The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 Cornwallis, III, 457.

  absurdity in continuing the war for objects which the war furnished no means of realising." 1

  Had it not been for the necessity of passing the annual estimates through Parliament and of knowing whether to budget for peace or war, it is doubtful whether Cornwallis would have ever completed his mission.

  But on March 14th, when a decision could no longer be postponed, the Government, roused by the First Consul's perpetually rising demands, embodied the latest of them in a formal treaty which it instructed its plenipotentiary to present for immediate, acceptance or rejection. If no answer was returned in eight days, he was to leave France.

  Yet, even after this, Bonaparte was able to wring a few small, final concessions from Cornwallis. For though the latter longed to be gone from Amiens and its dismal society, he remained acutely conscious of what he called " the ruinous consequences of. . . renewing a bloody and hopeless war. Sooner than risk this, he took it upon himself, to Addington's subsequent intense relief, to modify the tone of his instructions. And at three o'clock on the morning of March 25th, after a five-hour midnight session, he brought his mission to an end and signed the Treaty, leaving the most important question—that of Malta—still indeterminate. The British forces were to be withdrawn within three months and their place taken for a further year by a Neapolitan contingent. The Order of St. John was to be reconstituted—no one knew how—so as to be free from external influence, and the island's independence was to be guaranteed by the six major Powers, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Spain. The consent of the last four, however, had still to be obtained. " Nothing surely can be worse," wrote Pitt's confidant, George Rose, " than loose stipulations in a treaty of peace that may occasion strife and ill-blood." As another shrewd observer put it, the Treaty of Amiens bore the seeds of a just and durable war.

  But as the country had by now settled down to peace, the Government had no choice in the matter. It demanded a definitive Treaty and was prepared to wait no longer for it.2 Had Addington refused to give it, political power might well have passed to the pro-

  1 The Friend', Section I, Essay 10.

  2See Collingwood 90.

  Bonapartist Fox. The thought temporarily silenced even the strongest opponents of appeasement.

  In April, 1802, London celebrated the official Proclamation of Peace. The general, unthinking view was expressed by Southey's landlady who, after struggling in the crowd till two in the morning in a vain attempt to see the illuminations outside the French Consulate in Portman Square, execrated all who disliked the Treaty, congratulated herself on the fall in the price of bread, hoped that Hollands gin and French brandy would soon fall too, and " spoke with complacency of Bonniprat." 1 The crowd was prodigious, the principal streets as bright as day with rows of candles blazing in all the windows in twin, interminable, tapering lines of light, the fashionable gaming-houses in St. James's Street resplendent with lamp-lit crowns and patriotic inscriptions and transparent pictures " emblematical of peace and plenty." 2 And far away in Grasmere, Dorothy Wordsworth by the lakeside watched the moon travelling through the silent skies, the stars growing and diminishing as the clouds passed before them. The sheep were sleeping and all things quiet.

  A few weeks later Bonaparte received from his people the price of the settlement he had given them. By a plebiscite of three and a half millions to eight thousand they affirmed that he should be Consul for life. From that day he called himself Napoleon. The era of the Caesars had returned to Europe.

  Yet the masterpiece of knavery and cunning by which the great Corsican had won his ends from England laid the foundations of his own destruction. He had tricked the stubborn, stupid islanders, who did not know their own strength and the power of the terrible weapon their sea-captains had forged, into relaxing their stranglehold on his ports and restoring his colonies. He had gained eighteen months to revictual and refit the armed camp in which he chose to live, and with it twelve years of dominion and triumphant war. The sea winds with which France now filled her exhausted lungs fanned the distant camp-fires of Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland.

  1 Espriella, II, 50.

  2 " This was a transparency exhibited this night at a pot-house in the City, which represented a loaf of bread saying to a pint of porter, I am coming down ; to which the porter-pot made answer, So am I."—Espriella, I, 90.

  For, through the ultimate justice of the moral law that governs the destinies of this world, Bonaparte had begun to defeat himself. He could have had his boasted New Order of European unity and progress had he chosen. Only one thing at that moment could have prevented it. That one thing the First Consul in his arrogance and reckless cynicism elected to do. By cheating and bullying the most confiding but stubborn folk in the world, he forged the weapon that was to destroy him. He united the British people as they had never been united before. He united them in a single passionate resolve to put an end to him and all his purposes.

  Even as they rejoiced at the peace they had made, they began to perceive instinctively that there was no peace. As is the way with a free country, the knowing few—and more especially those who were untrammelled by office and the still stronger bonds of loyalty and personal friendship—were the first to voice their protest at what Grenville called " unnecessary and degrading concessions," and Canning the " gross faults and omissions, the weakness and baseness and shuffling and stupidity of the Treaty." But there was something more than Party feeling in the growing wave of criticism. Even Pitt, still flawless in his support of his old protege, Addington, spoke strongly in favour of increased armaments at the very moment that the negotiations were being concluded. " I am inclined to hope everything that is good," he declared, " but I am bound to act as if I feared otherwise."

