The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  But the sands of Allied opportunity were running out. On April 25th the French, ostensibly concentrating their main forces

  1 Fortescue, IV, 777.

  in southern Germany, crossed the Rhine under Moreau. Within a fortnight they had defeated Kray at Moesskirch and forced him back to the Upper Danube. This was Bonaparte's moment. On May 15th, having made the most careful preparations, he began the passage of the Great Saint Bernard with 50,000 men. A week later he emerged on the north Italian plain in the rear of the Austrian army.

  Thereafter events moved at the usual dazzling speed. On June 5 th, three days after Bonaparte entered Milan, Massena, reduced to his last rat, surrendered Genoa. On the same day Lord Keith sent an urgent summons to General Fox at Minorca for British troops to hold the port, since every Austrian was needed to meet the threat of Bonaparte's army to the north. But Fox, though Pigott's 5000 from England had now joined him, could do nothing—save assemble transports—until his new Commander-in-Chief arrived from England. " For God's sake," Grenville had written to Dundas two months before, " for your own honour and the cause for which we are engaged, do not let us, after having by immense exertions collected an army, leave it unemployed, gaping after messengers from Genoa, Augsburg and Vienna till the moment for acting is irrevocably past by." 1 It was precisely what the Secretary-for-War had done.

  It was Britain's last chance to liquidate the Revolution before it turned into something more terrible. On June 14th, 1800, the main armies met at Marengo. It was one of the most closely contested battles in history. At one moment disaster faced Bonaparte. Had the troops Stuart had begged for been fighting by the side of the Austrians it must have ended in an Allied victory. As it was, Bonaparte's reserves, flung into the scale at the eleventh hour, gave France the decision. Next day Melas, his communications cut, signed a convention abandoning all northern Italy west of the Mincio.

  From the battlefield on June 16th the victor addressed a letter to the ruler of Austria: " I have the honour of acquainting your Majesty with the desire of the French people that an end be put to the war that lays waste our two countries. English craft and cunning have repressed the effect which this simple and candid wish must have on the heart of your Majesty. On the battlefield of

  1 Pitt and the Great War, 386.

  Marengo, amidst the dying and wounded, surrounded by 15,000 dead bodies, I beg your Majesty to lend ear to the cry of humanity and not to permit the younger generation of two powerful and courageous countries to murder one another in the interest of causes with which they have no concern.''1 At that moment the British Secretary-for-War was dispatching new orders to Maitland off Belleisle to send 4000 men to Minorca for important operations on the Italian Riviera.

  A week later Abercromby reached Port Mahon. On reading Keith's appeal for troops to hold Genoa, he at once sailed with 10,000 men in the transports Fox had prepared. Before he could arrive the French were in the town. Two hundred miles to the north of the Lombard plain where Bonaparte, again ruled, the French under Moreau, having defeated Kray near Ulm, were entering Munich. The Austrians, fighting alone, had been beaten on every front. " Our own army," wrote the Foreign Secretary, " could not have done worse! "

  1 Frischauer, 100.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Of Nelson and the North 1800-1

  " The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn Till danger's troubled night depart And the star of peace return "

  Campbell.

  THE transformation wrought by Marengo and Moreau's victories on the Danube left the combatants a little breathless. The proud Austrian armies, which a short while before had threatened France with invasion, were still in being, but their prestige had been shattered. Bonaparte, on the other hand, was back where he had stood after Rivoli. His humiliations in Egypt and Syria were wiped out. Marengo, so near at one moment to being a defeat, had decided his destiny. His charter to rule was clearly writ in its blood.

  Immediately after the battle he returned to Paris. His first thought, as always in the hour of success, was to consolidate his position. From the royal palace of the Tuileries he opened a diplomatic offensive. To Austria he proposed peace on the tacit understanding that she should abandon her alliance with Britain. To the Tsar of Russia he offered Malta, where the French garrison of Valetta still precariously held out against its besiegers. To Spain he offered an Italian kingdom for the Queen's brother and dropped a hint to the dictator, Godoy, of a Lusitanian throne when the English should be driven from Portugal.

