Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (6 page)

Yet in all this chaotic city, with its 864,000 inhabitants and its congeries of thieves' kitchens and Alsatias, there was no police force but a handful of scarlet-waistcoated Bow Street Runners and the aged watchmen of the medieval Parishes. The government of the greatest city in the world was still fundamentally that of a village. The sculptures in the Abbey were so dirty that it was impossible to distinguish the figures, the tombs were mutilated and covered with names scratched by citizens in search of a half-holiday's immortality, and outside St. Paul's stood a shabby statue of Queen Anne, lacking nose and ears, with a pile of stones at her feet—target of successive generations of urchins. The seats in St. James's Park were too rickety to use, the streets fouled and blocked by herds of cattle, the air hideous with cries extolling the rival merits of flowers and vegetables, rabbits and lavender, baked fruits from charcoal braziers, bandboxes slung on poles, baskets and rat-traps, bellows and playbills and even pails of water, for large parts of the capital lacked the most elementary conveniences. It was so all over England; at Bristol the steps of the Cathedral were used habitually as a public lavatory.

What served when England was a village no longer sufficed in an age of steam and world trade. Within three generations the population of the United King
d
om had risen from five and a half to eleven million. The country was crying out for organisation. But so long as its leaders were busied with the struggle with France none was to be had. Peace meant a chance for England to put her crowded house in order; renewed war the postponement of all that was needed if fatal injuries to the national well-being were to be averted.

Even in the unsullied countryside with its unbroken life of centuries the need for wise control and thought for the future was being felt. Outwardly all was well: the freshness and sweetness of the air, the sunshine unclouded by smoke, the singing of the birds, the verdure of the fields had never seemed so beautiful to Englishmen. Crome's cottage in the woods, with its tiny latticed windows and fine jointing and plastering, its deep roof of thatch, its wood-smoke rising in the soft air, still stood foursquare to the challenge of a new world. So did the sturdy country folk; the squire in coat of pepper-and-salt cloth, white dimity waistcoat, nankeen breeches and fine linen ruffled at breast and wrist whom Nimrod saw standing with benevolent gaze and regular, pleasing features against the background of his own fireside; the retainer in his moleskin cap and stout Sunday suit of olive-coloured velveteen that lasted a lifetime; the black-eyed, rosy-cheeked kitchenmaid among the shining stew-pans and pewter starting up the great coal fire at daybreak with the blows of her mighty hammer. From the land they served with hereditary skill and virtues was drawn the abundant, home-grown, unprocessed fare to which the English attributed their robust health; the vast joints of beef and mutton that so astonished foreigners, the tubs of salted butter and curds and whey, the plentiful fat turkeys, geese and capons, the sides of bacon and bowls of eggs, the gigantic coppers and vats of beer and cider that they brewed at home and kept on perpetual tap as befitted neighbourly men of "great stowage" whose boast it was that they "never dried their nets."
¹

Yet beneath its smiling surface the cancer of commercialised individualism was sapping even this strong polity. Though under pressure of war and rising prices more wheat was grown than ever before, the process was mercilessly sacrificing the small man for the large and the peasant for the tenant farmer. Those able to borrow freely from the banks on the security of broad acres or ample stock were able to keep back their crops till the market reached its peak while smaller men were forced to sell early and cheap. Landlords and bankers both encouraged this tendency; it saved the former trouble to let his land in a few big holdings, and paid the latter to offer extended credit to facilitate the throwing together o"f farms.
²

¹
Appe
rley, 7, 19, 70, 80-1, 84, 224.
²
Farington 1, 317.

Rendered inevitable by war and th
e threat of famine, the process
had not enhanced the country's
living wealth, which had always rested o
n the transmitted skill,
industry and self-interest of a
numerous and contented peasantr
y. By driving the latter to the
towns the engrossment of farms a
nd enclosure of commons, though
resulting in a great improvemen
t in stock-raising and cropping
methods, was beginning to depopula
te the countryside. That system
of farming down to the smallest bla
de of grass associated with the
family holding was now to be a
bandoned. The consequences were
not to be felt till the next age. Yet
with it went the tradition of a
thousand years. When Betsey Frem
antle, staying with the Temples
at lordly Wotton, watched the contes
t of fifty-four labourers, each
mowing a quarter of an acre agains
t one another for a new hat and
a few groats, and saw them afterward
s with their wives and families
at dinner under the avenue, she wa
s unaware that she was witness
ing the passing of the Buckingha
mshire peasantry.
¹
Their rustic
knowledge and enthusiasm, th
e heritage of many generations,
were still at the disposal of their ne
w masters, but its sources were
drying up. Presently t
he yeomanry were to follow them into
penury and, in the fullness of time, the squirearchy, leaving the
land a wilderness of dock and undrained swamp to be farmed by
the
bank and the mortgagor.

To all these things the rulers of England were blind. So long as French bayonets lined the Channel shore and the Combined Fleets lay at Brest, it is hard to blame them. For a quarter of a century, ever since the start of the American War, England had faced external crisis, with only a break of six years between the disastrous Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution. That brief trough between two wars had been her only chance to recover from bankruptcy and the loss of her first Empire. Her immense reserves and vitality had since enabled her to ride storm after storm:. there had seemed no limit to her resilience and capacity for growth and achievement. Yet in 1802, having been at war for thirty-three out of t
he past sixty-three years, she
was ripe for a long period of peaceful reorganisation. British civilisation needed re-orientating.

