The War of Wars (66 page)

In an incredible demonstration of military mobility and discipline, Napoleon marched an army of 350,000 men, many of them all the way from the Channel ports where they had been posted to strike at Britain, in less than two months to surround a huge Austrian army at Ulm on 20 October, the day before Trafalgar. They secured its surrender almost without bloodshed and then went on to win the greatest victory of his career at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805.

Reports of the Austrian debacle at Ulm reached the British on 3 November. It was a Sunday and Pitt was appraised by Lord Malmesbury, translating a Danish newspaper. Grenville wrote with bleak despondency: ‘One’s mind is lost in astonishment and apprehension. An army of 100,000 men, reckoned the best troops in Europe, totally destroyed in three weeks . . . Yet even this, I am afraid, is only the beginning of our misfortunes. We are plunging into a sea of hitherto unthought of difficulties . . . Time and reflection may suggest topics of confidence which I have hitherto looked for in vain.’ Lady Bessborough
wrote: ‘You have no idea of the consternation here. I am so terrified, so shocked with the news I scarcely know what to wish. This man moves like a torrent.’

The prime minister, reeling from the threat of the invasion that had hung over Britain like a dagger throughout the summer, the weakness of his government, of which he was the only real force, and bad news from Ulster, was now an ill and weakened man. Years of responsibility on those still young shoulders, unsupported by a wife and family, whose chief companion had been the port bottle, had taken their toll.

With the news of Trafalgar he made one last show of his old determination. The ‘secret expedition’ had by now nearly reached Italy. The prime minister despatched General Don with 6,000 Hessian troops to the Elbe and a force of guards under General Edward Paget to follow, with every available unit after that – some 21,000 altogether. ‘We shall see Bonaparte’s army either cut off or driven back to France and Holland by Christmas,’ said Pitt. He had little hope of inflicting an immediate defeat, but his aim was to stiffen the Prussians, dithering in indecision, to enter the war and support their Austrian and Russian allies who might otherwise sue for peace.

During the next few weeks there was virtually no news from the continent, only conflicting rumours: fog and ice held up despatches from Germany. It was rumoured that the French had suffered a terrible rout and that Napoleon had been killed. Pitt himself was too much of a realist to believe the gossip. But he preserved his show of optimism: ‘. . . Great as have been the pecuniary efforts which His Majesty has made for the common cause, he is ready still to extend them to such a farther amount as may enable those Powers to bring an active force of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand men; and His Majesty has no doubt of being enabled himself to augment his own active force . . . to not less than sixty thousand men.’ He urged the ‘ancient spirit of Austria’ to ‘remain unshaken and undismayed’. Arthur Wellesley, who spent several days with him at the same country house in November, found him resolute, lunching heartily, riding a great deal and, as always, drinking port copiously in the evening. On the advice of his doctors he went to Bath, where the waters improved his gout.

On 29 December the news first reached him of Napoleon’s great
victory at Austerlitz and the possibility that the defeated Austrians were suing for a separate peace. Rosebery memorably described the scene:

Austerlitz killed him. He was at Bath when he received the news. Tradition says that he was looking at a picture gallery when he heard the furious gallop of a horse. ‘That must be a courier,’ he exclaimed, ‘with news for me.’ When he had opened the packet he said, ‘Heavy news indeed,’ and asked for brandy. He hurriedly swallowed one or two drams; had he not, says an eye-witness, he must have fainted. He then asked for a map, and desired to be left alone. He had gout flying about; the shock of the tidings threw it back on some vital organ. From this day he shrank visibly. His weakness and emaciation were painful to witness. Still, he did not abate his high hopes, or his unconquerable spirit.

Simultaneously eight British transports with 2,000 troops had got lost on their way to Bremen. The British army on the Elbe was also clearly in serious trouble – even though Lord Paget remarked optimistically: ‘I long to be at the rascals. You may depend upon it we will play with them.’ The young Arthur Wellesely had been despatched in charge of a brigade in Lord Cathcart’s division. Although the mob ran riot in dismay at news of Austerlitz, and the troops had to be called in, order and optimism soon returned. The size of the defeat had not been confirmed, nor the Austrian collapse. Pitt remarked cheerfully: ‘It is impossible not to disbelieve above nine tenths of the French bulletins and not to doubt a good deal of the armistice as stated.’ But on 4 January he was seized with another acute attack of gout.

