The Years of Endurance (33 page)

The issue which the Admiral had to face called for all his powers of judgment and fortitude. They were equal to the occasion. " Strong nerves and manly sense," he told the Admiralty, were superior in treating with barbarians to the finesse of the Corps Diplomatique. He applied them to the affairs of soudiern Europe.

¹
Spencer Papers,
II,
400-1.

²
It was a pleasantry of his when the weather was rough to summon the chaplains of the fleet for a conclave.

In consultation with the Viceroy he ordered the blockade of Leghorn and the occupation of Elba—a small Tuscan island between the mainland and Corsica. On July 9th Nelson accordingly appeared off the capital, Porto Ferrajo, and landed troops without opposition from the authorities. Indeed, they seemed to welcome this unorthodox but masculine diplomacy.

But the security of Corsica was the least of Jervis's worries. Expelled from the Italian mainland, cut off from all sources of fresh food and dangerously short of frigates and corvettes, the British fleet was now faced with a new danger. Ever since his craven surrender Godoy—since raised to almost royal dignity by the doting Queen under the fantastic tide of Prince of the Peace— had been playing with the idea of reviving the hundred-year-old family alliance between France and Spain. Many motives prompted him: personal vanity, hatred of the stiff-necked island ally he had betrayed, a natural sympathy towards those who like himself had overcome the disadvantages of mean birth. Though the old blood-link between the Bourbon Courts of Versailles and Madrid had been snapped, that between the peoples remained. Gallic victories on land might be matched by Iberian triumphs at sea, and the two great Latin nations of the west might together re-establish their ancient ascendancy over Saxons and Teutons. Spain had many old scores to settle with England: Gibraltar, the West Indies and two centuries of interloping by heretic freebooters. A great naval and imperial power with seventy-six ships of the line in her harbours and half the Americas as her private property, she had the strength to enforce her just pretensions.

So Godoy argued, seeing himself as a second Alberoni, and wily Jacobin agents encouraged him in his dreams. Needing the Spanish fleet and harbours for use against Britain, they represented the presence of British troops in Corsica and Santo Domingo as an affront to Spain's dignity. Against such arguments, the British Ambassador, Lord Bute, pleaded in vain. The ramshackle Power, which a year before had withdrawn from alliance into neutrality now sank from alliance to non-belligerency. Early in 1796 the French squadron which had captured the British Levant convoy put into Cadiz with its prizes and began openly to refit in the royal dockyards. Nor could all Bute's representations remove them.

French privateers used Spanish harbours to attack British

shipping, and Spanish naval arsenals hummed with unwonted activity. " Spain," Nelson wrote in May, " is certainly going to war with somebody." There could be little doubt with whom.

The Government, however, feeling that it had its hands full, did its best to ignore these provocations. It instructed an appeasing ambassador to do all in his power to preserve peace. Nor was Godoy in a hurry to bring matters to a head. He needed time to man his fleet and to see how the campaign in Italy went before finally committing himself. Even his ignora
nce and presumption could not bli
nd him to the fact that past wars with England had proved expensive for his country.

For these, as for reasons of even greater purport, the eyes of Spain and Britain became focused on the struggle in the Lombardy plain. Here Bonaparte was trying to reduce Mantua with a siege train of only half the gun-power of the fortress, while preventing the Austrian veteran, Wurmser, from relieving it through the Alpine passes. The struggle seemed uneven, for the Directors, now
jealous of his fame, were secretl
y starving their youthful general of men and guns. With 40,000 men Bonaparte had simultaneously to contain 11,000 Austrians in Mantua and beat off 60,000 more from the north. Nelson, writing from his station off Leghorn, felt full confidence again: the French army had suffered terrible losses, the outraged Italian states were combining against the aggressor, Wurmser would soon be in Mantua, Naples would stand firm in her alliance.
¹

At the end of July, 1796, Wurmser began to emerge from the mountain defiles, moving southwards
along either shore of Lake Gar
da and driving Massena's covering troops before him. Hardly had he done so when the whirlwind struck him. With almost incredible speed Bonaparte abandoned the siege of Mantua and every other inessential and hurled his entire force on the Austrian columns before they had time to assemble south of the lake. In the first five days of August, in operations around Castiglione he defeated both halves of Wurmser's army in turn and flung him back northeastwards into the passes. "All our expected hopes," wrote Nelson to Jervis, " are blasted. . . . Austria, I suppose, must make peace, and we shall, as usual, be left to fight it out." Britain would have to

¹
Nicolas,
II,
212,
219.

give up Corsica and withdraw from the Mediterranean. As for the Dons, they would pay for it, if they were fools enough to involve themselves in war.
¹

On August 4th, the French raiders, refitted after their long stay at Cadiz, were escorted into the Atlantic by the Spanish fleet, Admiral Man's small observation squadron discreedy withdrawing. The news of Castiglione removed Godoy's last doubts. On August 19th he signed at San Udefonso a full offensive alliance with the Directory. By a secret clause Spain was later to cede Louisiana to France, while France was to assist Spain to conquer Gibraltar and Portugal. War was to be declared on Britain within a month, the King of Spain was to become Grand Admiral of the Republic, and the two Latin Powers, sinking ideological differences, were to advance together inexorably to the final overthrow of " the province of England." In view of French victories on land, Spanish geography and the joint naval strength of France, Spain and Holland —together nearly double that of Britain—it looked a safe gamble.

A week later the Spanish Ambassador, making a flimsy excuse, left London. Already Pitt, seeing the writing on the wall, was buying naval stores for a long siege: ship timber from the Adriatic, masts and hemp from North America, corn, tallow, hides, hemp and iron from the Baltic.
²
On the
1
st
the Cabinet, anticipating an early surrender by Austria, reached the momentous decision to abandon Corsica and withdraw the fleet from the Mediterranean. Orders were at once dispatched to Jervis and Elliot. To defend her scattered possessions a concentration of Britain's effort had become essential. She could not longer contain the power of France from the circumference.

Yet just when Austria, reeling under Bonaparte's blows, seemed at her last gasp,
the
clouds for a moment lifted. A second attempt of Wurmser to relieve Mantua had ended in the discomfited old man being forced to take refuge with a remnant of his army in the fortress he had come to deliver. But in Germany, where both French and Austrians had planned their main campaign, the tide of war turned unexpectedly in Austria's favour. At the end of May the French armies had crossed the Rhine and pressed into the heart

¹
Nelson to Jervis, 20th Aug., 1796 ;
Nicolas,
II, 248-9.

²
Mahan, Sea Power,
I, 74
.

of Germany, laying waste Suabia, Franconia and Bavaria, and threatening Vienna itself. An urgent application to Pitt for aid was p
romptly met with an advance of
£1,200,000 on the Prime Minister's personal responsibility.
¹

This help enabled Austria to make a last effort. Her new commander-in-chief, the Archduke Charles—a man no older than Bonaparte—having shown patient stoicism in retreat, now successively defeated Bernadotte at Neumark on August 16th, and Jourdan at Wurzburg on September 3 rd. Had it not been for Austrian fears of Prussia, which kept 80,000 troops watching the Silesian frontier, the French retreat to the Rhine might have become a rout. As it was, for the third time the Empress of Russia unwittingly aided the Republic by concentrating an army on her western borders. For it was the weakness of the German powers that, facing both ways, they could never decide i
n which direction to act or con
siste
ntly
pursue any policy without becoming distracted.

The autumn of 1796 in Germany had consequences even more important than the military. For it first crystallised the real as opposed to the idealistic issue between Revolutionary France and Europe. Hitherto the Jacobins in all countries had been able to represent the war as an ideological one: a crusade to liberate the peoples from the despotism of selfish rulers and outworn laws. As a result the poorer and to a large extent the middle-classes had been lukewarm in their support of their governments, and many had openly sympathised with the French and welcomed their coming. Only in Britain had patriotism proved a stronger force than horizontal discontent, though even here a minority had displayed Jacobin leanings.

But after the invasion of southern and central Germany these illusions began to fade. For the invaders, carrying fire and sword, inflicted immense suffering. It fell, as always, most heavily on the poor. The plundered hen-roost, the emptied granary, the burning cottage represented the entire wealth of the peasant: not only his income but his capital. The Jacobin doctrine of making the conquered countryside maintain the victor's army awoke in its victims feelings of patriotism and national unity that had scarcely existed in the medieval medley of the older Europe. By making Germans

¹
Fox subsequently tried to impeach Pitt, but the House condoned the Premier's brave action by 285 votes to 81
.

aware that they hated Frenchmen, it made them conscious that they were Germans.
¹

The growth of this feeling was slow. For the moment its effects were confined to acts of revenge against French stragglers. Nor did the spirit of patriotism touch the governments, which continued in Germany as in Italy to be actuated by dynastic and personal motives. The Franconian and Suabian States bought a selfish peace with the invader who was fighting the titular Emperor of Germany. Prussia, on news of Bonaparte's victories, sought a closer understanding with France and encouraged the larger north German states to enlarge their territories at the expense of their smaller neighbours. In its jealousy of the Hapsburgs, the House of Hohenzollern exploited the Revolution to destroy what was left of the old Christian Reich and the fabric of European civilisation. By a secret pact signed in early August it agreed to recognise France's right to the Rhine frontier in return for compensation at the expense of the German ecclesiastical princes.

It was the Prussian attempt to form a northern federation— friendly to France and non-belligerent towards Britain—which, even more than the lowering aspect of Spain and Bonaparte's victories, made the British Government again contemplate peace. A threat to Hamburg and the Baltic ports—the chief source of naval stores and of surplus grain for the growing industrial towns —touched Pitt's most sensitive spot. It had been the Armed Neutrality of Prussia and the Baltic States that had tipped the scale against his country when he stood at the threshold of public life in the dark hours of the American war. A friendly Prussia and the trade of the North had always been corner stones of his foreign policy. At the end of June, 1796, he wrote to Grenville that since Austria would almost certainly be unable to continue the struggle after the end of the year, it would be inexcusable not to try " honourably and safely to set on foot some decent plan of pacification." For either now or in a few months Britain would find herself " left to sustain alone the conflict with France and Holland,

¹
" Have you seen," wrote an English lady a few years later, " a German Hymn for the Emperor Francis in the manner of our God Save the King ? and set by Haydn ; the words are translated by Dr. Burne
y into English— the music is ver
y fine."
(Bamford,
20 x.) The hymn, expressing the Austrian peasant's love for his fatherland, was
Deutschland uber Alle
s
.

probably joined by Spain and favoured more or less openly by the Northern Powers."
I

But the road to peace was not easy. The King was still against any concession and, like Burke, looked on a "Jacobin peace " as a deal with Satan.
²
And th
ough every report showed that the French people were heartily sick of war, the
ir rulers gave no sign of readi
ness to meet Britain half-way. A feeler through the Danish Charge d'Affaires was met by an insolent demand for a direct application. " If such a communication," wrote the King, " will not rouse the British lion, he must have lost his wonted energy! " Yet peace was so needful that even pride was worth sacrificing to obtain it. In July there was a financial crisis during which Consols fell below 60: the City said openly that unless Pitt made peace before Christmas the Bank would force him to resign.
³