The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (65 page)

Britain was the most substantial threat to France’s new ruler. Just as she had resisted the French revolutionary armies, Britain steadfastly resisted the extension of the Napoleonic Empire. Bonaparte or ‘Boney’ was contemptuously regarded as a new embodiment of the French tyranny and absolutism the British were used to combating. In the coming war Britain would not only be Napoleon’s chief opponent, but often his only opponent. For his part Napoleon had become obsessed with the idea of humbling the British. During the peace his consular agents had been involved in unobtrusive espionage, taking country walks whose subsidiary intention was to spy out good landing places.

But now the gloves were off. Much of the original attraction of the French Revolution for radical thinkers in this country had died out when Bonaparte had abandoned its republican forms and made a Concordat with the pope. But even if some, like Fox, continued to be attracted by the great ideals of the Revolution, all arguments were irrelevant from June 1803. For Napoleon had begun massing an enormous army of 150,000 soldiers to invade England. While he stirred up revolts simultaneously in Ireland and India (the latter being put down by a superior young officer named Sir Arthur Wellesley) the camp at Boulogne on the north-east coast of France had already accumulated 90,000 Frenchmen and the flat-bottomed boats required for the operation. The emperor was waiting for the moment when the tides and winds would converge to carry what was known as the Army of England over the Channel to conquer the recalcitrant islanders. Napoleon had even had a medal made bearing the legend ‘Struck in England 1804’.

When news of this build-up of troops across the Channel, with soldiers practising disembarkation techniques, reached England, the people became seriously alarmed. An invasion might only be days away, for even in the early nineteenth century the Channel took just hours to cross. At this crisis the British longed for the return of Pitt’s safe pair of hands, or as the politician George Canning called him in a piece of light verse, ‘the Pilot that weathered the storm’. Not only was the new prime minister Addington a complete nonentity but he had a poor grasp of foreign affairs and had even begun reducing the navy to save money. As another of Canning’s jingles put it:

By May 1804 not even George III could keep Addington in power. Pitt returned having promised never again to mention Catholic Emancipation to the king for fear that it would bring on his madness. Once more it was up to Pitt to plan the new war against Napoleon and hope that somehow he could persuade another coalition to materialize. Unlike Addington, during the peace Pitt had not been won over by Napoleon’s protestations of friendship. Convinced that war would recur soon, he had thrown himself into organizing the drilling on the south coast of the enthusiastic volunteer movement which was to provide 300,000 soldiers for the British army. He also supervised the building of those huge, round, windowless Martello towers you can still see today that were to serve as coastal defences. But after a year of the Grand Army sitting on the coast waiting for the best moment to cross the Channel, Napoleon realized that he might be waiting until Doomsday. The Channel was too well guarded by the British fleet. It would have to be overwhelmed by superior force. Napoleon therefore forced Charles IV of Spain to enlarge his fleet and join with the French to overcome the British once and for all. When British secret service agents reported this, Pitt declared war on Spain in December 1804.

Despite the overwhelming numbers against them, the British had one advantage on their side. The French navy after the Revolution was never up to the standard of the pre-revolutionary service; in a technical profession lack of technique counted badly against it. This also meant that Nelson could take risks he might not necessarily have got away with under the French
ancien régime
, for one of his characteristics was his ability to react to situations without scouring the rule book. But he also had extraordinary captains. Unlike the British army, where until the late nineteenth century officers could buy their rank, the king’s ships were considered far too valuable to be trusted to amateurs. Learning how to sail a ship to the exacting standards of the Royal Navy took a long time. Commanders at sea could not be anything other than excellent seamen, and there was a very strict order of training. Officers started as a midshipman, as Nelson did aged twelve on a battleship, and worked their way up.

Napoleon’s plan depended on the French navy joining up with the Spanish in a union of the fleets. But for the first half of 1805 the French naval ports of Toulon on the Mediterranean and Brest on the Atlantic were so closely barricaded in by British ships that the French fleets could not get out. But then in the summer the French had a bit of luck. A storm allowed Admiral Villeneuve and the Mediterranean fleet to escape from Toulon where Nelson was blockading him and join up with the Spanish fleet at Cadiz. The first part of the union of the fleets had been accomplished. The French and Spanish navies raced for the safety of the West Indies with Nelson in hot pursuit. But, to Nelson’s frustration, the minute that Villeneuve heard of his arrival in American waters, he rushed back to Europe hoping to free the French navy at Brest.