The last great event of his life was still to be played out. Pitt had personally supervised arrangements for Nelson’s funeral with the Garter King of Arms, down to details of the military decorations to be awarded. On 9 January 1806, the funeral was held, attended by 30,000 troops lining the way from Greenwich, where the body had been lying in state, to St Paul’s. It was drawn on a wagon shaped like the
Victory
and took three and a half hours to reach the cathedral through the hundreds of thousands lining the route.

The crew of the
Victory
followed the coffin on foot, which arrived in
deathly silence. Inside 7,000 dignitaries sat on a specially built dais seventeen tiers high. The huge flag of the
Victory
had been torn in pieces for each one of the forty-eight surviving crewmen to keep and the body was lowered to the tomb twenty feet below. It was a magnificently choreographed occasion of solemnity by Pitt to sustain the national spirit of defiance at a desperate time. Nelson in death had performed his final duty, and the legend was now to snowball steadily, gathering size, with the dedication of Trafalgar Square to the hero, the erection of Nelson’s column and perhaps most humbly and most movingly, the placing of replicas of Nelson’s ships along each of the lampstands that line London’s stateliest avenue, the Mall, where the admiral can look down upon them for posterity. Thus Nelson’s fleet still lives on in the centre of London today.

Now it was Pitt’s turn to breathe his last. He arrived at his villa on Putney Heath, Bowling Green House, on 12 January. On entry he told his eccentric niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who acted as his hostess to ‘roll up that map [of Europe hanging on the wall]; it will not be needed these ten years.’ This may have reflected an intention to concentrate the war effort in the colonies, now that Europe was apparently lost. He believed he would still see Britain through to victory, but he knew that years of struggle lay ahead after Austerlitz.

After the weekend he felt better and went out for a ride, but on the afternoon of 13 January the news of the Austrian armistice was confirmed, as well as of a pact between the Prussians and the French. The King and the cabinet had agreed that the British expeditionary armies should be recalled. Pitt acquiesced. The following day Wellesley, recently returned, called on him and as they talked at length Pitt fainted. Unlike Nelson he seems to have had no presentiment of death, but was undoubtedly dying. Wellesley went to Grenville, Pitt’s closest colleague through so much of the war and now in sad opposition. Grenville broke down in tears at the news of his first cousin’s final illness.

Pitt sat blankly staring, neither conversing nor reading. Gout had spread throughout his body. He took to his bed. After a brief rally, he became feverish, then delirious. He talked of his faithful niece: ‘Dear soul, I know she loves me.’James Stanhope, his nephew, reported: ‘He
spoke a good deal concerning a private letter from Lord Harrowby, and frequently inquired the direction of the wind; then said, answering himself, “East, ah! That will do; that will bring him quick”; at other times he seemed to be in conversation with a messenger, and sometimes cried out, “Hear, hear!” as if in the House of Commons.’

Benjamin Disraeli heard an amusing story about what he claimed were Pitt’s last words. An elderly House of Commons waiter and keeper of its secrets told him: ‘You hear many lies told as history, sir,’ he said; ‘do you know what Mr Pitt’s last words were?’ – ‘Of course,’ said Mr Disraeli, ‘they are well known . . . “O my country! how I love my country!” ’ for that was then the authorized version. ‘Nonsense,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll tell you how it was. Late one night I was called out of bed by a messenger in a postchaise, shouting to me outside the window. “What is it?” I said. “You’re to get up and dress and bring some of your meat pies down to Mr Pitt at Putney.” So I went; and as we drove along he told me that Mr Pitt had not been able to take any food, but had suddenly said, “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat pies.” And so I was sent for post-haste. When we arrived Mr Pitt was dead. Them was his last words: “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat pies.”

This version, although delightful, is almost certainly apocryphal. Canning believed the true words to be: ‘I am sorry to leave the country in such a situation.’ He was quoting the clergyman attending Pitt, insisting that theatricals were highly untypical of him. He died at 2.30 in the morning of 23 January, just three months after Nelson.