  " Peace, Sir, in a week and war in a month! " was Malmesbury's reply to the Duke of York's request for the news when they met in the Park in March, 1802. When Addington spoke of " a genuine reconciliation between the two first nations of the world," Britain already knew in her heart that he lied. For there was no room for her free spirit to exist beside the imperious, despotic philosophy that breathed on the other side of the Channel.

  The first to realise it after the dissentient Windhams and Grenvilles were the merchants whom Bonaparte had shut out of the Continent. If there had been no other failure in the Treaty, this omission would have sufficed to prove his bad faith and to ensure Britain's renewed hostility. For it robbed a trading people of the chief advantage they had promised themselves from the peace. Its effects, at first confined to the rich, were soon felt by the entire

  nation, even by the ignorant multitude who had hailed the peace because it would bring cheap food and plenty.

  A stronger Government, and one closer to the country's deeper feelings and historic destiny, would have known this from the first. Addington, ten years out of date, had mistaken war weariness for an expression of inability to wage war. As the sequal was to show, nothing could have been further from the truth. He misunderstood the character of his countrymen. He preceded them where in the mood of the moment they fancied they wanted to go, instead of steeling them to stand firm in the place dictated by their own unalterable temperament. So long as despotic power reigned on the Continent, something in the English heart forbade Englishmen to rest. It was a betrayal of that heart to let them think otherwise.

  Yet it may have been inevitable. Lack of social unity and the failure of the governing class—so fit for rule in other ways—to give the nation guidance in the great internal revolution through which it was passing had weakened Britain's war effort. So long as there was any shadow of doubt as to the nature of the Revolution militant and the intentions of Bonaparte, the popular mind remained divided. The weak Administration of Addington was the expression and price of that division: nations get the Government their failings as well as their virtues earn.

  Bonaparte, like Hitler after Munich, resolved Britain's dilemma. His actions—unmistakable in their intent—were
to restore to the British people " popular enthusiasm, national unanimity and simplicity of object . . . attaching to the right objects and enlisting under their proper banners the scorn and hatred of slavery, the passion for freedom, the high thoughts and feelings " 1 which were their birthright and which bound them to the great names of their own past: to Milton and Hampden, to Latimer, Falkland, and Sidney and the reeds at Runnymede. After the First Consul had betrayed the peace, had trodden down every remaining liberty in western Europe and, scorning his own promises, had insulted, threatened and cheated the only people save the Russians who had never flinched before him in the field, no Briton was ready to trust his word again or to believe that perjured France had anything better to offer mankind than had his own imperfect but dear

  1 Coleridge, The Friend, Section I, Essay 10.

  country. The Peace of Amiens deserved the name of peace, wrote Coleridge, because it gave unanimity at home and reconciled Englishmen with one another. The young rebels of yesterday became the patriots of to-morrow, bringing to the embattled cause of freedom a passion and fire unknown in the earlier years of grim endurance. Henceforward the British people were to follow and deserve great leaders: Pitt and Fox, Nelson and Wellington, Col-lingwood, Moore and Cornwallis, Castlereagh, Perceval and Canning. In the final stage of their victorious struggle against despotism, Wordsworth and Scott were to be their poets, and Southey and Coleridge their philosophers,

  EPILOGUE

  Light Out of the Past

  " YET now," said Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, " I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am." After nine years of harsh, unremitting war England had achieved parity with her adversary, made peace with her under a misconception and found, in the hour of making it, that there was no peace.

  As always, she had started to fight at a disadvantage. Our ancestors in 1793 were as unprepared for war as we in 1939. They were handicapped by all the defects of their libertarian virtues and institutions: by Party divisions, long-ingrained commercial habits, Treasury pedantry and incorrigible amateurishness. Their politicians, being more used to compromises than decisions, were ill-fitted to choose between rival courses: to make that option of difficulties which Wolfe defined as the problem of war. Having far-flung commitments and inadequate forces, they were weak at every point and strong at none. They left the initiative to the enemy and were unable to regain it. Their one asset was their courage. In the face of repeated disappointment and disaster they showed, in common with the people they led, an astonishing resilience.

  Such statesmen, like the British leaders of 1939, failed to grasp the strength and speed of the forces they had challenged. Facing men who were using a new dynamic of power to dominate the world, they put their trust in a victory based on financial resources. They forgot that the symbols of past commercial activity—favourable trade returns, accumulated bank balances and credits—could not avail on the battlefield. Economic like military strength is not the cause of human achievement but the result. It is not weapons which decide wars in the end but men, for it is men who make the weapons and then marshal and use them.

  For all their apparent bankruptcy, the Jacobins enjoyed an enthusiasm and cohesion unknown to their opponents. They felt that they were fighting for a way of life which offered them and

  their children a dignity and usefulness more in keeping with the eternal needs of human nature than the old dispensation. When, operating from interior lines under young and revolutionary leaders, they struck with concentrated force at the Allies' defensive cordons, the slow and confused sitzkrieg of the first year was succeeded by a lightning war of movement, terror and calamity. The monarchical States of the ancien regime proved no match in battle for the vigour and fanatic unity of Revolutionary France. They were routed by their own slackness, inefficiency and selfish divisions almost before a shot had been fired.