  To his own people he proffered new laws and regulations, lucid, rational and beneficent: extended trade, and glory; everything, in fact, except liberty. The Revolution, he explained, was over; the time had come to enjoy its fruits. He gave the peasant security in his lands against the feudal lords, the right to attend his parish church—so long as the priest kept out of politics—and an assured

  market for his produce. He gave the new rich and the bourgeoisie pomp and an ordered society. He ended the cruel dissensions of the past ten years and raised the proscription on more than a hundred thousand exiles. With the same unresting energy that he showed in battle, he established a new national administration. For all this he asked one thing only: absolute and universal obedience to his will. Those who were unwise enough to oppose him he subjected to a purge of death or deportation. Even over Fouche's police he set a secret police; of his own with spies and informers everywhere. It was a price which France was ready to pay. " Gen-tlemen," declared Sieyes, " you have a master over you. Bonaparte wants every thing, knows everything and can do everything! " The country rejoiced in its new-found despotism.

  The truce in Italy was followed by another in Germany. The French armies in both theatres of war were to continue to live at large on the territories they had conquered, while the encircled Imperial garrisons were to be revictualled every fortnight for two weeks only. With the liquidation of the Revolution by a Caesar, the war had suddenly become unreal to the tired peoples of Europe. They were ready for a new order. An Englishman lodging at Frankfurt-on-Main had left a description of the arrival of the French there that July. They did not seem to come as enemies but merely as friendly conquerors. The young officer who was billeted on the house did not even resent the fact that his fellow-lodger was an Englishman. On the contrary, he discussed poetry with him and shared with relish in the delights of the new German— and revolutionary—dance, the waltz.

  On July 21st, 1800, an Austrian plenipotentiary arrived in Paris to discuss peace After a week of tempestuous flattery, insinuation and veiled menaces, the First Consul prevailed upon him to sign formal preliminaries giving France everything she had won by the Peace of Campo Formio three years before. But this was too much for the Aulic Council and the Imperial Chancellor. With all his faults Thugut was an inflexible patriot. He refused to ratify terms based on an agreement dictated when the French armies were at the very gates of Vienna.

  Thugut was moved, too, by other considerations. His Government, in return for a loan of two millions sterling free of interest, had just made a formal compact with Britain not to conclude a separate peace. Britain had behaved with undeniable generosity. Not only had she overlooked an unredeemed former loan, but, putting the interests of Europe before her own, she had offered in any joint negotiations for peace to offset her colonial conquests against France's territorial claims in Germany and Italy. The extent of her good faith had been shown after a Turkish-French agreement had been signed in Sidney Smith's flagship for the evacuation of Kleber's army from Egypt to France. Nelson, with his strong sense of political ethics, had sternly pointed out to his erring subordinate " the impossibility of permitting a vanquished army to be placed by one Ally in a position to attack another," and Lord Keith on his return to the Mediterranean had promptly repudiated the Convention. Thus, to assist Austria, Britain deliberately jeopardised her eastern dominion and her friendship with Turkey by leaving a French army in Egypt.

  Accordingly on August 15th Austria notified Fran
ce of her inability to ratify the Paris preliminaries or to make peace without England. At the same time she expressed the readiness of both countries to negotiate concurrently. At this the First Consul, whose object was to separate the Allies, affected a great rage and threatened to end the Armistice and carry immediate war into the Hapsburg hereditary domains. But as his prime purpose was still to consolidate his internal position in France before extending his conquests, he used the Allied reluctance to negotiate separately as a means of filching advantages from England which he could not otherwise hope to obtain. For, despite all his conquests on land, he was still confronted by another's mastery of the sea. Through that dominion Britain had robbed France of her colonies and trade and even—and this was particularly bitter to the First Consul— of those Mediterranean conquests which had been his own peculiar achievement. Her stranglehold on the world's seaways not only withheld from the French people the prosperity which he had promised them in return for their liberty, but at that moment was threatening to starve his armies out of his last stronghold on the route to the Orient.

