The Years of Endurance (63 page)

It mattered little. For at the beginning of August the Cabinet had reached a further decision: to concentrate its entire available force for an attack on Cadiz. In accordance with its latest orders 22,000 British soldiers, drawn from Pulteney's abortive expedition and from Abercromby's Mediterranean command, were assembled at Gibraltar in September. With the hurricane season approaching, they were to make a sea-borne descent on one of the strongest places in Europe: the principal naval port of a proud people who, however lukewarm towards their ally's cause, were famed for valour in defence of their own soil.

It fell to Abercromby, supported by Pulteney and Moore, to command the expedition. It sailed from Gibraltar on October 3 rd, 1800, in more than a hundred and fifty transports escorted by Lord Keith and the Mediterranean Fleet. For the next three days, while

the crowded ships tossed up and down in a heavy swell, a spirited dispute raged between the General and Admiral about the latter's ability to guarantee the Army's communications once it was ashore. This the Admiral, though unaccountably refusing to give a definite reply, was naturally unable to do at such a time of year. Accordingly, after half Moore's Division was already in its boats, Abercromby took it on himself to abandon the venture. How right he was, was shown next day when a tempest arose which, driving the fleet far out into the Atlantic, kept it at sea for more than a fortnight. It was a fitting end to an ignominious summer. " Twenty-two thousand men," wrote Lord Cornwallis, " floating round the greater part of Europe, the scorn and laughing-stock of friends and foes."
¹

When the sea-sick army at last regained Gibraltar on October 24th it was to find new orders from England. In view of the worsening international situation Abercromby was to proceed to Malta for an attack on Egypt before the French were able to reinforce their forces there; Pulteney was to defend Portugal from an impending attack from Spain. For, while the military forces of Britain were groping their way round the shores of Spain in hopes of delivering a knock-out blow, Bonaparte had turned the tables on the fumbling islanders. On the first of the month he had concluded with the Court of Madrid the prehminary Treaty of San Ildefonso. In return for an Italian throne for the Queen's brother, Spain was to transfer to France six ships of the line and secretly cede the great colonial province of Louisiana in North America— a first step to the restoration of the French empire that Chatham had destroyed. And in order to deprive the common enemy of her oldest ally, the chief source of supply for her Mediterranean Fleet and the emporium for her South American trade, a Spanish army was to invade Portugal at the earliest possible moment. " Notify our Minister at Madrid," the First Consul wrote to Talleyrand on September 30th, " that our troops must be masters of Portugal before October 15th. This is the only means by which we can have an equivalent for Malta, Mahon and Trinidad."
²

It was not in Bonaparte's nature to be thwarted. He represented the embodied will of an invincible Revolution. By her mastery of

¹
Fortescue
y
IV,
798.

²
Mahan,
Sea
Power,
II,
67.

the
sea Britain was thwarting the consummation of that Revolution. Since for the moment his fleet could not challenge that mastery, he would choose another way: by expelling the islanders from every port in Europe, he would ruin their trade and force them to make peace. That, at least, lay within his power.

Though the uneasy armistice with Austria still held for the moment, Bonaparte was free to move against the smaller clients of the failing Coahtion. On October 15th his troops poured into the capital of Tuscany. At Leghorn he seized forty-six English ships, close on a million quintals of wheat, barley and dried vegetables, and every penny of British capital in the town. Meanwhile at the other end of Europe he prepared an unexpected blow.

Since the French flag had been driven from the seas, the maritime neutrals had had a growing incentive to run the gauntlet of the blockade and gain the Republic's carrying trade. To Denmark, Sweden and the United States—the chief of these—the First Consul offered in the summer and fall of 1800 the most advantageous terms. Reversing the harsh pohcy of his predecessors, he raised the embargo on their ships—-impounded for carrying British merchandise under Jacobin decrees—waived the customary rights of blockade and invited them to come and go as they chose. He had almost everything to gain by doing so, nothing to lose. If, in contrast to his liberal pohcy, England continued to use her ancient international rights of search and confiscation—her only remaining weapon against France—she would incur the odium of mankind.

Once before during the American war, when Britain was contending single-handed against the chief naval Powers of Europe, the Baltic States had combined to claim a novel immunity from the rights of search. The flag, they maintained, covered cargo: neutral ships sailing under convoy were immune from inspection and capture. In her then extremity Britain had been unable to do more than protest. Since that time, however, all the contracting Powers had either themselves enforced the customary rights of search in their own wars or expressly renounced their unwarrantable claim in friendly treaties with England. But during the early part of 1800, encouraged by France and impelled by commercial cupidity, Denmark had revived it. In July one of her frigates, attempting to protect a convoy, was fired on in the Channel and carried into the Downs.

This time Britain, all-powerful at sea, did not hesitate. She sent to Copenhagen an Ambassador backed by the guns of a powerful naval squadron. While the defences of the Danish capital were still incomplete, she extracted a recognition of her ancient rights pending full consideration of the matter at a conference to be held in London after the war. The Danes abandoned their claim to convoy ships to France and admitted their liability to search, while Britain undertook to repair the damaged frigate.

But at this point Bonaparte intervened. Ever since his accession to power he had been carefully courting the crazy autocrat of Russia. To inflame him against his former allies he offered to hand over Malta to his troops. Later, affecting immense indignation at a somewhat ungenerous British refusal to exchange French prisoners in England for Russians taken in Holland, he had sent the latter back to Russia in new uniforms accompanied by a flowery letter. This display of chivalrous sentiment was perfectly calculated to arouse the childlike enthusiasm of the Tsar, already full of venom towards the cowardly, selfish English and Austrians who had caused his invincible soldiers to be defeated.

