The War of Wars (14 page)

Saliceti relented and had Napoleon released. Napoleon’s eagerness to save his own skin, by distancing himself from the Robespierres, does not cast him in a pleasing light, but it was understandable in the fevered climate of the time, when the merest suspicion could have brought about his execution. Besides the brothers were dead.

Although Napoleon was no egalitarian and had little time for Maximilien’s more revolutionary ideas, the young officer certainly imbibed many political lessons from the ruthless Jacobins, in particular those of how a small movement, and even one man, could represent the general will of the people, as well as of the utter insignificance of human life in the balance against the general interests of the people and state. Previously reasonably humane, Napoleon’s callous streak towards enormous human casualties may date from this period. Now at liberty again, the tireless young brigadier-general threw himself into military planning, pressing for his Italian campaign. Carnot continued to overrule this, but told Napoleon instead to plan for a much more limited invasion of Corsica.

The new regime, entitled the Directory, was aptly summed up by Duff Cooper as: ‘The most inefficient, corrupt and contemptible [government] with which any great country has ever been cursed.’ Most of them had done well out of the Revolution – black marketeers, speculators, hoarders and those who had bought up church and aristocratic lands at knockdown prices. They were hostile both to the Bourbons and the real revolutionaries: they were primarily greedy opportunists. Of these Carnot was initially by far the most substantial.

Napoleon, although not one of the new men – on his official posting he had been anything but corrupt or wealthy – stood to benefit from the new regime. Although associated with Robespierre and the Jacobins, he had quickly severed the connection. He was an officer of energy and ability at a time when France was plunging ever deeper
into war and would need both. But first he wanted to make his peace with the new regime. There was still little hint of the glittering heights to come in the career of this twenty-five-year-old brigadier; he was only one of a number of promising young officers of whom one, Lazare Hoche, was already marked out as France’s greatest revolutionary commander.

While France burnt and beheaded, Britain slept. Its prime minister, the thirty-two-year-old William Pitt the Younger, was six years into office when the French Revolution broke out, absurdly youthful to be the leader of a well-established power. Yet he showed none of the impetuosity of youth. As a later British prime minister, Lord Rosebery, wrote:

While the eyes of all Europe were fixed on Paris, Pitt ostentatiously averted his gaze. He was deaf to the shrieks of rage and panic that arose from the convulsions of France. He determinedly set himself, to use the phrase of Candide, to cultivate his own garden and ignore all others. Let France settle her internal affairs as she chooses, was his unvarying principle. It is strange to read the uneventful record of the flat prosperous years as they passed in England from July 1789 to January 1793, and to contrast them with the contemporary stress and tumult in Europe.

No English minister can ever wish for war. Apart from the inseparable dangers to our constitution and our commerce, his own position suffers sensible detriment. He sinks into a superior commissary; he can reap little glory from success; he is the first scapegoat of failure. He too has to face, not the heroic excitement of the field, but domestic misery and discontent; the heavy burden of taxation, and the unpopularity of sacrifice which all war entails. If this be true of every minister, with how much greater force does it apply to Pitt. The task he had set himself was to raise the nation from
the exhaustion of the American war; to repair her finance; to strengthen by reform the foundations of the constitution, and by a liberal Irish policy the bonds of Empire. At this very moment he was meditating, we are told, the broadest application of free-trade principles – the throwing open of our ports and the raising of our revenue entirely by internal taxation.

He required, moreover, fifteen years of tranquillity to realize the fullness of the benefit of his cherished Sinking Fund. His enthusiasm was all for peace, retrenchment, and reform; he had experienced the difficulty of actively intervening in the affairs of Europe; he had no particle of that strange bias which has made some eminent statesmen believe themselves to be eminent generals; but he had the consciousness of a boundless capacity for meeting the real requirements of the country. Had he been able to carry out his own policy, had France only left him alone, or even given him a loophole for abstention, he would have been by far the greatest minister that England has ever seen. As it was, he was doomed to drag out the remainder of his life in darkness and dismay, in wrecking his whole financial edifice to find funds for incapable generals and for foreign statesmen more capable than honest, in postponing and indeed repressing all his projected reforms.

To no human being, then, did war come with such a curse as to Pitt, by none was it more hated or shunned.

On the day of the storming of the Bastille, Pitt remarked: ‘This scene, added to the prevailing scarcity, makes [France] an object of compassion even to a rival’. By October 1790 he was still writing:

This country means to persevere in the neutrality which it has hitherto scrupulously observed with respect to the internal dissensions of France, and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there should make it indispensable as an act of self-defence . . . We are sincerely desirous of preserving peace and of cultivating in general a friendly intercourse and understanding between the two nations.

Three months later he declared with astonishing complacency: ‘Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment.’

In November 1792, less than three months before the outbreak of war, his right-hand man and foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, declared:

Portugal and Holland will do what we please. We shall do nothing . . . All my ambition is that I may at some time hereafter . . . have the inexpressible satisfaction of being able . . . to tell myself that I have contributed to keep my own country at least a little longer from sharing in all the evils of every sort that surround us. I am more and more convinced that this can only be done by keeping wholly and entirely aloof.

Pitt said a week later: ‘Perhaps some opening may arise which may enable us to contribute to the termination of the war between different powers in Europe, leaving France (which I believe is the best way) to arrange its own internal affairs as it can.’

These remarkable statements preceded the French revolutionary decrees of November and December which provided assistance to all peoples who revolted against their governments and which proposed French-style revolutionary rule in such territories as Savoy and the Rhine. An assembly of British radicals was warmly welcomed in Paris with the hope that the French would soon be able to congratulate a National Assembly of England.

