The Years of Endurance (71 page)

¹
Cornwallis,
III,
382
.

He set out for Paris on November 3 rd, in order to be present, at the First Consul's express wish, at the Festival of Peace. The Festival turned out to be nothing but fireworks in the mud, and the French capital, to Cornwallis's saddened eyes, a dreary place without society or liberty, the women largely whores and the men ill-looking scoundrels " with the dress of mountebanks and the manners of assassins." Almost at once he encountered difficulties. The First Consul, who gave him two brief audiences, was impatient, imperious and plainly unaccustomed to being contradicted. At the start he asked after the King's health, spoke of the British nation with respect and declared that so long as the two peoples remained friends there need be no interruption to the peace of Europe. But the moment Cornwallis raised the question of the retention of Tobago, whose planters were petitioning the Cabinet against a return to French rule, Bonaparte stigmatised the suggestion as scandalously dishonourable and indignantly refused to recognise the obligation to refund the sums which the British Government had expended on the maintenance of French prisoners and which it had offered to cancel in exchange for the little island.

For when it came to tying up the untied ends of the Treaty and converting verbal promises into formed agreements, Cornwallis found he could do nothing. The First Consul and his shameless Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, either blandly denied ever having made them or treated them as the occasion for new and outrageous French demands. Truth and honour
were virtues unknown, to them
; nothing they said could be depended upon. Even Bonaparte's brother, Joseph, who had a reputation in Paris for moderation and honesty, and who on the peace conference's removal to Amiens in December became the chief Republican negotiator, proved wholly unreliable. " I feel it," Cornwallis complained, " as the most unpleasant circumstance attending this unpleasant business that, after I have obtained his acquiescence on any point, I can have no confidence that it is finally settled and that he will not recede from it in our next conversation."
¹

In any case Cornwallis's hands were tied. For by concluding an
armistice the Government had unloosed such a torrent of pent-up
longing for peace that there was now no controlling it. In a nation
¹
Cornwallis to Hawkesbury, 30th Dec, 1801,
Cornwallis
, III,
420.
ruled by public opinion the discipline and united purpose of war cannot be maintained when war is over. A parliamentary country, by laying down its arms before it has won a complete victory, loses the power to bargain. However prudent or necessary it might now appear to the Cabinet to insist on the performance of verbal promises given before the preliminary Treaty, they could no longer enforce them by breaking off negotiations. The country would never have permitted an immediate renewal of the war, or even the threat of it, save under the most overwhelming and unmistakable necessity. When France promptly took advantage of the cessation of the blockade to fit out an enormous expedition, including twenty-two battleships and 25,000 troops, to reconquer Santo Domingo from the negro Toussaint l'Ouverture, Britain could only feebly protest. The Admiralty could not even strengthen the West Indian Squadron, because seamen who had been pressed in time of war refused to serve abroad until the ships had been remanned by volunteers.

The First Consul saw that the British Government was in a trap, and he acted accordingly. He refused all satisfaction on matters not already formally concluded and instructed his brother to refuse even to discuss the affairs of Germany, Italy or Switzerland. " All these subjects," he wrote, " are completely outside our deliberations with England." That country had foolishly relaxed the blockade and made peace: its reward was to have the door of the Continent slammed in its face. Even its trade was not to be admitted there: on this point Bonaparte now remained absolutely adamant. He announced that he would sooner have war than " illusory arrangements." He had regained his own colonial empire and the freedom of the seas, but his rival's commerce was still to be excluded from western Europe.

Simultaneously he sought new strategic advantages for the day when he should be able to renew the war. At the end of the old year he put out a counter-project, amounting almost to a new treaty, claiming extended fishing rights in Newfoundland, the restoration of the fortifications of Pondicherry at British expense, an establishment in the Falkland Islands and the abolition of the right of salute at sea. In the same document, as though the matter were still open, he omitted all reference to Spanish and Dutch recognition of the cession of Trinidad and Ceylon and calmly pro-

posed to substitute the King of Naples for the Tsar of Russia as the guarantor of Malta.

Cornwallis and Hawkesbury had the utmost difficulty in resisting these claims. They were accompanied by every sort of trickery: the Spanish representative, when at last he was appointed, turned out to be a man who either was or pretended to be ill at Padua. The suggestion that the future independence of Malta should depend solely on the weak Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would give France, with its prepondering influence over the smaller nations of the Continent, the power to betray Britain's interests in the island at any moment. The difficulty was to get Bonaparte to see this or, at least, to admit that he saw it. Yet even while the negotiations were proceeding, he provided an illustration of what was likely to happen in the future. For after a visit to Lyons in January, 1802, to meet the Deputies of the Cisalpine Republic, he calmly announced that he had accepted its supreme office under the style of President of the
Italian
Republic. Yet the independence of the Cisalpine, Ligurian, Helvetic and Batavian Republics had been one of the chief conditions of the Treaty of Luneville signed less than a year before.

