Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (20 page)

" If blocks can a nation deliver, Two places are safe from the French: The one is the mouth of the river, The other the Treasury Bench!"

Yet few were prepared to put the Opposition leaders into power. "Neither Mr. Fox's principles nor Lord Grenville's .manners are popular," wrote Auckland. Their unnatural union inspired no confidence. Only one man had the power to break the solid Tory majority. So long as Pitt held himself bound by his old promise to Addington and remained at Walmer, the Government was safe. And as Addington enjoyed the King's favour and was sustained by

¹
Corbett,
26.
²
Paget Papers,
II,
97.
91

an invincible belief in his own integrity, Canning feared the Administration would hobble on and outlive the country.

From this
impasse
England was rescued by a domestic calamity. The old King, catching a chill while inspecting Volunteers in the rain, went off his head. For some time he had been showing signs of growing eccentricity; his attendants had only with difficulty prevented him from opening Parliament with the words, " My Lords and Peacocks!"
¹
In February, 1804, his malady took a graver turn, and for a few days his life was despaired of. Visions of a new reign or at best a Regency floated before a horrified country. No one save a few irresponsible
F
rondeurs
at Brooks's cared to contemplate the accession of the fat, bloated, disreputable occupant of Carlton House. The comic hero of Gargantuan drinking bouts, astronomically in debt, separated from his legal wife and living with a Roman Catholic whom he had morganatically married, and at daggers drawn with his own brothers and father, the forty-one-year-old Prince of Wales was a national menace.

It was at this point that Pitt came to the conclusion that the Government must be replaced. Private reports reaching him of the state of the Fleet and Army were increasingly disquieting. The reins could no-longer be left in the Prime Minister's flaccid hands. A strong Government had become an urgent necessity. To return to office meant Pitt's repudiation not only of his pledge to Addington but of his championship of the Irish Catholic cause for which he had resigned. Yet it was a sacrifice of honour he could no longer refuse. The royal insanity that had attended his resignation now enforced his return.

In the spring of 1804, therefore, Pitt returned to town and joined with Fox and Grenville in the attack on the Administration. On St. George's Day he rose after his lifelong rival to ridicule the Army of Reserve Suspension Bill with which Ministers were trying to patch up their military policy. Under Ins "high indignant stare" and that bitter freezing sarcasm which contemporaries thought his highest parliamentary talent the Government collapsed. It scarcely troubled to defend itself, and the Attorney-General in reply almost openly confessed that he wished Pitt in Addington's place. Two days later Pitt soared above the petty details of parish rota and ballot to focus the attention of the House on the real issue. "We are come to a new era in the history of nations; we arc called to struggle for the destiny, not of this country alone but of the civilised world. We must remember that it is not only for ourselves that we submit to unexampled privations. We have for ourselves the great duty of

¹
Glenbe
rvie, I,
384.

self-preservation to perform; but the duty of the people of E
ngland now is of a nobler and h
igher order. . . . Amid the wreck and the misery of nations
it
is our just exultation that we have continued superior to all that ambition or that despotism could effect; and bur still higher exultation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the iron yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of a free people can effect."
¹

Next day Addington resigned. The King, slowly recovering his mental health, struggled for a few days to save his favourite: then on May
7th
sent for Pitt. For a moment it looked as though the impossible was about to happen, and that, in the hour of the nation's need, the talents of all Parties were to be welded under its first statesman.

But the old King's crazed mind and conscience spoilt all. Nothing would induce him to receive his bugbear, Fox, into the Cabinet. The dream of a " large comprehensive Administration" vanished at his touch. Pitt had no alternative but to acquiesce, for persistence might have precipitated a royal relapse and a Regency. Though Fox generously promised the new Government his support, his followers and the Grenvilles refused to join on the ground that it was based on "exclusion." Pitt was left to take office alone, with a Cabinet of Tory mediocrities.

On the day that Pitt resumed his seat as Prime Minister, Napoleon was declared Emperor of the French by a
Senatus Consultum.
The immediate cause of his elevation was an assassination plot, in which the Addington Administration had rashly implicated itself. Like all governments with a weak head, its right hand never knew what its left was doing, and, while it gave official encouragement to a projected Royalist-Republican rising, certain of the Under-Secretaries became privy to a far more disreputable plan to mu
rder the First Consul. From the
start the tangled threads of this dual conspiracy were held, not by Downing Street but by Fouche, who retained in his pay one of the principal conspirators. This creature, a notorious
agent provocateur,
imposed without difficulty on the garrulous emigres and their English patrons. In the course of the
denouement
two famous Republican generals, Moreau and Pichegru, were arrested, the latter and the Breton chief, Georges Cadoudal, paying the forfeit with their lives. The complicity of Downing Street was proved by the seizure—on neutral soil—of the papers of an indiscreet British agent.

¹
Coupland,
332-3.

By giving the affair the widest possible publicity, Napoleon won over the Republican elements who had hitherto opposed his craving for hereditary honours. Realisation of the slender thread on which his life hung re-awoke fears of a Bourbon restoration. All who had lands or heads to lose, particularly the Regicides, became convinced that their only safety lay in making the Consulship hereditary. Under Fouchc's skilful hand petitions to assume the crown poured in on the First Consul. On April 23rd the Tribunate voted the adoption of the hereditary principle, Carnot alone protesting. Four weeks later the Ajaccio lawyer's son assumed the purple. A plebiscite confirmed his apotheosis.
"I
came to give France a King," said the dying Cadoudal, "and I have given her an Emperor!"

There could hardly have been a greater contrast than that between the two national leaders. On the one side was the frail, tired Minister who took over Addington's neglected estate with a precarious majority in the Commons and a discredited foreign policy. On the other was the absolute master of France at the height of his mental and physical powers, served by the greatest army in the world. The one was the servant of a half-crazed monarch, a divided Parliament and a stubborn, liberty-loving people. The other could do unreservedly what he chose with his own.