  As in 1940, Britain was driven back to her last line of resistance, the sea. Her expeditionary force, deserted by its allies, was expelled from the Continent, the flanks of her trade routes exposed to attack and the ports of Western Europe closed to her ships. Her people suffered a food shortage as grave but far less equally borne than in the present war. Even her vaunted financial system came within a few hours of bankruptcy.

  But those who thought that Britain was defeated were proved wrong. In adversity her real strength became apparent. It lay not in her gossamer web of trade and usury and amorphous commercial empire—as the Jacobins, like their Nazi prototypes, supposed— but in the character of her people. Against that rock the waves of conquest broke in vain. In the hour of danger our ancestors closed their ranks. They made many mistakes but they never bowed under the consequences. They learnt from them and went on.

  By 1797 they had discovered where their strength resided. Forced by adverse circumstances to concentrate on the sea, they made the destruction of the enemy's naval power their first objective. In doing so they reaped the advantage geography and history had given them. They learnt what Raleigh and Pepys, Cromwell and Chatham had taught by precept and example: that an island Power wastes and dissipates its strength unless it controls the sea. Only by an absolute command of the ocean trade routes— such as to-day involves mastery of the air above as much as of the sea itself—could Britain secure her shores, obtain the sinews of war and sustain her allies. Without it her armies were mere immobilised spectators of Continental battles like the Culloden on her shoal at the Nile.

  By putting first things first this country, within eighteen months of the fall of her last ally and the naval mutinies that marked her nadir, established a command of the sea so complete that, so long as she retained it and fought on, defeat was impossible. Discarding seniority-encrusted Admirals who used sea-power as a defensive weapon till it all but broke in their hands, she evolved under younger and more daring leaders a new offensive technique. Cape St. Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile and Copenhagen not only saved her from destruction but placed an unborn century of human destiny in her hands. It was then decided that Pitt's—and Jeremy Bentham's—England and not France's New Order was to shape the human future. Henceforward the seas remained a ring of steel round the tyrant's conquests. He had to break it or perish.

  But the colleagues of Pitt and Addington did not yet realise it. They had saved England; they had yet to learn how to save Europe. Though Nelson's glorious counter-attack and Russian victories awoke universal hopes of a second front, the army which Britain had raised behind the shelter of her fleets struck too late and too far from the main theatre of war to break an enemy acting on interior lines. Its troops were insufficiently trained in the new warfare and its commanders so oppressed by their own difficulties that they forgot those of their enemies. · Instead of pushing boldly on and snatching victory, they consolidated minor gains while the odds against them hardened. When a few months later Bonaparte smashed Austria at Marengo, Britain, having shot her bolt, remained a helpless spectator of events on land. By her sea offensive she had enclosed the armed Jacobin in a cage. She had still to find out how to enter it and destroy him.

  Discouraged by that failure and the collapse for the second time of all her allies, Britain relaxed her stranglehold. When out of necessity she resumed it, she did so without seeing any rational way of destroying the titanic power she had challenged. Time had still to teach her that, so long as she kept the sea routes closed to the conqueror, his New Order was denied the means of enduring life, while her own growing industrial strength, freely nourished through those same watery channels, could become, like that of America to-day, a potent force for liberating Europe. She had still to learn, too, how a British army, based on the sea and enjoying perfect freedom of movement, could exert an influence out of all proportion to its size 1 and could prove to an enslaved and restless Continent that the Grand Armee was not invincible.

  Yet military prowess alone could scarcely have conquered Napoleon's France. It needed a human agency with its own superlative efficiency even to resist it. Only one
with a greater spiritual force could break it. After Nelson's victories and the resumption of war Britain, having repaired her early defects and omissions, faced France at last on something approaching equal terms. The struggle then became a contest not merely between physical forces but between rival principles.

  That of Jacobin and Napoleonic France had one ineradicable weakness. With all its immense vitality and military virtue and efficiency, it tended to worship itself. It lacked humility and therefore understanding of the laws that ultimately govern the universe. Even at the outset the Revolutionary effort was impaired by human failings. The besetting vices of the men who set out to build a new heaven and earth in a day were impatience and arrogance. The resulting lack of discipline brought them into trouble as soon as they encountered an orderly and cohesive people like the British. The fleets which put out of Brest and Toulon with wild boasts and unharnessed enthusiasms were no match for the patient, hard-trained men who sailed under the " meteor flag of England."

  But the vitality which sprang from the new philosophy of freedom gave the French people the honesty and vigour to correct these early faults. They learnt the first lessons of the harsh school of war more quickly than their foes. They subjected themselves to discipline to achieve unity. Yet here again they fell into moral errors which impaired their victories. In their impatience for victory they condoned cruelty and injustice. Because of this, the Terror which united France ended by dividing her.