Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (14 page)

¹
Wilberforce,
i,
276.
62

Yet over the green fields and the wooded squares and gardens of London lay the peace of the English summer; the Wordsworths, picknicking on Grasmere water, floated their infant child in a half-

crown bread basket on the water, or carried him to the orchard seat to sleep beside them as they worked. "I had last night," wrote Farington, " the most distinct dream of Invasion that could possess the fancy. Of seeing the French boats approach in the utmost disorder, and myself surrounded by them after their landing. I thought they preserved great forbearance, not offering to plunder, and that I was in the midst of them conversing in broken English. It seemed to me that they came upon the country quite unprepared, and met with no resistance."

It was only to be expected that among a people subjected to such alarms the w
^r
eaker brethren should lose their heads. The Bess-boroughs received five letters in a single day from their neighbour, Lady Downshire: one with handbills for them to distribute, another to inform them that with the blessing of God the Fleet had taken the island of Tobago, a third that to her certain knowledge five volunteers had been given muskets who had not received the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Scarcely had her servant departed after delivering the last than he was back again with another, announcing the safe arrival of the Bombay fleet. Half an hour later he returned with four sides of paper full of advice, queries and proposals about the Putney Volunteers, followed a few minutes later by the excited lady in person. Others were troubled with spies; respectable holiday makers in the Isle of Thanet viewing passing ships through perspective-glasses were hauled off by the military, while several persons were arrested in different parts of the country under the impression that they were Bonaparte. The mountain folk of South Wales were for a time convinced that the First Consul was lurking in their midst; it was believed that he had been born a Welshman and that two of his brothers had been transported.
²

Such alarms were all the while fanned by authentic news of his preparations. In the middle of July it became known that he had inspected troops and barges at Boulogne, that he had been seen on the water and had trained a gun with his own hands at a British frigate. This w
^r
as followed on the 27th by tidings of a rising in Dublin, with fanatic Irish patriots in green uniforms trying to seize the Castle and, dragging the aged Lord Chief Justice from his coach, butchering him on their pikes. Subsequently several hundred muskets were found and a large number of proclamations, drafted in the name of the Provisional Government of Ireland " in the true spirit of Robespierrian principles with very considerable ingenuity and ability and of the wickedest tendency."
²

¹
Granville, I,
425;
Ashton,
99-100;
Wheeler and Broadley, I,
41.

²
John Croker to Charles Abbott,
25th
July,
1803.—
Colchester, I,
435
.

Thou
gh the interior
remained quiet and the young rebel leader, Robert Emmet, was seized and executed—inspiring Tom Moore's ballad, "She is far from the Land"—there could be no doubt that the country had had a providential escape. For it appeared that the military authorities had been taken wholly by surprise.

All this helped to stimulate popular patriotism. Even in the Fleet, where service entailed a heavy financial sacrifice for the merchant seamen, volunteers exceeded pressed men by twelve to one. By the autumn 342,000 men had joined the local Volunteer Associations, and, but for the Government calling a halt, Wilberforce believed that a million—or nearly a tenth of the population—would have been enrolled. "You never saw so military a country," wrote Auckland, "nothing but fighting is talked of. From the highest to the lowest the zeal is wonderful, and I am convinced that, should an invasion be tried, you would sec all the ladies letting their nails grow that they might scratch at the invader."

Throughout that summer and autumn men drilled in town squares and on villages green as though their lives depended on it. Young barristers and elderly merchants rose every morning at four to put in two or three hours under a bawling sergeant before going to their work and tramped back for another bout when their labours were done. The sound of drums and bugles rose above the din of the London traffic: and the evening stillness was broken by the pop, pop, pop of the musket and the crash of the volley. At Edinburgh "professors wheeled in the college area: side-arms peeped' from behind the gown at the bar." The citizens of Bristol panted in battle formation up the slopes of Leigh Down—cool sport, thought Southey, for the dog days—and in the remotest villages tired, awkward-looking rustics exercised on Sabbath afternoons in smock frocks. "Everybody is a soldier here," wrote Eugenia Wynne from Burton, "whether they like it or not."
¹

Many liked it immensely. Walter Scott, slashing at turnips stuck on poles on the Mussleburgh sands, found in the pomp and circumstance of war "a very poignant and pleasing sensation." "Since I came to London," a future Victorian Lord Chancellor told his father who thought he was reading for the Bar, " I have done nothing but soldier and even now I can scarcely steal half an hour from my military duties." The lawyer who commanded the Bloomsbury Association became so soldier-mad that he boasted he could carry his battalion through its manual and platoon exercises better than a

¹
Wynne,
iii,
86;
Hardcastle,
34;
Horner,
i,
225;
Cock burn, I,
187;
Wheeler and Broadle
y, II,
104-7, 345-6;
A Pop Gun fired off by George Cruikshank,
1859.

colonel of the Guards and was constantly boring his "devils" by explaining the errors committed in Bonaparte's battles. Young ladies noted in their journals how all their male acquaintances had become cornets and captains, resplendent in regimentals and unsteadily poised cocked-hats. The latter, Elizabeth Ham recorded, were generally worn by undisciplined youth bobbing down the back. But—until the enthusiasm of the hour died away—every one worked with a will, and Messrs. Ginger, the "invasion publishers" in Piccadilly, made a fortune by selling pocket drill-books.