  For this reason Bonaparte instructed Monsieur Otto, the French agent-general for the exchange of prisoners in London, to demand a naval armistice from Britain as the condition of any extension of the military convention with Austria. The Cabinet at first

  demurred on the ground that such a thing was unheard of. But on the First Consul threatening an immediate renewal of the war in Germany and Italy they gave way. There seemed no alternative if they were to retain their ally. They therefore proposed on September 7th that Malta and Egypt should be put on the same footing as the beleaguered Imperial garrisons and revictualled once a fortnight, that the blockade of Brest should be lifted, but that the right to sail should only be extended to merchant ships and not to men-of-war.

  This did not suit Bonaparte, for he was determined, even if he could not save Malta, to put Egypt out of danger of capture. He needed it both for the fulfilment of his eastern ambitions and as a bargaining counter. In counter-proposals on September 20th he demanded that the ban on warships should apply only to capital ships and that six French frigates should sail for Alexandria at once without being searched by British cruisers. It was his plan to cram these with troops and munitions. Simultaneously he attempted to double-cross the Allies by using the new manual telegraph to instruct Moreau to insist on the immediate surrender of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Philipsburg as the price for renewal of the Austrian armistice.

  In this he was successful. Austria yielded to obtain a respite till December and the full fall of winter. But over Malta and Egypt Bonaparte overreached himself. For, with the Imperial fortresses in his hands, the need for Britain to make concessions at sea on her behalf ceased. She flatly refused to allow the cunning Corsican to revictual Egypt. As for Malta, the starving garrison of Valetta, after a two years' siege, had surrendered that month to a small force of British soldiers under Colonel Thomas Graham. The chief heroes of the siege had been the Maltese themselves—" a hardy, brave race," wrote General Abercromby, " animated, and eager in the cause in which they were engaged " 1—and the calm, philosophical Gloucestershire sea captain, Alexander Ball, to whom Nelson had entrusted the blockade of Valetta and who became, a little incongruously, the subject of their passionate devotion. So close had been the Navy's watch that for nearly a year not a single vessel entered the port. Since his assumption of power, Bonaparte had given repeated orders to revictual it, but in vain.

  1 Moore, I, 369.

  111 February, 1800, one of the two survivors of the line-of-battle at the Nile, the Genereux 74, with three frigates and 3000 troops from Toulon, had had the misfortune to encounter Nelson on one of his rare excursions to Valetta, and had at once been captured. A month later the remaining Nile battleship, the Guillaume Tell, attempting to escape from the doomed port, suffered the same fate.

  But Nelson, back in his Sicilian bondage, was not there to see it. Nor, for all the entreaties of his friends and sad-eyed captains, did he receive the surrender of Valetta. Vexed in his vanity by the return of Lord Keith to the Mediterranean, and caught up in an unwonted sensual web, he had insisted on being relieved of his command on the grounds of ill-health. " My career of service," he assured the faithful, protesting Troubridge, " is at an end." On the day of Marengo he had arrived at Leghorn with his siren—" Rinaldo in the arms of Armida "—on the first stage of his journey home. Four weeks later he had struck his flag and set out for Vienna with the Queen of Naples and the Hamiltons, who had been recalled to England. It was a strange menage. "They sit," wrote Lady Minto, " and flatter each other all day long." Another eyewitness described Emma as cramming the Admiral with trowelfuls of flattery which he swallowed quietly like a child taking pap. At Vienna, as one after another of the laurels of the Nile were plucked by the new Caesar of the West, Nelson, tricked out with ribands and stars like the hero of an opera, received the plaudits of an idle multitude and sat at faro with Lady Hamilton while Haydn played unregarded.1

  Yet, for all his rival's triumph, one fruit of the great Admiral's victory remained. His country still rode mistress of the Mediterranean. Here during the summer months of 1800 a British army wandered vainly up and down in its transports seeking employment. From Minorca to Leghorn, from Leghorn to Malta, from Malta back to Minorca and from Minorca to Gibraltar, its path was guided by the successive and varying instructions of the Cabinet, always sent several weeks after the event which prompted them and always arriving too late to effect the purpose for which they were sent.

