Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (38 page)

a hero!" Only a few saw from the first what the great Admiral had achieved in his death. "How truly he has accomplished his prediction that when they met it must be to extermination," wrote Lady Bessborough. "He could not have picked out a finer close to such a life. Do you know, it makes me feel almost as much envy as compassion; I think I should like to die so." "He was above pity!" wrote another, "he died as he always wished to do in the arms of Victory after driving our Foes by the bare sound of his name from the farthest parts of the earth back to their own ports." To his old friend Minto, his splendid- death seemed indeed the last favour Providence could bestow—a seal and security for all the rest.

Within a few days, too, men with their minds set on the ephemeral were seeing in Trafalgar a quick way to liberate Europe. "The news from Cadiz," wrote Lord Auckland, "came like a cordial to fainting men"; old Admiral Roddam declared that it made every one alive again. A week later England learnt how on November
4th
Richard Strachan, searching for Allemand off the Spanish coast, had encountered Dumanoir's four battleships flying from Trafalgar and captured all by nightfall. As Charles Paget wrote, it made the smash complete. Patriots began to pore over the map of Europe as they marked the progress of the armies with wafers stuck on pins; good wives reckoned that they might yet live to see "that monster humbled in the dust."
¹

For the tide of defeat, it was felt, had been turned; courage could still redeem all things. On November
9th,
after an unwonted popular triumph in which his carriage was drawn by cheering crowds through the streets, the Prime Minister spoke at the Lord Mayor's Banquet. Toasted as the saviour of Europe, he replied in the shortest speech of his career. " Europe," he told that glittering audience, "is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, I trust, save Europe by her example."

Though Napoleon was advancing on Vienna, a union between the Russian and Austrian forces was known to be imminent, and the French communications were lengthening dangerously. Everything turned on Berlin; could the Prussians be made to feel like men, wrote Lord Uxbridge, the Corsican rascal might still be crushed by a new army striking at his flank from the north. Roused by Napoleon's violation of his territory, King Frederick William was still balancing precariously between war and peace, inclining to the former with British promises of gold and receding with news

¹
Colchester, II,
23;
Barham, HI,
336;
Holland Rose,
Pitt and Napoleon,314;
H. M. C. Dropmore, VII,
313;
Granville, II,
120;
Paget Brothers,
44.

of each Austrian reverse. To stiffen him the Czar of Russia and a former British Foreign Secretary, Lord Harrowby, had both set out for Berlin in the middle of October. The latter was empowered to offer subsidies for 180,000 troops at an annual rate of £12
10s
.
a man together with a Prussian occupation of the former Austrian Netherlands. Since Russia was inexorably opposed to any expansion of Prussia towards the east there seemed no other way by which England could satisfy the latter's craving for land
¹
and outbid Napoleon's bribe of Hanover. For the latter did not lie within its disposal. It was the property of the King—the patrimony of his family for a thousand years—and nothing would induce the old man to relinquish it.

To bring Berlin to the striking point Pitt prepared to send a British army to the Continent. Just as to encourage Russia he had despatched Craig's expedition—now on the point of landing in Italy—to menace Napoleon's southern flank, he now launched another force to the northward. As soon as he saw a reasonable chance of forcing Prussia's hand, he ordered Lieutenant-General Don to the Elbe with 6000 of the King's German Legion, a corps of first-class Hanoverian troops embodied in the British Army after Napoleon's invasion of the Electorate two years before. The Guards and a Brigade of the Line under Major-General Edward Paget were to follow. With the news that the Czar had induced Frederick William to sign a provisional alliance at Potsdam on November
3rd,
the Government decided to hurry over every mobile soldier the country possessed. With Napoleon committed to a campaign in central Austria, a Prussian army threatening his flank, and Hanover and Holland almost denuded of French first-line troops, the risk seemed worth taking. The stakes were the liberation of northern Germany and the Dutch coast and the invasion of Napoleon's overgrown Empire at its weakest point by a British-Russian-Prussian-Swedish force. " We shall see Bonaparte's army either cut off or driven back to France, and Holland recovered before Christmas," declared Pitt.

