The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (63 page)

It had been growing fairly inevitable that Britain would go to war. The Revolution’s foreign policy threatened monarchies all over Europe by its mere existence. However, it was only after the revolutionaries had declared that ‘the Laws of Nature’ meant the important Scheldt estuary was open to all shipping that Britain was forced into the conflict. France had threatened the neutrality of Holland, which Britain was bound by treaty to defend. There was nothing for it. Reluctantly Pitt steeled himself to put an end to the peace and progress that he had pursued for ten years.

But Pitt was pre-empted. The same day that he was speaking in the House of Commons, the men battling for power within France agreed to declare war on England and Holland. It was a war that would engulf Europe for the next twenty-three years and would not end until the Battle of Waterloo.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815)

During the next two decades of almost continuous war with France, the tolerant political climate of Great Britain underwent a dramatic change. Pitt had originally declared that this was not to be a war against ‘armed opinions’. It was to protect British commerce, which was threatened by French ships on the Scheldt. However, it soon became clear that fighting ‘armed opinions’ had to be its objective, since the French government had vowed to help all nations which rose against their rulers. Just as ‘Jacobite’ had been a catch-all phrase in England denoting an enemy of the state for half the eighteenth century, so the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ was to be in that century’s last decade and the first decades of the nineteenth.

Only a few years after celebrating the Glorious Revolution’s hundredth anniversary, for the English the word ‘revolution’ had taken on the most fearful connotations. Apart from a short-lived ministry of 1806–7 during which they abolished slavery, the Whigs and their ideas were as firmly out of office and out of fashion as the Tories had been for two generations. Political conservatism was in vogue, and more to the point was in office. In the face of war and the threat to British institutions posed by sympathizers with the French Revolution, the rational liberal convictions of Pitt and of most of the political classes vanished so absolutely that it was hard to recognize the former friend of reform in the young prime minister.

Even before the war Pitt had become alarmed by support for the Revolution. When a pamphlet entitled
The Rights of Man
, written by the radical Tom Paine and proposing an English republic, sold 200,000 copies in 1792, all further ‘seditious writing’ was forbidden by law. Paine was prosecuted and had to flee to France, escaping arrest by an hour thanks to a warning from the poet William Blake, who had had a prophetic dream about him. He was later elected to the French Convention. Once war commenced, a regime of complete repression was instituted. Pitt closed down the enthusiastic Corresponding Societies which had sprung up all over the country since the Revolution as a means of obtaining information about the great political experiment in France. In the new mood of suspicion most political clubs were considered nests of revolutionaries. If they would not abolish themselves, their members were imprisoned.

To make the authorities’ work easier, in May 1794, habeas corpus, the foundation stone of English liberties, was suspended. This measure, which allowed the government to hold citizens in prison indefinitely while they were investigated for unspecified crimes, was opposed by only thirty-nine votes in the House of Commons. Moreover, contact with France was forbidden as a treasonable act punishable by death. Had it not been for the example set by Fox’s continuing brave outspokenness, in which he was followed by his nephew Lord Holland, the playwright Richard Sheridan and the young nobleman Charles Grey, it might not have been opposed at all. Many Whigs were becoming increasingly uneasy about their leaders’ opposition to the war. By July 1794 a large number of them, headed by the Duke of Portland and Edmund Burke, had crossed the floor to join Pitt’s Tory party.

The war against Revolutionary France opened with Britain as a partner in the First Coalition, formed as a result of Pitt’s efforts in 1793 and including Holland, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Portugal and Sardinia. Britain’s allotted role was to concentrate on what she did best, which meant exploiting her large fleet. She was the only European country not to have conscription–indeed her army’s very existence had to be approved by Parliament every year. The fleet, on the other hand, was that of a powerful maritime nation, and was successfully used to preserve the sea routes and seize enemy colonies. The route to India was saved when in 1795 the British captured the Cape of Good Hope from Dutch settlers. In India itself at Seringapatam prompt action by the governor, Marquis Wellesley, brother of the future Duke of Wellington, prevented Tipoo Sahib endangering the colony by stirring up trouble on behalf of the French. But the effect of concentrating on the colonies was that Britain’s interventions by her army in Europe were too limited to be successful. Attempts to bring aid to the pockets of French royalist resistance in the Vendée in the west and to Toulon in the south were failures, while an army to the Austrian Netherlands under the Duke of York was run out of the country.

