The Years of Endurance (62 page)

A week later Abercromby reached Port Mahon. On reading Keith's appeal for troops to hold Genoa, he at once sailed with 10,000 men in the transports Fox had prepared. Before he could arrive the French were in the town. Two hundred miles to the north of the Lombard plain where Bonaparte, again ruled, the French under Moreau, having defeated Kray near Ulm, were entering Munich. The Austrians, fighting alone, had been beaten on every front. " Our own army," wrote the Foreign Secretary, " could not have done worse! "

¹
Frischauer,
100.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Of Nelson and the North
1
800-1

" The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn Till danger's troubled night depart And the star of peace return "

Campbell.

T
he
transformation wrought by Marengo and Moreau's victories on the Danube left the combatants a little breathless. The proud Austrian armies, which a short while before had threatened France with invasion, were still in being, but their prestige had been shattered. Bonaparte, on the other hand, was back where he had stood after Rivoli. His humiliations in Egypt and Syria were wiped out. Marengo, so near at one moment to being a defeat, had decided his destiny. His charter to rule was clearly writ in its blood.

Immediately after the battle he returned to Paris. His first thought, as always in the hour of success, was to consolidate his position. From the royal palace of the Tuileries he opened a diplomatic offensive. To Austria he proposed peace on the tacit understanding that she should abandon her alliance with Britain. To the Tsar of Russia he offered Malta, where the French garrison of Valetta still precariously held out against its besiegers. To Spain he offered an Italian kingdom for the Queen's brother and dropped a hint to the dictator, Godoy, of a Lusitanian throne when the English should be driven from Portugal.

To his own people he proffered new laws and regulations, lucid, rational and beneficent: extended trade, and glor
y; everything, in fact, except li
berty. The Revolution, he explained, was over; the time had come to enjoy its fruits. He gave the peasant security in his lands against the feudal lords, the right to attend his parish church—so long as the priest kept out of politics—and an assured

market for his produce. He gave the new rich and the bourgeoisie pomp and an ordered society. He ended the cruel dissensions of the past ten years and raised the proscription on more than a hundred thousand exiles. With the same unresting energy that he showed in battle, he established a new national administration. For all this he asked one thing only: abso
lute and universal obedience to
his will. Those who were unwise enough to oppose him he subjected to a purge of death or deportation. Even over Fouche's police
he set a secret police; of his
own with spies and informers everywhere. It was a price which
France was ready to pay. " Gen-tl
emen," declared Sieyes, " you have a master over you. Bonaparte wan
ts every th
ing, knows everything and can do everything! " The country rejoiced in its new-found despotism.

The truce in Italy was followed by another in Germany. The French armies in both theatres of war were to continue to live at large on the territories they had conquered, while the encircled Imperial garrisons were to be revictualled every fortnight for two weeks only. With the liquidation of the Revolution by a Caesar, the war had suddenly become unreal to the tired peoples of Europe. They were ready for a new order. An Englishman lodging at Frankfurt-on-Main had left a description of the arrival of the French there that July. They did not seem to come as enemies but merely as friendly conquerors. The young officer who was billeted on the house did not even resent the fact that his fellow-lodger was an Englishman. On the contrary, he discussed poetry with him and shared with relish in
the
delights of the new German— and revolutionary—dance, the waltz.

On July 21st, 1800, an Austrian plenipotentiary arrived in Paris to discuss peace After a week of tempestuous flattery, insinuation and veiled menaces, the First Consul prevailed upon him to sign formal preliminaries giving France everything she had won by the Peace of Campo Formio three years before. But this was too much for the Aulic Council and the Imperial Chancellor. With all his faults Thugut was an inflexible patriot. He refused to ratify terms based on an agreement dictated when the French armies were at the very gates of Vienna.

Thugut was moved, too, by other considerations. His Government, in return for a loan of two millions sterling free of interest, had just made a formal compact
with
Britain not to conclude a separate peace. Britain had behaved with undeniable generosity. Not only had she overlooked an unredeemed former loan, but, putting the interests of Europe before her own, she had offered in any joint negotiations for peace to offset her colonial conquests against France's territorial claims in Germany and Italy. The extent of her good faith had been shown after a Turkish-French agreement had been signed in Sidney Smith's flagship for the evacuation of Kleber's army from Egypt to France. Nelson, with his strong sense of political ethics, had sternly pointed out to his erring subordinate " the impossibility of permitting a vanquished army to be placed by one Ally in a position to attack another," and Lord Keith on his return to the Mediterranean had promptly repudiated the Convention. Thus, to assist Austria, Britain deliberately jeopardised her eastern dominion and her friendship with Turkey by leaving a French army in Egypt.

Accordingly on August 15th Austria notified France of her inability to ratify
the
Paris preliminaries or to make peace without England. At the same time she expressed the readiness of both countries to negotiate concurrently. At this the First Consul, whose object was to separate the Allies, affected a great rage and threatened to end the Armistice and carry immediate war into the Hapsburg hereditary domains. But as his prime purpose was still to consolidate his internal position in France before extending his conquests, he used the Allied reluctance to negotiate separately as a means of filching advantages from England which he could not otherwise hope to obtain. For, despite all his conquests on land, he was still confronted by another's mastery of the sea. Through that dominion Britain had robbed France of her colonies and trade and even—and this was particularly bitter to the First Consul— of those Mediterranean conquests which had been his own peculiar achievement. Her stranglehold on the world's seaways not only withheld from
the
French people the prosperity which he had promised them in return for their liberty, but at that moment was threatening to starve his armies out of his last stronghold on the route to the Orient.

For this reason Bonaparte instructed Monsieur Otto, the French agent-general for the exchange of prisoners in London, to demand a naval armistice from Britain as the condition of any extension of the military convention
with
Austria. The Cabinet at first

demurred on the ground that such a thing was unheard of. But on the First Consul threatening an immediate renewal of the war in Germany and Italy they gave way. There seemed no alternative if they were to retain their ally. They therefore proposed on September 7th that Malta and Egypt should be put on the same footing as the beleaguered Imperial garrisons and revictualled once a fortnight, that the blockade of Brest should be lifted, but that the right to sail should only be extended to merchant ships and not to men-of-war.

This did not suit Bonaparte, for he was determined, even if he could not save Malta, to put Egypt out of danger of capture. He needed it both for the fulfilment of his eastern ambitions and as a bargaining counter. In counter-proposals on September 20th he demanded
that the ban on warships should
apply only to capital ships and that six French frigates should sail for Alexandria at once without being searched by British cruisers. It was his plan to cram these with troops and munitions. Simultaneously he attempted to double-cross the Allies by using the new manual telegraph to instruct Moreau to insist on the immediate surrender of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Philipsburg as the price for renewal of the Austrian armistice.

In this he was successful. Austria yielded to obtain a respite till December and the full fall of winter. But over Malta and Egypt Bonaparte overreached himself. For, with the Imperial fortresses in his hands, the need for Britain to make concessions at sea on her behalf ceased. She flatly refused to allow the cunning Corsican to revictual Egypt. As for Malta, the starving garrison of Valetta, after a two years' siege, had surrendered that month to a small force of British soldiers under Colonel Thomas Graham. The chief heroes of the siege had been the Maltese themselves—" a hardy, brave race," wrote General Abercromby, " animated, and eager in the cause in which they were engaged "
¹
—and the calm, philosophical Gloucestershire sea captain, Alexander Ball, to whom Nelson had entrusted the blockade of Valetta and who became, a little incongruously, the subject of their passionate devotion. So close had been the Navy's watch that for nearly a year not a single vessel entered the port. Since his assumption of power, Bonaparte had given repeated orders to revictual it, but in vain.

¹
Moore,
I,
369.

111 February, 1800, one of the two survivors of the line-of-battle at the Nile, the
Genereux
74, with three frigates and 3000 troops from Toulon, had had the misfortune to encounter Nelson on one of his rare excursions to Valetta, and had at once been captured. A month later
the
remaining Nile battleship, the
Guillaume Tell,
attempting to escape from the doomed port, suffered the same fate.

But Nelson, back in his Sicilian bondage, was not there to see it. Nor, for all the entreaties of his friends and sad-eyed captains, did he receive the surrender of Valetta. Vexed in his vanity by the return of Lord Keith to the Mediterranean, and caught up in an unwonted sensual web, he had insisted on being relieved of his command on
the
grounds of ill-health. " My career of service," he assured the faithful, protesting Troubridge, " is at an end." On the day of Marengo he had arrived at Leghorn with his siren—" Rinaldo in the arms of Armida "—on the first stage of his journey home. Four weeks later he had struck his flag and set out for Vienna with the Queen of Naples and the Hamiltons, who had been recalled to England. It was a strange menage. "They sit," wrote Lady Minto, " and flatter each other all day long." Another eyewitness described Emma as cramming the Admiral with trowelfuls of flattery which he swallowed quietly like a child taking pap. At Vienna, as one after another of the laurels of the Nile were plucked by the new Caesar of the West, Nelson, tricked out with ribands and stars like the hero of an opera, received the plaudits of an idle multitude and sat at faro with Lady Hamilton while Haydn played unregarded.
¹

Yet, for all his rival's triumph, one fruit of the great Admiral's victory remained. His country still rode mistress of the Mediterranean. Here during the summer months of 1800 a British army wandered vainly up and down in its transports seeking employment. From Minorca to Leghorn, from Leghorn to Malta, from Malta back to Minorca and from Minorca to Gibraltar, its path was guided by the successive and varying instructions of the Cabinet, always sent several weeks after the event which prompted them and always arriving too late to effect the purpose for which they were sent.

For, despite the now unmistakable impatience of the public

¹
" It is really melancholy," wrote John Moore in July at Leghorn, " to see a brave and good man, who has deserved well of his country, cutting so pitiful a figure."—
Moore,
I,
367.

with all its military ventures, the Government in its contest of manoeuvre with Bonaparte was again making use of the Army. At midsummer, after the failure of the attempt on Belleisle and the final liquidation of the Chouans, it resolved to employ it to knock Spain out of the war. For France's junior partner, after three ruinous years, hoped only for peace. Relations between blockader and blockaded off the Iberian ports had for long been far more friendly than those between the Spaniards and their bullying French masters: high-flown compliments, presents of wine and cheese, and even more substantial services had been continuously exchanged by Brit
ish naval officers and the courtl
y Dons. It was only Godoy who seemed to be keeping Spain in the war at all.

The capture of Spanish naval bases became, therefore, the Government's first objective. In July 13,000 of the troops which Stuart had vainly demanded for operations in Italy were sent under General Pulteney and a naval escort to seize the great naval arsenal of Ferrol. No attempt had been made to reconnoitre the ground or obtain information about the strength of the Spanish garrison and defences: a little vague talk by sanguine naval officers was quite enough for Dundas. When the troops landed on the Galician coast in the third week in August they found the place impregnable. After a brief skirmish with Spanish outposts they re-embarked, much to the fury of the Navy which had set its heart on prize money. The public, which was now ready to blame the Army for everything, ignorantly endorsed this view.