The Years of Endurance (34 page)
The Government, therefore, decided to swallow its scruples and to apply to the Directory for a passport for a Minister Plenipotentiary. With Pitt's approval a pamphlet of Lord Auckland's was published to prepare the public mind. The King was assured that the internal state of the country required it and that only when the opponents of war had been convinced of its necessity by a French refusal to conclude even the most reasonable peace, would the nation be united enough to face a world in arms.
4
"As Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt think a further step of humiliation necessary to call forth the spirit which used to be characteristic of this island," the old man wrote, " I will not object." The first diplomat in Britain, Lord Malmesbury, was selected for the mission. The embodiment of English tact, good nature and common sense, " the white Hon," as his friends called him, was the perfect appeaser.
It had been hoped to bring Austria into the negotiations. But by the time Malmesbury set out for Calais on October 16th the Court of Vienna was veering once more. Bonaparte's Italian victories had been offset by the Archduke Charles's German campaign, and the old imperial hauteur had revived. Thugut had hopes of inducing Russia to join in stemming a French advance to the Adriatic—a sea in which the scheming Empress Catherine was interested as protector of the Orthodox Christians. The scene
1
Pitt to Grenville, 23rd June, 1796.—
H. M. C. Dropmore,
III, 214.
2
King to Grenville, 30th July, 1796.—
H. M. C. Dropmore,
III, 227.
3
Farington,
I, 158.
4
H. M. C. Dropmore,
III, 242.
was thus set for a counter-offensive in Italy and a new attempt to relieve Mantua. For this reason, three days after Malmesbury left London the Cabinet countermanded its earlier orders to abandon Corsica. For, forgetting both its defencelessness and the promise made to its inhabitants, the politicians supposed that the island might be useful as a bribe to bring Russia into the war.
Therefore when Malmesbury reached Paris—travelling, wrote the infuriated Burke, " the whole way on his knees "—his proposal for a European pacification was met by an inquiry whether the Court of Vienna concurred. How, the French Foreign Minister asked, could a general peace be expected when every day brought new accounts of the Emperor's determination to carry on the war? The truth was that both sides were temporising until an issue had been reached elsewhere. The Austrians were waiting for Russia's decision,
for further victories on the Rh
ine and the relief of Mantua; the French for an end to the Lombardy campaign and a Spanish move at sea. Malmesbury therefore remained in Paris, recording only such minor triumphs and set-backs as the civility shown to his diplomatic uniform and the necessity—repugnant to an English nobleman—of having to wear the tricolour in the streets.
Meanwhile Spain had declared war. Godoy handed Lord Bute the official declaration on October 5 th, accompanied by a long list of imaginary Spanish grievances. Four days earlier Admiral Man, sailing to Gibraltar with seven ships of the line, was attacked without
warning by nineteen Spanish battl
eships, losing two of the merchantmen he was convoying. Further up the Mediterranean Jervis and Nelson were putting into execution the Government's orders of August 31st—received in the last week of September—to evacuate Corsica. Here, despite the odds, the feeling was one of confidence: it was a tradition in the Navy to despise Spain. " The Dons may make fine ships," Nelson had written when they were allies, " but they cannot make men," A Spanish war was sure to bring in prize-money, and though few sailors quarrelled with the decision to leave Corsica, the desertion of the Mediterranean was regarded as unnecessary. Eight months of Jervis's discipline had given his command an astonishing assurance. " They at home," wrote Nelson to his wife, " do not know what this fleet is capable of per
forming; any tiling and everyth
ing. . . . I lament our present
orders in sackcloth and ashes, so dishonourable to the dignity of England, whose fleets are equal to meet the world in arms."
1
Yet it was probably as well that the Government's countermanding orders did not reach Jervis in time. For on putting into Gibraltar after his rough handling by the Spanish fleet, Admiral Man, his anxious mind obsessed by thoughts of being " hemmed in by superiority of numbers," decided to return to England instead of rejoining his chief in San Fiorenzo Bay. This breach of orders deprived Jervis at a critical moment of a third of his fleet. With only fourteen ships of the line against a Franco-Spanish combination of thirty-eight he waited for the errant Man until November 2nd, when he sailed in desperation for Gibraltar. Before he left the Corsican coast, the French had already landed in the island.
On the same day the Austrian Alvinzi crossed the Piave with a force nearly twice as large as that with which Bonaparte was besieging Mantua. On November nth he drove back the French at Caldiero. For forty-eight hours it looked as though the relief of the fortress was certain. Then on the night of the 14th Bonaparte gave orders for one of the most daring marches in history. It ended three days later in the victory of Areola. The third attempt to relieve Mantua had failed.
