The Years of Endurance (30 page)

It was perhaps because of this incident that Pitt, in a year dark with storm, gave so much of his thought to a far-reaching scheme of social reform which, had it been adopted by Parliament, might have changed the tenor of English history. He had already made partial attempts to adjust the social system to the new conditions of economic life, exempting dwellings with only one hearth from hearth tax and modifying the old harsh law of settlement which still gave parish authorities the right to expel newcomers who might become chargeable to the rates. Early in 1796 he took a more momentous step. At the end of the previous session, Samuel Whit-bread—" the great fermentator "—had introduced a measure fos: fixing minimum wages, erroneously asserting that, while wages had risen threefold in the past two centuries, the price of food and clothing had multiplied seven and fifteenfold. Pitt, in demolishing

¹
Farington,
I, 137.
⁸
Lord Rosebery,
Pitt,
1891, 169,

these
¹
extravagant claims, took the wind out of Whitbread's sails by a plea for family allowances, compulsory national insurance, and a general system of technical education. He declined to consider a minimum wage as an infringement of economic law: " trade, industry and barter will always find their own level and will be impeded by regulations which violate their natural operation and derange their proper effect."
¹
But to the chagrin of the Foxites he promised to introduce a Bill which should place the whole question of poor relief on a national basis.

The measure was delayed by the general election of the summer. But on November 12, 1796, Pitt laid it before the House. It provided that a father, unable to support his children, should receive a shilling a week for each child until it became self-supporting, and that poor and industrious persons whose wages fell below a certain level should have a legal claim on the rates for any deficiency. Up to this point the Bill did no more than give a national stamp to the provisions of Speenhamland. But in its remaining clauses it was revolutionary. By a bold use of national credit it empowered parish authorities to advance money for the purchase of a cow to any industrious man unable to support his family by his own unaided efforts. It established a Parochial Fund, to be raised by weekly subscriptions and rates, for contributory old-age pensions. And it created in every parish or union of parishes a School of Industry for training children in some craft or trade until they grew up. To feed them the uncultivated waste in every parish was to be enclosed by the Overseers. To meet the needs of agriculture boys over 14 and girls over 12 could be hired out at harvest time for a period of not more than six consecutive weeks. The work of the schools was to be supervised by the magistracy and the clergy. " With reform," the Prime Minister declared, defending a project far in advance of his time, " you disarm the Jacobins of their most dangerous weapon."

Pitt had copies of his Bill printed and circulated to experts. In their marginal comments a few approved whole-heartedly. But the general verdict of experience and authority was adverse. Indoor work for Schools of Industry, it was stated, would unfit boys for field labour; public morals would be ruined by allowing illegitimate children to qualify for relief; the labourer would sell or eat

¹
J.
H. Rose,
Pitt and Napoleon,
1912, 82.

the cow advanced him by the parish. Most scathing of all was the great jurist, Jeremy Bentham, on whose chilling logic the next age was to rear
the structure of Victorian utili
tarianism. To him Pitt's remedies seemed wildly sentimental and dangerous. The Bill, it was felt, required more disinterested virtue than either the poor or the guardians possessed.

It was certainly far in advance of the prevailing level of British administrative science. The fury with which it was assailed by the magistrates of Mary-le-bone and St. Giles proved this. Their sole conception of their duty was to keep the rates down and their only use for pauper children sale to the north-country factories. Assailed by so much detailed criticism, the bill was withdrawn for amendment. Pitt never had another opportunity of introducing it. Few could see any reason for so co
stly
a measure in a time of war and high taxation: in any case food prices had dropped with the better h
arvest of 1796, and the early p
art of the winter was exceptionally mild. The English mind could only envisage the immediate task of winning the war, and could not look beyond it. Within a few weeks the nation was in the throes of the worst financial crisis of its history, and any scheme for increasing the alarming burden of tax and ratepayers had ceased to be practical politics.

With so much suffering and the chances of victory receding as Europe made her peace with the triumphing Jacobin, it was not surprising that there were patriots who sometimes despaired of the war. Even so close a friend of the Prime Minister as Wilberforce at one time brought forward a motion for peace. Noblemen like the Marquis of Buckingham, who had been among the first to panic at the Revolution, now talked of compromising with the sacrifice of a few colonial conquests, and argued that in its half-bankrupt state France was no longer to be feared. In the spring of 1795 a captain of the naval recruiting service told a traveller that, though Britain might beat France to loggerheads at sea, she would never be able to give laws to her. Even Nelson seemed to think peace inevitable and wrote home about buying a neat cottage in which to end his days.
¹

¹
" . . . As all Powers give up the contest, for what has England to fight ? I wish most heartily we had peace, or that all our troops were drawn from the Continent and only a Naval war carried on, the war where England can alone make a figure.
"-
Nicolas,
II,
8.

But Pitt, though more anxious for a genuine peace than any Englishman living, knew how hard it would be to obtain. Each successive Revolutionary government, he told the House, based its policy on " the same unqualified rights of man, the same principles of liberty and equality—principles by which they flatter the people with the possession of the theoretical rights of man, all of which they vitiate and violate in practice."
¹
Adherence to pledged word had no place in their scheme of statecraft. A composition could only be followed by a few years of uneasy peace before the same storm broke in England. For Pitt saw in Jacobin France all that
his
father's training and his own frugal apprenticeship had taught him to dread: a " system of dividin
g the orders of the community,"
of r
epresenting property as " the easy prey of the indigent, the idle and the licentious," and religion and moral duty as useless superstitions. He knew how easily such doctrines might take hold of ignorant multitudes in the great cities if their rulers sought appeasement with those who championed them.