In this Bonaparte almost overreached himself, for the more informed part of the British public showed signs of strong resentment. " The proceedings at Lyons," wrote Hawkesbury to Cornwallis on February 12th, " have created the greatest alarm in this country, and there are many persons who were pacifically disposed and who since this event are desirous of renewing the war."
¹
Even Hawkesbury expressed himself as shocked by the " inordinate ambition, the gross breach of faith and the inclination to insult Europe " shown by the First Consul. But with the Powers prostrating themselves at his feet and the great mass of
the
British people still stubbornly set in its new mood of good-humoured indolence, there was little the Government could do. As Coleridge put it, " any attempt to secure Italy, Holland and the German Empire would have been preposterous. The nation would have withdrawn all faith in the pacific intentions of the Ministers if the negotiations had been broken off on a plea of this kind, for it had taken for granted the extreme desirableness, nay, the necessity of a peace; and this once admitted, there would have been an

¹
Cornwallis,
III,
457.

absurdity in continuing the war for objects wh
ich the war fur
nished no means of realising."
¹

Had it not been for the necessity of passing the annual estimates through Parliament and of knowing whether to budget for peace or war, it is doubtful whether Cornwallis would have ever completed his mission.

But on March 14th, when a decision could no longer be postponed, the Government, roused by
the
First Consul's perpetually rising demands, embodied the latest of them in a formal treaty which it instructed its plenipotentiary to present for immediate, acceptance or rejection. If no answer was returned in eight days, he was to leave France.

Yet, even after this, Bonaparte was able to wring a few small, final concessions from Cornwallis. For though the latter longed to be gone from Amiens and its dismal society, he remained acutely conscious of what he called " the ruinous consequences of. . . rene
wing a bloody and hopeless war.
Sooner than risk this, he took it upon himself, to Addington's subsequent intense relief, to modify the tone of his instructions. And at three o'clock on the morning of March 25th, after a five-hour midnight session, he brought his mission to an end and signed the Treaty, leaving the most important question—that of Malta—still indeterminate. The British forces were to be withdrawn within three months and their place taken for a further year by a Neapolitan contingent. The Order of St. John was to be reconstituted—no one knew how—so as to be free from external influence, and the island's independence was to be guaranteed by the six major Powers, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Spain. The consent of the last four, however, had still to be obtained. " Nothing surely can be worse," wrote Pitt's confidant, George Rose, " than loose stipulations in a treaty of peace that may occasion strife and ill-blood." As another shrewd observer put it, the Treaty of Amiens bore the seeds of a just and durable war.

But as the country had by now settled down to peace, the Government had no choice in the matter. It demanded a definitive Treaty and was prepared to wait no longer for it.
²
Had Addington refused to give it, political power might well have passed to
the
pro-

¹
The
Friend
',
Section
I,
Essay
10.

²
See
Collingw
ood
90.

Bonapartist Fox. The thought temporarily silenced even the strongest opponents of appeasement.

In April, 1802, London celebrated the official Proclamation of Peace. The general, unthinking view was expressed by Southey's landlady who, after struggling in the crowd till two in the morning in a vain attempt to see the illuminations outside the French Consulate in Portman Square, execrated all who disliked the Treaty, congratulated herself on the fall in the price of bread, hoped that Hollands gin and French brandy would soon fall too, and " spoke with complacency of Bonniprat."
¹
The crowd was prodigious, the principal streets as bright as day with rows of candles blazing in all the windows in twin, interminable, tapering lines of light, the fashionable gaming-houses in St. James's Street resplendent with lamp-lit crowns and patriotic inscriptions and transparent pictures " emblematical of peace and plenty."
²
And far away in Grasmere, Dorothy Wordsworth by the lakeside watched the moon travelling through the silent skies, the stars growing and diminishing as the clouds passed before them. The sheep were sleeping and all things quiet.

A few weeks later Bonaparte received from his people the price of the settlement he had given them. By a plebiscite of three and a half millions to eight thousand they affirmed that he should be Consul for life. From that day he called himself Napoleon. The era of the Caesars had returned to Europe.

Yet the masterpiece of knavery and cunning by which the great Corsican had won his ends from England laid the foundations of his own destruction. He had tricked the stubborn, stupid islanders, who did not know their own strength and the power of the terrible weapon their sea-captains had forged, into relaxing their stranglehold on his ports and restoring his colonies. He had gained eighteen months to revictual and refit the armed camp in which he chose to live, and with it twelve years of dominion and triumphant war. The sea winds with which France now filled her exhausted lungs fanned the distant camp-fires of Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland.

¹
Espriella,
II, 50.

²
"
This
was
a
transparency
exhibited
this
night
at
a
pot-house
in
the City,
which
represented
a
loaf
of
bread
saying
to
a
pint
of
porter,
I
am
coming down
;
to
which
the
porter-pot
made
answer,
So
am
I."—
Espriell
a,
I, 90.

For, through the ultimate justice of the moral law that governs the destinies of this world, Bonaparte had begun to defeat himself. He could have had his boasted New Order of European unity and progress had he chosen. Only one thing at that moment could have prevented it. That one thing the First Consul in his arrogance and reckless cynicism elected to do. By cheating and bullying the most confiding but stubborn folk in the world, he forged the weapon that was to destroy him. He united the British people as they had never been united before. He united them in a single passionate resolve to put an end to him and all his purposes.