Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (21 page)

¹
Holland Rose,
Napoleon,
I,
452;
C.
77.
F. P.,
I,
316,319, 324-5;
Paget Papers,
II,
75.

²
Castlere
agh, V,
76, 253-6;
C.
H. F. P.,
I,
316, 330, 332;
Third Coalition,
vi.-vii.,
28;
Nicolas, V,
462, 470;
VI,
131.
Serving in Nelson's Fleet were some Russian cadets. "They are most exceedingly good boys," he wrote to Count Voronzoff, "and arc very much liked."—Nicolas, V,
42-3.

While the Czar—to Napoleon's unspeakable fury—protested against the violation of German territory, Pitt empowered Warren to promise subsidies to Russia and any other country that would join in restraining France. Believing that if England was to survive, no sacrifice could be too great to create the conditions in which the European Powers could take the field, he went further and promised a British army for the common cause. "We have both lived long enough in the world," Nelson wrote to the Sicilian Prime Minister about this time, "to know that Nations are like individuals: make it their interest to do what is right, and they will do it."
¹

Even before he returned to Westminster Pitt had calculated the military help Britain might afford a resurgent Continent. In December, 1803, he spoke to Melville of employing 50,000 trained troops for offensive operations in conjunction with the European Powers as soon as they regained their senses. For the moment, as was his habit, he was being wildly sanguine; months of hard work were needed before a far smaller force could even begin to take shape. But on assuming office, he at once introduced a Bill to repair the defects of his p
redecessor's Army of Reserve Act
. By reducing the embodied Militia from
74
,000 to 52,000 and transferring the balance to the Army of Reserve, he hoped, with the help of Treasury bounties and the parish authorities, to secure by the end of the year a small surplus of trained troops for mobile operations. As befitted a Volunteer Colonel he left the Volunteers alone, valuing their ability to release the Regular Army for the offensive. In this he parted company w
ith other critics of Addington
's military policy. For he thought it "talking wildly and like old women to contend as Mr. Windham and Mr. Fox that great bodies of Britons with arms in their hands and trained to use them were not a most important bulwark of security to the Empire." Pitt's sole objection to Volunteers was that they could not be sent overseas.
²

Though the fundamental laws that militate against a single Power's hegemony of the Continent were again beginning to operate, the difficulties Pitt had to overcome were immense. The Russians were intensely suspicious, particularly of the British claim to Malta, and, though anxious to co-operate, would not understand the difference between a land Power with an almost unlimited population and a small commercial island putting forth her strength not in armies but in ships. The two nations, as Pitt saw,

¹
Nicolas, V,
65-6.

²
Fortescue, V,
230-1;
Fremantle, I,
396-7;
Pitt and the Great War,
494.
Angered by the lawyer-like insistence of-one of his battalions on privileges only to be relinquished "in case of invasion," Pitt added to the clause exempting it from service overseas the caustic proviso "except in case of invasion."

were ulti
mately complementary and could each bring to the common cause what the other lacked: the one armed hosts to halt Bonaparte on his own ground, the other control of the world's sea communications and the financial resilience afforded by world trade. Yet Russia, not content with the promise of a subsidy, demanded the immediate dispatch of British troops to expel the French from Calabria where Neapolitan guerrillas were holding out in the hills. Britain, on the other hand, was fearful of any action that might tempt the French to occupy Sicily and Sardinia before forces were available to defend them. So long as Russia remained neutral, her patronage of the Sicilian and Sardinian Courts afforded their territories some faint security. A precipitate Russian landing on Neapolitan soil might deprive the Mediterranean Fleet of supply bases and open the way for that French drive from Italy to the Orient which it was the common interest of Russia and Britain to prevent.
¹

But the chief obstacle to Anglo-Russian understanding was what Nelson called " the miserable, cringing conduct of the great Powers." No nation save Sweden, which lacked the force, was ready that summer to risk crossing swords with France. Prussia, riddled with corrupt Francophils and eager for bribes to satisfy her insatiable land-hunger, could not be relied on for a moment. The smaller States of Germany would do nothing; the.Landgrave of Hesse had even cancelled the annual review of his army on an intimation that it would displease the Tuileries. As for the Austrians, they admitted unashamedly that with 100,000 French troops in Italy, and their own army on a peace footing, they dared not go to war. They did not like the French : aristocrats that they were, it was impossible for them to do so. And they were gravely affronted by Napoleon's claim to the imperial honours of Charlemagne : according to the old theory of Teuton and Roman Europe there could only be one Emperor in western Christendom. But the idea of seeing a French army again at the gates of Vienna terrified them. Though almost every day produced some new act of infamy—"treaties broken, territory violated, the rights of nations trampled upon, murder even committed"—no arguments could budge the imperial Chancellery. Its one idea was to play for time and avoid any action that might make its present situation worse.

The Grand Alliance, therefore, hung fire. Nor had Napoleon, whose spies told him what was in the wind, any intention of allowing it to develop. It was not in his nature to lie down under menaces.

¹
Third Coalition,
4, 10-11, 15, 19-20, 22-3;
Nicolas, VI,
67;
Corbett,
9.

To the Russian protest he replied in his haughtiest tone that, as lie was not in the habit of intervening in other people's affairs, he did not expect their interference in his, adding that, if war was sought, France did not fear the event. Views inimical to her interest, he pointed out, could only arise from evil counsellors in the pay of England. With the tactful
brusquerie
of the Revolution he also reminded Alexander that he was suspected of having condoned the murder of his own father. Having intimidated those who dared oppose him, he cracked the whip at his underlings. From Prussia he demanded and obtained a categorical promise to bar the passage of Russian troops westwards across northern Germany, and from Austria—with a proffered bribe of Balkan territory in exchange for Venetia—a reluctant recognition of his imperial title. " God only knows," wrote old Lord Cornwallis, "how Europe is to be saved!"

