The Years of Endurance (64 page)

Thus Bonaparte's threat to conquer the sea by the land was a very real one for the rulers of England in the closing months of 1800. In the villages at their park gates and in the towns through which they passed they saw men and women starving. The Tsar's embargo and the impending stoppage of the Baltic grain fleets placed them in a terrible dilemma. On December 16th Russia and Sweden signed a treaty of alliance by which they bound themselves to revive the heretical maritime code of the Armed Neutrality and to enforce their claims against any dissenting belligerent by naval action. A few days later Prussia and Denmark, despite her recent treaty with Britain, gave their adherence to the " League of the Armed Neutrals."

Before this was known in London, Britain had lost her last effective allies. On November 28th, 1800, the French armistice with Austria expired. Within less than a week the Imperial field army in southern Germany had been destroyed. With incredible folly the Aulic Council had deprived the Archduke Charles of his command in favour of an inexperienced boy. As a result the one fighting force in Europe capable of checking the French Army had been exposed to Moreau's counter-attack in the snow-clad forest of Hohenlinden. Thereafter, though the great Archduke was hastily recalled to his former command, nothing could withstand the French advance. On Christmas Day an armistice was signed at Steyer, less than a hundred miles from Vienna. Thugut, his policy shattered, resigned, and the reacceptance by a defeated Austria of the terms of Campo Formio became inevitable.

Meanwhile the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seeking peace with the conqueror. After the occupation of Tuscany the Queen had hurried to St. Petersburg to beg the Tsar to intercede for her husband's throne. Bonaparte had gladly acceded to his new friend's request: it was his present policy to refuse him nothing. But he accompanied his forbearance with a servile treaty by which the Neapolitan Government bound itself to close its ports to British ships and merchandise, and to admit French garrisons to its fortresses. Save for Portugal, now once more in deadly peril from Spain, the proud island which eighteen months before had led all Europe in a triumphant crusade against France had not a friend in the world.

One resort only remained to Britain in the ruin of her hopes: her command of the sea. This still stood, dominating the angry winter waves beyond every rocky promontory of the Continent and setting bounds to the conqueror's dominion. Since St. Vincent had been appointed to the Channel Fleet a year before, it had become far more formidable. For in place of old Bridport's lax watch on Brest and the Atlantic ports, the new Admiral had imposed a rigid blockade of his own devising that spared neith
er man nor ship but allowed noth
ing that floated to enter or leave France's naval arsenals. In front of Brest, where the Combined Navies of France and Spain now lay an inert mass, the duty division of the blockading fleet was increased from the customary fifteen to thirty sail. During easterly winds five ships of the line were always anchored between the Black Rocks and Porquette Shoal, ten miles from the entrance to the harbour, and
the
frigates and cutters plied day and night in the opening of the Goulet. The main fleet rode well in with Ushant, seldom more than two or three leagues from the island. To prevent further escapes through the shoals to the south, a detachment of from two to four ships of the line was stationed p
ermanently at the south
ern entrance of the Passage du Raz, while cruisers ranged the Bay of Biscay intercepting every attempt to move along the coast and making periodic cutting-out expeditions on French roadsteads.

The strain imposed by these methods on ships and seamen was terrific. Collingwood, wintering off that rocky coast with only

occasional spells in Cawsand Bay or lonely Torbay to break the monotony, complained bitterly to his wife of his irksome life and of a system which increased instead of softening the rigours of the sailor's unremitting service. Others of coarser clay murmured openly at the Admiral's attempt to apply the stern discipline of the Mediterranean to the Channel Fleet. But where the interests of his country were concerned, St. Vincent admitted neither humanity nor pity. " I am at my wits' end," he wrote, " to meet every shift, evasion and neglect of duty. Seven-eighths of the captains who compose this fleet are practising every subterfuge to get into liar-bour for the winter." They met with scant success. Even when driven by storms to Plymouth or Falmouth, no officer on blockade duty was allowed to sleep on shore or take his ship to the dockyards without leave from the Admiral. It was not surprising that the longing for peace among all ranks grew as their one hope of release from a life of slavery.

But the results justified the policy. The threat of the forty-eight battleships in Brest to Ireland and the West Indies diminished week by week as the shortage of naval stores and supplies in
the
congested port grew. The primitive and disorganised road services of western France were quite inadequate to take the place of the coastal carrying trade that St. Vincent's stranglehold had destroyed. Nothing could evade his unceasing vigilance. Repeated orders from the terrible First Consul for part of the French Fleet to put to sea—to relieve Egypt or to harry British commerce—were unavailing, for the fleet could not move. It had not even food enough for its crews.

Bonaparte's delight in the success of his plot to involve the Baltic Powers in the war can therefore be imagined. Between them they possessed 123 ships of the line with an immediate potential of 24 battleships and 25 frigates while the hulks in harbour were being fitted out. With such a force, operating from a semi-inland sea, the British blockade could be outflanked and broken in the spring; then with a combined fleet of perhaps a hundred sail of the line the threat to Ireland and of a direct invasion of England could be renewed. The shortage of naval stores which was crippling every effort to restore the French Marine would then be reversed. Faced, as always at the end of a long war, by a serious domestic timber shortage, Britain in her turn would lose the source of supply

from which five-sixths of her imported masts and timbers were derived. Her defeat would then be certain.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Bonaparte felt that his alliance with the Tsar far outweighed his victory over the Emperor. For it would enable him to " dominate England "; to do what had

E

roved impossible after his earlier victory in
'97
and without which e could not rule the world. His ascendancy over the mind of the autocrat of Russia was now complete. " Whenever I see a man," Paul addressed him, " who knows how to govern, my heart goes out to him. I write to you of my feelings about England—the country that champions the rights of all peoples yet is ruled only by greed and selfishness. I wish to ally myself with you to end that Government's injustices." His Ambassador paraded the scene o£ Suvorof's conquests with the French and Russian flags interlocked, announcing that the two great nations of the Continent should henceforward be eternally united for the peace of mankind. The Napoleonic myth was taking shape: of a heaven-born deliverer sent to re-unify Europe and save its civilisation from the perfidious dividing usurer of the seas.

