Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (7 page)

Yet in their individual capacities the islanders still gave him trouble. They seemed to suppose that by signing a Peace they had secured the right to trade wherever they chose in his dominions. When they discovered that he had refused to allow their Government to insert any trade agreement in the peace treaty, and that their ships and goods were still liable to seizure in French ports, many of them became extremely angry. Moreover the First Consul kept finding new evidences of their incorrigible itch for intrigue and meddling in other people's business. He even accused them of plotting his assassination with the Royalist and Republican refugees whom they sheltered. For like most despots who have risen suddenly, Bonaparte was inordinately suspicious. The very gullibility of the English made him suspect them of sinister designs.

He had a more tangible grievance. He was not in the habit of being publicly criticised; in France the excesses of Revolutionary licence had been succeeded by a censorship more rigid than that of the Bourbons. It was difficult for Bonaparte to conceive of a newspaper not being subject to police supervision. Yet, in England-, Opposition and refugee journals published the most outrageous things about him without the Government stirring a finger. He used to lie in his bath every morning and have them read by an interpreter ; at any particularly o
utrageous passage he would bang
the side of the bath with the guide rope and shout furiously "
Il
en a menti
!
"
¹

This made for friction. The British Ministers, who suffered, poor men, from libels themselves,
²
listened with sympathy to Bonaparte's protests but pointed out that they were debarred by the Constitution from interference. This failed to satisfy Ins logical Latin mind, since under that Constitution any Government with a parliamentary majority was apparently all-powerful. He therefore demanded the suppression of the more offensive newspapers and the punishment of their writers, naming Cobbett, the editor of Windham's intemperate
Porcupine,
and Peltier, a particularly offensive emigre journalist. In its anxiety to appease him the Government consulted its law officers and, after one more than usually gross breach of international good manners, instituted criminal libel proceedings against Peltier. The Prime Minister also personally circularised outraged newspaper proprietors on the need for restraint. But, as Bonaparte capped every libel by dictating some still more scurrilous passage for the official French Press, the flow of " reciprocal Billingsgate," as Fox called it, grew rather than diminished.
³

In more material matters the British gave little trouble. Throughout 1802 the First Consul was allowed to break one after another of the terms of the Peace. The
status quo
had been a fundamental condition of the armistice. Yet even before the definitive treaty was signed Bonaparte not only dispatched a force to the West Indies— ostensibly to subject the negro republicans of San Domingo to his rule—but claimed the American hinterland of Louisiana under a secret treaty with Spain. Simultaneously he embarked on a series of bloodless conquests in Europe as alarming as those made at the cannon's mouth. Ignoring his own guarantee of its independence, he partly dragooned, partly coaxed the delegates of the Cisalpine Republic to confer on him the Presidency of their puppet State, renaming it the Republic of Italy—an ominous hint to the remaining principalities in the peninsula. Thereafter his agents swarmed in every Italian capital, talking treaties and concessions, surveying forts and harbours and stirring up the populace to throw in their lot with their fellow-countrymen under the green, white and red

¹
Granville, I, 343-9; Farington, II, 38.

2
One wag suggested that, as Ministers and the First Consul were equally calumniated, they should institute joint proceedings, it being the fate of greatness like theirs to be misunderstood by the vulgar.

³
Pelle
w, II, 75-6, 153-7; Castlereagh, I, 72-3; Auckland,
rV,
160; Malmesbury,
FV,
77. Lady Bessborough, a critic of the Government, wrote: "If Bonaparte choses to go to war for the newspapers
a son loisir, w
e
must fight through thick and thin; but do not let us imitate
Le Moniteur
and begin a war because the French newspapers are impertinent" —Granville, I, 345.

tricolour of the Cisalpine Republic whose authorities encouraged an appearance of popular licence long suppressed in every other part of the French dominions. Yet it had been to secure the integrity of the Italian States that Britain had surrendered Minorca, and Porto Ferraro and agreed to evacuate Egypt and Malta.
¹