Having secured his rear, Napoleon resumed his projects for subjugating England. In spite of Nelson's belief that be would once more strike east, he still meant to cross the Channel. But by the spring of 1804 he knew that he could not do so by flat-bottomed barges alone. He had first to secure a concentration of battle fleets strong enough to drive the English sloops and gun vessels out of the Straits of Dover.

For the moment, because of past neglect, Napoleon's naval forces were too small for such a purpose. They were scattered and blockaded in their ports along a wide arc of ocean from the Zuyder Zee to the Mediterranean. At the Texel three small Dutch battleships, covering an invasion force under Marmont, were watched by eight British under Rear-Admiral Thornbrough; at Brest the main French fleet—consisting of twelve capital ships ready for sea—was bottled up by Cornwallis with twenty, while at Rochefort four more were held by five. The six battleships from the Caribbean which had taken refuge in Spanish ports were still there, one at Cadiz and the others in Ferrol where they were masked by Pellew's seven. Eleven more were blockaded in Toulon by Nelson with a varying but generally slightly superior force. A total of thirty-six French and allied ships was thus held by about fifty-two British.

Time, however, was on the Emperor's side. Twenty or more great ships were nearing completion in his ports, and the Spanish Fleet—after his own the finest on the Continent—had still to be used. With Admiral Decres, the French Minister of Marine, putting pressure on the naval dockyards, Napoleon had only to be patient in order to recover the ground he had lost in building barges.

Yet patience was the one military virtue he could not practise. Flis temperament would not permit of it. Sooner than wait till his naval forces outnumbered England's, he trusted to his genius to offset her advantage in ships and seamanship. For a short-cut to victory which ignored sea-power he substituted a short-cut to sea-power itself. When the slow course of maritime affairs impeded his will, he laid the blame, not on his own refusal to adapt his ends to his means, but on his naval subordinates who did their best to keep him straight. "There is in the Navy a peculiarity, a technicality that impeded all my conceptions," he complained later. "If I proposed a new idea, immediately Ganteaume and the whole Maritime Department were up agains
t me: ' Sire, that cannot be.'
Why not?' ' Sire, the winds do not admit of it !' They always repeated that no man could be a good sailor unless he were brought up to it from his cradle." For, realising the causes of British naval superiority, the French Admirals knew only one way in which it could be overcome. Napoleon refused to see this. He persisted in trying to conquer the sea by the land.

On July 2nd, 1804, he therefore ordered his best Admiral, Latouche-Treville, to give Nelson the slip at the first opportunity. Leaving the Mediterranean, with the Toulon Fleet, he was to release the French ships in Cadiz and Rochefort, make a wide sweep round Cornwallis's blockading force off Brest and, either rounding the British Isles or running straight up Channel, appear off Boulogne in September with sixteen sail of the line and eleven frigates. " Let us," Napoleon wrote, "be masters of the Straits for six hours and we shall be masters of the world." In anticipation he moved his Court to Boulogne where, arrayed in Roman costume and seated on the ancient throne of Dagobert, he reviewed 80,000 troops and distributed crosses of the Legion of Honour out of the helmet of du Guesclin. So confident was he that he had a victory medal struck bearing on one side his laurelled head with the inscription: "
Descente en Angleterre, frappe
a Londres en 1804"
and on the other an image of Hercules crushing the sea-giant Antaeus.

During the spring and early summer of 1804—an unusually calm and lovely one—invasion talk had died away in England. Betsey Fremantle "walked with her brats" in the Buckinghamshire meadows, and fashionable holiday-makers at Margate and Rams-gate held alfresco fetes and children's open-air dances on cliffs almost within sight of the Grand Army. But with Napoleon once more at Boulogne and reports of preparations in every French naval port, old rumours revived. The French nuns at Marnhull, Dorset, were woken by Justices of the Peace seeking for arms in their cellars; " we were not more surprised," declared
the Lady Abbess, " when, in the
beginning of the Reign of Tyranny in France, a domiciliary visit was paid at our convent there under the idea that Mr. Pitt, the English Minister, was secreted there."
¹
At Weymouth, which the King—still a little crazy—supposed to be the enemy's principal objective, the drums beat to arms one misty August morning and, while half-dressed Volunteers clattered out of the houses, the royal carriages waited outside Gloucester Lodge ready to start at a moment's notice. " But about twelve o'clock," wrote Elizabeth Ham, " the fog thought proper to lift its awful curtain and to disclose to all eager eyes strained seawards, first the frigates and Royal Yachts with sails set and ready for action; then a clear expanse of smooth, unruffled water without another speck of canvas in sight. The French fleet had vanished."
²
Until the end of October such rumours continued to ruffle the life of the south coast; at Hastings Lady Bessborough, taking a late holiday, found the camion of the Martello tower manned and horses and wagons in constant readiness to evacuate the women and children.
³

Yet there was little real alarm. The English people at heart no longer believed in invasion. "When rich men find their wealth a curse," sang the marching soldiers,

"And freely fill the poor man's purse, Then little Boney, he'll come down And march his men on London town."

The martial Empire which Napoleon had set up in Paris with such pomp failed to impress them. They viewed the new Charlemagne, "that cruel and foolish Emperor," as Dorothy Wordsworth called him, as the same old Bonaparte or Boney—a " little French froggie" who would end by bursting—and the glittering Princes and Marshals of his Court as a pack of beggars on horseback from the Paris gutters and Corsican caves. Gillray portrayed the-blood-stained hag of the Republic nursing an ermine-cloaked Napoleon and dangling before him kingly trinkets to a nursery refrain: