Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (10 page)

Next Bonaparte stressed the disparity in strength between the two countries. France, with a population swollen by conquest to many times England's, had half a million men in arms: a number which could be doubled at any moment. Yet, since a terrible struggle would be necessary before she could out-build England's Fleet and destroy her mastery of the seas, it would be better for the two nations, acting together, to rule the world; their strife could only overturn it. But the British Government must choose between peace and war.' If peace, the Treaty must be executed, the Press controlled and protection to French traitors withdrawn. If war, it was only necessary to say so.

He had tried to be a good friend, but his friendship had been spurned. He would now show how terrible his enmity could be. It would be useless for England to seek allies, for none would dare to aid her. What then could she do ?

Tor nearly two hours the British Ambassador remained silent under this tirade. At last he contrived to speak of his countrymen's unchanged desire for peace. But when, he added, they saw the violent changes wrought in Europe, they could not remain silent. The very understanding both countries needed depended on British security against France's growing acquisitions. " What ?" shouted Bonaparte with a coachman's filthy oath, "you mean France has got Piedmont and part of Switzerland: two miserable bagatelles of which you thought so little at the time that you said nothing! What right have you to speak of them now?"
¹

Bonaparte never believed in half measures. He had set out to bully Aldington's England out of Malta, and he was resolved to make the English people see he meant business. Two days after his interview with Whit worth he sent a message to the French Legislature boasting of France's strength. "In London," he announced, " there are two factions struggling for power; one of them has made peace, the other has sworn implaccable hatred to France. While this partisan strife lasts, the Republic must take precautions. Half a million must be ready to defend and avenge her.... Alone England can never resist her!"

If anything could have aligned the British people against the peace, it was this taunt. A few weeks before Windham had been lamenting that their only attitude to their impending fate was "Let us eat, drink and be merry for to-morrow we die!" Fashionable conversation revolved- round the crush at Mrs. Jordan's last performance, the doings of the Pic-nic Society, or the progress of the shooting season in Norfolk. It now turned almost in a night to French atrocities in San Domingo and the iniquity of British merchants who had chartered ships to help the French in such a horrible business. In vain did the Attorney-General wring from a reluctant jury a verdict of criminal libel against the journalist Peltier for calling the head of the French State a tiger; in vain the gentle Addington explained to Lord Malmesbury that it was necessary, if peace was to be preserved, to bear the insolences of the French dictator like a gentleman those of a drunk cabman. Bonaparte, Betsey Fremantle confided to her diary, was a treacherous monster.

By overplaying his hand the First Consul had awoken the most easily gulled and most stubborn of all his enemies. That experienced diplomat, Lord Auckland, expressed astonishment that he should have been so impolitic. " Had he amused us a year or two," he wrote, "our dupery would have been complete and we should not have had a chance of effectual resistance." Now, while far away the fast

¹
Browning, 66-8, 78-84; Castlcreagh, V, 70, 75; Malmesbury, IV, 191, 195-6, 216.

British troops embarked at the Cape,
¹
the London mob, which nine months before had dragged the French envoy's carriage through the street, sang bellicose ballads, and that erstwhile appeaser, Lord Nelson, demonstrating with the Downing Street fire
-
irons, told the Prime Minister that it did not matter what way he laid the poker on the floor, provided that, when Bonaparte said it
must
be placed in one direction, he immediately
insisted
upon its being laid in some other.

Indeed Castlereagh, the man who had been most responsible for this change of front, was forced to counsel restraint. There was now a danger that Ministers would be stampeded into war by the force of public opinion and, in their determination to stand firm ov
er Malta, put themselves in the
wrong by clinging too rigidly to that which they had undertaken to surrender. The First Consul, since he could loosen the British grip on the island in no other way, had now secured from the Czar the provisional guarantee of Maltese independence which Russia, in common with the other great Powers, had hitherto withheld. He was also doing his best to use the disputed island to create friction between Russia and England, encouraging the former to oppose in the name of the Knights native Maltese rights which the British had promised to protect, and hinting that the latter might obtain security by dismantling the Valetta fortifications and so incurring the onus of exposing the Mediterranean to Tunisian pirates. Castlereagh, who had a far clearer head than either Addington or Hawkesbury, saw that in any prolonged war two things would be essential—the unquestioning confidence of the British people in their cause, and the goodwill of the only Continental Power which had proved its ability to stand up to the French.

On February 28th, therefore, revised instructions were sent to Whitworth. He was to point out that Britain had fulfilled every condition of the Treaty except the evacuation of Malta, which had been delayed only for want of the Powers' guarantee and because of threatening French moves in Italy and the East. If Napoleon would guarantee the integrity of the Turkish Empire, make amends for his encroachments in Europe and offer "substantial security" for the island's independence, the British garrison would be withdrawn.

Yet, even had Napoleon been willing to give Britain the satisfaction she asked, nothing could have stayed the tide set in motion by his anger. The British were now angry too and on their guard. On

¹
To the grief, it would appear, of the natives, who " dreaded the change of an English for a Dutch Government, fearing everything from their experienced inhumanity."— Farington, II, 114.

March 8th, while icy gales swept out of the north, a Royal Message was read to Parliament calling for precautions against hostile preparations in the ports of France and Holland. At the same time it was revealed that French commercial agents, sent to England to collect data for a trade treaty, had been transmitting through the post detailed surveys of British harbours. An addition of 10,000 men for the Navy was voted unanimously. Nobody wanted war, but after so many shocks the country was in stubborn mood.

