The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (64 page)

But it was in that year, 1798, that the balance of the French Revolutionary Wars began to tip in Britain’s favour. Nelson was in the grip of a deep conviction that the continental alliances on which Pitt had spent so much energy generally turned out to be useless. He believed that only British sea-power could save Europe from French domination. Thanks to him it did. When he heard that Napoleon with a flotilla of ships had managed to slip out of Toulon and capture Malta, one of the best harbours in the eastern Mediterranean, he became intuitively convinced that the Corsican must be heading for Egypt and possibly India. In this he was quite right, though it was a closely guarded secret even from the French ships’ captains themselves. As the weather changed to the luxuriant warmth of the Middle East, Nelson followed grimly behind on what he was sure was Napoleon’s trail. Without permission from his commanding officer he continued to sail east, severely hampered by the loss of his frigates during a storm–because in the days before radio these scouting ships, known as ‘the eyes of the sea’, would have been miles ahead searching for information. For the rest of the voyage Nelson was completely blind as far as long-distance scouting was concerned.

Extraordinarily enough, Nelson and the English fleet actually overtook the French ships during the night of 22–23 June. But because he had no frigates he never realized what had happened; the French fleet seemed simply to have vanished. While Nelson sailed fruitlessly round the eastern Mediterranean, the French war plan went like clockwork. By the end of July the loss of India loomed as Napoleon led his army south across the desert, defeated the rulers of Egypt, the Mamelukes, in the Battle of the Pyramids and captured Cairo. At last Nelson stumbled on a clue to where the French fleet had hidden itself. French ships were seen off Crete steering south-east, and on the morning of 1 August Nelson was back at Alexandria once more, to find his first instinct had been right all along. The French fleet was anchored in the crucially important Aboukir Bay, five miles east of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile river.

Without pausing for even a moment, even though it was dusk, Nelson sailed straight in and attacked the enemy. The French, who had first sighted the English fleet in the far distance at two o’clock in the afternoon, were astonished that Nelson had made no preliminary skirmishes and by his lack of orthodoxy in choosing to give battle at six in the evening, since night-fighting was notoriously difficult. Theoretically the French fleet under Admiral Brueys was in a very good position at Aboukir Bay because Brueys had mounted batteries on the shore, but their range turned out to be too short. Brueys’ second big mistake–but he was ignorant of Nelson’s talent for spotting a vulnerable point which to others seemed nothing of the kind–was to have ordered his ships to be anchored far enough apart to give his ships room to swing round. Nelson suddenly realized that, if there was room for an enemy ship to swing, there was room enough for British ships and their uniquely skilled sailors to anchor alongside.

After a long night illuminated by a massive explosion and by burning ships, Nelson had captured or killed 9,000 men. But he had not only destroyed French naval power in the Mediterranean. Horatio Nelson’s outstanding and unexpected victory against the French navy at the Battle of the Nile literally changed the course of the war. French plans were checked for the first time in five years. The British gained control of the eastern Mediterranean while the French army, with the best general it possessed, was left stranded in Egypt, having never received the reinforcements it was relying on, the soldiers on board ship in Aboukir Bay. But above all the Battle of the Nile gave heart to Britain’s former allies, such as Austria. Up to now they had all accepted defeat. Now they tore up their peace treaties, enabling Pitt to form the Second Coalition of Britain, Austria, Russia, Naples and Turkey, and renew the war by land. Egypt became France’s firm enemy as a result of her treatment by Napoleon and Britain’s firm friend, while any ideas Napoleon had of starting a war in India had become pipe dreams. He was now in the middle of extremely hostile enemy territory surrounded by angry Turks and Egyptians. Nelson summed it all up when he said laconically, ‘Their army is in a scrape and will not get out of it.’