Yet as Napoleon's genius was untrammelled, so were his weaknesses. Ambition, passion and arrogance were the defects of his marvellous energy and intellect. Success intoxicated him and made him mad. Then in his petulant anger he defied not only men but the gods: his cool, pellucid mind seemed to become the prey of some terrible daemon. Madame de Remusat, who was intimate with him, described how sooner or later every rule became a constraint and its breach an irresistible craving. He refused to submit for long to anything, even grammar. "He cannot dress himself," she wrote; "his valet dresses him as he would a child. When he unrobes himself at night, he snatches his clothes off impatiently and throws them on the floor as if they were an unaccustomed and useless weight." Visiting Fontainebleau ten years later, Haydon was immensely struck by a picture of Napoleon painted about this time: the yellow complexion, the tip of the nose tinged with red, the tight, resolute mouth and liquorish, glassy eyes staring without pity. The portrait," with its complete absence of mercy, breeding or high
-
mindedness," reminded Haydon of the reptile house at the Jardin des Plantes. This man, so superhuman in his powers, was almost sub-human in his maniacal egoism. It was the reverse of his dazzling genius.

In the course of the exposure of the conspiracy that raised him to the throne Napoleon made a fata
l blunder. Like his decision to
invade England it was a mistake of temperament. Enraged by the clumsy plot against his life, he sent his cavalry on March 14th across the Rhine to seize on neutral soil the young Bourbon Due d'Enghien, then living with his bride in the Electorate of Baden. Finding no evidence against him, he had him summarily shot after a drumhead court-martial in tne Castle of Vincennes.

D'Enghien's murder horrified Europe. It gave Pitt his opportunity. When the Continental cause seemed most lost and England in her resistance to tyranny most lonely, it suddenly played into his hands. It shattered the comfortable legend, flowering in servile, hothouse Courts, that the young conqueror was no Jacobin but a pious and law-abiding sovereign. At the very moment that he took his place among the crowned heads of Europe, he proved himself the untamed heir not only of the Revolution but of the Terror. The weak guilt of English bureaucrats as accessories before the fact of which he had made so much was condoned by his far more glaring guilt as principal in a more resounding crime. The English, he proclaimed, had tried to commit murder, and with the same breath he committed it himself in the face of all the world.

To them—his implacable enemies—the crime of Ettenheim offered a gleam of hope. It scarcely seemed possible that the European Powers would not be roused by the injuries of what Lord Paget called "the most savage Devil that ever disgraced human nature."
¹
Nelson thought that, if the young Emperors of Austria and Russia condoned this latest invasion of territory they had sworn to protect, they would deserve the worst that could happen. To the Czar Alexander in particular Napoleon's act was a direct insult, for not only had he guaranteed the new frontiers of the Reich, but Baden was his father-in-law's patrimony.

For some time the few Englishmen who dared to look abroad had seen in Russia the last hope of the Continent—"a great Power destined to assume the part so clearly marked out for her and come forward to settle Europe and ensure the permanency of peace."
²
But so long as Addington ruled in Downing Street and Hawkesbury with his " vacant grin" presided over the Foreign Office, there was little hope of co-operation from the proud, warlike barbarians of the North who, despising half-measures and half-men, would do business with greatness but never with mediocrity. Resentful of the British Government's attitude over Malta and its rejection of the Czar's offer of mediation, St. Peter
sburg had reverted to its tradi
tional

¹
Paget Papers,
II,
1
-9.

²
Malmesbury, IV,
241;
sec also Browning,
117.

defensive policy of suspicion and guile. It preserved friendly relations with Paris and was chillingly correct towards the Court of St. James's.
¹

Yet in the long run there was no place for a Power so independent as Russia in Napoleon's scheme of things. So long as the British Navy hemmed h
im in to the north, west and sout
h, there was only one direction in which he could expand. Sooner or later he was bound to turn east. For the moment his concentration on the Channel and Nelson's watch in the Mediterranean secured Russia from danger. Yet the very measures Napoleon took to hoodwink Nelson and make the British think he was aiming at the Orient instead of their own shores awoke Russian fears. The troops in the Calabrian ports threatening Sicily and the Morea, the sedulous talk of a new expedition to Egypt and the great armament fitting out in Toulon with so much ostentation, all pointed to a quarter which Russia regarded as her own.

Pitt had always realised this. But except for Castlereagh no member of Addington's Cabinet had been able to see that, while France remained untamed, the ultimate interests of Britain and Russia were the same. The smaller vision of the men of Amiens was focused on the differences between the two great Asiatic Powers: the suspicion over Malta, the Muscovite patronage of the Christians in Turkey, the growing Russian military establishments in Tiflis and Georgia with their threat to Persia, Afghanistan and distant India. Sir John Warre
n, the worthy Admiral whom Hawke
sbury had sent to St. Petersburg as Ambassador, was a great conductor of such fears. Even Nelson, though a lifelong advocate of friendly relations with Russia, had doubts of her
bona fi
des
and expected to see her seize Greece or Constantinople with French connivance.
²

Pitt's first act on taking office, therefore, was to open negotiations with St. Petersburg. The young Czar, Alexander, had recently been fired by his Polish Minister, Czartoryski, with the desire to become the patron of the smaller nations. That spring, alarmed by French intrigues in Albania, he had sent a preventative expedition from Sevastopol to Corfu and had hinted at Anglo-Russian collaboration in the Two Sicilies. So long as Britain declined to send troops abroad and persisted in regarding every Russian move with suspicion, little could be done. But with Addington's fall, an understanding between the tw
o surviving free
Powers became possible.