By the autumn, intoxicated by a report from his agent in London that the accommodating Addington had agreed to abandon the Continent, Bonaparte ventured further. Having artificially separated the Canton of Valais from Switzerland in order to secure the exclusive use of the Great St. Bernard and Simplon passes for his armies, he suddenly incorporated Piedmont in his dominions to gain a similar control of the Mont Cenis. The only excuse he gave for this outrage was that it was not specifically forbidden by the Treaties of Luneville and Amiens. A few weeks later, on the death of its Grand Duke, he annexed Parma. Meanwhile, instead of withdrawing his troops from Holland as he had promised, he continued to quarter them on the Dutch, on the ground that English agents were stirring up disaffection against that country's Republican constitution.

The British Government at first made no protest. Sunk in its summer dream of perpetual peace, it took its holidays by the sea. The King bathed and sailed in Weymouth Bay, legislators and their families on the Kentish coast admired the clear view of Calais in the September sunshine, and Pitt in the calm of Walmer Castle wrote to Addington, who was watering at Eastbourne, that since it seemed improbable that" the pacificator of Europe" would send over an army to avenge himself for a newspaper paragraph, he was about to exchange shooting for farming.

Yet Bonaparte could not leave well alone. Having secured his position in North Italy and Holland at the beginning of October, he pounced on Switzerland. It had been a condition of the Treaty of Luneville, signed with Austria in the previous year, that he should withdraw his garrison from Switzerland. But with his usual adroitness he had used the occasion to stir up Swiss feeling against the bureaucratic constitution which Jacobin doctrinaires had imposed on the little Republic. When, relying on his encouragement, the peasants and
petite noblesse
of the mountain Cantons took up arms to overturn it, he promptly announced that his obligation to refrain from interference in Swiss affairs was at an end. Denouncing the

¹
Colonel Dyott, visiting Bologna and Turin, found swaggering ruffians wearing the Italian tricolour, trees of liberty and guillotines in the principal squares, the inns packed with French officers living free, the theatres full of filthy brawlers, the ballet "an obscene, bawdy display of naked women," the convents destroyed, the palaces and gardens devastated and "everything Frenchified according to the true bon patriot system."—Dyott, I, 227-9.

federal patriots as counter-revolutionaries in English pay, he ordered General Ney to invade the country. The Helvetic Republic was ordered to submit or cease to exist. In an insolent proclamation from Lausanne General Rapp added insult to injury by telling the heirs of a thousand years of ordered liberty that their history showed they could not settle their affairs without the intervention of France.

Before the French closed in, the Swiss appealed to Eng
land. That worthy Christian, Ad
dington, was much moved ; the First Consul, he confided to a friend, had acted outrageously. The Cabinet met and, without considering the consequences, dispatched an agent to Switzerland with an offer of arms and money and a remonstrance to Paris. Couched in the time-honoured language dear, to British statesmen who, feeling the call to rebuke sin, lack the force to cast it out, this stated that his Majesty's Government must regard the exertions of the Swiss as the lawful efforts of a brave people to » recover their ancient laws and government. "The Cantons of Switzerland unquestionably possess in the same degree as every other independent State the right of regulating their own internal concerns . . . without the interposition of any foreign Powers."

Nothing could have been better calculated to enrage the French dictator. For the British note raised the question which he claimed had been settled by the Peace—the exclusion of England from the Continent. In a furious temper he dictated a dispatch declaring that nothing would induce him to "deliver the Alps"—for so he described the independence of Switzerland—to a few hundred English mercenaries, and that, should these prating Ministers suggest that they had stopped him from doing anything, he would promptly do it. He also inserted a reminder in the
Moniteur
that Britain, not being a party to the Treaty of Luneville, could not appeal to its terms.

