On September 18 th the Admiralty received official news of Nelson's departure from Syracuse on July 26th to search the Levant for the second time. Three days later certain London newspapers drew attention to a vague reference in the supplement of the Paris Redacteur of the 14th to an attack on Admiral Brueys' squadron by a superior British force off Beguieres in which the French flagship and several other vessels of both navies had been burnt or driven ashore. The public regarded it with scepticism, especially as no such place as Beguieres could be found on any atlas. None the less it seemed hard to explain why such unfavourable news, if not true, should have appeared in the official journal of the French Directory. During the following week no confirmation came from any source, though an ingenious person pointed out that Beguieres might be a French translation of the Arab Al-Bekir or Aboukir, midway between Alexandria and Rosetta.
The expectation of the people of England had been raised to the highest pitch. It had been repeatedly disappointed. It was now to be exceeded beyond all rational hope. At two o'clock on Monday, October ist, exactly two months after the battle, the postscript of Lloyd's Evening Post announced that the Hamburg mail had arrived with news of a glorious victory in which Admiral Nelson had destroyed or captured all but two of the French battleships. Next morning Captain Capel of the Mutine delivered Nelson's dispatches to the Admiralty. Within a few minutes the Park and Tower guns began to fire and all the church bells to peal. And as the steeples started to rock, the wife of the First Lord sat down to write to the hero of England. " Joy, joy, joy to you, brave, gallant, immortal Nelson ! May the great God whose cause you so valiantly support, protect and bless you to the end of your brilliant career. . . . My heart is absolutely bursting with different sensations of joy, of
1 British Chronicle, 10th Sept., 1798,
2 Stanhope, III, 139.
gratitude, of pride, of every emotion that ever warmed the bosom of a British woman on hearing of her country's glory." 1
There was scarcely anybody in England who did not realise the magnitude of the victory. The Annual Register described it as " the most signal that had graced the British Navy since the days of the Spanish Armada." The old king, when the dispatch reached him at Weymouth, read Nelson's opening words, then stopped and, standing silent for a minute, turned his eyes to heaven. It seemed to promise not only a lasting salvation for England, but preservation from anarchy, distress and misery for the still free countries of Europe, liberation for the enslaved, and in the fullness of time, peace.
For that October, as illuminations lit the streets, and cities and tithe barns reeked with celebration beef, plum puddings and punch and echoed with jubilant " Rule Britannias," the confidence of the country in the certainty of victory came flooding back. Within a fortnight the news of the Nile was followed by that of Admiral Sir John Borlace Warren intercepting a squadron of French warships and transports on their way to Lough Swilly and capturing all but two of them, including a ship of the line, three frigates and the redoubtable Wolfe Tone. The fears of the previous winter vanished in a swelling crescendo of British triumph: Gillray in one of his grandest cartoons drew the one-eyed Nelson slaying the Revolutionary crocodiles of the Nile and in another John Bull taking his luncheon of naval victories and crying out to the Frenchmen: " What, more fricasses! why you sons of bitches you, where do you think I shall find room to stow it all? " And The Times, in a report that the French Government had ordered the building of sixteen new battleships and eighteen frigates, added the comment, " Good news this for old England! It saves us the trouble and expense of building them ourselves, for they are sure to find their way into our ports! " 2
A great nation had received the first fruits of its own endeavours. That autumn it emerged from a long dark valley of tribulation into the sunshine. Even the weather smiled and gave the country a bumper harvest. Despite the stringencies of prolonged war, trade was reviving and revenue expanding: imports for 1798 showed an
1Nicolas, III, 74.
2 Times, 26th Nov., 1798.
increase of nearly seven millions and exports of four millions. It was with a full and proud consciousness of these things that Pitt in his Budget speech of December 3 rd called on the country to bear new burdens that it might help not itself alone but others. Rather than burden posterity with war debts and impair its inheritance, he proposed the unprecedented step of a direct tax on all incomes of more than £60, rising in the case of all those exceeding £200 to two shillings in the pound.