On 22 July the combined fleets of France and Spain arrived off Cape Finisterre at the north-west corner of Spain. It was the watching brief of Sir Robert Calder, who was patrolling the harbour of Ferrol. Calder had only fifteen ships of the line, while the French and Spanish had twenty-five. Nevertheless, knowing what the enemy vessels portended, the daring Calder attacked the combined fleet and captured two of their ships. But the overall consequence was better than that. For Villeneuve was so unnerved by the English ferocity that he whisked the Spanish ships out of Ferrol, made south for the safety of Cadiz, and ruined Napoleon’s plans. If the combined fleets had instead sailed north they might have seized control of the Channel there and then, and overseen the safe crossing to England of the immense French army. But they did not, and England was safe for the time being.

Pitt had meanwhile managed to conjure up a new alliance against Napoleon, the Third Coalition, consisting of Austria, Russia and Sweden, which had become more wary of the Little Corporal’s intentions. After Villeneuve’s failure Napoleon had decided to cut his losses. The troops from the Channel ports were hurried to south Germany to fight Austria before she could get ready. But Napoleon’s plan to control the Channel had not gone away. It could easily be resurrected. In the late summer of 1805 Pitt believed that destroying the combined enemy fleet sheltering down at Cadiz remained the most crucial task of the war. The situation was desperate, and it required desperate solutions. Admiral St Vincent had written after the Battle of Copenhagen, ‘All agree there is but one Nelson.’ It was Nelson that Pitt called in to see him at Downing Street to entrust him with an extraordinarily important task.

For this courageous man held the fate of Britain and the free world in his hand. On land in 1805 Napoleon was unbeatable; if the threatening allied fleet were not destroyed, he might be unbeatable on sea as well. Then the invasion of England would be assured. This was Britain’s very last chance to continue to survive against Napoleon. As Nelson left Portsmouth on 14 September on board the
Victory
people knelt on the shore and prayed.

Although Nelson reached Cadiz at the end of the month, it took three weeks to lure Admiral Villeneuve out to give battle at Cape Trafalgar. On 21 October Nelson went up on to the
Victory
’s poop having visited every deck to boost morale. He was wearing the dress uniform of a vice-admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet, to which he had been appointed in 1804. In the view of his friend and flag-captain Thomas Hardy this made him too conspicuous, but Nelson felt that it was important that his men should be able to see him. Looking out over the dark sea, which was a mass of fluttering white sails, he said, ‘I’ll amuse the fleet with a signal,’ and asked for the message ‘England confides [meaning ‘trusts’] that every man will do his duty’ to be run up. But since a flag for ‘confides’ did not exist, the word ‘expects’ was used instead. Then the battle began.

Nelson had twenty-seven ships to Villeneuve’s thirty-three. His plan was to use his three biggest ships, the
Victory
,
Neptune
and
Temeraire
, ‘like a spear to break the enemy line’, the great Nelsonian innovation. He and Vice-Admiral Collingwood were leading two lines of fourteen and thirteen ships spaced about a mile apart. They would bear down at right angles on the two enemy lines and cut them in three, to create maximum confusion. This they proceeded to do at considerable cost to themselves.

Two hours after the battle began, a French sniper perched in the rigging of the
Redoubtable
picked Nelson off from about forty feet away. As he fell to the deck bleeding fatally all over his white uniform, Nelson cried, ‘They have done for me at last, Hardy. My backbone is shot through.’ Hardy carried the greatest seaman of the age, perhaps of any age, down to the surgeon’s cabin, while Nelson concealed his face with a handkerchief so the men would not see the agony he was in. For four hours the admiral lay dying amid the din and smoke of battle. But by 4.30 in the afternoon his strategy had worked and the battle had been won. Of the thirty-three enemy ships, only eleven returned to Cadiz. As his ship’s log reported, when the victory had been reported to Lord Nelson, ‘He then died of his wound.’ His last words, as a weeping Hardy held the little body in his arms, were ‘Kiss me, Hardy. Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done my duty.’