It was not in thi
s light that the people of Britain saw their country. Friendless and alone against a world in arms, the lion, as Colhngwood put it, took his stand at the mouth of his cave.
¹
At the beginning of February, 1801, Austria made her formal peace at Luneville in a treaty which secured to France in perpetuity the Rhine and Adige frontiers, and an increase of a sixth in her population. The conqueror was thus free to concentrate his entire force against England. " Thus," he told his slaves, " will that nation which has armed itself against France be taught to abjure its excessive pretensions and learn at length the great truth that, for peoples as for individuals, there can be no security for real prosperity but an the happiness of all."
²

As always in the hour of adversity, Pitt's spirits—for months past oppressed by gout—soared into a serener air. His reply to threats was to attack. On January 14th, when the full extent of the Baltic League became realised in London, the Cabinet gave immediate orders for an embargo on the ships of the contracting Powers. At the same time letters of marque were issued to seize all Russian, Swedish and Danish ships on the high seas. So promptly did the

¹
Collingwood,
82.
²
Alison,
V,
472.

Navy act that nearly fifty per cent of the tonnage of the Baltic States at sea was brought in the next few months into British ports.

Already the Cabinet was committed to an offensive in the Mediterranean. In the autumn of 1800, as soon as the weakness of Austria and the trend of Russian policy had become apparent, Dundas, with his eye on India, had urged that no effort should be spared to destroy the French army in Egypt while there was still time. On October 6th orders had been given for a joint expedition against that country from Malta, India and the Cape of Good Hope. The. plan was wildly sanguine, took little account of the difficulties of co-operation over such vast distances and grossly underestimated French strength. It was largely based on wishful thinking about a few defeatist and homesick letters found in a captured mailbag and subsequently given immense publicity in England. Yet it also showed a certain imperial vision which Dundas, prosaic journeyman though he was, inherited from Chatham. And it displayed— what Britain most needed at that moment—courage and daring.

On November 24th Abercromby and Moore had reached Malta. A month later they sailed, under the majestic escort of the Mediterranean Fleet, with 16,000 troops for Marmaris Bay in Asia Minor to co-operate with the Turkish authorities for a landing near Alexandria and to purchase supplies, of which they were in great need. Dundas's letter to Lord Wellesley (as Mornington had now become) reached India early in 1801 and was followed by the dispatch of a force under Major-General David Baird to the Red Sea, where a squadron had already been sent by Spencer from the Cape under Home Popham. The Government was pitting concentri
c sea power against a purely mili
tary force operating on interior lines —a trial of strength on a small scale foreshadowing greater conflicts to come.

In her bold and realist policy of anticipation Britain carried her offensive against the First Consul into even remoter places. Early in 1800 the great Governor-General had sent the thirty-year-old John Malcolm on a twelve months' journey to Teheran and Bagdad to exclude the French from Persia and Mesopotamia and forestall Bonaparte's plans to march on India. Nothing could have been more timely. For when Malcolm was setting the seal on his laborious mission
with
an Anglo-Persian treaty of commerce, the First Consul was perfecting a grandiose scheme with his ally, the

Tsar
, for a French march along the Da
nube to the Black Sea and Caspia
n and a junction with a Russian army at Astrakhan for a joint drive on India.

Before these brave measures could bear fruit, the Cabinet which had conceived them had dissolved. At the beginning of February, 1801, the country was shaken by the greatest political crisis of the war. Ever since the Irish Rebellion
Pitt and the new Viceroy, Corn
wallis, had been pushing forward plans for a Union of the British and Irish Parliaments. The measure, however mistakenly, appeared to them to offer the only means of ending the fatal unrest of Ireland and freeing the Empire from a constant peril at its heart. All through 2799 and 1800,
with
the war at a critical stage and the combined fleets lying at Brest, 50,000 British regulars had remained in Ireland to guard against the joint dangers of invasion and revolution. Survival, let alone final victory, depended on a solution. " Something must be done," wrote Lord Carlisle, " or we must fight for Ireland once a week."

Union seemed the one way out. By removing the fatal dualism that poisoned every attempt to alleviate the lot of Ireland, a sane and honest administration of Irish affairs might become possible. It would be the British reply to that policy of centralisation which in a few years had transformed the old, weak, federal constitution of France into the most powerful single unit of government in the world. The disappearance of selfish commercial and fiscal barriers between the two countries would bring prosperity to the " distress-fill island." Above all it would be a step, as Cornwallis said, to a real partnership with the Irish nation instead of with a corrupt ruling faction which only represented a tithe of it.

The measure was bitterly opposed by the fanatic Protestant minority and the graceful and dissipated aristocracy which regarded its governing monopoly and its freedom from the pedantic control of Westminster as an inalienable personal property. Such opposition could only be overcome by coercion or bribery. It was the English way to choose the latter. " I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work," wrote Cornwallis, " and am only supported by the reflection that without an Union the British Empire must be dissolved."
¹
The place-holders and

¹
Pitt
and
the
Great
War,
424.