The Years of Endurance (44 page)

¹
H. M. C. Dropmore,
III,
379.

^a
J.
W.
Fortescue,
Statesmen of the Great War
(1911), 125.

3
Collingwood,
63-4.

had brutally seized all who dared to oppose them and huddled them off to
the
in tropical concentration camps. Here, Pitt told the House, " was a system of tyranny the most galling, the most horrible, the most undisguised in all its parts and attributes that has stained the page of history or disgraced the annals of the world."
¹
Set against it, and stigmatised as an anachronistic despotism by sordid tyrants who had just annulled the elections in forty-nine Departments and sent two thousand apolitical opponents to the galleys, was a mild constitutional monarchy whose worst offence against civil liberty during a year in which the very foundations of its existence had been threatened was the sentencing of a Lincolnshire blacksmith to a few months' solitary confinement for damning the King.

A fortnight after Malmesbury's hasty departure from Lille the Directory launched its attack. Throughout the summer Duncan had been holding grimly to his station off the Texel where Daendels' army was waiting to embark for Ireland. At one period in July the troops had actually boarded the transports, only to be driven ashore again by the prolonged spell of westerly winds which marked the critical summer of 1797. For six weeks, while Wolfe Tone blotted his diary with expletives, it blew steadily from the same quarter, as though Heaven were fighting for England. Meanwhile Brigadier John Moore, invalided from
the
West Indies, inspected the defences of Clacton beach, and young Walter Scott, Quartermaster of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, rose at five each summer morning to charge imaginary Frenchmen on Musselburgh sands before going to his legal labours in the Parliament House. And far away in Ireland Lake's dragoons went about their grim business of disarming the populace.

In mid-August, the favourable season for invasion nearing its close, the Dutch abandoned the idea of a large-scale attack on Ireland for a raid on Scotland. A month later, on September 19th, Hoche, the one disinterested champion of Ireland's cause in France, died prematurely of consumption. Irish emancipation fell into the background at the very moment that Irish wrongs had made it the most deadly of all explosives with which to destroy the Republic's last enemy. The feeling was growing in Paris that, with Austria making her formal surrender at Campo Formio and the entire

¹
War Speeches,
204.

resources of France and her allies available for a direct assault on England, an attempt on starving Ireland was no longer necessary. The victorious liberators of the Great Nation could not be expected to be bothered with a " levee-en-masse of potatoes."

Early in October, 1797, the Dutch fleet at the Texel received orders to put to sea to disable the British North Sea squadron and so prepare the way for a raid on the English or Scottish coast. Equinoctial gales had driven Duncan back to Yarmouth to refit: the old man, who had long been anxious to retire with an Irish peerage, had recently complained that his flagship, the
Venerable,
was so unseaworthy that even his cabin was not dry when it rained. " When she has much motion she cracks as if she would go to pieces," he told Spencer.
¹
He was lying in Yarmouth Roads on the morning of the 9th when the sound of a lugger firing at the back of the sands gave the signal that the enemy were at sea. Leaving many of his officers still ashore, he weighed anchor at once and was on his way back to the Dutch coast before noon. Early on the nth he sighted the enemy.

The battle that followed showed the world that the resistance of Britain, which appeared to have been crumbling during the naval mutinies and the peace negotiations at Lille, was still a factor to be reckoned with. The memory of Camperdown was soon eclipsed by Nelson's more famous victories, but at the time it seemed—and was—a crowning deliverance. The two fleets were well matched— sixteen battleships against sixteen with a Dutch superiority in gun power—but the British were in an invincible mood. The men, who four months before had refused to follow their Admiral and hoisted the red flag, were on their mettle: resolved to re-establish their patriotism and worth in the eyes of their countrymen. And they knew that they were fighting literally for their country's existence; a defeat at that hour would have sealed her doom.

Duncan, having the weather gauge, boldly endeavoured to put his fleet between the enemy and the shore to prevent their escape. Then flying the signal for close action, and not waiting to form line of battle, the stately old giant went in like a boxer set on victory. The spirit of the day was epitomised by the captain of the
Belliqueux
who, puzzled by the Admiral's signals, flung down the signal book with a " Damn it! up wi' the helium and gang into the

¹
7th
Aug.,
1797,
Spencer Papers,
II,
188.

middle o't! " The Dutch fought with traditional stubbornness and skill: unlike the ill-disciplined French and Spaniards, firing low and doing great execution to the British hulls. The carnage in Duncan's flagship was so great that at one moment he and the pilot were the only men unwounded on the quarter-deck. But the British gunnery was transcendent. When after a three-hour duel Admiral de Winter struck his flag, he surrendered not so much a ship as a mortuary.

Only seven Dutch vessels escaped. Ten others were taken, including seven ships of the line. They were too battered to be of much use to the victors. But their eclipse meant the end of the North Sea menace. Henceforward Britain could concentrate her main force against Brest and the Atlantic ports: the Dutch navy as a striking force was out of the war. For this, and still more for the needed fillip his victory gave to British spirits, his countrymen hailed Duncan as a saviour.
¹
Pitt, over his dinner at Walmer Castle, heard the news from a smuggler and broke into a boyish ecstasy: Dundas wrote joyously that an Irish peerage would no longer do for the brave old man now. Bonfires blazed in every city and village, and a public subscription in London for the families of fallen sailors rea
ched £
5000 in a day. Later a solemn thanksgiving for
the
victory was held in St. Paul's: in the centre of the royal procession through the City were three wa
ggons guarded by seamen with cutl
asses and adorned with captured French, Spanish and Dutch flags. Nor was it in Britain only that Camperdown was acclaimed. The Russian Ambassador wrote that all over the universe honest men rejoiced with the good people of England. For it was a portent that nations could still command their own destiny.

It was some such thought that must have been passing through Pitt's mind when his old tutor, the Bishop of Lincoln, consulted him about the thanksgiving sermon. The Prime Minister agreed with the proposed text:
" Except these abide in the ship
, ye cannot be saved," but went o
n to suggest its application. ‘
Your sermon would be to prove that God who
governs the world by his provi
dence never interposes for the preservation of men or nations without their own exertions." After a pause, he added, " I really think with that text, it will be the best sermon ever preached."

He preached it himself when he met the Commons on November

¹
"
One
of
the
greatest
objects
is
raising
people's
spirits."—Grenville
to Spencer,
13th
Oct.,
1797.—
Spencer Papers,
II,
196.

10
th to recount the breakdown of the peace negotiations at Lille. He described his inextinguishable wish for peace even with a Revolutionary government if it could be had on terms which did not rob the nation of its security or honour. But since it could not, there was no extremity which was not preferable to a base surrender. Upon such an alternative, he declared, no Englishman would hesitate. Once more he asked for unity, with which the country could accomplish anything, and for a cessation of the defeatist jeremiads of the Opposition Press which seemed to know " no other use of English liberty but servilely to retail and transcribe French opinions." He appealed instead for the virtues which a reverse of fortune had never failed to evoke from England: " the virtues of adversity endured and adversity resisted, of adversity encountered and adversity surmounted."

The Prime Minister's speech ended with a great peroration. " There is one great resource which I trust will never abandon us. It has shone forth in the English character, by which we have preserved our existence and fame as a nation, which I trust we shall be determined never to abandon under any extremity, but shall join hand and heart in the solemn pledge that is proposed to us, and declare to His Majesty that we know great exertions are wanting, that we are prepared to make them and at all events determined to stand or fall by the laws, liberties and religion of our country."
¹
When Pitt sat down Sir John Sinclair withdrew his hostile amendment and the whole House rose spontaneously to sing " Britons, Strike Home! "

Rider and steed were worthy of one another. All through the autumn, under the surface of depression and the cross-currents of defeatism, the tide of popular resolve had been rising. The victory of Camperdown and the Prime Minister's great appeal heralded an epoch of national revival and glory. The long years of apathy and retreat were over: rising from the last ditch of disaster and peril, the country prepared to wrestle with destiny. That November, under the shadow of defeat and invasion, a curious electric current ran through the land. Wilberforce's
Practical View,
with its scorching contempt for moral complacency and unprofitable respectability, enjoyed for a religious book an almost sensational sale: forced by the all-pervading threat to existence to examine their

¹
War Speeches,
228-9.

consciences and the roots of belief, men found a new quickening of faith. Early in December a notice was given in at the fashionable church of St. George's, Hanover Square, that an officer wished to return thanks to Almighty God for his recovery from a severe wound and the mercies bestowed on him. It was the one-armed, one-eyed Nelson.

Duncan's guns and Pitt's words marked the beginning of the English counter-attack against the French Revolution. It began, characteristically, when " that ungovernable, intolerable, destroying spirit " had broken down all other resistance and was threatening to engulf the island itself.
¹
Though men of the older generation, oppressed by continuous difficulties and defeats, could not yet feel the turn of the tide, Pitt's young disciple, Canning, recovering from the gloom of the autumn, had already published the first number of his
Anti-Jacobin.
The new paper was nothing if not aggressive: during its brief existence " Pitt's Kindergarten " in one brilliant squib after another took the offensive against the cherished idols of revolutionary ideology, contrasting them in scathing verse and satire with the sorry performances—murders, perjuries and outrages—of the French " friends of humanity " and the vanity and ignorance of their English sympathisers:

" Come, little drummer boy, lay down your knapsack here, I am the soldier's friend, here are some books for you, Nice clever books by Tom Paine the philanthropist."

Against these it contrasted the virtues of old England—the " little body with a mighty heart"—which the Jacobins despised but which would yet prove too strong for them.

It was to harness the resurgent forces of the nation to
the
war effort that Pitt laid his plans at the close of 1797 for the biggest

¹
Across
the
Atlantic
the
young
Anglo-Saxon
Republic
had
just
realised that
the
political
convulsion
in
France
was
not
a
new
birth
of
freedom
akin to
its
own
but
a
despotism
which
only
the
resistance
of
stubborn,
stupid England
could
prevent
from
enslaving
the
earth.
Farington
has
a
note
in his
diary
for
31st
January,
1798
:
"
Eyes
of
America
now
opened—did favour
France—but
now
see
nothing
permanent,
no
integrity—though
do not
approve
all
in
England,
yet
see
it
a
country
which
can
be
depended
on." A
few
months
later
Britain
modified
a
Convoy
Bill
before
Parliament
to please
the
U.S.A.—See
Rose,
I,
209.