Yet everything turned on Prussia. Despite the hopes of Ministers and the anxious expectations of the public that there would be no more shuffling and that Bonaparte would be caught in a trap, the Prussians continued to sit on the fence. The Treaty of Potsdam had

¹
It was popularly—though wrongly—supposed that Holland also figured in the arrangement. Even Wilberforce, who did not like the idea, thought it necessary. "Any arrangement," he wrote, " by which Prussia should be out in possession of Holland would tend much, as matters now stand, to the security of this country, though somehow I feel a repugnance to our being parties to any of those arrangements which have the air of partitioning the territories of weaker States."—Wilberforce, II,
49.

provided for the dispatch of a Prussian emissary to the French camp with the terms for a European settlement, and a declaration of war within four weeks if Napoleon refused to accept them. But the envoy chosen was the notorious Francophil, Count Haugwitz, and the length of the time-limit seemed designed to play into the enemy's hand. When Harrowby reached Berlin in the middle of November with an urgent request for military collaboration on the Weser, he was met with long explanations about the need for mobilising every available soldier on the Moravian frontier and the impossibility of an advance into Holland until adequate forces could be spared from the south. Simultaneously he was told that Prussian troops were taking the place of the former French garrisons in Hanover. A few days later he found that the Czar had offered Berlin the Electorate in a secret clause behind England's back.

While the Prussian King continued to wobble and make excuses —"I wish I was by him sticking a spur into his side," wrote one angry lady—it became known, on November 29th, that the French had entered Vienna. " It now seems all is over as I had long feared," Thomas Grenville confided to his gloomy brother on the same day; "Bonaparte will force Austria to a separate peace first, and Russia next, and we shall be the third." The Marquis of Buckingham thought that Trafalgar had been fought in vain.

Yet though there were rumours of Austria's having capitulated —put about, it subsequently appeared, by Stock Exchange operators —the country refused to consider any compromise or surrender. "For God's sake," wrote Lord Paget,
¹
"don't make peace on any terms. Believe me there can be no peace but by beating these vagabonds into it. Face them, and they are beat." The national reply to the continued tale of disaster on the Danube was to send more troops to the Elbe. "What madness is this," asked the lord of Stowe to his brother Grenville, "if the Ministers are not sure of Prussian co-operation?" But the wisdom of the English was greater than the wisdom of the Grenvilles. Sir Arthur Wellesley, nominated to command a Brigade in the Expeditionary Force and asked on a Saturday when he would be ready to sail, replied, "Next week."
²

For in her unyielding tenacity England soared above the realities of the immediate situation—Napoleon's speed, Austrian incompetence, Russian recklessness, Prussian greed and treachery, the intransigeance of the Swedes, the servility of the Germans. She

¹
Paget Brothers,
50.
His
octogenarian grandson, Lord Que
enborough, as President of the Royal Society of St. George, was sending out similar exhortations throughout the black summer of
1940.

²
Auckland, IV,
256.
Two Duchesses,
225-6;
Paget Papers,
II,
250;
Granville, II,
139;
H. M. C. Dropmore,
318-20;
Fortescue, V,
289.

knew of these from her newspapers and her diplomatic agents: " the ignorance here and at headquarters respecting the movements of the enemy," her Ambassador wrote from the Austrian Court, "is beyond all credibility." But she knew also that these in the last resort were only
minutiae,
of ephemeral but not of eternal importance, and that she had only to stand firm against the tyrant for his power one day, now or in the future, to break before the forces of human decency. It was the realisation of this that made Pitt so representative a leader of his countrymen. He might, as the Opposition complained, be too sanguine and far too ready, as even his admirer, Lady Bessborough, admitted, to turn a deaf ear to unpleasant tidings and believe only what he wanted to believe, with the result that the Government was always prepared for a lesser danger than existed. By underrating Napoleon and his successes and decimating his forces in speeches, he and his followers constantly laid themselves open to ridicule. Yet they never committed the almost universal fault of the Continent—of collapsing before a bogey.