What Britain could do, however, thanks to the trade surpluses now mounting in the Treasury, was to pay for the armies on the continent after the fashion of Pitt the Elder. She had reached this position thanks to the application of Watt’s steam engine, which propelled British industrial development into a different league from other European countries. The strength of the British fleet meant that British manufacturing exports and imports of raw materials from the colonies were almost unaffected by the war, while British manufactures were stimulated by the demand for materials from uniforms to tents to cannon balls. In an already reactive and practical industrial culture, a shortage of labour drove the ironmasters and factory owners, who were daily pushing invention forward in their factories, to greater heights of mechanization.

Since the Austrian armies alone consisted of perhaps 300,000 highly professional soldiers, Britain and her allies believed that the combination of so many countries against a rabble would prove irresistible, that France would soon be defeated and forced to retreat behind her old frontiers. But the French Revolutionary Wars showed that the world had reached a new stage. Fighting a war was no longer just a question of military science. Beliefs too could provide a secret weapon. Wherever France’s Armies of the Republic marched, their call for ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ found an emotional response from those living under more repressive regimes, and they were welcomed as liberators. Nor did the amateur leadership in the French military matter at all. The armies under the ex-lawyer Lazare Carnot were honed into a magnificent new fighting machine. Where they were not magnificent, their enormous numbers as ‘the nation in arms’ made up for their defects, and they swept all before them. In 1794 the French humiliatingly drove out the Austrians from the Netherlands and severed the Habsburgs’ 300-year link with that country for ever.

And the efficiency of the coalition armies on the continent was undermined by the fact that Britain’s main allies, Austria and Prussia, were far more interested in carving up the weakened kingdom of Poland with Russia than in eradicating the threat the French armies posed to the world order. After two years of war Prussia made peace with France, abandoning the coalition in order to finish off the partition of Poland (Russia, Austria and Prussia vowing to extinguish the name of Poland), while a mere two alarming encounters with the French armies had been enough to persuade Spain to ally with France. In addition, Holland had become a French puppet-state, the Batavian Republic. But Pitt had high hopes of the Austrian army, which still held Italy, for it was the largest in the world. Pitt also had information that after four years of war not only were the French armies suffering from exhaustion and lack of supplies, but the inexperienced government in Paris was running out of money. A peace might be arranged. But these were not conventional times. By October 1797, in an astonishing, almost miraculous campaign in Italy under a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French had expelled the Austrian army from Italy and changed the shape of the war.

The British had first encountered Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the war in 1793 when the masterly tactics of the twenty-three-year-old had defeated the British fleet’s attempt to help the royalist resistance in the south of France by seizing Toulon. Napoleon was a small, thin, sallow-skinned, shabbily dressed artillery officer affectionately known to his men as the Little Corporal. After the Italian campaign he captured the world’s imagination as one of history’s greatest generals. Bonaparte began to be compared to Caesar and Alexander the Great rolled into one; and he certainly shared their dreams of conquest. During the Italian campaign he had thrown the Austrian defences into chaos by the swiftness of his forays, winning a series of victories that enabled him to overrun the entire peninsula. The portrait of a long-haired, windswept Napoleon holding a standard at the Battle of Arcola as he turns to urge his men on is perhaps the best-known image of him as a young man.

By the end of the Italian campaign his men would do anything for the leader who could apparently pluck victories from the air. Wellington, Napoleon’s great opponent, would say in his memoirs that he had always believed that Napoleon’s presence on the battlefield was the equivalent of 40,000 men, and military historians have agreed. The reason why Napoleon succeeded when everything was against him was because his personality caused the men to march and fight harder than any could have dreamed possible.