And the country, instinctively rather than intellectually, agreed with him. " How the storm gathers and blackens on the Continent," confided Miss Iremonger to a friend, " it really makes one tremble." She did not come of a trembling race. " My heart and my imagination are saddened," wrote Hannah More, " by the slaughter and devastation of my species with which every newspaper is full." But it never occurred to her to give in. The English view was expressed by Captain Harry Carter, the Cornish smuggler, who declared himself unafraid of all the lions in France. Gillray's comment on the peace proposals of the Opposition was to portray Britannia on her knees yielding crown, trident and Magna Charta to a flaming-headed, jack-booted monster while Fox and Sheridan, grovelling at her side, offered up the Fleet, the Church and the keys of the Bank. In another of his cartoons Pitt, overrunning
the
lurking, traitor crew with their daggers and craven howls, drives godlike in his sun-chariot behind the Lion and Unicorn crying, " Inexorable peace or Eternal war! "

So it was that instead of despairing of the Coalition, Britain,
in
the fatal summer of 1795, did her best to revive it. She offered an asanual subsidy to Russia of a million sterling in return for a force

¹
War Speeches,
121.

of 50,000 men and to Austria a guarantee of a four and a half million loan for a renewed offensive on the Rhine. She sent
a new ambassador to Spain, and
tried,
first by reason—and then, when it
was too late, by bribery—to avert the final betrayal planned by her upstart Minister, Godoy, Such efforts were unavailing. Russia aodt Austria took Pitt's money but continued to make their main concern the final partition of Poland. Godoy—" a Birmingham Vilhers " who had made himself indispensable to an amorous queen and a half-wit king—preferred Jacobin flattery and bribes to British and withdrew from the Coalition, ceding Spanish Santo Domingo to France. But the war went on.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Before the Storm
1795-6

" The plot seems to thicken as if the most serious part of the war were but beginning."

Capt.
Collingwood
to
J.
E.
Blackett,
11
th
May,
1796
.

With
Austria confining her efforts in the campaign of 1795 to the Italian Riviera, Britain had four choices. She could concentrate her forces in Corsica for amphibious operations on the Austrian flank. She could open a new offensive in the West Indies. She could take the King's advice, renew the war in Hanover, where she still had 30,000 German auxiliaries and British cavalry on her pay-roll, and trust to Russian collaboration for a reconquest of Holland. Or she could aid the rising Royalist tide in France by a landing with all she had on the Brittany coast.

As usual the Government failed to make up its mind. It did bring itself to inform its Viceroy in Corsica—where a provisional government had been set up at the islanders' request under the British crown
¹
—that the 5000 troops promised as a reinforcement could not be sent. But it allowed its cavalry to remain in Hanover, continued to prepare a West Indian expedition and drifted into becoming a party to operations in Brittany.

Such irresolution arose from the dual nature of the coalition Government. Carried away by the enthusiasm of Burke and Windham, the Portland Whigs had made themselves champions of the
emigres,
in opposition to the King, who represented the typical John Bull distrust of all Frenchmen.
²
Against his judgment Pitt was gradually brought to a grudging recognition of their right to

¹
Thus technically making Napoleon Bonaparte a British subject.

²
" My own inclination would tend to oblige every one of that perfidious nation here either to go on that service or, by the Aliens Act, be removed from this country.''—George III to Grenville, 2nd Aug., 1794.
H. M. C. Dropmore,
II, 609.

British support. Thousands of them had been released from the Allied armies by the end of the war in northern France. There was an opportunity to enrol them in British pay and in the growing royalism of Brittany a field for their services.

This policy was strengthened by the arrival in England of Count Puisaye, a giant Breton who had embraced the monarchical cause rather late in the day. He made up for it by the vehemence with which he now pressed it on his hosts. His idea was to* band all the
Emigres
in Europe into a white army which, equipped by British money, should make a descent on Brittany during the summer. By its threat to Brest the landing would help the Navy—a consideration for an overstrained Admiralty—and, by carrying the war into the enemy's country, forestall any attempt to invade England.

Unfortunately—though Puisaye's enthusiasm obscured the fact —the Royalists were far from united. They suffered from the feuds common to political exiles in all ages. The aristocratic Court refugees who followed the murdered King's brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois, regarded upstart rustics hke Puisaye with contempt. In Paris the Royalist committee was jealous of the provincial leaders. In La Vendee, after the ravages of the Republican " infernal columns," the peasants had settled down to an uneasy truce confirmed by a mutually insincere pact between their chieftain, Charette, and the Convention. The other Vendean leader— the grim ex-gamekeepe
r, Stoffl
et—refused to recognise it and maintained a guerrilla war in the woods.

Yet the Royalist cause was undoubtedly gaining ground. Despite her victories the Republic was showing renewed signs of the spiritual and financial bankruptcy which Pitt had always foretold. The currency was discredited, the price of provisions soaring, and the peasants, trusting no one, were holding back their corn. The cities were full of bread queues and unemployed artisans. In the capital the Terror had been succeeded by a vicious reaction, directed by unprincipled profiteers and enforced by gangs of youthful
nouveaux riches
called Muscadins, who ran a counter-terror of their own in the streets and theatres. In May, 1795, a rising of the starving
faubourgs
was followed by a purge of the Popular Party: in this even Carnot, the organiser of victory, nearly lost his head. Thousands of decent and moderate folk began to think of a restoration as the only hope of justice, bread and peace. Several towns even elected Royalist mayors.