Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (23 page)

While Pitt was forcing the issue to secure his offensive, Napoleon was becoming aware of the net which Downing Street was spinning round him. At the very moment that he was symbolising his triumph over the old Europe by crowning himself Emperor of the Franks in the presence of a trembling Pope, the Czar's emissary was closeted with the British Prime Minister. Behind her watery barriers perfidious Albion was employing her ancient wiles and bribes to rally the armies of the corrupt
ancien regime
in the new Charlemagne's rear. On December
3rd,
the day after his coronation, she signed a secret convention with Sweden securing, for £80,000, the use of the Baltic island of Riigen and the fortress of Stralsund for an Anglo-Russian landing on the Pomeranian mainland. Three weeks later her Ambassador at St. Petersburg reported that Austria, heartened by the promise o'f British gold and Russian armies, was ready to collaborate in imposing a reasonable peace on France.

There was only one possible response from Napoleon.

¹
The British Government subsequently refu
nded his fortune.—Wheeler and Br
oadley, II,
.

In the
opening days of the New Year he sent an ultimatum to Vienna demanding an immediate explanation of Austria's intentions and a cessation of military activity. Simultaneously he addressed a note to London, proposing—in the name of humanity—an end to a useless war. Though still unaware of how dangerous his enemy was, he saw that so long as Pitt retained power, he would continue to be thwarted at every turn. By offering peace he would divide the English either from their Prime Minister or their allies. If Pitt refused to treat they would repudiate him as a war-monger, while if he did so the Russians would lose faith in him.

Napoleon counted on the weakness of Pitt's position. Since the failure of his plans for a national Government the Prime Minister had had to maintain himself with a weak Front Bench and the narrowest of parliamentary majorities. Against him were ranged his former allies, the Grenvilles—" the cousinhood" who, according to the King, were resolved to rule or ruin the State—and the Foxites who pinned their rising hopes on Carlton House and spoke of Pitt as
"a
rapacious, selfish, shabby villain surrounded by shabby partisans." He had only been able to retain a precarious majority by a humiliating reconciliation with Addington, who at Christmas had entered his Cabinet as Lord Sidmouth with a family following of Hobarts and Bathursts. Even his staunchest adherents were divided. A simple sailorman back from the Mediterranean was bewildered at finding White's, once the sacred rallying-ground of all Pittites, a hive of faction, while the needs of the country seemed forgotten in the clamour for offices and pensions.
¹
Meanwhile Society could talk of nothing but a theatrical prodigy of thirteen called Master Betty—the infant Roscius—who in the Christmastide of 1804 filled Drury Lane with hysterical peeresses and emotional statesmen and even changed the fashionable hour of dinner. " You would not suspect," wrote Lady Bessborough, " that Europe was in a state of warfare and bondage."
²

Yet Napoleon's eminently reasonable exposition of the blessings of peace failed to achieve the results he expected. He made the mistake, in the first place, of sending it, not to the Foreign Office but to the King whom, with the natural vanity of a newly-crowned head, he addressed as royal brother.

¹
Cornwallis-West,
419.
"Such things are;" wrote Nelson, "politicians are not like other men."—Nicolas, VI,
123.
Sec also Barham, III,
56.

²
Granville, I,
486, 489-90, 494-5;
11
,38-40;
Ashton,
325-6, 330;
Barbauld,
105;
Horner, I,
275, 298;
Auckland, IV,
223;
Farrington, II,
285;
Brougnton, I,
136;
Tw
o Duchesses,
191-2, 195, 201, 207,
.

This merely annoyed the old man and struck his subjects as an impertinence. And though, after two years of what General Moore called the " confinement without
the occupation of war," the English badly wanted peace, they did not want it with Napoleon. They had tried that at Amiens. What they wanted was his death. For as long as he lived, they did not believe there could be peace.
¹

Napoleon's ruse, therefore, failed to overthrow the new Prime Minister. Nor did it cause a breach between England and Russia. Instead it gave Pitt a chance to convince the latter of his good faith. While the Foreign Office frigidly addressed " the head of the French Government," informing him that his Majesty would take counsel of his friends in Europe, a dispatch was sent to St. Petersburg accepting the Russian proposals and detailing the contribution Britain was ready to make to the common cause.

But t
he peace offensive was only one
move in Napoleon's campaign to unhorse Pitt. Even as he launched it, he ordered the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons to open their attack on Britain's colonies and commerce. Nothing was more likely to shake Pitt's parliamentary power than a run of bad news from the sugar islands and trade routes. Already the winter had brought alarming intelligence from India, where Wellesley's first Mahratta War had been followed by a second—undertaken by the imperious Governor-General without the least reference to what he called "that loathsome den, the India Office," or even to the Government. The great chieftain, Holkar, declaring that his house was the saddle on his horse's back, had reverted to the predatory cavalry war of Hindustan and inflicted a disastrous reverse on a British column in the jungle. Even when better news arrived at Christmas public disquiet continued, partly on account of the cost of these repeated campaigns, partly on moral grounds. The little Irish proconsul's "system of conquest" made no appeal to the English imagination; Wilberforce was puzzled to distinguish between French aggression in Europe and British in India.
"I
do not delight much in East-Indian victories and extensions of the Empire," wrote Lord Sheffield. All this helped to discredit Pitt, who had first sent Wellesley to India. Seizing his opportunity, Napoleon on January 16th drafted a last-minute supplement to his grand project by which the Brest fleet, after embarking 15,000 troops, was to release the Ferrol squadron and sail for India to "make terrible war on England."