The peace party at Paris with whom Pitt had been negotiating for the previous two years were cast aside in favour of a war party headed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had no intention of allowing his conquests to stop at Italy. By October 1797 Italy had become a series of republics set up by Napoleon. Alarmed by the threat the French Grand Army posed to Vienna, and to preserve the Veneto for themselves, the Austrians too made peace with France. With the Treaty of Campo Formio they were out of the war. Of the theoretically invincible First Coalition, Britain was left to face Revolutionary France on her own. Italy, whose indented coast had provided harbours for the British navy, was now out of bounds, her waters swarming with French and Spanish ships. French armies were established up to the left bank of the Rhine and the Alps, on what the French government decreed to be France’s ‘natural frontiers’.

For Pitt and the British, the years of Napoleon’s most startling triumphs, which inspired Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, were very bad years indeed. Not only did the French seem unstoppable, but since Spain’s desertion Britain’s independence had been seriously threatened by three fleets. The combined forces of the Spanish and the French and the Dutch had the potential to seize control of the Channel and launch invasions of both Ireland and England. In 1796 French soldiers landed at Fishguard in south Wales and there were abortive attempts at invading Britain via Ireland. Only bad weather at Christmas that year stopped French soldiers being received at Bantry Bay by an Irish independence movement. But there was still the constant danger that the inherent anti-British feeling in Ireland would always make it a landing spot for the vanguard of French invaders. There Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of the United Irishmen–an increasingly republican progressive reform movement, which included both Catholics and Protestants–was only waiting for propitious conditions and French soldiers to throw off British rule.

The personal bravery of Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in February 1797 prevented the Spanish fleet from seizing control of the Channel. Nevertheless for much of the ensuing year Britain continued to be threatened by three navies, a predicament made much more grave by a series of mutinies (against bad conditions) in her own fleet which left the Channel quite unguarded. Only the quick wits of Admiral Duncan saved Britain from invasion by the Dutch when the mutinies were at their height. Duncan was out at sea watching the Dutch fleet in the Texel, quite alone and without a fleet apart from two little frigates. He sent the frigates up to where they could be seen by the Dutch from the Texel estuary; for the next few weeks the frigates signalled to an imaginary fleet out of the Dutch line of vision, and the invasion plan was abandoned. Then in October Duncan destroyed the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Camperdown.

There was danger of a different kind that same year. No one had appreciated quite how expensive the war would be. Thanks to the war’s monumental costs and the gold disbursed to the allied armies, and despite the trade surpluses, the Treasury was empty. The Bank of England was about to suspend payment. There was a danger of real civil disorder, as poor harvests had brought severe social distress. Fortunately Pitt persuaded the king to put his authority behind a Parliamentary bill which allowed Bank of England notes to be issued as legal tender throughout the country instead of gold. The armed forces continued to be paid in gold, but the rest of the country used banknotes until 1819. This in turn brought its own troubles: prices rose but wages followed far more slowly. With so many labourers living just above subsistence level, local authorities throughout the country started to supplement their wages out of the rates, copying what was called the Speenhamland system of poor relief begun in Berkshire in 1795. As a result farmers saw no reason to put up their labourers’ wages, which thus remained static for twenty years.

By 1798 Pitt was forced to introduce a rising scale of income tax to help pay for the war. It was based on the simple principle that taxing the rich at a higher rate would raise more money; it proved extremely unpopular with them, especially because the war showed no sign of ending. Pitt’s attempts to bring the French government to the peace table, by returning France’s captured West Indian colonies with a £400,000 bribe, had been rejected. The French had no need of money after Bonaparte’s looting of Italy: all her treasures whether in gold or Old Masters were being dragged on baggage trains into France. And the French had no intention of moving out of the Netherlands, which was Britain’s precondition for peace. Elated by Bonaparte’s victories the French government was happily contemplating other campaigns–invading Egypt and Syria, perhaps Turkey and India, to make a new empire in the east.