" Let us do justice to ourselves," he declared. " We have been enabled to stand forth the saviours of mankind. . . . We have presented a phenomenon in the character of nations." Already the peoples of Europe were rising in their wrath against the spoiler and oppressor. Turkey had already declared war on France, Russia was marching, Naples and Austria arming. A second Coalition was forming to reduce France within its ancient limits. " A general war," wrote Farington in his diary on November 13th, " is looked upon as certain."
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Lost Chance 1798-1800
" Experience shows that nothing is to be reckoned an
obstacle which is not found to be so on trial; that in war
something must be allowed to chance and fortune, seeing
that it is in its nature hazardous and an option of difficul-
ties ; that the greatness of an object should come under
consideration as opposed to the impediments that lie in the
way."
General Wolfe.
" Failure will always be the lot of maritime expeditions
when, instead of pushing the invasion rapidly, one limits
oneself to acting pusillanimously, leaving time to the
enemy to manoeuvre." Jomini.
IT was the fiery Nelson who began the offensive. Reflecting the new belief of his country that aggression was justified where it anticipated a ruthless foe,1 he persuaded the Neapolitan Court to strike at the French in the despoiled territories of the Pope to the north. Thirty thousand troops in their glittering Italian uniforms marched past the saluting base in the camp of St. Germaines and were pronounced by the famous General Mack, lent by Austria to its little ally, as the most beautiful army in Europe. On November 24th, 1798, they crossed the border while Nelson, who now saw himself as the saviour of Italy, landed a force in the enemy's rear at Leghorn.
But the nerve of the Aulic Council failed at the eleventh hour. It was not yet ready for war. As soon as the French realised that Austria was not going to march, they struck back. In the north they forced the hapless King of Piedmont to abdicate. In the Cam-pagna, having withdrawn from Rome, they turned on Mack's
1 " To avert by anticipation a meditated blow where destruction would follow its infliction is surely justifiable."—Lloyd’s Evening Post, August, 1798.
pedantically scattered forces. The gleaming, scented Italian officers took to their heels at the first shot and their men followed. " The Neapolitans," wrote Nelson, " have not lost much honour, for God knows they have but little to lose; but they lost all they had." A few weeks later, while the King fled in Nelson's flagship to Sicily, the French entered Naples after liquidating a brief resistance by the mob. Here they set up a Parthenopean Republic of middle-class traitors under cover of which they proceeded to plunder the country.
Yet the Neapolitan affair was only an incident. The Mediterranean conflagration was spreading. In October the Turkish and Russian fleets, emerging in unwonted amity from the Dardanelles, attacked the French in the Ionian Islands. At Malta a Portuguese squadron took its place beside the British fleet and the insurgent Maltese in a common front against the despoilers of Valetta.
Farther down the Mediterranean Britain had struck at the Balearics. Since Spain's entry into the war Dundas had been waiting the chance to seize Minorca and its great naval base, Port Mahon. Even before the news of the Nile he had ordered British and emigre regiments in Portugal to be sent under secret cover of St. Vincent's ships to attack the island. At the A
dmiral's entreaty the operation was entrusted to their former commander, now Lieutenant-General Charles Stuart. " No one," he wrote to the Secretary of State, " can manage Frenchmen as him, and the English will go to hell for him." 1 It says something for Dundas's magnanimity that he consented, for Stuart—a true son of the proud, erratic House of Bute— was in the habit of treating politicians with contempt. He frequently disobeyed their orders and never failed to point out their absurdities. "I am determined," he had written to Dundas at the outset of his defensive campaign in Portugal, " to be guided by your instructions so long as they are within the reach of my comprehension." 2 Whenever—as often happened—they were not, he disregarded them.
