Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (69 page)

when he expressed his fear that the Whigs would come in like a flood, make peace and lay the country at Bonaparte's feet. " I don't care for place myself," wrote a country magnate, "but for the sake of the country keep out the Talents!"
¹

On October
4th,
1809
—three weeks before Portland breathed his last under the surgeon's knife—Spencer Perceval took office as Prime Minister. No one supposed that he would survive for a single session. For two days before meeting Parliament this cheerful, modest little man appeared gloomy and silent for the only time in his career. But his habitual courage came to his aid and, like his stubborn countrymen at Talavera, he resolved to go through with it. A peer's younger son with small means and large family, he had built up a lucrative practice at the bar which two years earlier, at the age of forty-four, he had sacrificed to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of narrow education and principles, his good manners, honourable conduct and generous disposition had won him the esteem of all who knew him. His only obvious defect, apart from his unimposing stature, was that he was a lawyer with a lawyer's limited vision, and in religious matters an evangelical of extreme Protestant views. As an opponent said, it was hard to object to anything about him except his opinions.

Against this pleasant-looking but rather insignificant little man, with his bright, wide-apart eyes, large sensitive mouth and firm chin, stood Napoleon Bonaparte, now at the very apex of his glory. At the age of forty the latter looked, as a contemporary described him, " the very incarnation of success." Within a few years he had entered every capital in Christendom save Moscow and London, had incorporated Italy and half Germany into his dominions and had filled the tin-ones of Spain, Holland, Westphalia and Naples with his
#
kinsfolk. As though this immense dynastic empire was not enough, he had buttressed it round with a group of subservient Teuton princes on whom, in return for unquestioning obedience, he conferred puppet crowns. It was all done, a wit explained, by their saying the Lord's Prayer together; the Electors of the German States said to Bonaparte, "Thy will be done," and the great man replied "Thy Kingdom cornel"

Only the English could have seen subject for jest in the matter. Sweden, their last ally outside the Peninsula, had now repudiated them and joined in the embargo on their trade. Even the Pope had been bundled that summer off St. Peter's throne and imprisoned for

¹
Granville, II,
347, 355;
Cree
vey, I,
107;
Jackson, II,
492;
Romilly,
305;
Dudley,
81;
Tucker, II,
350-2;
Windham Papers,
II,
357
.

failing to prohibit their spices and cottons. His domains, he was curtly informed, had not been granted by Charlemagne to his predecessor to succour heretic usurers and were therefore forfeit to the imperial power whence they derived. The Eternal City would become instead the second capital of the new Empire.

Charlemagne's successor took care, too, in that autumn of conquest to perpetuate Ins dynasty. As his wife was barren, he divorced her and took another.
¹
His first choice was a sister of the Czar. But when Alexander, prompted by an old-fashioned mother, made excuses, the dual and Byzantine policy of Tilsit was dropped. In its place Napoleon reverted to the single European State of his earlier dreams and—like some sudden counter-stroke in battle—demanded the hand of the eighteen-year-old Archduchess Marie-Louise. Instead of a barbarian princess, the new Caesar would marry the lineal representative of the old, and, by union with the Hapsburgs, legitimise his line and restore the unity of civilised Europe. This accorded with the policy advocated by that good European, Talleyrand: it suited, too, the book of Prince Metternich who, promoted from the Paris Embassy to the Imperial Chancellery at Vienna, was-secretly advising his master that the only hope for Austria was to tack, turn and flatter and so build up strength for better days. Thus it came about that on April ist, 1810, the niece of Marie Antoinette was united to the heir of the Revolution amid the cheers of the Paris mob. The guillotine had been legitimised.

Later that summer a Jewish lad of genius saw the architect of all these wonders riding through the palace avenue at Diisseldorf—the world-famous hat, the white steed, the invisible-green uniform, the glittering
cortege
overshadowed by its chief's dazzling simplicity. " Carelessly, almost lazily sat the Emperor, holding his rein with one hand and with the other good-naturedly patting the horse's neck. It was a sunny, marble hand, a mighty hand, one of those two hands which bound fast the many-headed monster of anarchy, and ordered the war of races, and it good-naturedly patted the horse's neck. Even the face had that hue which we find in the marble of Greek and Roman busts; the traits were as nobly cut as in the antique, and on that face was written, * Thou shalt have no Gods before me
!'
A
smile flitted over the lips—and yet all knew that those lips needed but to whistle—
et la Prusse n’
existait plus;
those lips needed but to whistle—and the entire clergy would have stopped their ringing and singing; those lips needed but to whistle—and the entire Holy

¹
The Minister of Police, Fouche
—now Duke of Otranto and exceedingly anxious to make amends for his hesitation at the time of Walcheren—was employed to persuade Josephine of the necessity of " this most sublime and inevitable of sacrifices."

Roman Empir
e would have danced. And those li
ps smiled and the eye smiled too. In was an eye clear as heaven; it could read the hearts of men, it saw at a glance all the things of this world, while we others see them only one by one and by their coloured shadows. . . . The Emperor rode quietly straight through the avenue. No policeman opposed him; proudly, on snorting horses and laden with gold and jewels, rode his retinue; the drums were beating, the trumpets were sounding; close to me the wild Aloysius was muttering his general's name; not far away the drunken Gumpertz was grumbling, and the people shouted with a thousand voices, ' Long live the Emperor! "

Four years l
ater when all was in the dust H
aydon, the painter, who like a true John Bull had always hated Napoleon, visited his palace at Fontainebleau. There he saw the sculptured heads of Alexander, Caesar and Michael Angelo in his bedroom, the golden eagle grappling the world with its great talons outside the library window, the avenues where the conqueror of mankind had walked with brooding, lowered head and hands clasped behind his back. And still echoing from that tremendous dominion, he heard the drums of the Imperial Guard in the barracks outside: " beating with a harsh unity that made my heart throb with their stony rattle. Never did I hear such drums and never shall again; there were years of battle and blood in every sound."
²
It was their tyrannic unity that Napoleon imposed on mankind, sweeping away the franchises, privileges and serfdoms of bygone centuries, smashing outworn ideals and institutions, making new laws, roads and bridges, devising out of his sole reason codes and systems to last for all time, and imposing on all the rationalising, undiscriminating bureaucracy through which, regardless of race or prescriptive right, he made his will obeyed.