The news of the capture of Malta—which Paul now viewed as his private property—and of the British expedition to the Sound set a match to the train which the First Consul had so carefully prepared. On November
7th
in a fit of homicidal rage the Tsar placed an embargo on all British ships in Russian ports. When some succeeded in escaping, he had a number of the others burnt and marched their crews in chains into the interior.

Bonaparte's project was taking shape. With Muscovite aid the decision of Nelson's guns in Aboukir Bay could be reversed, the position in the eastern Mediterranean transformed and a new road to the Orient opened through Persia. On December 2nd Dundas sent warning to Keith and Abercromby to be prepared to repel an attack from Russia—still nominally Britain's ally—through the Dardanelles. On every horizon on which the Cabinet in London looked out that autumn of 1800, storms were rising. The Tsar's embargo, followed by his impetuous approach to Sweden, Denmark and Prussia to revive the Armed Neutrality of the North, threatened both to break the blockade of France and to close the Baltic to British trade. Already in November Prussia, angered by the seizure of one of her ships carrying contraband, had marched

into Cuxhaven, a port of
the
free city of Hamburg and one of
the
chief channels of British commerce
with
central Europe. The First Consul's purpose was plain. It was to make the sea useless to the country which ruled it.

Similar threats had been made against England before. But they had done her little harm because, as long as the Baltic, with its all-important trade in grain, timber and naval stores, remained open to her ships, the closure of the remainder of the European coastline hurt Europe more than it injured Britain. Controlling the ocean routes, she could deny the colonial produce of the New World and the East to her foes while extending her own imports and supporting her elaborate structure of usury through trade with the Hanseatic and Scandinavian towns. On this basis the long war, which many had thought would be her ruin, had actually enriched her. So soon as she had established complete command of the seas over the combined fleets of France, Spain and Holland, her wealth and financial power, instead of contracting, had expanded. " Our trade," Pitt told the House of Commons in the summer of 1799, two years after Cape St. Vincent and Camperdown, " has never been in a more flourishing situation." By the turn of the century British exports had reached a declared annual value of nearly forty millions, or half as much again as at the outbreak of war, while imports had doubled. Despite privateers the tonnage cleared from Great Britain to North Germany in the same period had trebled. The destructive effect of the war and Revolution on the Continent was making Britain the manufactory as well as the warehouse of the world.

These increases were reflected in the revenue returns, which, notwithstanding the vast sums sunk in free loans and subsidies to the Allies, remained as buoyant, as the Prime Minister's spirits. By 1800 the nation was raising thirty-six millions a year on an estimated trade of between seventy and eighty millions. The conquest of the French, Spanish and Dutch islands in the West and East Indies had raised the Custom receipts by as much as fifty per cent. "If," Pitt proudly declared, " we compare this year of war with former years of peace, we shall in the produce of our revenue and in the extent of our commerce behold a spectacle at once paradoxical, inexplicable and astonishing."

But there was one flaw in the imposing structure of British commercial supremacy, and Bonaparte saw it. Owing to the national passion for individual liberty and the utter inadequacy of the antiquated administrative machine, the prosperity of the populace had not kept pace with the country's expanding trade. The war had enriched the wealthy and enabled them to bear its financial burdens with comparative ease. But though it had increased the purchasing power of the landed and commercial classes, it had only as yet indirectly and very partially raised that of the peasant and labourer. The rise in prices far outran the rise in wages: a Suffolk labourer earning 5s. a week in 1750, and 9s. a week plus 6s. from the parish
in 1800, needed
£1 6s.
5
d
.
in 1800 to buy the equivalent of 5s. worth in 1750.
¹
And by restricting the flow of certain essential commodities, the war had crea
ted shortages in real wealth wh
ich had fallen almost exclusively on the poor. By further contracting vital imports by an extension of his continental blockade to the Baltic, Bonaparte intended to strike at the stubborn rulers of England through the bellies of the poor. He would bring the Revolution home to them hi the form they most feared.

It seemed in the autumn of 1800 as though the heavens were fighting on his side. The terrible rains of the previous summer had been followed by a black season of high prices and food shortage. In July wheat, which had averaged 45s. a quarter before the war, touched 134s. Parliamentary Acts, compelling bread to be baked twenty-four hours before sale and establishing a wholemeal loaf, failed to alleviate the scarcity. At Dorking Fanny D'Arblay reported that respectable journeymen's children were begging from door to door for halfpence, and at the other end of the country Dorothy Wordsworth at Rydale noted the same alarming phenomenon.
²

A prolonged midsummer drought and a charming August had been followed by a sudden downpour just when the harvest was beginning. For the second year in succession the crops were ruined. By October the people in many districts were literally starving. A succession of bread riots, aggravated by the repressive measures of narrow-minded " anti-Jacobin " magistrates and judges, brought home the danger in the situation. To keep order in the industrial towns troops had to be recalled in November from Portugal.

¹
Mathieson,
87.

²
Journals
of
Dorothy
Wordsworth
(ed.
W.
Knight,
1934), 32.

So far as the state of educated opinion in economic matters permitted, the Government did its best. A special emergency session of Parliament was called and large additional bounties were offered for imports of wheat. But though the country had the wherewithal to buy, the markets from which it could do so were perilously narrow. The value of wheat imports for the yea
r touched the record figure of £
2,675,000, nearly three times the pre-war normal. But the population of the British Isles had risen since 1791 from thirteen to fifteen and a half millions—an increase in mouths which even the farming improvements brought about by enclosures could not meet. Indeed, by reducing that individual attention to the lesser fruits of good husbandry which the family holding stimulates in times of scarcity, enclosures aggravated rather than solved the immediate problem.