Stuart's Minorca campaign was as successful as Nelson's Neapolitan essay was inglorious. Unlike his great contemporary, the soldier was operating in his own element, and he was complete master of his business. He was fortunate in having as second-in-
1 Fortescue, IV, 606.
2 Ibid., IV, 604.
command a fellow Scot who, five years his senior, had until as many years before known nothing of war or soldiering. Thomas Giaham of Balgowan was forty-five when he first served as a volunteer on Lord Mulgrave's staff at the siege of Toulon. But though impelled to arms mainly as a distraction for the loss of a beloved wife and out of a political fury roused by a Jacobin mob's insults to her coffin,1 he was as natural a soldier as Cromwell. After displaying the cool courage of his race in mountain fighting round the doomed port, he had returned to England, where having raised a regiment at his own expense—to-day the Second Scottish Rifles— he had been gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. Since then he had served under General Doyle in the expedition to the Isle d'Yeu and later, as British Military Commissioner with the Austrian Army in Italy, had distinguished himself by carrying dispatches for the starving garrison of Mantua through Bonaparte's lines.
On landing in Minorca on November 7th—an operation facilitated by complete British command of the sea—this gallant soldier was sent by Stuart with 600 troops to capture the Meradal Pass in the centre of the island. This he accomplished without loss, cutting all communication between Port Mahon and Ciudadella. The last stronghold with 3,600 defenders surrendered a week later to a British force of 3,000 which, owing to a blunder in the Ordnance Department, had been sent without field guns. But Stuart, by exquisite economy of means and a mixture of shrewdness and bluff, conquered the entire island in just over a week without losing a man. It is hard to escape Sir John Fortescue's conclusion that, had he lived longer or been given a fair field for his gifts, this brilliant soldier might have won as great a name as Marlborough or Wellington. After the capture of Minorca he increased his claim on his country by disregarding all Dundas's entreaties for raids on the Spanish coast and the great fortress of Cartagena. " Let no persuasion of the Navy," he told him, " lead you to conceive its reduction could be accomplished by a handful of men." 2 Instead he husbanded his slender forces and prepared for the day when Minorca might have to defend itself by making
1 He was bringing her body home in 1792 from the Riviera where she had died. His bereavement was to make him, in the fullness of time, perhaps the greatest of Wellington's Peninsula commanders.
2 Fortescue, IV, 620.
every landing place an impregnable maze of earthworks. His power of making British soldiers dig was remarkable.
To Stuart came early in 1799 an urgent summons from Nelson to save Sicily from invasion. In the midst of a craven, panic-stricken Court and a wild, barbarous peasantry, the great sailor wrote on February 16th to beg for a thousand British infantry from Minorca to hold Messina against the rising Jacobin tide. He did not appeal in vain. For the clear-headed soldier was profoundly aware of the strategic importance of Sicily and its possibilities as a base for those amphibious operations against the southern flank of the French armies which he was at that very moment urging on the British Government. Though short of troops, he at once sailed with the 30th and 89th Regiments of Foot, arriving at Palermo on March 10th. Within five hours of landing he was on the road to Messina, where his fiery energy and magnetism and astonishing understanding of peasant mentality turned the resentful suspicions of the native husbandmen into an enthusiastic patriotism. During his brief stay he drafted a masterly plan for the defence of the island in which he anticipated the events of the next decade by showing how a brave peasantry might be armed and used to break the heart of disciplined armies. " Essential military operations," he wrote, with a genius that still burns through his stilted eighteenth-century phrases, " are too often avoided, neglected and misarranged from the false idea that they can only be effected by disciplined troops, whereas in many cases, in many countries and particularly in Sicily, the joint efforts and exertions of armed pleasants are more likely to prove effectual." 1 Then, his work done and leaving Colonel Graham behind him, he hurried back to Minorca. A few weeks later, worn out by his own resdess energy, he was forced to return, a sick man, to England.
