Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (4 page)

¹
Dyott,
i,
230; Berry,
ii,
181.
²
Young, 386-7. 3
Romilly,
ii,
87, 99-100; Farington,
ii,
13; Granville,
i,
385.

the husband from the wife. Make as many bedrooms as you please, but only
one
for me and Madame Bonaparte." Such claptrap did not deceive the more sophisticated, but it served its turn.
¹

The First Consul employed all his arts of fascination to captivate his visitors. Fanny D'Arblay, who hated the martial display with which he surrounded himself and saw the cruelty and misery behind it, was moved by the melancholy though
t
fulness, genius and penetrating sadness of his brow. Sheridan made a bet with Lady Elizabeth Foster that, if she went to Paris on pretence of seeing the Apollo Belvedere, she would faint seven times at the sight of Bonaparte. In the summer of 1802, several thousand British tourists witnessed the gorgeous ceremonies of the great man's birthday; levees, reviews, drawing-rooms and
Te Deums
followed one another for several weeks. Henceforward he called himself by his first name alone—Napoleon. It was the beginning of a legend.

Nothing could have been more gracious than the bonhomie with which he received his English guests: a condescension enhanced by the contrast with his parade-ground bearing. Miss Berry scarcely knew how to reconcile the Man of the Parade with the Man of the Circle: the former so solemn and terrifying, the latter so good-humoured and intelligent and with so much sweetness in his frank, grey eyes. Augustus Foster conceded him the air and manners of a gentleman; his cousin, John, praised his unaffected dignity and address; Lord Aberdeen was fascinated by his smile. For these the First Consul reserved his mildest manner, bearing even fools gladly and allowing Mr. Thornton, the banker, to show him the great medallion presented to him by his Volunteer Company. It was for their benefit, perhaps, that he kept busts of Fox and Nelson on either side of his cabinet chimney-piece.
²

He had his reward. Young Lord Boringdon went about saying that if Master Bonaparte chose to make this or that addition to his dominions, what was that to an Englishman? "I hope your new Parliament," Napoleon graciously observed to one of its members, " will co-operate with me in the great work of peace and will not suffer themselves to be misled by Mr. Windham and his partisans." The more gullible heard him speak with sorrow of the libels on his good name in the English Press and his hope that such "petulant and provoking recrimination" would be suppressed. Unconsciously,

¹
Carr, 116-17, 120-1. Lady Holland, however, told by the "sycophant" Caffarelli how the First Consul and his wife slept in the same bed, merely referred
to.it

as "disgusting cant employed by the present government as a counterpoise to the wild extravagant opinions of atheism and immorality set afloat under the first Constitution of the Republic."—Holland, 154.

2
Berry, II, 189;
Tito
Duchesses,
164-5,
170
3! Trotter, 240; Aberdeen, I, 15; Romilly,
II,
90; Granville, I, 343;
Espriella,
I, 21-22; Glcnbervie, I, 337-8.

in their admiration for his achievement and desire for peace, they found themselves becoming apologists for everything which their own libertarian land had opposed for three centuries of her history. Charles Lamb, secure in the uncorrupted dingi
ne
ss of Leadenhall Street, humorously rebuked his friend, Thomas Manning, for his account of "the god-like face of the First Consul." "You are frenchified; your tastes and your morals are perverted and corrupted. By and by you will come to assert that Bonaparte is as great a commander as the old Duke of Cumberland and deny that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen!"

There were plenty of critical visitors who shared Charles Lamb's doubts. They sensed the untameable, vulgar reverse of Bonaparte's dazzling character,
¹
recalled old tale
s of his cruelty in Syria and Italy, and reacted instinctively against a ruler whose Palace corridors were thronged with sentries and whose coming was invariably heralded by the rattle of cavalry. " The civil power is not distinguishable in Paris," wrote one, "it is the musket and bayonet that settle all differences." It was the antithesis of every political principle in John Bull's sober scheme of things. Despite the imposing appearance of national unanimity, the Press was muzzled, literature—though obedient
savants
lived in clover—was the servile mouthpiece of authority, and the very school teachers were drill-sergeants. Englishmen could not help noticing how their French hosts, who discoursed volubly on every other subject, shunned politics ; they seemed to be always conscious of the secret police.

That freedom of discussion and criticism, which for Englishmen was the mainspring of public life and whose adoption by France they had hailed with delight in 1789, seemed to have no place in the Consular Republic. Frenchmen secretly either ridiculed or reviled it. "Look at that sanguinary prostitute!" cried a worthy merchant of Rouen to his English guest as they stood before the statue of Liberty in the Law Courts, "for years we have had liberty and bloodshed: thank Heaven we are no longer free!" There were few Englishmen, even the most conservative, who were not shocked by such an attitude. What made this unblushing acceptance of despotism the more nauseating was that the French still paid lip-service to the political virtues they condemned. The sacred names of Liberty and Reason looked down on dragooned streets from the pediments of public buildings; the stranger in the Consular palace, challenged at every turn by the sentinel's strident, "
On ne passe pas ici"
raised his eyes and saw inscribed over every door the word "
Liberte
."
"Such,"

¹
" When Bonaparte is out of his ceremonious habits his language is
often coarse and vulgar."—Malme
sbury, IV, 257
.

wrote Farington, "is the farce that France now presents to the rest of the world."
¹

It was not only on ideological grounds that Englishmen were critical of French society. One of their negotiators at Amiens reported that what had struck him most about those with whom he had to deal was their constant attempts to deceive: their duplicity, bad faith, insolence and vanity. After all they had passed through, the French appeared to have discarded their hearts; pleasant to live and talk with, they seemed to have become utterly unfeeling. Their behaviour to those dependent on them was insupportable. Gambling was universal; Romilly noted that there was a lottery office in .almost every street. "No morals, no integrity," wrote another traveller; " characters of the lowest kind abounding in wealth which they expend in the most licentious way; there appears to be an indifference to everything but pleasure. The government may be said to resemble that of the Praetorian bands in ancient Rome. The military power overawes every one."
²

British revulsion to a society devoid of principle was not confined to opponents of the Revolution. The most honoured visitor to Paris in the autumn of 1802 was the great Opposition leader who had so long defied patriotic opinion by championing France and peace. His visit—complicated by a characteristically good-natured kindness to an Irish rebel whom he met on the road—was pilloried mercilessly by Tory cartoonists. Yet Fox's reaction to what he saw in the land he had praised as a new Utopia was anything but favourable. Told by the French Foreign Minister that only " the rule and religion of our ancestors" could now restore good order and morals and .that torture by the wheel was a necessary instrument of government, he was profoundly shocked. At his meeting with Bonaparte he listened in silence to a long adulatory speech on the importance of treating Europe as a single nation and the necessity for large military establishments, until, able to bear it no longer, he cried out: "Large military establishments are always odious and must be, for all government that exists only by force is oppressive and evil." A second talk between the two great men on the freedom of the Press ended no better; when Fox remarked that in England no one minded being abused in the newspapers, Napoleon shouted, "It is another thing here!" and strode away.
³

¹
Farington, II, 13, 23; Aberdeen, I, 16; Barlov, 201; Romilly,
11
,85-7, 92, 99-100; Carr, 155; Wilberforce I, 245; Malmesbury, IV, 70; Holland, 142; Auckland, IV, 159-60; D'Arblay, III, 335; Granville, I, 379; Broughton, I, 270.

²
Malmcsbury, IV, 70; Romilly, II, 89; Farington, I, 348.

³
Trotter,
passim;
Wilberforce,* I, 245; Auckland, IV, 171; Ashton, 52; H.M.C.
Drop-more,VlI,
111; Holland, 150; Granville, I, 352-5, 360-1, 367.

Other English progressives were equally repelled, Samuel Romilly, attending the Opera in a hackney cab, was forced by dragoons to wait until every private coach had set down its passengers. He found the society of Paris indescribably gloomy; at Talleyrand's he was confronted with a magnificence that out-shone the splendours of the Bourbon Court, while his host, a few years before a penniless exile in England, sat at the head of an incense-scented table looking the picture of melancholy. Indeed, almost every English visitor seems to have disliked the French Foreign Minister. He was described as pompous, affected, insolent; a shameless liar with a diseased, white face hanging like a decaying corpse over the top of his gaudy, silver-embroidered uniform; a trickster
whose inturne
d feet were "as crooked as his principles."
¹
The Minister of Police, the notorious Fouche, fared still worse: a little foxy man with pale, flattish face and small, grey eyes, absurdly dressed in a blue velvet uniform with hussar boots. Those privileged to listen to his observations on the blessings of peace and humanity could generally count on some fellow guest's whispered tale of less edifying days when he used to ride to massacres with a pair of human cars dangling from either side of his hat. In the autumn of 1802 his presence at the enlightened Court of the new Charlemagne proved so embarrassing that he was temporarily relegated to the decent obscurity of private life. But he was far too useful to stay there.

Throughout the year that was to have inaugurated perpetual peace between the two nations, the British liberal view of France became increasingly unfavourable. Sheridan, sooner than receive civilities which might prevent him from speaking of tyrants as he pleased, refused to go to Paris at all. Lady Bessborough, unimpressed by the spectacle of police officers in the churches replacing Caps of Liberty by Crucifixes, was appalled by the universal espionage and tyranny. "If what I was told to-day is true," she wrote, "that eighteen poor blacks"—captured patriots from San Domingo— " are to be executed next Monday, every remains of admiration will be turned into abhorrence." Farington, landing at Newhaven in October, felt acutely the transition from subjection to freedom; a friend of Creevey's returned from a fortnight's tour "scared out of his wits by the dreadful power a
nd villainy of the French gover
ment."

Such experiences drove the English back on themselves. No one could have been less insular than Lady Bessborough, yet even she

1
Jackson described him as "the most barefaced teller of untruths he had ever met with." Malmesbury,
iv,
70. Sec Romilly,
ii,
87-8; Creevey, 5;
Two Duchesses,
171; Argylc,
1,
34; Glenbervie,
i,
292; 'Granville,
i,
381
-2.

after a few weeks in Paris wrote to her lover: "You accuse me sometimes of not being English enough and proud; you would find no fault with me here, for I do not know how it. is but I feel ten times more proud and more indignant at anything that looks like a slight to England than I ever do at home." Farington on his return broke into a paean of patriotism: what mind, he asked, could not but feel grateful for being English. " I could not be insensible to the air of independence bordering upon haughtiness which is manifested in the English character but is little seen among the people I had left.
...
If in this effect there is less of what is called the
amiable,
it is amply made up by a quality of a much higher kind which is
integrity"
It was perhaps of this that the American encountered at Dieppe was thinking when he assured him that, though every country had something to be admired, there was only one England.
¹
One greater than Farington drew the contrast between French despotism and British freedom. On the last day of July, after jotting down on the coach roof his impressions of Westminster Bridge at dawn, William Wordsworth embarked at Dover to renew his acquaintance with the land which had aroused his youthful enthusiasm. He was bitterly disappointed. On the day after-he landed the Consulship for life was granted to Napoleon, and, as the stream of English coaches and equipages rattled over the Calais cobblestones towards the capital, the erstwhile republican poet gave vent to his indignation:

"Is it a reed that's shaken by the wind,

Or what is it that ye go forth to see?

Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree
...

Post forward all, like creatures of one kind,

With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee . . .

Shame on you, feeble heads, to slavery prone!"

For, looking out that autumn on F
rance, Word
worth could see only the extinction of liberty. From the spectacle of a Continent in chains he turned to the white cliffs from which he had come. Soon he hurried back to them, watching in the boat to Dover a negress, silent and hopeless, flying before the Consular decree that had expelled her race from France. That night he poured out his heart in pride and love:

¹
Granville, I, 378; Farington, II, 61-2.

"Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more.

The cock that crows, t
he smoke that curls, that sound

Of bells;—those boys who in yon meadow-ground

In white-sleeved shirts are playing; and the roar

Of the waves breaking on the chalky shore;—

AH, all are English. Oft have I looked round

With joy in Kent's green vales; but never found

Myself so satisfied in heart before.

Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass,

Thought for another moment. Thou art free,

My Country! and 'tis joy enough and pride

For one hour's perfect bliss, to tread the grass

Of England once again."

Henceforward he resolved to devote himself to arousing his countrymen to the peril in which they stood and their rulers from the selfish sleep into which they had fallen.
¹

¹
His great sonnets to Milton and to " the later Sidney, Marvel, Harington" were composed that autumn.—Harper, II, 34-5.

CHAPTER
TWO

No Peace with the Dictator

^‘
I axe pardon, Master
Boney, but as we say: 'Hands of
f, Pompey, we keep this little spot to ourselves.'"

Popular Cartoon of 1802.

"England is not asleep, she is always on the watch."

Napoleon.

N

ot
since the exhausted lull of Mary Tudor's reign had the British people been content to allow a single nation such power on the Continent. It was as if the metamorphosis of the bloody land of the Terror into the orderly and resplendent France of the First Consul had dazzled their slow-moving judgment. For nine years they had struggled against a Revolutionary force which had overwhelmed or defeated all their continental neighbours. At times their own society had seemed on the verge of crumbling before its insidious advance. Though, with their genius for cohesion in the face of danger, they had surmounted such threats, they had been twice left to contend single-handed against the greatest military Power in the world and the fleets of all Europe. The liquidation by its own offspring of the lawless Revolution they had so long resisted had come to the English as a heaven-sent deliverance.