After Wagram the whole Continent, from the Urals to the Atlantic, and from the North Cape to the Pyrenees, was at peace under the shadow of the Eagles. But beyond that shadow were still the sea and the sierras. Here the maritime barbarians and their dupes stood at bay. Every night old Mr. Duffe, their Consul at Cadiz— almost the last port in Europe open to their trade—drank his unchanging toast, " To the downfall of Bonaparte !"
³
Nearly a hundred and fifty ships of the line, two hundred frigates and five hundred sloops and brigs, manned by 130,000 seamen and marines, kept watch round the long European coastline. In the Mediterranean one of the

¹
B
onapartism,
61
-3.

²
Haydon, I,
280.

³
Jackson, II,
488.

largest fleets England had ever maintained in those waters exerted an invisible influence on every State round its shores. Under its pressure and that of its taciturn Commander-in-Chief, Turkey made peace with London and reopened her ports, the craven Court of Sicily continued to tolerate a British garrison, and the guerrilleros of Catalonia and Valencia, armed and nourished from the sea, held up the eastern highroads out of France. For Collingwood's work never ended: from dawn till far into the night he bent over his desk in the
Ocean's
cabin, corresponding with princes, sultans, merchants and consuls, smugglers, spies and naval and military commanders. Driven from the Continent, the cautious, tenuous, ubiquitous diplomacy of England still sent out its disturbing waves from a three-decker's tilting quarter-deck.

Its most awful quality was its persistence. It was Lord Collingwood's boast that no battle or storm could ever remove a British squadron from the station it had been ordered to hold. Once for fifteen mon
ths he never let go an anchor.
" My family are actually strangers to me," he told a fellow officer in one of his rare moments of communicativeness; " how little do the people of England know the sacrifices we make for them." His heart was utterly set on England: on the patient, sensible wife on whom he had not set eyes for seven years, on the daughters who had forgotten what he looked like, on his beloved Morpeth and the oaks he had laid out with old Scott, the gardener, for a maritime country's future.
¹
"Tell me," he wrote, " do the trees which I planted thrive ? Is there shade under the three oaks for a comfortable summer seat ? Do the poplars grow on the walk, and docs the wall of the terrace stand firm ?" One thing only he valued more; his country's honour and security. "To stand a barrier between the ambition of France and the independence of England," he once confessed to his wife, "is the first wish of my life." Until the giant who threatened her was defeated or dead, there was no moving this homesick, domestic, ageing man. Not Nelson himself had loved England more.

In 1808 Collingwood's health gave way under his close confinement and unceasing labour and he asked to be relieved. The Admiralty, which regarded him as as much a feature of the landscape as the rock of Gibraltar, replied that he could not be spared, and he remained. "This mortal body of ours," he wrote, "is but a crazy

¹
"What I am most anxious about is the plantation of oak in the country. We shall never cease to be a great people while we have ships, which we cannot have without timber; and that is not planted because people are unable to play at cards next year with the produce of it. I plant an oak whenever I have a place to put it in."—Collingwood,
272.
"I consider it as enriching and fertilising that which would otherwise be barren. It is drawing soil from the very air."—
Idem,
199.

sort of machine at the best of times, and, when old it is always wanting repair, but I must keep it going as long as I can. From England they tell me of my being relieved at the end of the war: I wish to heaven that day were come." By the end of the following year age and infirmities, blinding headaches by day and cramps at night had done their work, and he could do no more. In March, 1810, the doctors, despairing of his life, ordered him to return to England for rest and exercise, and, so weak that he could hardly stand, he sailed from Port Mahon for Gibraltar. He died on the first day of the voyage.
¹
A month after the old stoic's death an amphibious force from Sicily freed the Ionian island of Santa Maura, thus tightening a little closer the sea circumference of Napoleon's immense land-bound empire.

Outside it, in an unimaginably wider world of sun-bathed islands and undeveloped continents, British ships and minute detachments of troops still gathered in—at an ever accelerating pace—the fruits of Trafalgar. During the summer of 1809 and the ensuing winter the last West Indian stations hauled down the tricolour: by the spring of 1810 the whole Caribbean had become a British lake. " Homebound Frenchmen," wrote a naval captain, "is so scarce a commodity that it is for us sailors a sad measure of policy possessing the West Indies."
²
The whole wealth of the sugar islands now flowed directly, and without deduction of prize-money, into the Customs and the pockets of Liverpool and Bristol merchants. Elsewhere Senegal, Cayenne, the Seychelles, the lie dc Bourbon, Amboina and Banda Neira fell to local British expeditions. Sailing along the Malayan shores Jane Austen's brother found his countrymen firmly established at Penang with a garrison of Sepoys and European artillery; in Paramatta, while Napoleon rode triumphantly through German cities, humble Englishmen were building schools and laying the foundations of a new commonwealth under the Southern Cross. Others in the hutted town of Sydney were making up shares to settle New Zealand with flax-growers so as to enrich themselves and provide sail-cloth for the Royal Navy.