In the space of three short months Britain had gone from euphoria at the news of Trafalgar, to shock at the news of Ulm, to despair followed by grim determination at the news of Austerlitz. Britain had now lost the two towering figures who had come to embody its thirteen-year-long struggle with the militarized hordes of revolutionary France at almost the same time. The country appeared forlorn, rudderless and directionless, in the hands of confused minor politicians.

The twelve previous months had seen history at its most capricious, showering the world with violent shocks – the defeats of the Austrians at Marengo and Hohenlinden, the crowning of Napoleon as Emperor, the naval chase to the West Indies, the resurrection of the coalition
against Napoleon, the near-invasion of Britain, the death of Nelson, victory at Trafalgar, the news of Ulm and Austerlitz and now this, the loss of the leader who had come to symbolize Britain’s undying resistance to the French. Nothing had stayed constant for more than a month or two at a time. Every time Britain’s hopes had been raised, they were dashed immediately afterwards. The country was numbed by changes of fortune.

The death of Pitt was much more serious a blow than that of Nelson. It was like the death of a king. A young man who had just come of age when Pitt died would have known of only one prime minister almost all his life. He had not just been a politician, but the personification of the British manner: of British coldness, aloofness, fair play, balanced judgement, efficiency and good sense. It is extraordinary how the qualities that to this day are seen as uniquely British probably had their origin in Pitt.

After the robber barons of the Wars of the Roses, the despotism of the Tudors, the autocracy of the Stuarts and the corrupt jobbery of Walpole and the early politicians, two men, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the great parliamentary orator and founder of empire, and George Grenville, the meticulous administrator, had laid the foundations for a detached civil service based on sound finance to run a modern imperial country. William Pitt, a product of both clans, had epitomized the new breed. For all the disappointments and tumult of his ministry, he had presided over a smooth administration of enormous efficiency for the times, which perfectly complemented the radical social and economic changes Britain was going through.

He was still a young man by the time of his death, at forty-six a year younger even than Nelson. He was the effective head of state, more of a rock than the nominal one, George III, whose early attempts to guide the political process had long since mellowed to interventions on those matters he cared most deeply about, and then were marginalized by recurring bouts of illness.

In war ordinary people all that time had been able to look to Pitt’s trusted leadership. For all the mistakes he had made, he had never faltered, never been anything less than cool, determined, stubborn towards Britain’s enemies, nor projected anything but confidence and
leadership. Few people of any class in Britain liked Pitt, but they all respected him. His whole career had been something of a tragedy, the youthful idealist overtaken by events and forced to take on policies he had initially opposed. The paradox of Pitt’s career was described brilliantly by the historian W.H. Fitchett:

He was, by bent of genius, a peace minister, yet he spent most of his years of office in what to him was the hateful business of war. No other British minister, perhaps, ever so much hungered for peace, or spent so much money in breaking it. He began his administration with the dream of extinguishing the national debt, and betwixt 1793 and 1801 he added nearly £300,000,000 to it. He had a wise and generous zeal for liberal reforms, yet more than half his official life was spent in strangling them. He proposed the abolition of the rotten boroughs fifty years before Lord Grey accomplished it, yet he left the franchise as narrow as he found it. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended continuously betwixt 1795 and 1801.

The irony of fate pursued Pitt through all his career. By the most eloquent speech of his life he carried a bill against the slave trade; by refusing to interfere with what was supposed to be the ‘interests’ of the newly-captured slave-holding colonies he doubled that evil traffic. Perhaps his greatest legislative feat was the union of England with Ireland. Yet that feat cost him his office, and is held by multitudes to be a blot on his fame. No living Englishman of that generation was less the enemy of France than Pitt, yet none was so much hated by all good Frenchmen.

The extraordinary thing about a man who dominated his country for so long and presided over such great events was that the quality of greatness somehow eluded him. It was not just a matter of his detached, shy personality or the absence of the rhetoric that attached to, for example, his father or, later, men like Gladstone and Disraeli, Lloyd George and Churchill: it was his inability to shape the tide of events, or at least give the impression of doing so and rouse the nation with a single clarion call.