The Years of Endurance (17 page)

As a matter of equity Chauvelin had some reason to feel aggrieved, for the Act had already been put into force against his unofficial adviser, Talleyrand—the chief remaining advocate of Anglo-French understanding. Yet even while his Foreign Secretary was administering this pedantic rebuff to the French Ambassador, Pitt was still pathetically exploring possibilities of peace. For everything he counted dear in the world depended on it. Resolved to show no weakness in any direct negotiations with France, he still clung to his old idea of a general European settlement.

In this he hoped not only to avert war for his own country but to save Poland from its fate at the hands of Russia and Prussia. He therefore sent the Russian Government a proposal that all the European nations not at war should offer their mediation to France on the following terms:

" The withdrawing of their armies within the limits of the French territory; the abandoning their conquests; the rescinding any acts injurious to the sovereignty or rights of any other nations; and the giving, in some public and unequivocal manner, a pledge of their intention no longer to foment troubles and to excite disturbances against their own Governments. In return for these stipulations the different Powers of Europe who should be parties to tins measure might engage to abandon all measures or views of hostility against France or interference in her internal affairs."
¹

But Pitt was peddling dreams. Even had there been time for their consideration, such proposals had little chance of acceptance either in Europe or France. The allied sovereigns had no intention of laying down their arms until they had obtained " indemnities " for their losses. The Emperor, bound by his relationship to the French Queen, insisted on the restoration of the monarchy—a point on which he was encouraged for reasons of her own by Cadierine of Russia. As for the French democrats, they became daily more intransigent. Pitt was haughtily told by
the
Convention orators that he deceived himself, " for that France should receive laws only from herself." The first cannon fired at sea would simultaneously free Holland, Spain and America.

¹
B. M. Add. MSS. 34446, Grenville to Whitworth, 29th Dec, 1792.

For, like others before and after them, the men of the Revolution believed that Britain's strength was a web of gossamer. They supposed, as it was not spun of armies, that it would break at a touch. They thought it depended on banknotes. They had only to cut off the trade of the London plutocrats and their power would vanish in a night. Revolution in the countries with which they traded would soon bring them to their knees. The people would then rise and massacre them and welcome the French invaders. France would then " regulate the destiny of nations and found the liberty of the world."

Such men were incapable of understanding the secret sources of England's power. They could no more gauge the islanders' tenacity than those stubborn pragmatists could themselves conceive the
credo
of faith and destruction with which the revolutionaries confronted the complacent
status quo.
Goethe's phrase: " I love the man who wants the impossible! " was to provide the violent
motif
of the next twenty-two years of European history. It was to transform the world and bring it for a time to the edge of ruin. On that narrow verge between humanity and the abyss was to stand for many years nothing but the tried bulwark of Pitt's England.

On January 10
th the French Executive Council ordered General Miranda to prepare for the immediate invasion of the United Netherlands. Meanwhile Chauvelin was to seek another interview with Grenville in order to lull him into false security. But though Grenville promptly received him, and unofficial negotiations were still pursued through subordinate intermediaries, the British Government was not to be caught off its guard. Instead it gave orders to stop cargoes of grain that might be used by Miranda's invading army. When Chauvelin protested, Grenville refused to discuss the matter.

On both sides the momentum of military preparations was now moving irresistibly towards war. On the 12th Dundas, the Secretary of State, acceding at l
ast to the offers o
f royalist planters to transfer the province of Santo Domingo to Britain, sent instructions to the Governor of Jamaica " to extend to them the protection of His Majesty's arms " in the event of war. On
the
same day the French Government commissioned thirty ships of the line and twenty frigates. Down in
Norfolk Captain Horatio Nelson,
promised a ship at last after five years' half-pay, was jubilant: " everything indicates war," he wrote; " one ot our ships looking into Brest has been fired into." On January 20th, 1793, the Cabinet opened overtures for concerted action with Austria and Prussia.

Three days later London learnt of the French King's execution on the 21st. The news was received with an almost hysterical indignation. At the theatres the curtains were run down, and the Palace was surrounded by crowds shouting for war. The peacemaker Maret, still delaying in London, dared not show his face in the street for fear of " insults and ignorant ferocity." In the midst of all this anger Pitt—a lonely and tragic figure—waited wearily like a man in a dream. He had given up hope now: on the day before Louis wa
s guillotined, he told a friend
that war was inevitable, and the sooner it was begun, the better. Yet the very tenacity of his reason made the triumph of all this violence and unreason seem unthinkable.

On January 24th, the day after his recall had been ordered in Paris, the Government requested Chauvelin to leave the country.
¹
A week later, while a French appeaser in London was still assuring an English opposite number that it was the intention of his countrymen to give up all their conquests, Danton swept the Convention into a unanimous vote annexing Belgium. " The coalesced Kings threaten us! " his great voice boomed, "(let us hurl at their feet as gage of battle the
head of a King! " On February 1
st the Republic declared war on Great Britain and Holland.