When the news of the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay reached England two months later on 2 October the country went wild with joy. After five years of inexorable French military success the British could scarcely believe that at last they had dealt a serious blow to the enemy. Nelson was the hero of the hour, inspiring public prints and cartoons as adoring as Napoleon’s in France. Lively, immensely charming and very patriotic, Nelson displayed genius and daring in a string of triumphs at sea between 1797 and 1805 which established the British maritime supremacy that would last for a hundred years. He had been in the navy since he was twelve and had often been wounded–he had only one arm (the other had been amputated) and one good eye (the other could only distinguish between light and dark). A small man, his clothes always looked too big for him–the future King William IV said that he was ‘the merest boy of a Captain that I ever saw’–he was adored by his men.

Typically Bonaparte refused to admit that the Battle of the Nile was a defeat. The Army of Egypt was told in one of his most grandiloquent speeches that it must go on and accomplish great new things. But for once he had taken on more than he bargained for. The Sultan of Turkey, refusing to lie down under the French invasion, despatched two armies against Napoleon, and on 22 August 1799 the Little Corporal saw that the time was ripe for him to return to Paris before the disastrous Egypt campaign became known. Effectively deserting his troops, he sailed secretly from Alexandria on a small frigate to mount the coup which overturned the French government, the Directory, and enabled him that November to become France’s principal ruling consul, a virtual dictator. A year later, when Sir Ralph Abercromby landed in Egypt and defeated the French at the Battle of Alexandria, the last wraiths of their hoped-for eastern empire melted away.

The Austrians now drove the French out of Germany. The Russians under the leadership of the remarkable Russian General Suvorov began to force the French to retire up the Italian peninsula, back the way they had come. The French were also attacked in Switzerland and Holland. But after a good start the Second Coalition did not realize its early promise. Led by poor commanders the English were pushed out of Holland and Pitt’s attention was distracted by a rebellion that blew up in Ireland at the end of 1798. In Switzerland the French defeated the Russians at Zurich before Suvorov could get there.

The rebellion in Ireland was a revival of the one that had failed the year before for lack of French and Dutch troops. Revolutionary ideas had increased the already strongly anti-British tendencies in Ireland. The Irish anyway had little regard for a British king, and when they saw the French throwing off their monarch they were encouraged to do the same. Their excuse was Pitt’s Catholic Relief measures, which were felt not to have gone far enough. In 1792 and 1793 Pitt had agreed that as a concession to the large number of Irish Roman Catholics, in Ireland Catholics should be allowed to sit on juries and vote in elections even if they could not stand for Parliament themselves. But eventually the hot-headed Wolfe Tone abandoned hopes of internal reform and concluded that revolution was the only answer. The British navy guarded the Channel and Irish Sea so efficiently, however, that what had been intended to be an Irish uprising backed by French military support turned into a civil war. Members of the newly formed extreme Presbyterian Orange Lodges in Ulster, named in remembrance of William of Orange, fought bitterly against the United Irishmen and their largely Catholic following. Despite strong support in Wexford the revolt failed, so that by the time French troops had managed to sneak across to Ireland’s west coast they were too late.

The need for a proper solution to the Irish problem had become acute, particularly now that Napoleon had escaped from Egypt and was directing French military operations. To Lord Cornwallis, the former general of the English army in America sent over to keep peace between the warring factions as lord lieutenant, the Irish appeared congenitally incapable of seeing one another’s point of view. He told Pitt that Ireland could be ruled only by a neutral government which had none of the Irish prejudices and hatreds. Rule from Westminster was the only way of escaping the implacable antagonisms of Irish internal politics.

But short of main force how could Pitt get the Dublin Parliament to vote for its own destruction? Not only was its existence a matter of national pride, but it was such a nest of entrenched interests. Pitt’s solution was what he viewed as an extremely generous offer: Ireland should have one hundred seats in the Parliament at Westminster, and would thus play a part in decision-making way above her power and importance in the world. Free trade was to be established between Ireland and England. But it was the carefully designed package of bribes for the greedy and unpatriotic Dublin borough-mongers which got them to abolish the Dublin Parliament and their independence for the sum of £7,500 per seat. As for national acceptance of the Union, Pitt understood that the only way to win over the Irish and make them loyal to England was by courting the Catholics. The Act of Union between Britain and Ireland was predicated on its being accompanied by Catholic Emancipation for the Irish. Roman Catholics were to be admitted to Parliament and have their disabilities removed.