More extraordinary still, Pitt had actually cut back defence spending in his energetic attempts to place Britain’s finances on a regular footing. In February 1792 he reduced the navy from 18,000 to 16,000 men, ended the subsidy to Hessian mercenaries, and cut back on army appropriations – although by the end of the year he was forced to raise a militia as a precautionary measure.

Not even Britain in the grip of appeasement a century and a half later bears comparison with the Head-in-the-sand attitude adopted by the British towards the French Revolution. The William Pitt who was
later to become so celebrated as a war minister resembled at this time nothing more than a dormouse terrified of continental entanglement, devoid of any spark of courage or vigour. Why did Britain, under an otherwise able prime minister show such blindness?

The answer lies in a combination of circumstances. Britain’s last experience of war with France, Spain and Holland joining the rebellious American colonies had ended in a defeat on points. It had also proved expensive, and Pitt was nothing if not a meticulous bookkeeper when it came to national finances (although oddly enough not his own). Both Pitt and Grenville were deeply wary of continental entanglements, and believed they could avoid them through a judicious mixture of alliances and subsidies. Britain, moreover, had undergone a colossal economic, social and demographic revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century that was dramatically altering the face of the country, and commerce was booming as never before, in part thanks to the raw materials, capital and captive markets provided by the expanding empire. Thirdly, there was a genuine apprehension about the impact of the French Revolution on Britain’s increasingly frayed social and political fabric. Yet, even more significant than these political and economic factors were the character and background of Pitt himself.

William Pitt the Younger was to be Napoleon’s first, most stubborn and tenacious adversary. It would be hard to think of two more completely contrasting personalities, although they were almost of the same generation. Unlike the tempestuous Napoleon, who had been born on an island fighting for national survival and by the age of twenty-five had experienced two attempts at assassination, poverty, sudden enrichment, the loss of his family fortune and had fought in one campaign and one minor engagement, Pitt had been born in an atmosphere of aristocratic security such as few men have ever experienced, his prodigious intellect and gifts cultivated with the specific aim of rising to the highest position in the land.

On 28 May 1759, one of the most glorious years in the founding of the British empire, with the triumphs of Goree and Guadeloupe, Minden, Lagos, Quiberon Bay and Quebec still reverberating in the ears of Englishmen, a second son was born to the prime minister of the day. The father was a towering intellect, orator and natural leader, William Pitt the Elder, later Earl of Chatham. Pitt’s family descended from the governor of Madras in Queen Anne’s reign. His grandson, Pitt’s father, was a manic depressive in a family of seven children, three or four of whom were mentally unstable. The family traits were, in John Ehrman’s words: ‘an imperious and often quarrelsome temper, extravagant behaviour and emotion, a marked inability to understand other people, and a fundamental simplicity which sometimes gave its possessors a surprisingly sweet and winning charm.’

William’s mother, Hester, was from an equally distinguished family,
the Grenvilles, a methodical, highly cultivated family which boasted George Grenville, the prime minister who first tried to introduce disinterested administration into corrupt British government and to set Britain’s finances on a sound footing – and inadvertently triggered off the American War of Independence in doing so. The boy Pitt, in short, was descended from two of the greatest political dynasties of the age; and to begin with it seemed his much more stable character and penchant for administration derived from his mother. Rosebery wrote:

He went into the House of Commons as an heir enters his home; he breathed in its his native atmosphere, he had, indeed, breathed no other; in the nursery, in the schoolroom, at the university, he lived in its temperature; it had been, so to speak, made over to him as a bequest by its unquestioned master. Throughout his life, from the cradle to the grave, he may be said to have known no wider existence. The objects and amusements, that other men seek in a thousand ways, were for him all concentrated there. It was his mistress, his stud, his dice-box, his game-preserve; it was his ambition, his library, his creed. For it, and it alone, had the consummate Chatham trained him from his birth. No young Hannibal was ever more solemnly devoted to his country than Pitt to parliament.

He was destined, at one bound, to attain that supreme but isolated position, the first necessity of which is self-control; and, behind the imperious mask of power, he all but concealed the softer emotions of his earlier years. Grief for the loss of his sister and her husband are the only instances of human weakness that break the stern impressiveness of his life. Up to that last year when fate pressed pitilessly on the dying man, from the time that he went to Cambridge, as a boy of fourteen with his tutor and his nurse, he seems, with one short interval, to have left youth and gaiety behind.

The boy was brought up by tutors at home, not sent to Eton as his father had been, and went to Cambridge at the absurdly young age of fourteen. The young man was promptly given a rotten borough by a friend of his father, and entered the House of Commons at the age of
twenty-one, where he made his maiden speech. Burke observed: ‘It is not a chip off the old block. It is the old block itself.’ He sat on the opposition benches. Appointed chancellor of the exchequer by the Earl of Shelburne at twenty-three, he was made prime minister the following year after Shelburne’s administration had fallen on the terms of the peace treaty with France, Spain, and America, and the short government of Lord Portland had also fallen. The young man was greeted with universal derision. In the event, he presided over Britain for an unbroken eighteen years.

The early Pitt was an idealistic reformer, pressing for a reform bill which would widen the restricted franchise of the House of Commons, advocating the cause of Catholic emancipation in Ireland and appointing the most pro-Catholic British proconsul to date, the Earl Fitzwilliam. He also pressed for economic liberalization – he initially favoured complete free trade from Britain’s ports – as well as undertaking a thoroughgoing overhaul of Britain’s public finances. As a personality he was haughty, even priggish, in public, capable of a withering sarcasm towards his enemies: in private he was almost childishly affectionate towards his friends, and he loved the children he never had.

Some later suggested he was homosexual and held such feelings towards the young man later to become his protégé, George Canning; others simply that he was wedded to his job. Two formidable women acted as his hostesses – Harriet, his sister, and Jane, Duchess of Gordon, a somewhat masculine and domineering woman. John Ehrman summed up his private character: