Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (43 page)

With all a weak man's sudden resolution, Frederick William surrendered to the rising Gallophobia of his people. Betrayed by Napoleon, he turned to that other patron whom he himself had betrayed a year before while the ink on the Treaty of Potsdam was still wet. Still uncompromising in resistance to France, the Czar forgave the past and promised his aid. Thereupon, on September 26th, the Prussian King despatched an ultimatum to Paris demanding the immediate withdrawal of the French from Germany. Simultaneously he ordered the mobilisation of his forces, reduced since the Treaty of Pressburg to a peace footing.

Napoleon's armies had not been reduced to a peace footing. Almost before England, still deeply suspicious of Prussia,
¹
had heard

¹
"Heavens!" an Englishman wrote after Prcssburg "what has Prussia to answer for
1
For nothing less in my mind than every calamity which has befallen Europe for more than ten years."—
Pitt and the Great War,
534.

of her change of front, the campaign was over. At one moment Prussian officers were reported sharpening their swords on the steps of the French Embassy, the next they were trailing past the same steps behind the victor's coach. The arrogant military State which Frederick the Great had made the terror of Europe collapsed on October 14th at Jena and Auerstadt in a single day. Its morale cracked like its Army. Fortress after fortress surrendered without a fight, famous cavalry regiments stampeded over their officers into neutral territory at the mere rumour of pursuit, and the corrupt plutocracy of the capital covered its shame and placated its conquerors with offerings of ballets and operas. "What a people! what a country!" cried Napoleon. "The Austrians have no energy, but they have honour. The Prussians have neither honour nor soul— sheer
canaille’

Yet the overthrow of Prussia was only a means to an end. While Napoleon wreaked his vengeance on her, exempting only Potsdam— in honour of Frederick the Great—from the crushing imposts laid on her cities, he launched a new thunderbolt against the real enemy. On November 21st, five weeks after Jena, he issued from Berlin a Decree to strike her to the heart. Instead of England blockading France, Europe would blockade England. Commerce and correspondence with her, whether carried in neutral or her own ships, was forbidden under pain of death in all lands controlled by France; all ships and goods hailing from her shores or those of her colonies were declared forfeit. The nation of higglers who had made themselves masters of salt water should be left with nothing else. Against the distant and dispersed conquests of Trafalgar the new Charlemagne opposed the solid Continental
bloc
won by Austerlitz and Jena. To enlarge it he ordered his armies to advance on Russia. A week after the Berlin Decrees Murat entered Warsaw.

It was not surprising that for a moment many good Englishmen despaired of the future. Scott, gazing that November over the darkening shades of Ettrick Forest, added to the unfinished manuscript of
Marmion
the noble but mournful stanzas which record the deaths of Nelson, Pitt and Fox. "Another year," wrote Wordsworth,

"another deadly blow!

Another mighty Empire overthrown!

And we are left, or shall be left, alone;

The last that dare to struggle with the foe!"

Yet it was always the way of En
gland to measure adversity with
resolution, and there was no weakening of her purpose. To counter the Berlin Decrees—"to retort upon our foes," as a Minister put it, "the error of their own injustice"—Orders in Council were issued in the New Year forbidding neutral vessels to trade between ports closed to British ships. If England was to be excluded from the European carrying trade, she would use her sea power to prohibit that trade altogether. Yet in deference to neutral rights the Cabinet refrained from pressing its counter-measures too far; an American or Danish ship was still free, so long as she did not carry contraband, to ply direct between her own ports and those of France or her allies. She was only liable to seizure if she carried goods between one French controlled harbour and another.

For the rest England relied on her ability to counter Napoleon's Continental trade veto by opening fresh markets beyond the oceans. "The state of things is terrible," wrote Lady Elizabeth Foster; "however, I hope that we shall extend our conquests in the New World and so keep a balance." The capture of Buenos Ayres roused speculative hopes which had slumbered since the days of the South Sea Bubble. The Government allowed itself to be swept away by the popular tide. Three thousand troops were hurried off under Major-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty to reinforce Colonel Beresford in the River Plate, while two further expeditions were projected to seize the heritage of Spain in Central and South America. The one, sponsored by the Prime Minister and led by Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, was to conquer Mexico, the other, conceived by the quixotic War Secretary, William Windham, was to liberate Chile. This last, consisting of 4000 men under Colonel Robin Craufurd— Windham's favourite soldier—sailed at Christmas with orders as astonishing as ever came out of a British War Office; after rounding the Horn and seizing the great town of Valparaiso, it was to subjugate a country six times the size of England, cross the Andes and establish communications across nearly a thousand miles of mountain and pampas with Auchmuty's forces in the Argentine.

Fortunately for itself the expedition never reached the Pacific. Shortly after it sailed the Government learnt that the Spanish colonists, recovering from their first surprise, had overwhelmed Beresford's garrison and recaptured Buenos Ayres. It was, therefore, decided to concentrate every available man to recover the city. Craufurd's transports, sheltering from a storm at the Cape, were diverted just in time and fresh drafts were sent from England. By the spring of 1807 more than 12,000 first-line troops were encamped among or on their way to the swamps of the River Plate. Here in February Auchmuty, a tough soldier of the Aberc
romby school,
carried Montevideo after a brief siege and a night of desperate slaughter under the breached walls.

In all this, whatever its mercantile promise for the future, Ministers unconsciously dissipated the country's military resources, just as Pitt and Dundas—before learning their lesson—had dissipated them a decade earlier by wasting campaigns in West Indian islands. Sea power continued to tempt parliamentary politicians to yield to every man's demand to do everything but husband strength for a decisive blow. In the Mediterranean, too, the Government found itself committed to scattered operations which it had not the force to sustain. Here the desire to take pressure off its ally, Russia, led it to countenance a purely Muscovite project against Turkey and, in its pursuit, to embark on needless campaigns in the Sea of Marmora and in Egypt. In November, 1806, Collingwood, Nelson's successor and England's ambassador-at-arms in the Mediterranean, was instructed to detach a squadron to force the Dardanelles and procure the dismissal of Sebastiani, the French Ambassador to the Porte. But instead of supporting it by a military expedition from Sicily, as Sir John Moore—the ablest soldier on the spot—advocated, the Cabinet ordered Lieutenant-General Fox to land 6000 troops in Egypt in the event of the Turks rejecting the British demand.

The result was a double failure. Lacking military backing, Vice-Admiral Duckworth—the victor of San Domingo—hesitated for more than a week before taking his ships past the Dardanelles batteries and waited still longer in the Sea of Marmora while the British Ambassador bargained with the scared, wily Sultan. Sir Sidney Smith's advice that line of battleships alone had any weight on the minds of the inhabitants of the Seraglio was unfortunately forgotten.
¹
By the time it was clear that nothing could be gained by diplomacy, the neglected fortifications of the Turkish capital had been so strengthened that Duckworth, without an army to support him, was forced to withdraw through the Dardanelles, suffering casualties on the way. Meanwhile General Fox, assuming that war with Turkey had begun, had despatched half the garrison of Sicily to Egypt under Major-General Mackenzie Fraser. Though able to capture Alexandria, the expedition was too small for its main purpose and quickly found itself in difficulties. Sixteen hundred men sent to seize Rosetta were repulsed with heavy loss in its narrow, pestilential streets, and a column, hastening to its relief, was forced after a brief siege to retire to the coast, losing a third of its strength. By the end of April Fraser's little army was itself blockaded in Alexandria by a young Albanian General named Mehemet Ali, and

¹
Wellesley, I,
206.
208

the stakes along the public highways were crowned with rotting British heads.