It was less an unconscious realisation of this than a desire to be rid of an intolerable strain that had prompted the peacemakers. Summoned two years before to succeed his friend and patron, Pitt, as Prime Minister, Henry Addington—"that mass of conciliation and clemency" as his enemies called him—had staked everything on giving his exhausted country peace. Since every other nation had

¹
Wynne, HI,
126.
23

abandoned the fight and since France under her new ruler had apparently liquidated the Revolution, there had seemed to him and his lanky Foreign Secretary,
Lord Hawkesbury, no purpose in
further bloodshed. They had therefore used Nelson's victory at Copenhagen and Abercromby's invasion of Egypt to open negotiations with the young dictator in Paris. To prove their pacific intentions they had sacrificed all Britain's colonial conquests except Ceylon and Trinidad, and returned to France her West Indian, African and Indian colonies, to Spain Minorca, and to the puppet Dutch Republic the Cape, Demerara, Berbice, Malacca and the Spice Islands. They had also agreed, subject to some vague safeguards, to restore Egypt and Malta to their former owners, Turkey and the Knights of St. John. All they had asked of the First Consul as an equivalent was the preservation of the European
status quo.

On the assumption that they had secured it they had disarmed at almost indecent speed. Ten days after the signature of peace Addington in his first budget had abolished Pitt's income tax. With its yield mortgaged for many years and the national debt standing at double its pre-war figure, such a concession was only possible at the cost of drastic reductions in the armed forces. While Bonaparte continued to maintain vast armaments and used the raising of the blockade to replenish his empty dockyards, Great Britain disbanded the Volunteers and halved her Army. In conformity with national precedent the Grand Fleet at Torbay was broken up, the Sea Fencibles abolished and the line-of-battle ships in commission reduced from over a hundred to less than forty. Within a few months 40,000 sailors were discharged and hundreds of experienced officers relegated to half-pay.

It was symptomatic of the general desire for peace that one of the leading advocates of disarmament should have been the great sailor who had saved England at Cape St. Vincent and by his blockade forced the First Consul to terms.
¹
Lord St. Vincent, the one member of the. Government in whom the country felt complete confidence, used his immense prestige to secure drastic economies in naval administration. Angered by the time-honoured corruptions of the dockyards, he forced a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry on his colleagues, silencing their feeble protests with the same unyielding sternness with which he had dealt with mutiny in the Fleet. While every ship cried out for repairs after long war, the country was shaken by revelations about fraudulent contractors, embezzling ropemakers and peculating shipwrights. Under the old First Lord's uncompromising policy of "brushing away the spiders," dockyard

¹
Napoleon himself admitted this a year after the armistice.

hands were dismissed, contracts with private yards withdrawn and surplus stores sold off—in some cases to French agents. And this at a time when the greatest military Power the world had ever seen remained mobilised on the other side of the Channel!
¹

Unlike the English, Bonaparte had not made peace because his people wanted liberty to trade. What he wanted was liberty to re-plan the world. For that he needed obedience to his will. Except for a remote and half barbarous Russia and the moribund dominion of the Turks, he had already secured it throughout the Continent. But the English with their chaotic notions of individual rights still resisted him. And since their selfish stranglehold on the sea prevented him from overcoming them in battle, he had sought peace as the only means of relaxing it. Before he could renew the struggle he needed oceanic trading bases from which to revive France's industries and time to replenish his naval arsenals. His adversaries in their folly had allowed him both.

It was his plan to use the breathing space that had been given him to build twenty-five battleships annually. In six or seven years, with two hundred sail-of-the-line, he would be as invincible on sea as on land.
²
Into the corrupt and indolent administration of the French marine—stagnant since the liquidation of its officers by the Terror— he would infuse the discipline, enthusiasm and efficiency that had made his armies the terror of the world. He would transform into impregnable fortresses the colonies and trading factories England had restored. Behind him a nation of more than thirty millions, drunk with military glory and avid for new conquests, was acclaiming him as the new Charlemagne and erecting in the Place Vendome a pillar like the column of Trajan to commemorate his victories.

It was Bonaparte's belief that the English, seduced by his policy of recoiling to spring, would succumb without a struggle. In their individual greed and sloth they displayed a disregard for their aggregate interests so infatuate that their doom seemed only a question of time.
³
And in the unthinking summer of 1802, it was easy for a foreigner to suppose that pleasure, moneymaking, social display and faction monopolised the English mind. Wordsworth, passing through London, described a society dressed only for show, "glittering like a brook in the open sunshine":

¹
Minto, III, 257-8; Markham, 173, 178, 186-90; Barrow, 256, 276; Tucker, II, 144-62; Sherrard, 192
et
set/.;
Barbam,
iii,
17-21, 68-72.

²
Las Cases, IV, 8. "

³
Even Nelson, happy at last with his beloved Hamiltons at Merton, wrote complacently that all the world was at peace except Lord Grenville and his friends.

"The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more."

Balls and masquerades succeeded each other nightly, fine ladies with feathers crowded on to the stage to hear Mrs. Billington sing at the
(
Opera, health-seekers listened to the music on th
e Pantiles at Tun
bridge Wells, the Gentlemen of the Marylebone Cricket Club played a match against the Gentlemen of Hampstead and Highgate for five hundred guineas, and in the West Country hungry clothworkers rioted against the new machines that robbed them of their hereditary livelihood. Meanwhile Parliament, after debating Sir Richard Hill's Bill for abolishing bull-baiting, dissolved in search of the suffrages of an indifferent country. Thereafter for several weeks the shops of Brentford were-shut, and an idle, cheering, rioting crowd blocked the Exeter Road and treated passers-by to that astonishing spectacle of disorder and tumult which was libertarian England's peculiar contribution to the art of human governance. And all the while Bonaparte went quietly on with his plans for subjugating the world.