Far away, under the great chandelier of the old House of Commons, Pitt was quietly speaking, the pale wintry sunlight falling on his paler face and the packed benches around him. " They will not accept, under the name of liberty, any model of government but that which is conformable to their own opinions and ideas; and all men must learn from the mouth of their cannon
the
propagation of their system. . . . They have stated that they would organise every country by a disorganising principle; and afterwards they tell you all this is done- by the will of the people. And then comes

¹
The diplomatic
impasse
reached by this time is illustrated by a dispatch from Lord St. Helens to Grenville. " It would be extremely difficult to draw one up so as to meet the ideas of the two parties or even to
name
the actual French Government without giving it some appellation which would be either too honourable for its members to wear or too coarse for His Majesty to use."—
H. M.
C.
Dropmore,
II, 374.

this plain question, what is the will of the people? It is the power of the French. . . . This has given a more fatal blow to the liberties of mankind than any they have suffered, even from the boldest attempts of the most aspiring monarch."

Therefore, Pitt went on, England must face the issue. " Unless we wish to stand by, and to suffer State after State to be subverted under the power of France, we must now declare our firm resolution effectually to oppose those principles of ambition and aggrandisement which have for their object the destruction of England, of Europe and of the world. . . . If France is really desirous of maintaining friendship and peace with England, she must show herself disposed to renounce her views of aggression and aggrandisement, and to confine herself within her own territory without insulting other governments, without disturbing their tranquillity, without violating their rights. And unless she consents to these terms, whatever may be our wishes for peace, the final issue must be war."

CHAPTER
FOUR

The War of Inaction
1793

" Our first and great object ought to be to destroy the
Convention, and it appears to me that if we are materially
diverted from that object by the pursuits of conquests,
whether on the continent of Europe or in the East or West
Indies, we risk the fate of the whole war and of the existing
race of mankind."
Lord Auckland,
7
Nov.,
1793.

" The principal object is to have what is wanted and to
have it in time."
General Sir James Murray.

Ther
e
was nothing unusual in Britain finding herself at war with France. Six times in just over a century had the summons come and always against the same foe. At such moments the ordinary Englishman instinctively obeyed the precept Captain Nelson taught his midshipmen: to hate a Frenchman like the devil.

Because the French were republicans the English, who themselves had once been republican, became filled with an intense loathing for republicans. " All the Kings are dead! " cried a Marseillaise on the night Louis was beheaded. But in the London streets the boys sang:

" Thus in famed ninety-three

Shall all Britons agree,

While with one heart and voice in loud chorus they sing,

To improve '
Ca
ira' into ' God Save the King !
^“

At the pantomime on February 5th, the whole house including their Majesties joined in the loyal chorus. At the Opera House the management converted the National Anthem into a Pas de Trois and introduced it into the ballet. A people more given to criticising their rulers than any in Europe suddenly presented an uncompromisingly united front to their enemies. In the general hatred of France one noble Lord even went so far as to propose that the customary Norman French should be dropped from the Royal assent to Acts of Parliament.

A few held out—Fox and his devoted handful in the Commons and those radical clubmen who had committed themselves so far to the foreigner's cause that pride forbade them to turn back. But they were insignificant in numbers and damned by their former association with the enemy. After the first debate of the war the entire Opposition in the Upper House went home in a single coach.
¹
The bulk of the Whigs followed the Duke of Portland into a kind of grieved retirement: too loyal to principle to coalesce with Pitt and too patriotic to have anything but detestation for their old chief's views.

Yet Britons, though unanimous in their resolve to fight, were far from so about their war aims. To Pitt England was fighting to honour her word, to combat the view that international treaties could be treated as waste paper and to prevent the domination of the Low Countries: in other words for " security " which without these did not exist for her. In the royal message to Parliament on February nth, he declared that the King had taken up arms against "wanton and unprovoked aggression
...
to oppose an effectual barrier to the further progress of a system which struck at the security and peace of all independent nations and was pursued in open defiance of every principle of moderation, good faith and justice."

The official attitude did not meet the views of Burke. " A war for the Scheldt!" he cried when the news was brought to him: "a war for a chamber pot! " With his heated but historic imagination he saw before him the last Christian crusade: a civil conflict transcending international frontiers between the forces of righteousness and evil on which everything must be stated. To him the French Royalists were outraged allies to be avenged, the Republicans alone

¹
A few aristocrats like Lady Sarah Napier, mother of three of Wellington's future heroes, did not even at this hour lose faith in Fox but saw him " more glorious than ever, with a
Jew
friends upholding his well-founded opinions in the midst of the confusion of prejudices, frights and abuse and resisting all temptation to fall from his noble height of principle into mean power and adulation." " I abhor," she wrote a few weeks later, " 300 and odd of the French murderers, I pity the rest who are slaves to tyrants ; I pity the deluded multitude and I wish them success at home but ruin if they go one step out of France. I think our war, the King's war, very wrong and very foolish, but still I wish it success."—
Lennox,
II, 89, 92.

the enemy. The King, on the other hand, regarded it as something simpler: a necessary campaign to punish regicides, atheists and robbers. This was the view of the bulk of his more conservative and unreflecting subjects.
¹
As for the man in the alehouse, he accepted the fight as something ordained by nature: another scrap to put Johnny Crapaud in his place.