While these events were taking place in the Mediterranean, Pitt was putting forth all his powers to align Europe against the aggressor. On November 16th, 1798, in a dispatch to the Russian, Austrian and Prussian Governments, he defined his aim as a grand alliance " to reduce France within her ancient limits ... to which every other Power should be ready to accede." It was to them as much as to his countrymen that he addressed his Budget Speech of
1 Fortescue, IV, 625.
December 3 rd, which Mallet du Pan thought the greatest survey of a nation's financial strength ever made.
For the Income Tax was imposed not so much to save Britain as to free Europe by putting the armies of the Continent once more into the field. In the closing days of 1798 a formal alliance was signed with Russia by the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg: in return for an advance of £225,000 for Russia and monthly subsidies of £75,000, the Tsar promised 45,000 men for action with British and, it was hoped, Prussian and Swedish troops against the French invaders of Holland. Already he had sent to Galicia 20,000 of the 60,000 soldiers guaranteed to Austria by the military convention of the summer. A French declaration of war on Russia followed immediately.
For these reasons, Nelson, despite his Neapolitan disappointment, wrote on New Year's Day that he hoped before the year's end to see the French crushed and peace restored to the world. The inherent weakness of the dreaded Republic had suddenly become apparent. Corruption and materialism had rotted France's giant strength. The country swarmed with deserters and robbers, the bridges, roads and canals were perishing from neglect, the public finances were in indescribable confusion. In a land in which morals and religion had long been discarded as antiquated superstitions, every man thought only of himself and how to defraud the commonwealth. France was racked by senseless feuds: in Brittany the ministers of religion were hunted down like wild beasts. The only people who seemed happy were government contractors.
Tlie extent of the Republic's conquests increased its danger. For throughout Germany, Italy, Holland and Switzerland the greed of the Directory's agents aroused the common people against the French and the rootless bourgeois who collaborated with them. Their anger kept the Republican armies scattered in a thousand garrisons. Nobody trusted France: every one loathed and feared her. Even the infant American Republic, bound to her by old ties of gratitude, broke off relations with her in the summer of 1798, George Washington in a Presidential message to the Senate voicing his countrymen's abhorrence of the French Directory's disregard of solemn Treaties and the Laws of Nations."
Yet the shortcomings of Revolutionary France were once more matched by those of the legitimist rulers of Europe. Austria, though she had reorganised her armies, had failed to cast off the petty selfishness of her Court and Council. The Emperor and his Minister, Thugut, nursed not only ancient jealousies of Prussia and Russia, but more recent grudges against Britain. For it is the nature of defaulting allies to feel resentment towards those they have injured. Austrian statesmen could not readily overlook the loans which
Britain had advanced to them and which they were unwilling to repay, or their own betrayal of her at the Peace of Campo Formio.
Yet the logic of events was too strong for such cross-currents of selfishness to do more than check the tide which had set in against France with Nelson's victory. Pitt's purpose was delayed but not prevented. Throughout the winter—the coldest in human memqry —the armies of Europe were rumbling towards the coming battle line. Even the Tsar Paul of Russia—a petulant maniac—scouted the French suggestion that he should be allowed to partition Turkey as his mother had Poland, for his vanity, stronger than his ambition, had been mortally affronted by Bonaparte's seizure of Malta, of which he had had himself declared Protector. The Aulic Council of Austria might refuse to be hustled into war, but it knew that war was its only alternative to extinction at the hands of the insatiable Jacobins. And though the frosts and snows of that awful winter held up mails for many weeks, keeping Pitt's envoys three months on the road to Berlin, no frost lasts for ever. On January 31st, 1799, the Directory, exalted by its entry into Naples and its easy conquest of yet another European monarchy, informed Vienna that, unless the Russian corps in Galicia was wididrawn within fifteen days, war would immediately follow. No reply was made. Passively rather than actively the Hapsburg State aligned itself with Russia, Britain, Turkey, Portugal and the Two Sicilies in a second Coalition against the overgrown power of France.
The Years of Endurance Page 38
