The Years of Endurance (16 page)

Pitt was above all things a practising statesman. He was an innovator, trained in the scientific principles of the new economics,

¹
Looking, as one of his fellow-passengers described him, " the very picture of a journeyman tailor who has been drunk and playing at ninepins for the first three days of the week and is returning to his work on Thursday."—
H. M. C. Dropmore,
II, 316.

who cared nothing for theory, everything for measurable results. A self-appointed committee of ignorant journeymen, passing omniscient resolutions on far-reaching issues of which they knew nothing, or a mob wreaking the basest passions of human nature on society to square the theories of excitable orators, were not, according to his scheme of things, likely to advance the course of rational progress, He was the parent of more practical reforms in administration and political economy than almost any other English statesman: free trade; a statistical franchise; the Sinking Fund; the Income Tax and the fiscal principle of graduation; national insurance and family allowances; the abolition of slavery and the end of religious disability, can all in part trace their ancestry to him. But he approached them with his eye, not on the horizon like a man of the study, but always on the treacherous and broken ground at his feet. He was wholly out of sympathy with what he once described as " the vain and false philosophy . . . which refers all things to theory, nothing to practice—which rejects experience, which substitutes visionary hypotheses for the solid test of experience, and bewilders the human mind in a maze of opinions when it should be employed in directing to action."

He was confronted with the spectacle of frenzied enthusiasts— men foolish or bad or both—who wanted to jeopardise all his careful, hard-wrought progress and the peaceful and stable society of which he was the trustee for the sake of general propositions which to his empirical mind were almost without meaning. At that very moment Chauvelin, the agent of the French Government in England, was appeasing his new masters in Paris by fomenting plots among British malcontents to seize the Tower, arm the mob and proclaim English and Irish republics in dependence on France. Across the Channel the Convention—a body whose extravagant language appeared to Pitt frequently to verge on lunacy—was giving, an enthusiastic reception to the complimentary Addresses sent it by British Corresponding Societies. Its President had declared that Britons, once the masters of the French in the social arts, were now their disciples and, treading in their steps, would shortly strike a blow that would resound to the extremities of Asia.

Pitt had good ground for fearing the spread of revolutionary doctrines among the poorer classes. In the country men faced a hungry winter over blackened crops: in the towns, where there was a mysterious commercial crisis, the price of bread rose alarmingly. An epidemic of strikes, food riots and wild talk in taverns had broken out, fomented, it was believed, by French agents. At Manchester and Sheffield di
saffection was even reported am
ong the troops. Nor was the language of a little section of ambitious aristocrats out of office, who pictured Carlton House as a second Palais Royal and themselves as Tribunes of the People, calculated to allay unrest.

It was on a Britain so divided that the news burst of the sudden French advance. On the 24th October rough old Custine—" General Moustache "—captured Mainz and,
striking terror into the Rhine
land, advanced swiftly on Frankfurt. Four days later Dumouriez, sweeping back the Austrians from the long-beleagured fortresses of the north, entered Belgium at the head of more than 70,000 men. On November 6th he won the first great victory of the Republic at Jemappes as a cloud of skirmishers, followed by columns of ragged fanatics chanting
the Marseillaise
' drove the white-coated Austrians from the low heights near Mons. A week later they were in Brussels.

The politician
s in Paris went mad with joy. S
uddenly the whole earth seemed to be coming their way. Nothing could now stop the advance of their armies and of their apocalyptic creed: nothing should be allowed to. On November 16th an excited Convention passed two Decrees, the first empowering their generals to follow the flying foe into neutral territory, the other declaring the navigation of the Scheldt estuary—granted exclusively to Holland by a long series of international agreements—open to all nations by the Law of Nature. This was followed by the appearance of French gunboats in the river on their way to reduce Antwerp.

