One of the greatest objects is raising people's spirits."—Grenville to Spencer, 13th Oct., 1797.—Spencer Papers, II, 196.

  10th to recount the breakdown of the peace negotiations at Lille. He described his inextinguishable wish for peace even with a Revolutionary government if it could be had on terms which did not rob the nation of its security or honour. But since it could not, there was no extremity which was not preferable to a base surrender. Upon such an alternative, he declared, no Englishman would hesitate. Once more he asked for unity, with which the country could accomplish anything, and for a cessation of the defeatist jeremiads of the Opposition Press which seemed to know " no other use of English liberty but servilely to retail and transcribe French opinions." He appealed instead for the virtues which a reverse of fortune had never failed to evoke from England: " the virtues of adversity endured and adversity resisted, of adversity encountered and adversity surmounted."

  The Prime Minister's speech ended with a great peroration. " There is one great resource which I trust will never abandon us. It has shone forth in the English character, by which we have preserved our existence and fame as a nation, which I trust we shall be determined never to abandon under any extremity, but shall join hand and heart in the solemn pledge that is proposed to us, and declare to His Majesty that we know great exertions are wanting, that we are prepared to make them and at all events determined to stand or fall by the laws, liberties and religion of our country."1 When Pitt sat down Sir John Sinclair withdrew his hostile amendment and the whole House rose spontaneously to sing " Britons, Strike Home! "

  Rider and steed were worthy of one another. All through the autumn, under the surface of depression and the cross-currents of defeatism, the tide of popular resolve had been rising. The victory of Camperdown and the Prime Minister's great appeal heralded an epoch of national revival and glory. The long years of apathy and retreat were over: rising from the last ditch of disaster and peril, the country prepared to wrestle with destiny. That November, under the shadow of defeat and invasion, a curious electric current ran through the land. Wilberforce's Practical View, with its scorching contempt for moral complacency and unprofitable respectability, enjoyed for a religious book an almost sensational sale: forced by the all-pervading threat to existence to examine their

  1 War Speeches, 228-9.

  consciences and the roots of belief, men found a new quickening of faith. Early in December a notice was given in at the fashionable church of St. George's, Hanover Square, that an officer wished to return thanks to Almighty God for his recovery from a severe wound and the mercies bestowed on him. It was the one-armed, one-eyed Nelson.

  Duncan's guns and Pitt's words marked the beginning of the English counter-attack against the French Revolution. It began, characteristically, when " that ungovernable, intolerable, destroying spirit " had broken down all other resistance and was threatening to engulf the island itself.1 Though men of the older generation, oppressed by continuous difficulties and defeats, could not yet feel the turn of the tide, Pitt's young disciple, Canning, recovering from the gloom of the autumn, had already published the first number of his Anti-Jacobin. The new paper was nothing if not aggressive: during its brief existence " Pitt's Kindergarten " in one brilliant squib after another took the offensive against the cherished idols of revolutionary ideology, contrasting them in scathing verse and satire with the sorry performances—murders, perjuries and outrages—of the French " friends of humanity " and the vanity and ignorance of their English sympathisers:

  " Come, little drummer boy, lay down your knapsack here, I am the soldier's friend, here are some books for you, Nice clever books by Tom Paine the philanthropist."

  Against these it contrasted the virtues of old England—the " little body with a mighty heart"—which the Jacobins despised but which would yet prove too strong for them.

  It was to harness the resurgent forces of the nation to the war effort that Pitt laid his plans at the close of 1797 for the biggest

  1 Across the Atlantic the young Anglo-Saxon Republic had just realised that the political convulsion in France was not a new birth of freedom akin to its own but a despotism which only the resistance of stubborn, stupid England could prevent from enslaving the earth. Farington has a note in his diary for 31st January, 1798 : " Eyes of America now opened—did favour France—but now see nothing permanent, no integrity—though do not approve all
in England, yet see it a country which can be depended on." A few months later Britain modified a Convoy Bill before Parliament to please the U.S.A.—See Rose, I, 209.

  Budget in its history. He had to face a deficit of nineteen millions. Reckoning the taxable income of the country at just over a hundred millions, he proposed to raise a quarter of it for national purposes during the coming year, besides demanding a further loan of fifteen millions to support the war. To do so he trebled and in cases quadrupled the assessed taxes, an impost which, levied on larger inhabited houses and windows, on male servants, horses, carriages and similar luxuries, fell almost entirely on the propertied classes. This augmentation of what was virtually a direct tax on wealth threatened to undermine the whole basis of the British fiscal system.

  At the first shock this revolutionary proposal was almost too much for the patriotism of the possessing classes: it outraged both their native conservatism and their sense of liberty. The Opposition argued that its result would be universal starvation, for, though the poor would escape its direct effect, it would dry up the wealth which employed them. Fox, making one of his rare appearances in the House, declared it would annihilate trade and property. When Pitt drove to the City to attend the thanksgiving service for Camperdown his coach was hooted by a hired mob. " The chief and almost only topic of conversation," wrote one society lady, " is the new taxes; how people are to live if the Bill is passed I know not." Even Fanny Burney, established with her refugee husband in Camilla Cottage on the proceeds of her latest novel, felt that the increased assessment, though just and necessary, would spell ruin to herself and her father. " We have this very morning," she wrote at Christmas, " decided upon parting with four of our new windows."