At one o’clock in the morning of 6 November 1805 the Admiralty received the news of Trafalgar, and by two in the morning Pitt knew. That restrained man was so stirred up that he, who could always put his head on the pillow and sleep, for once could not do so. Throughout Britain, people wept when they heard the news of Nelson’s death. Even the London mob, who usually celebrated victories with fires along the Thames and frenzied toasts, were silent from grief.

And the British could not have been in direr need of victory, especially one that secured control of the seas. Only three days before, Napoleon, moving faster than had been thought possible, with a Grand Army of 190,000 men, had forced the Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. Three days after the news of Trafalgar had roused the nation from gloom, Pitt attended the annual banquet at the Guildhall. His popularity in the country was such, after the great victory against Boney, that his carriage was unhitched from its horses and drawn to the dinner by cheering crowds. At the end of the evening the lord mayor proposed the health of ‘the Saviour of Europe’. Pitt responded with one of his most quoted and briefest speeches: ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ The young soldier who had done so well in the fight against the powerful Maratha chiefs in India was present. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, said of Pitt’s speech, ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’

But though Pitt was in good form that night, in reality his health was breaking under the strain of overwork and the increasingly depressing news from the continent. Little more than a month later, amid the snow of Austerlitz, on 2 December Napoleon utterly routed the Austrians and Russians. The resulting Peace of Pressburg gave France back control over Italy and most of Germany. So many of the hereditary Habsburg lands were redistributed to the smaller German principalities that the Holy Roman Empire became an archaic concept and the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis abdicated on 6 August 1806. The new German states were organized into the Confederation of the Rhine, headed by Napoleon himself. Not only was he formally recognized as King of Italy, but he made all his brothers kings. The Bourbons were evicted from Naples in favour of Joseph Bonaparte, Louis was placed on the throne of Holland and Jérôme became King of Westphalia, at whose heart were George III’s hereditary Hanoverian lands.

Except for England, almost the whole of Europe from the south of Spain to the borders of Russia was now controlled by Napoleon, and within the year Prussia and Russia would be entirely defeated. Pitt himself, passing a map of Europe in the company of his niece Lady Hester Stanhope, gloomily told her to roll it up, because it would not be wanted for the next ten years. Pitt himself would not live to see them. His doctors sent him to Bath for the waters, but it did no good for a constitution shattered by exhaustion and poisoned by the port which doctors then prescribed as a cure-all. Instead of relaxing he was feverishly working at new permutations of alliances–would Prussia help?–but without success. He gave the dreaded order to withdraw the British army from northern Europe. Then the dying man sank into a fever of delirium. He called ‘Hear! hear!’ to imaginary debates in the House of Commons, and kept summoning his messenger to ask how the wind blew. If the wind was in the east the news travelled faster. Then just before he died on 23 January 1806, Pitt suddenly shouted in a voice of agony that his cousin watching by the bed could never forget, ‘Oh, my country! how I leave my country!’ He was only forty-six.

In England there was a sense of loss almost as if the sun had fallen from the sky. For more than twenty years Pitt had presided over the British government. For most of that time he had been considered an inspiring figure, whether as the personification of virtue when he was a young reformer, or more recently as the man whose prompt actions had saved Britain from revolution and French invasion. To millions of people the solitary figure of Pitt, the ‘watchman on the lonely tower’ as Sir Walter Scott called him after his death, often seemed to be all that stood between them and Napoleon. Every morning in Downing Street, he had been at his post in his severe black coat, methodically plotting the course of Napoleon’s latest troop movements and the latest engagements in all the different countries of Europe. He had been consumed by a patriotism which left no time for any other life than the late hours at the House of Commons. A sickly frame could not endure it for ever. And perhaps, as was said at the time, the news of Austerlitz was a blow from which he never recovered. Fox, who was himself to die later in the year, turned pale when he heard the news, and exclaimed that there was ‘something missing in the world’.