These measures acted on the First Consul's nature like an emetic. On March 13th, at a Sunday Drawing Room, he bore down on the British Ambassador and declared in the presence of a large gathering, " So you are bent on war!" When the astonished Ambassador replied that his countrymen, after fighting for so many years, were far too conscious of the blessings of peace, Bonaparte retorted, " But now you mean to force me to fight for fifteen more years!" Again, after telling the Russian and Spanish Ambassadors that the British did not keep their word, he paced back to Whitworth. Shaking his stick so that the tall, stately Englishman thought he was about to strike, he repeatedly demanded the reason for such uncalled-for armaments. "If you arm," he shouted,
"I
shall arm too; if you fight, I will fight also! You think to destroy France; you will never intimidate her!"

The Ambassador who, though outwardly calm, was wondering what he ought to do with his sword if Bonaparte assaulted him, replied that his country did not wish to do either, but only to live on good terms with France.

" Then you should respect treaties! Bad luck to those who cannot respect treaties! They must answer for their breach to Europe." And, repeating the last sentence, the dictator flounced out of the room.
¹

Strangely enough, though it caused intense excitement, the incident reassured the English. For they supposed that in making a scene in public—to them a sure sign of weakness—the First Consul had shown that he was merely bluffing. They shared Whitworth's view, expressed after Napoleon's earlier outburst, that the only object of such tantrums was to bully them into concessions otherwise unobtainable. From this time stories multiplied of his unpopularity, the hatred of his oppressive taxes and conscriptions, the growing power of his Republican rivals. Whitworth, a great believer in such tales, reported that if the First Consul involved France in war he would be assassinated. After March 13th many Englishmen came to believe that he was a mere madman like the

¹
Browning,
115-19, 125; Argyll, I, 36; Farington, II, 87-8.

Czar Paul whose bark was worse than his bite. His hysterical fits of temper, they felt, marked the beginning of the end.
¹

An adroit diplomacy was quick to exploit such wishful thinking. In London the French Ambassador, Count Andreossy, impressed on Hawkesbury the danger of renewed Jacobin violence in the event of an "unsuccessful invasion of England and the fall of the dictator. But though the Foreign Office, convinced that the latter must now climb down over Malta, was inclined to swallow the bait, nothing could have been further from the truth. Bonaparte was not yet ready for war, and still hoped to avoid a premature resort to arms which would endanger his long-term plans for world' domination. But he meant to get Malta out of British hands at all costs. He had always had his way, and weakness was alien to his temper and philosophy. It was his rule that those who thwarted him must be immediately smashed. At the f
irst news of English mobilisatio
n he gave orders for five hundred invasion craft to be assembled in the Channel ports and for the permanent military occupation of Switzerland and Holland.

With Decaen's expedition still on the way to Pondicherry and the bulk of his available warships on the far side of the Atlantic, he was forced to play for time till they could reach safety. He used the occasion for a display of moderation to trick the European Powers into the belief that a restless and meddlesome Britain was endangering the peace of the world through her insatiable greed for an island which she had promised to evacuate. In this he was much assisted by Hawkesbury and Whitworth, who were by now so obsessed with the formula—Malta or war—and harped on it so insistently that they obscured the real issue. Despite Castlereagh's repeated memoranda to the Cabinet, they failed to marshal Bonaparte's breaches of the Treaty and their own undeniable grievances and lost the thread of their argument in vague and partial protests and proposals.

But though Napoleon and Talleyrand used the shortcomings of the British leaders to make them look foolish, there was one thing they could not do. Nothing would induce the latter to relax their grip on Malta. Though a few infatuated Francophils and appeasers— traitors and intruding rascals, declared Whitworth, who disgraced the name of Englishmen—hinted hopefully in Paris that Downing Street was bluffing, they were soon given the lie. On April 4th, angered by delay and evasions, the British raised their terms.

¹
Sec Gillray's cartoon, "Maniac Ravings or Lit
tle Boney in a Strong Fit"; Mal
mesbury, IV, 189, 202, 235, 238; Brown
ing, 84, 88, 100, 127-8, 133; We
llesley, I, 163; Granville, I, 390; Moore, II, 169; Romilly, 78; Auckland, IV, 164; Barante, 53-6.

Whit
worth was instructed to ask not only for perpetual possession of Malta, the Treasury indemnifying the Knights of St. John, but for the withdrawal 6f French troops from Holland and Switzerland. In return Britain would recognise the puppet Kingdom of Etruria and—provided a satisfactory settlement was made for the House of Savoy—the Italian and Ligurian Republics. If the French made counter-proposals affording comparable security and compensation, they would be sympathetically considered. If not, Whitworth was to leave Paris.

This ultimatum was met by an attitude of bland astonishment. Talleyrand, after reading it with polite attention, asked Whitworth for a list of the points on which it was so unaccountably argued that the French Government had failed to provide satisfaction. In a second interview he stated that First Consul was deeply hurt at the use of the word "satisfaction." It implied superiority, and by requiring it the British were arrogating to themselves a position which no Frenchman could permit. As for Malta, the First Consul with his delicate sense of honour would sooner be cut to pieces than permit the British to retain it in defiance of an international obligation. But when this produced no impression, Talleyrand asked whether some modification of the demands capable of satisfying both parties was not possible. If a Neapolitan garrison would not afford security to England, could not Malta be held by a mixed international force composed of English, French, Italians, Germans? When Whitworth refused to discuss this, the Foreign Minister insisted on a mental tour of Europe in search of some neutral guaranteeing Power and some compensatory Mediterranean island capable of affording an equivalent security—Crete, Corfu or some Turkish trifle in the Aegean Archipelago ? Could nothing be found to satisfy the British?
¹