  For, despite the now unmistakable impatience of the public

  1 " It is really melancholy," wrote John Moore in July at Leghorn, " to see a brave and good man, who has deserved well of his country, cutting so pitiful a figure."—Moore, I, 367.

  with all its military ventures, the Government in its contest of manoeuvre with Bonaparte was again making use of the Army. At midsummer, after the failure of the attempt on Belleisle and the final liquidation of the Chouans, it resolved to employ it to knock Spain out of the war. For France's junior partner, after three ruinous years, hoped only for peace. Relations between blockader and blockaded off the Iberian ports had for long been far more friendly than those between the Spaniards and their bullying French masters: high-flown compliments, presents of wine and cheese, and even more substantial services had been continuously exchanged by British naval officers and the courtly Dons. It was only Godoy who seemed to be keeping Spain in the war at all.

  The capture of Spanish naval bases became, therefore, the Government's first objective. In July 13,000 of the troops which Stuart had vainly demanded for operations in Italy were sent under General Pulteney and a naval escort to seize the great naval arsenal of Ferrol. No attempt had been made to reconnoitre the ground or obtain information about the strength of the Spanish garrison and defences: a little vague talk by sanguine naval officers was quite enough for Dundas. When the troops landed on the Galician coast in the third week in August they found the place impregnable. After a brief skirmish with Spanish outposts they re-embarked, much to the fury of the Navy which had set its heart on prize money. The public, which was now ready to blame the Army for everything, ignorantly endorsed this view.

  It mattered little. For at the beginning of August the Cabinet had reached a further decision: to concentrate its entire available force for an attack on Cadiz. In accordance with its latest orders 22,000 British soldiers, drawn from Pulteney's abortive expedition and from Abercromby's Mediterranean command, were assembled at Gibraltar in September. With the hurricane season approaching, they were to make a sea-borne descent on one of the strongest places in Europe: the principal naval port of a proud people who, however lukewarm towards their ally's cause, were famed for valour in defence of their own soil.

  It fell to Abercromby, supported by Pulteney and Moore, to command the expedition. It sailed from Gibraltar on October 3 rd, 1800, in more than a hundred and fifty transports escorted by Lord Keith and the Mediterranean Fleet. For the next thr
ee days, while

  the crowded ships tossed up and down in a heavy swell, a spirited dispute raged between the General and Admiral about the latter's ability to guarantee the Army's communications once it was ashore. This the Admiral, though unaccountably refusing to give a definite reply, was naturally unable to do at such a time of year. Accordingly, after half Moore's Division was already in its boats, Abercromby took it on himself to abandon the venture. How right he was, was shown next day when a tempest arose which, driving the fleet far out into the Atlantic, kept it at sea for more than a fortnight. It was a fitting end to an ignominious summer. " Twenty-two thousand men," wrote Lord Cornwallis, " floating round the greater part of Europe, the scorn and laughing-stock of friends and foes." 1

  When the sea-sick army at last regained Gibraltar on October 24th it was to find new orders from England. In view of the worsening international situation Abercromby was to proceed to Malta for an attack on Egypt before the French were able to reinforce their forces there; Pulteney was to defend Portugal from an impending attack from Spain. For, while the military forces of Britain were groping their way round the shores of Spain in hopes of delivering a knock-out blow, Bonaparte had turned the tables on the fumbling islanders. On the first of the month he had concluded with the Court of Madrid the prehminary Treaty of San Ildefonso. In return for an Italian throne for the Queen's brother, Spain was to transfer to France six ships of the line and secretly cede the great colonial province of Louisiana in North America— a first step to the restoration of the French empire that Chatham had destroyed. And in order to deprive the common enemy of her oldest ally, the chief source of supply for her Mediterranean Fleet and the emporium for her South American trade, a Spanish army was to invade Portugal at the earliest possible moment. " Notify our Minister at Madrid," the First Consul wrote to Talleyrand on September 30th, " that our troops must be masters of Portugal before October 15th. This is the only means by which we can have an equivalent for Malta, Mahon and Trinidad." 2