The Years of Endurance (68 page)

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

A Truce of Exhaustion
1
801-2

" No one fights with more obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle is over and he comes to the reconciliation, he is so much taken up with the shaking of hands that he is apt to let his antagonist pocket all they have been quarrelling about.
...
It is difficult to cudgel him out of a farthing ; but put him in a good humour and you may bargain him out of all the money in his pocket."

Washington Irving, John Bull.

T
he
tide had turned and—despite
the
odds against her—in England's favour. The First Consul had lost the initiative. So long as Britain fought with Continental allies France had found it easy to divide and destroy their cumbrous combinations. But whenever the great island Power had been left alone, as in 1798, the offensive had passed to her. " We have at this moment in the wreck of surrounding nations," Pitt declared in defence of the new Government, " the glory and satisfaction of maintaining the dignity of the country. We have kept our resources entire, our honour unimpaired, our integrity inviolate. We have not lost a single foot of territory, and we have given the rest of the world many chances of salvation."

For, unchallenged as was Bonaparte's mastery of western and southern Europe, the martial power of Britain was as tremendous. In eight years of war the strength of her Navy, losses notwithstanding, had grown from 15,000 to 133,000 men, and from 135 ships of the line and 133 frigates to 202 and 277 respectively. According to Bonaparte's estimate of a fleet of 30 sail of the line as equal to 120,000 troops on land, Britain had a sea force equivalent to a Continental army of nearly a million. Against this the French Navy had been reduced by more than fifty per cent: by 1801 she had only 39 battleships and 3 5 frigates left and few of these in condition to take
the sea.
¹
Britain had almost as many building. In the same period the British Army had grown from 64,000 to 380,000 men with more than another 100,000 Volunteers.

For all this Englishmen were proud and glad. Yet they were not happy. On May 3rd, 1801, Mrs. Fremantle, whose husband commanded the
Ganges
in Nelson's fleet, noted in her diary the glorious news from Egypt contained in that day's papers. But her only comment was: " I wish all these victories may lead to peace." For more than eight years Britain had been struggling to achieve her aims. But still the war went on. And the country, weighed down by taxes, high prices and bloodshed, was weary of it.

That spring the sixth bad harvest in succession, accompanied by the stoppage of the Baltic grain trade, brought popular discontent to a head. In Buckinghamshire Mrs. Fremantle found the Swan-bourne villagers starving; in the West Country every family was on a ration of one quartern loaf per week per head.
²
For the poor, who depended on bread for their main support, it was a terrible deprivation. As a whole they had borne their distress with noble patriotism; their patience during the winter of 1800-1801 matched Nelson's constancy among the Baltic fogs and ice. But though in the smaller villages, where ancient patriarchal conditions of life still lingered, much was done by their richer neighbours to alleviate their lot,
³
in districts where the new economies had supplanted personal responsibility for the common weal, the industrial workers and the starving peasants, deprived of their patrimony by enclosures, took
the
law into their own hands. In Somerset and Devon village mobs put ropes round farmers' necks to make them reduce the price of their corn;
⁴
the Mendip miners marched into Bristol and held
the
town up to ransom. At Plymouth the dockyard men became so threatening that the Commissioner had the cannon spiked. The workers of the manufacturing north were equally sullen and explosive.

These things were reminding the class in whose hands political

¹
Mahan,
Sea
Power,
II,
73 ;
Rose,
I,
481.

²
Ham,
MS.

³
Elizabeth Ham's father and his fellow South Dorset farmers during the bad period bought up barrels of imported rice and sold it to the poor at three-halfpence a pound, while their wives and daughters served daily in its distribution.

⁴
Hester
Stanhope,

power rested of the price that had to be paid for Pitt's prolonged war against the Revolution. The martial progress and financial resilience of the country on which he had dwelt so often in his speeches could not conceal the dark social reverse. "A very pretty state we are reduced to," was the characteristic comment of a London merchant towards the close of his Administration. "Our pockets filled with paper and our bellies with chicken's meat! " Taxes, rates and prices could not always go on rising: a halt would have to be called some time to the appalling extravagance of the war. Since its start the national debt had more than doubled. The thought of that swelling incubus made prudent, honest men shake their heads and even—in their weaker moments—share the defeatist Fox's gloomy fears for the future.

Pitt had repeatedly reminded his countrymen that they were at war with armed opinions. So long as the Revolution continued on its bloody course, they needed no reminding: one horror and outrage after another shocked and steeled them for the fight. It was not France as a nation or the abstract speculations of a School they were then fighting, but a fanatic national horde who were turning all the resources of civilisation into a fearful instrument to destroy the laws, manners, property and religions of their neighbours. So long as " this strange, nameless, wild thing " raged in the middle of Europe, consuming and threatening, Britain was forced to contend against it. The existence of everything Englishmen held dear plainly depended on her doing so.

But eighteen months of Bonaparte's rule had changed the face of affairs. " This last adventurer in the lottery of revolutions," as Pitt described him after his rape of power, had not gone the way of his furious predecessors. Whatever else might be said of his government, it was proving stable. Internally at any rate the revolution of destruction seemed over. While he was still climbing, the First Consul had committed as foul atrocities as any other Jacobin chief: plundered churches, mutilated tombs, " burnt the town of Benasco and massacred eight hundred of its inhabitants," murdered his prisoners in Syria, shot the municipality of Pavia. He was a liar, a perjurer and a robber. But once he had extinguished his rivals, he established some sort of justice and enforced it. And he professed as much desire for external tranquillity as for internal. He was— or appeared to be—coming to terms with the old order. He had
made peace with the Emperor of Austria. He was the ally of the Court of Spain, the friend of the Tsar and the patron of the King of Prussia.