Unlike either the Regular Army or the Navy the Volunteers represented the whole nation. From the Duke of Clarence, who laid aside the role of half-pay Admiral to command a corps near his seat at Bushey, to the sixteen honest sons of St. Crispin who marched with their employer to the recruiting office at St. Margaret's Buildings, Bristol, "each man determined to sacrifice his all," Britons met for a moment on a broad egalitarian platform of patriotic endeavour. Pitt became Colonel of the Cinque Port Volunteers, Fox a private in the Chertsey Association; even Adding-ton came down to the House in uniform. Tom Campbell, the poet, precariously starting married life in Pimlico lodgings, bore his Brown Bess musket side by side with brewers' draymen and market gardeners. The future Lord Brougham served a gun in an artillery company, the Duke of Bedford was a private and the Lord Chancellor a corporal. On lawns sloping down to the River the projecting corporations of the stately Temple benchers—the most famous' belly-gerent' corps in England, as the young law-students called them— might be seen advancing majestically but unevenly, while nightly the neighbourhood of Highbury Barn resounded with the learned volleys of the brethren of Gray's Inn. Even clergymen laid aside their sacred character, and children formed their own corps with drums and colours and held field-days like their elders in the much fought-over Bloomsbury meadows.
¹

The economy of England being essentially pacific, it was easier to clothe than to arm such multitudes. It was a good time for tailors, who were swamped with orders for showy regimentals from smart young gentlemen and country magnates anxious to see their corps outshine those of their neighbours. But it was a harrowing one for the Ordnance Board. Lord Chatham, the Master-General —Pitt's indolent elder brother—complained that his long-maturing plans to replace the old Tower musket by an improved pattern had been upset by this unprecedented demand, and that he had been

¹
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
106, 169, 116-17, 299;
Cockburn, I,
187-97;
Campbell,
1,
466;
Hickey,
291;
Hardcastle; Lord Campbell,
Lives of the Lord Chancellors.

forced to re-order the manufacture of the old weapons. But even these proved quite inadequate in numbers, nor was there ammunition for them. The amateur soldiers whom the Government had so sanguinely called into existence could be no more equipped than trained, for the peace-time Establishment was utterly unprepared for so sudden an expansion. The politicians had forgotten this.

They did their best to repair the omission by offering the people pikes. The vehemence of the popular reaction surprised them. Instead of gratefully receiving these weapons, which could be easily and cheaply manufactured, the Volunteers angrily demanded firelocks and bayonets. Lord Mulgrave reported that every village in Yorkshire was seething with indignation. "I cannot think without disgust," he wrote, "of the cool confidence with which pikes are pressed upon masses of untrained, unformed peasants that they might exercise their spirit with that weapon against the enemy.
m
The penetration of the people has induced them to reject the idea of being so armed and left to themselves.... No progress of the French in the first instance could give them so much spirits or operate so strongly on the minds of the people as the easy conquest they must gain with musketry, artillery and discipline against a mob of brave fellows with flimsy and unwieldy pikes."
¹

It was not only the Government's reliance on medieval arms, or even on no arms at all, that disturbed the people. The rejection of their services, after so many appeals, angered them still more. Not only had the War Office limited the number of Volunteers so that many who had come forward found themselves unenrolled, but the special services demanded in the event of invasion and so gladly offered were left vague and indeterminate. In the first flush of national peril the farmers of the South and East had been told that they must waste the country and drive their stock before them. To this demand, which spelt their ruin, they had responded without hesitation. Yet nothing had followed but chilling and contradictory demands from officialdom for lists of cattle and implements, without the slightest guidance as to what was to be done when the enemy landed. "If the idea of driving is given up as inexpedient or impracticable," wrote General Moore, " the people should surely be told so. At present for want of explicit instructions, they are kept in a state of suspense which tends to lessen their confidence in themselves and others. At this instant if they were attacked, the military excepted, not a man would know what is expected of him."
²

¹
Plumer Ward,
139-43.

²
Moore, II,
74-5.
See also Wheeler and Broadley, I,
61;
Plumer Ward,
139;
Two
Duchesses,
184-5;
Wilberforce, I,
286.

"All
the zeal of the country," wrote Mulgrave from the North, "evaporates in professions and regrets."

Windham's gloom did not therefore seem unjustified when he declared that if 50,000 Frenchmen landed nothing could save England and that his only hope was that Bonaparte for some reason or other might not come. Yet his pessimism found no echo in the stout hearts of his countrymen. The public was more frightened of the Cockpit—the eighteenth century synonym for Whitehall—than the Tuilcries. Lord John Townshend, wearing his Volunteer uniform night and day, might grumble and growl like a true John Bull that Fox, Pitt and Grenville ought to seize the Doctor and toss him in a blanket, but he continued to pray that the French would come. When writers in the
Moniteur
asserted that the downtrodden English were longing for the Republican armies, they were speaking no more than the truth. Not to acclaim them, however, but, in the words of the Editor of the
Bath Herald,
to leather them and well strap their quarters! Pitt at his post at Walmer Castle was only expressing the mood of the hour when, to the fury of the Admiralty, he toasted at a Volunteer banquet:
"A
speedy meeting with our enemy on our
own
shores!"