The Government by its hasty action had placed itself in a dilemma. The independence of Switzerland could not be secured by the Navy or the capture of West Indian sugar islands. It depended on the joint action of the Continental Powers. Of such a coalition, for all Lord Hawkesbury's hurried dispatches to Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin, there was not the slightest sign. Bonaparte had taken the precaution of setting Europe by the ears over the affairs of Germany where a new Diet had met in August to "secularise," in other words confiscate, the ecclesiastical sovereignties of the Reich. By secretly promising advantages in turn to Prussia, Austria and the Teutonic clients of Russia and then encouraging them to wrangle over the spoils, he had so embroiled them with one another as to make concerted European action impossible.

Isolated and confronted by ov
erwhelming force and aware that
a distant England was powerless to help them, the Swiss submitted. Their leader was thrown into the Castle of Chillon and a delegation waited on the conqueror for a new constitution. The "great little man in Paris" bestrode the world like a Colossus. There was nothing for the Cabinet to do but to cancel the hasty orders sent to delay the evacuation of its garrisons fronibthe French and Dutch colonies and to inform Parliament that the cause of Switzerland had been abandoned. The "Doctor," as all the world called the Prime Minister, had only got a sore head for his warlike language.

The British protest, though Addington privately boasted that he had caused the dictator to modify his pretensions, did nothing to stay Napoleon's outward march.' But it caused a grave split in British public opinion. During the crisis the country became divided between those who viewed the extinction of Swiss liberty with such horror that they wished to defend it as their own and those who argued that Britain, having made a treaty with France, had no right to go to war to make it better.
¹
On the one hand were enthusiasts like Windham who asserted that the Administration had in effect told the tyrant to go where he pleased so long as he kept his hands off England ; on the other were prudent lovers of peace like the evangelical Tory M.P. who wrote to the Prime Minister: "If Bonaparte chooses to interfere in the internal government of Switzerland, is it our duty or interest to try to prevent it? Were we not silent and neutral spectators at the partition of Poland ? Why should we break a peace which every friend to the country rejoices in?"
²
. The controversy parted even lovers. "Why do you hate and abuse the Swiss so much?" wrote Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower; "I do not know that they are a very polished and amiable people, but they certainly were the most hospitable and the happiest of any I ever saw." For some supporters of the Government, in their resentment of the growing fracas on the Continent, visited their resentment not on the dictator but on his victims.

From this time the public began to question the Doctor's prescription of Peace and Plenty. It was not they did not want peace but that they doubted his ability to preserve it. "The miserable and insulting experiment of governing without talents" was losing its charm. The sudden essay at crossing swords with the First Consul had exposed the inherent weakness of what Lady Malmesbury called the "Dumplin' Ministry" and Canning the " Goose Administration."

¹
"I begin most cordially to wish for the apotheosis of Bonaparte," wrote Auckland "He is too much for modern mortals."—Auckland, IV, 174.

2
We have had enough of war and its direst calamities."—Pellew, II, 162.

It was hard after that to feel any confidence in the complacent Addington and his lugubrious Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury —the " Stinkingson" of Lord Wellesley's contemptuous phrase.
¹

The prosy, platitudes of Addington, so suited to the summer mood of 1802 when the country, tired like the King of the " confounded men of genius," had welcomed a Government of mediocrities, sounded perilously thin against the rumble of French guns on the Swiss cobblestones. The Prime Minister's constant references to the state of the revenue, his deplorable habit of being " too candid on his legs,"
²
his feeble oratorical riddles of "Never venture to foretell" and "To doubt is to decide" aroused contempt. "What a damned decided fellow this," observed one, "he is always doubting!" "Those on whom our salvation rests," wrote another, "are weak in sense, in spirit, in character and in conduct. Would you trust the island of Nevis, the smallest of our possessions, to be fought for, to be argued for, to be played at push-pin for between Bonaparte and Addington ?" It was not only yesterday's " fallen warmongers" who now asked such questio
ns. Even the unpopular Grenville
s—those uncompromising aristocrats from the frigid shades of Stowe and Dropmore—and the pushing, theatrical Canning who had derisively given the Doctor's Peace six months, found auditors at last. For events across the Channel were proving their unpalatable opinions right.
³