Britain was the principal guarantor of
the
Scheldt treaties. She was also the United Netherlands' ally. Only three days before, the Dutch Ambassador had asked London for an assurance that Britain would honour her pledge in the event of a French invasion. Pitt, whose historic conception of European peace was founded 011 respect for international obligations, could only agree. " However unfortunate it would be to find this country in any shape committed," he wrote, " it seems absolutely impossible to hesitate as to supporting our ally in case of necessity." But he added that he hoped for an opportunity to reconcile Continental differences and so end the war, leaving France to arrange her internal affairs in her own way. For he and his Government still clung to their policy of appeasement. As late as November 6th, the Foreign Secretary wrote that his chief ambition was to know that he had kept England from sharing in the evils that surrounded her. " I am more than convinced that this can only be done by keeping wholly and entirely aloof."

It was one thing to wish to keep aloof: another to do so. In the van of the French armies moved a swarm of French agents preparing a " liberating " road for them. A number of these gentlemen were hard at work in Holland, where they had long been sowing trouble in a fertile soil. In the middle of November the British Ambassador at the Hague reported that there was scarcely a village without a seditious club and a travelling Jacobin. It was obvious that the French meant to follow up ideological infiltration with an invasion. It was equally plain that the Dutch plutocracy was incapable of stopping either.

The rulers of Holland, a rich and timorous
merchant oligarchy, did everyth
ing within their power to avoid inflaming their powerful neighbour. As long as it was possible they refrained from formally asking Britain to fulfil her treaty obligations. But after the fall of Antwerp on November 28th and a peremptory ultimatum demanding the passage of French troops through the frontier fortress of Maestricht, they begged that a British squadron should be assembled in the Downs. An intercepted letter from Dumouriez to the French envoy at the Hague made that general's aggressive intentions unmistakable.

Pitt was thus faced with the fact that the war he had struggled so hard to avoid was inevitable unless the Convention relinquished its designs on Holland. The retention of the Dutch coastline and the great anchorages of the Scheldt in friendly hands was a vital British interest: the Dutch alliance the keystone of his foreign policy. He could not abandon them at the dictates of frenzied demagogues and of an imaginary " Law of Nature " enforced by French guns. No such canon of law—let alone the exclusive right of French politicians to interpret it—was recognised by his country.

On November 29th Grenville had a conversation with Chauvelin. It was a chilling interview,
¹
for th
e Foreign Office with characteristic

¹
It opened with the Foreign Secretary motioning Chauvelin to the smallest chair in the room and the latter promptly occupying the largest.

pedantry refused to admit the French Ambassador's official status, the royal government which had sent him to London no longer existing. At Grenville's request Chauvelin affirmed, not very convincingly, his government's desire to respect Dutch neutrality. Three days later on the suggestion of a well-meaning Member of Parliament Pitt gave an informal interview to Maret, a French diplomat then on a private visit to England.
¹
The conversation was friendly, but the Prime Minister warned the would-be appeaser that any act of aggression against Holland would lead to immediate war. When Maret's account of the interview was published in Paris, this warning was deliberately suppressed.

For though a few of the wiser Revolutionary leaders still wanted Anglo-French friendship, others had made up their minds that a war with Britain was necessary. In their view France's interest was not peace but conquest as a Revolutionary instrument. Without it the dictatorship would lose its
raison d'etre.
Even the Jacobin Robespierre, who had first opposed a European war out of fear of a counter-revolutionary dictatorship, now advocated its extension. To preserve their monopoly of power, the Party chiefs had to continue down the bloody slope or be overwhelmed by the forces they had aroused. The ease with which victory had so far crowned their audacity encouraged them to go on: to unloose the Terror of the armed mob beyond the frontiers and again conquer. Aggression, too, was needed to replenish their coffers and recoup the moneylenders and stock-jobbers. War against Holland, with its international banks and gold reserves, offered a wonderful opportunity.

Success depended on the ruling class of every nation proving as weak and irresolute as those of France's immediate neighbours. But an unpleasant shock was now administered to the Revolutionary statesmen by England,, which their agents and the Gallophil enthusiasts of-the Corresponding Societies had painted as ripe for revolution. For foreign criticism of British institutions instead of dividing the nation united it: foreign victories instead of intimidating aroused it. That eternally recurrent spectacle took every one, even Englishmen, by surprise.