Pitt's real test, and England's, was the hour when hopes were proved liars. Throughout a black December, sustained by his faith and courage, the country's trust in victory continued to rise. The advance guard of the army was known to have landed at Cuxhaven, the Russians under their brave young Czar were reported, to have inflicted heavy losses on the enemy in Moravia and on more than one occasion to have cut their way to safety through superior forces,
¹
and the Archduke Charles was hastening from Italy to join the main Allied army near Olmtitz. Before long accounts of a major reverse suffered by Napoleon in Bohemia were circulating in London. There was nothing definite, for the mails from northern Germany —the only direct channel of communication
with
the Continent— were held up by fog and ice. But the Admiralty spies in Brittany reported rumours of a disastrous battle, fought by the Grand Army in the early days of the month,
Which
the French police were trying vainly to suppress. There were even tales that Bonaparte himself had

¹
"
The Russians fought with unexampled courage during the whole of their retreat; constantly attacked by an army nearly double their force, they have not lost a single standard, and have taken several from the French. Prince Bagration has really done wonders; to save the main body of Kutusov's army by checking the pursuit of the French, he remained with the rearguard, consisting of
5000
men, and was at last surrounded by
30,000
French
. Murat had a conference with hi
m, and represented tbe inutility of his resisting, showing to him his vast superiority of numbers. Bagration replied that he would not surrender were the French army treble what it was, and upon the French commencing the attack, he cut his way through, took some prisoners and some Standards, marched
30
English miles after the battle, and regained the main body of the Russian army under Kutusov." Lord Granville Leveson-Gower to Lady Bessborough, Olmutz,
23rd
Nov.,
1805.
Granville,
n,
148-9.

been killed. " It has given me such spirits," wrote Captain Fremantle from the Fleet off Cadiz, "that I can scarcely contain myself."
¹

Pitt, ardent though his nature was, could not wholly credit these stories. His responsibility was too great. Wilberforce noted that autumn that he was far less sanguine than of old. His health was deteriorating fast, though he concealed it from the public and even perhaps from himself; Arthur Wellesley, who spent a few days in the same country house with him in November, found him riding twenty miles a day, lunching on beefsteak and porter and drinking a good deal of port at supper. The doctors, hoping to part him from his-"odious green boxes," had prescribed a prolonged visit to Bath, but at the end of the month the Prime Minister was still in London, walking in St. James's Park with Lord Malmesbury and anxiously canvassing the sticking power of his allies. He was writing hopefully of Prussia from Downing Street on December 5th. Two days later he set off for Bath. Here, watched by crowds who made a lane for him as he passed,
²
he visited the Pump Room every morning and walked on the South Parade with firm, deceptive step.

Ten days before Christmas the waters threw the gout down to his feet, to the delight o^his physician, who wrote from London to prescribe flannel, port and a complete rest from business. But Sir Walter Farquhar could not stop his patient from worrying, and, as the long frost continued and with it the absence of news from the Continent, Pitt's weakness and debility of digestion grew. None the less, he continued to assure his friends that he was on the mend. He dismissed as unnecessary an offer of Farquhar's to visit Bath and wrote long letters to the ailing Harrowby in Berlin, tenderly inquiring after his health.

At the end of December the axe fell. The dearth of authentic news and the spate of rumours had keyed the nation up to an unusual" pitch; the very children, Lady Uxbridge wrote, had become politicians and flew to the paper. Two days after Christmas confused and contradictory accounts of a battle near Olmlitz began to take definite shape as an Allied victory, and the Government journals became jubilant. On the 29th the Prince of Wales at the Pavilion, Brighton, told his guests that all was over with the French and that they had been sent to the Devil. But while he was getting out his maps to show the route by which they had retreated, one of his equerries received a despatch from the Horse Guards. The Allies