His attempt to force England to make peace by blackmailing her with a Baltic League—a thing no Englishman would brook—had now been defeated. Britons had proved to their satisfaction and every one else's that Bonaparte could not beat them. But they seemed as far away as ever from liquidating the new regrouping of Europe he had stabilised. The Dutch ports, which the Guards had sailed to protect in 1793, had been in French hands for more than six years; the Austrian Netherlands had been incorporated in France for even longer and had been twice formally renounced by the Austrian Government. The task of conquering the European mainland was as manifestly beyond the English as that of conquering the British Fleet was beyond France. There was no common ground on which they could attack their adversary. And in the meantime they were ruining themselves by their refusal to listen to the First Consul's appeal for peace. By doing so they ran the risk of precipitating in their own country the same social cataclysm that had plunged the Continent into misery and war.

Such was the growing feeling: an expression of war weariness which had spread even to the Fleet. " Would to God that this war were happily concluded," wrote Collingwood from his vigil off Brest, "nothing good can ever happen to us short of peace." No longer was the first question when officers met, " What news of the French? "; it was now, " What prospect of peace? ". Everywhere men and, above all women, were longing for an end to the interminable business of killing, hatred and sacrifice. It was only, perhaps, a mood, but it was become a very powerful one. " Wearied out," as Coleridge recorded, " by overwhelming novelties; stunned by a series of strange explosions; sick of hope long delayed, and uncertain as to the real objects and motives of the war from the rapid change and general failure of its ostensible objects and motives, the public mind had lost all its tone and elasticity.
...
An unmanly impatience for peace became almost universal."
¹

A nation which had never had a very clear grasp of first principles had temporarily forgotten what it was fighting for. The changes of the European scene had been so dazzling, the exhaustion

¹
The
Friend,
Section
I,
Essay
10.

of the war so great, that the British people were in a state of bewilderment. Again and again Pitt had told them they were contending for security, but, an empirical Englishman and not a philosopher like Burke, he had never made it clear in what their security consisted. They supposed that it had been achieved because the French Revolution had been liquidated. They forgot that it was not the Terror and the red Cap of Liberty—the propagandist's bogey—that had endangered Britain's existence and her sober philosophy of law and liberty, but the Revolutionary thesis that there was no law but the untrammelled will of a single Party or Nation and the Revolutionary practice which threatened at the cannon's mouth all who opposed that will. A people unversed in abstractions failed to see that, though the First Consul had succeeded the pitiless Tribunes of the mob, French claims and practice remained unchanged. There was no law or morality in Europe but the will of the " Great Nation " and its leader. There could be no security for libertarian England in such a Europe.

The Government failed to make this clear. Addington was a weak, well-meaning, inexperienced mediocrity, little given to examining, let alone enunciating first principles. He was merely a stop-gap. His Cabinet of second-rate peers and sons of peers contained no one who commanded the slightest confidence except the sailor, St. Vincent. Such an Administ
ration was incapable of controlli
ng the new tide of public opinion. ' On the contrary, conscious of its own weakness, it tried to anticipate it. In the dark days of the Baltic League when it first took office it had put out peace-feelers through Bonaparte's agent in London, Monsieur Otto: an approach which the First Consul treated with contempt so long as he thought there was a chance of obtaining his ends by smashing instead of tricking Britain. And when Nelson's and Abercromby's unexpected achievements and the death of the Tsar changed the face of affairs, the Cabinet resumed its overtures. Like good Mrs. Fremantle, it welcomed British victories chiefly because they made peace possible.

For it could see no other end in them. To an unimaginative mind like Addington's it now seemed impossible that Britain could win the war. The fate of the First and Second Coalitions had shown that though she could annihilate every fleet France and her allies sent to sea and seize their colonies at will, she was powerless to prevent the French armies from overrumiing the Continent. Oa the
terra firma
of the old world—the home of traditional civilisation —Bonaparte with his forty million slaves and dupes could not be challenged. The balance of power had gone and the hegemony of France, against which Dutch William and Marlborough had fought, was become an established fact. There was no further point
in
struggling against it. Continental nations could not be saved in their own despite: in yielding they had signed away their right to Britain's protection. And perhaps it was better for the world that Europe, like France, after so much useless anarchy and destruction* should pass under Bonaparte's strong, orderly, unifying rule. It would be good for trade and might conceivably make for ultimate progress.

Material security, in fact, which had formerly depended on waging war, now seemed to such rootless minds to depend on making peace. A prolonged war always brings in its train of exhaustion and unnatural sacrifice a feverish aftermath of materialistic longing. France experienced it under the Directory; Britain under Addington. A cant phrase—" the blessings of peace "—became much in vogue about this time. The nation, it was felt, having proved itself unconquerable and given an unparalleled if useless example to the world, had earned a respite from alarm, starvation prices and high taxation. It could now reap the rich reward to which its manufacturing skill and commercial enterprise entitled it.
¹