What Pitt had left out of the equation was the ailing king. George III took his coronation oath very seriously. As a Protestant monarch, he believed that it would be dereliction of his sacred royal duty if he allowed the remedial measures for the Catholics to go before Parliament. Despite all the arguments put to him, he held to his idea that allowing Catholic Emancipation would violate his promise to uphold the Protestant religion. ‘None of your Scotch metaphysics,’ he said to Pitt’s friend the Scots politician Henry Dundas, when the latter tried to persuade him otherwise.

The Act of Union of 1800 thoroughly tied Ireland to Great Britain, temporarily at least. The first United Parliament sat in February 1801 and contained within it one hundred Irish members of Parliament, twenty-eight Irish peers and four Irish bishops. But it had a dramatic consequence: it caused Pitt’s resignation. Pitt felt he could not stay in office as the failure to introduce Emancipation made it look as if he had deceived the Irish Catholics to get their support. Since any mention of the Catholics wound the king’s nerves up to an alarming pitch, it was better if his prime minister resigned. Addington, the inconspicuous Speaker of the House of Commons, took his place.

Throughout the year 1800 the Second Coalition was on the retreat. Russia and her huge armies had already pulled out of the alliance; the new tsar Paul wished to be the chief arbiter in making peace with Britain and thereby gain Napoleon’s gratitude. Tsar Paul, exploiting resentment of British naval policy on enemy goods, began to create an armed Northern League of former neutral countries, whose Danish navy posed a real danger to British defences. Then, in a typical feat of daring, Napoleon took his army straight over the Alps through the snow to attack the Austrians, crossing the Great St Bernard Pass to fall on the Austrians’ rear where they were besieging Genoa. By December the Austrians had been driven back down the Danube. Terrified that Vienna would be Bonaparte’s next target, in February 1801 they signed the peace treaty of Lunéville and withdrew from the coalition. Once more the British were left to face the French alone, and they had to do so under Addington, who had little executive sense.

Nevertheless by 1801 the tsar’s plans to create a dangerous Northern League had been thwarted by Nelson. The slaughter at the Battle of Copenhagen in April when the British sank the Danish fleet was so terrible and the two navies so evenly matched that Admiral Parker started signalling to Nelson to ‘leave off action’. But Nelson believing, accurately as it turned out, that he could bring the Danes to their knees, put his telescope to his blinded eye so that he could not see his commander’s signal. He continued fighting until the Danes accepted his offer of a truce. The Northern League’s most fearsome weapon, the Danish navy, was now out of the picture, and the League was soon broken up by the assassination of Tsar Paul.

Thus by 1802 Great Britain and France were level pegging, and a peace between the two nations was successfully negotiated: Great Britain could not hurt France by land, and France could not hurt Britain by sea. Both nations were utterly weary of war and in March that year the Treaty of Amiens was signed, which accepted the stalemate between the two countries. Britain agreed to recognize the French Republic and to give back all the colonies she had taken from France, apart from Trinidad and Ceylon. Malta was to be returned to the Knights of St John, who were to be under the protection of the tsar.

But the Peace of Amiens was not a peace so much as a truce, which Napoleon made use of to regroup his forces. He illegally annexed Piedmont and Elba to France, moved troops into Switzerland and was still occupying Holland. When in response the British refused to surrender Malta to a Russian protectorate, because of the growing rapprochement between France and Russia, hostilities resumed. But the nature of the conflict had changed. Not only are the wars which raged once more from 1803 to 1815 called the Napoleonic Wars, but the spirit of them was different.

The French revolutionary armies had invaded monarchist countries as an act of self-defence to prevent their enemies crushing the Revolution and restoring the royal family. But, though Napoleon’s armies still claimed that they were recovering the liberty of the people from medieval laws, the Napoleonic Wars were old-fashioned wars of conquest. Bonaparte had drawn the Revolution in France firmly to a close. Not content to merely be military dictator as the first consul for life, in 1804 Napoleon crowned himself emperor in the presence of the pope, and six months later made himself King of Italy.