For from every county there suddenly poured in resolutions by spontaneous " Loyal Associations " of yeomen, gentry and shopkeepers, promising the Government their support to maintain the

¹
Afterwards, as Due de Bassano, Napoleon's Foreign Minister.

rights and liberties of Englishmen. When Pitt on December ist, at last openly declaring that nothing but readiness for war could preserve peace, issued a Proclamation calling out two-thirds of the Militia and summoned Parliament to meet in a fortnight, he was universally applauded.

The half-baked enthusiasts, who a few weeks earlier had been acclaiming French victories and penning fraternal greetings to the Convention, now found themselves in a hopeless minority, scorned by their neighbours and threatened by the magistrates. The hour had struck, as often before in her history, when Britain with a single voice resolved to:

" Stand by the Church and the King and the Laws; The old Lion still has his teeth and his claws. Let Britain still rule in the midst of her waves, And chastise all those foes who dare call her sons slaves."

Chauvelin could scarcely believe his
ears. The English, he reported t
o his Government, were hardly recognisable.

It was this transformation which alone averted war in December. Faced with the certainty of British intervention, the French Government instructed Dumouriez to postpone the invasion of Holland. But nothing could stop the unreasoning course of violence in Paris. The statesman who paused on the downward slope soon heard the yell of the mob and the click of the guillotine behind him. On December 15th a resolution was forced through the Convention that France would regard any nation as hostile that dared preserve its Sovereign and privileged Orders.

When the British Parliament met on December 13th it approved the Government's resolve to strengthen the forces by an overwhelming majority. In the nation's need for unity Whig and Tory had become in Gibbon's phrase, " obsolete odious words." Unfortunately Fox, who had declared in private that Britain was bound to fight if Holland were attacked, took the occasion to divide the House. With the curious political irresponsibility that marred his generous and lovable character he made a violent attack on Pitt's foreign policy. Only a handful of his former supporters followed him into the lobby, and but for personal loyalty and affection they would have been even fewer. But the effect of this futile division was to encourage the war .party in the Convention. The French extremists were strengthened in their delusion that they had to deal only with a ruling clique and not a nation.

Immediate security measures were now taken by Parliament. 17,000 addition soldiers were voted and 9000 seamen,
raising the personnel of the
Navy to 25,000 or about a quarter of its American war figure. A Bill was also introduced to subject foreign refugees to more stringent supervision. The debate was enlivened by Burke, who, exposing a Jacobin conspiracy to arm the mob of Birmingham, astonished the House by flinging down a dagger on the floor. Sheridan spoilt the effect by asking where the fork was.

These proceedings were magnified in Paris by those who wanted war. Chauvelin was instructed to ask in peremptory language whether Britain was hostile or neutral. This was the same technique that had brought about the rupture with Austria. It was regarded by Pitt and Grenville as an ultimatum. The latter informed Chauvelin that the Government wholly rejected the Convention's claim that its unilateral denunciation of the Scheldt treaties was a purely French concern. With his natural frigidity stiffened by his race's traditional self-justification when it stands on its rights, the Foreign Secretary recalled that his Government had always desired to preserve neutrality but denied that she could watch with indifference any nation make herself " sovereign of the Low Countries or general arbitress of the rig
hts and liberties of Europe."
After this there was little hope. On Christmas Day Parson Woodforde, representing an older England soon to spend herself in Herculean labours and in spending herself to pass away, administered the sacrament at Weston Church and afterwards entertained at his house five old men to each of whom he gave a traditional gift of money and a dinner of roast beef and plum pudding. Next day Louis was brought to his trial and the French Ministers discussed a plan for the invasion of England. " We will make a descent on the island," cried the Minister of Marine, " we will lodge there 50,000 caps of Liberty. . . . The tyranny of their government will soon be destroyed."

When Chauvelin on January 7th, 1793, pressed a new demand for the immediate repeal of the Aliens' Bill, the Foreign Office refused to receive it. True to the English habit in the final vigil before contest, Grenville took his stand on the rigid letter of the law.