Because of these calls on her man-power England had no army, to spare for her allies in eastern Europe when they needed one. That winter Napoleon suffered his first setback on land since his flight from Egypt eight years before. As then, his attempt to break out of Europe to the East was meeting with unlooked-for difficulties. In his impatience to defeat Russia and close the Continent to England, he had embarked on a winter invasion of Poland without magazines or supplies. The country turned out to be a roadless wilderness of ragged hovels and ruined estates out of which even a French army could not wring a subsistence. Within a few weeks the victors of Jena were stuck fast in the mud. When, after a bloody and indecisive engagement at Pultusk, they went into winter quarters at the beginning of 1807, the Russians, ignoring the ordinary decencies of war, counter-attacked. On February 8th the armies met in a terrible encounter at Preuss-Eylau. Two French columns, attacking in a snowstorm, were caught in the crossfire of Russian batteries, and by nightfall a third of the 140,000 men engaged had fallen. For the first time in his career Napoleon had been held in pitched battle.

Though too battered to follow up their success, the Russians were greatly elated. The blow to Napoleon's prestige was great. For weeks Europe gloated over tales of Cossacks harrying hungry French columns and swarms of shivering deserters, who turned out, however, to be mostly Italians.
¹
The King of Prussia, hitherto only kept from submission by the rising intractability of Napoleon's demands, took heart and rejected a hastily proffered separate peace which would have restored him his Polish possessions. Instead he signed an alliance with Russia at Bartenstein. Even Austria began to canvass the chances of an attack on Napoleon's southern flank.

But the overriding question in the Allied camp was whether these successes would ensure the arrival of a British force? Landed in Napoleon's rear in East Prussia or even in Swedish Pomerania, its effect on the campaign might be incalculable. Yet not only had Grenville and his colleagues no army available, but they were not even sympathetic to the idea. They had gained power by ridiculing Pitt's Continental commitments and were resolved not to emulate him. Their military representative at the Czar's headquarters, Lord Hutchinson, up to the time of Eylau took the gloomiest view of Russian "prospects and made no attempt to conceal it.
²
The most Ministers were prepared to consider was the landing of a Flanoverian

¹
Tw
o Duchesses,
306-7;
Jackson,
n,
77, 85-90;
H.
M. C. Bathurst,
154;
Boothby,
101.
¹
Jackson, II,
116.
See also Malme
sbury, IV,
354.

division in northern Germany or France as a diversion. They even refused a loan to the Russians on the ground that they might later make peace and repudiate it.

Fortunately for England's dwindling reputation the Government fell in March. Since Fox's death it had been driving on the rocks, partly through its own divisions and partly through the nation's growing sense of its inadequacy. In England, Pozzo di Borgo observed, a vigorous and energetic policy was always popular. This was precisely what the policy of the Ministry of All the Talents was not. As a war directive it lacked conviction. After the ignominious end of the Peace negotiation it appeared to have lost its
raison d'etre.
The proper people to carry on a war to the death against Napoleon seemed those who had always advocated such a course—Mr. Pitt's friends. The Whigs only seemed to feel enthusiasm for humanitarian reforms or such purely partisan causes as the impeachment of the fallen Melville, the scandals in the naval dockyards and the rights of Irish Catholics.

It was on this last point that they fell. Lord Grenville was a man of talent and uncommon industry, but he could never see a subject in all its aspects. Obsessed with the idea that Ireland was on the verge of another rebellion and that the only remedy for the wrongs of landless peasants was an extension of political privileges to Catholic landowners, he pressed on the King a measure for admitting Catholics to Staff rank in the Army. As a moment's reflection would have warned him, the only result was to drive the stubborn old man into a stand on a point in which his religious convictions were shared by almost the entire nation. Moreover, the King was so old, had had such a large family and had been such a regular attendant upon divine service that, as one indignant Whig said, the greatest part of his subjects thought no evil so dreadful as shocking any one of his prejudices. To practical English minds the discussion seemed absurd and unrealist: persisted in, it could only end in a Regency or civil war.