In other words the logic of sea power was forcing Napoleon back on the policy of '98: of action not against England's heart but against the circumference from winch he imagined she drew her

¹
I ardently wish," wrote Nelson, "that it would please God to take him out of the world." Nicolas, V,
338, 479;
VI,
205;
Collingwood,
98-9;
Ashton,
112-14;
Colchester I,
535-6;
Horner,
282
.

strength.
¹
All over the world were British trading stations and richly laden merchantmen whose only protection was the thin wooden crust of the blockade along the western and southern seaboard of Europe. There was so much to defend that Britain's naval resources appeared insufficient for the task. Spain's entry into the war had further narrowed her dwindling margin of safety. By a treaty signed in Madrid on January 4th, 1805, Napoleon secured the promise of thirty-two Spanish ships of the line by the spring. Till they were ready Spain, with her position athwart England's trade routes, afforded a splendid springboard for diversionary raids into the western and southern Atlantic.

Already, spurred on by their master's orders and aided by winter gales, the commanders of the Rochefort and Toulon squadrons had sailed on t
heir West Indian mission. Missie
ssy, with 3500 troops packed in his five battleships and attendant cruisers, escaped from Rochefort in-a snowstorm on January nth while Sir Thomas Graves's blockading division was watering in Quiberon Bay. Owing to a British frigate grounding on a reef he was able to get clean away, leaving the Admiralty guessing. A week later Latouche-Treville's successor, Villeneuve, put out of Toulon with eleven of the line and nine cruisers. Nelson, who had been praying for him to come out, was victualling in Maddalena Bay when his frigates brought the news. In three hours he was under way, leading his ships in a north
-
westerly gale- through the dangerous Biche Passage and standing along the eastern coast of Sardinia for Cagliari. With the wind hauling every minute more into the west, he had three main anxieties—Sardinia, the Two Sicilies, and Egypt, for he knew that the French had embarked troops. On the 26th, battered by the gale, he reached Cagliari to learn that no landing had been made. He at once sailed with the wind for Palermo to save Naples and Sicily.

For Nelson's duty was clear. Only by preventing the enemy from invading the neutral countries of the central and eastern Mediterranean could he maintain the command of the sea on which Pitt's plans for the offensive depended. "On this side," he had written a year before, " Bonaparte is the most vulnerable. It is from here that it would be most easy to mortify his pride and humble him."

From this strategic principle nothing could deflect him, not even his longing for glory and an early return to his mistress and daughter. Aching to meet the enemy, he continued to put first things first. "I would willingly have half of mine burnt to effect
their destruction," he wrote on January 25th, "I am in a fever; God send I may find them!" But he refused to uncover the vital point that he had been sent to defend, and kept his eastward course for Sicily.

¹
"The French," wrote an American observer, "believe that the fountains of British wealth arc in India and China. They never appear to understand that the most abundant source is her agriculture, her manufacturers and the foreign demand."—Mahan, II,
146.
See Castlere
agh, V,
413-15.

By the 30th Nelson knew that the island key to the central Mediterranean was safe. The French had made no attempt to attack Neapolitan territory. With the prevailing westerly gales they must have put back into Toulon or sailed ahead of him, as in '98, to Egypt or Greece. To secure the Turkish provinces and the overland route to Egypt, he therefore pressed on through the Straits of Messina towards the Morea and Alexandria. Here on February 7th, as he had predicted, he found the Turks unprepared, the fortifications unmanned and the garrison asleep. With a week's start, he told the Governor of Malta, the enemy could have made the place impregnable.

But the French were back in Toulon. Three days of storm and the thought of the victor of the Nile had been too much for Ville-neuve and his untrained crews. "These gentlemen," wrote Nelson, who in twenty-one months had never set foot on shore or lost a spar,
¹
" are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyons gale. . . . Bonaparte has often made his boast that our fleet would be worn out by keeping the sea and that his was kept, in order and increasing by staying in port; but he now finds, I fancy, that his fleet suffers more in a night than ours in a year." At that moment Napoleon was raging over Villeneuve's complaints about his ships and sailors, the soldiers who littered the decks in sea-sick heaps, the broken yard-arms and rotten sails. "The great evil of our Navy," he declared, "is that the men who command it are unused to the risks of command. What is to be done with Admirals who allow their spirits to sink and resolve to be beaten home at the first damage they suffer?"

But Missicssy at least had got away. Of stouter stuff than Villeneuve, he had carried out his orders, mastered the Atlantic storms and with his troops was now presumably playing havoc in the West Indies. Soon the news of his depredations would bring down the City about Pitt's ears and send the British squadrons scurrying from their covering positions in the Bay to the outer oceans. Encouraged by an abject reply from the Austrian Court to his ultimatum, Napoleon once more resumed his plan for a direct blow at England's heart. With the promise of twelve Spanish battleships at Cadiz, six at Cartagena and seven at Ferrol by the summer,

¹
Nicolas, VI,
352:
"Such a place as the Gulf of Lyons for gales of wind from the N.W. to
N.E.
I never saw."—
Idem,
V,
302.
"We have
nothing but incessant gales of wind and I am absolutely worn out."—
Idem,
VI,
98;
also
153, 156.

he had a last chance to destroy her before her Continental hirelings could be mobilised.

In the first days of March, therefore, the Emperor drqw up his third and final Grand Design. The Brest squadron, now twenty-one ships of the line, was to sail at once, release Admiral Gourdon's battleships from Ferrol and make
for the West Indies, where Mis
siessy was ordered to await its
arrival. Simultaneously Villene
uve was to renew his attempt to reach the Atlantic, collect the Spanish and French ships in Cadiz and join Ganteaume at Martinique where each Admiral, after landing his troops on the British islands, was to await the other for forty days. Then the combined battle-fleet, more than forty strong, was to return to the Channel, brush aside the outnumbered Western Squadron and appear off Boulogne in June. By that time the Grand Army and Marmont's 25,000 at the Texel would be at full strength and perfected in their embarkation exercises.