The same day also brought news of the death of the Empress Catherine. A fortnight earlier she had been found in an apoplectic fit on the floor of her writing-closet. Her successor, the Tsar Paul, was mad, and reputed to be opposed to Russian intervention in a western war. The French at once
began to raise their terms. Mal
mesbury's temperate and inflexibly honest restatements of Britain's position—her readiness to surrender conquered sugar islands in return for adjustments in Europe and a vindication of the outraged law of nations—grew ever more remote from the realities of Parisian extravagance. Every time he met Delacroix, who like all revolutionary diplomats was apt to shout when excited, the French Minister became more unreasonable, insisting that all France's acquisitions were sacred and " indivisible," whereas Britain's colonial conquests were mere robbery and must be immediately restored. After the news of Areola only a glimmer of hope remained.
1
Nicolas
II, 290.
There was another reason for France's increasing obduracy. On November 13 th Malmesbury, keeping his ears open for rumours, dispatched a courier to London with information that eleven ships of the line and fifteen thousand troops were at Brest preparing for sea. It was certain, he reported, that they were intended for Ireland. Had he been able to see the letters which since the summer had been passing between Carnot, Hoche and Wolfe Tone, the founder of the United Irishmen, then in Paris, he might have been even more alarmed. " I am practically certain the English Government is at its wits' end," Hoche had written; " the kind of war I propose to wage on our rivals is a terrible one." On Tone's assurance that half a million men would rise the day the French landed, Ireland had been selected as the first objective of Carnot's favourite project—a direct attack on the British Isles.
Until the expedition was ready to start the French Foreign Minister continued to keep Malmesbury amused. Two days before the end of November he gave him a long interview, in the course of which he tried to prove that while Britain's ambitions were commercial and colonial, those of France were purely continental.
1
He did not mention that a few weeks before his Government had passed a decree confiscating every neutral ship carrying British goods. In a later and more impassioned meeting Delacroix declared that with the RJiine as the natural boundary of France the tranquillity of Europe would be assured for two centuries. At last on December 18th Malmesbury received peremptory orders from his hosts to leave Paris within forty-eight hours. For on that day it became known that Hoche had sailed for Ireland.
Meanwhile Britain was preparing for the storm. Ever since the summer the Adjutant-General's office had been drawing up detailed plans for defending the southern counties against an invader. On October 18th Pitt met Parliament with proposals for doubling the Militia and adding 15,000 seamen to the fleet by a compulsory quota on all parishes. The House voted supplies for over 400,000 men. These included a new force of Provisional Cavalry, to be raised by compulsion, the owner or owners of every ten horses
1
" Commerce is your empire. It is to be founded in the Indies and in your colonies. But as for France, I should be better pleased with an addition of four villages on the frontiers of the Republic than by the acquisition of the richest island among the Antilles, and sh
ould be even sorry to see Pondi
cherry and Chandenagore again belong to France."—
Malmesbury,
III, 334.
being responsible for one fully equipped horseman; and another of sportsmen and gamekeepers to be used as riflemen and skirmishers. To meet the increase in expenditure the Prime Minister not only trebled the assessed taxes but adopted a revolutionary procedure. Instead of resorting to professional financiers he applied direct to the nation. Early in December a Loyalty Loan of eighteen millions, issued at £112 10s. per £100 of stock, and bearing interest at 5 per cent, was offered to the public. Though a more expensive purchase than other existing stock, the entire loan was subscribed in less than sixteen hours. " The Constitution,
,,
Pitt proudly announced, " inspires the steady affection of the people and is worth defending with every drop of our blood."
1
War Speeches,
172.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Her Darkest Hour
1796-7
" Be assured I will omit no opportunity of chastising the Spaniards, and if I have the good fortune to fall in with them the stuff I have in this fleet will tell.".
Sir John Jervis to Lord Spencer,
2nd
Oct.,
1796.
" And Jack the tawny whiskers singed Of the astonished Don."
Dibdin,
"A
Dose for the Dons,"
1797.
On
the evening of December 15 th, 1796, the French armada for Ireland, having stood through the narrow Goulet out of Brest, anchored in the Camaret Roads. There was no sign of the British Fleet save for t
hree frigates cruising on the Atl
antic horizon. The French had seventeen ships of the line, twenty-six smaller warships and transports, most of the 15,000 troops being crowded on board the battleships.
For nearly six weeks the wind had been in the east. It had blown the British blockading fleet far out into the Atlantic and opened the gateway to Ireland. Wolfe Tone, the rebel Irish leader, had cursed the delays of the Directory and its chaotic Navy. " Damn them! damn them! sempiternally damn them! " There was no discipline in the Fleet and dockyards, nobody obeyed or respected anybody, nobody worked.
But the Republican army—its wonderful enthusiasm, its ardour, its pride—had impressed the excitable Irishman as much as the navy depressed him. In the Festival of Youth in the church of a provincial town he had seen hundreds of young recruits, bareheaded before the statue of Liberty, receiving their arms from veterans to the strains of the " Marseillaise.'' Here, he felt, was true Liberty and Patriotism: a moving contrast to the depressed, drunken drafts he had seen shambling off to the colours in his own downtrodden land. And this army was led by men who shared its aspirations and passionate youth: still in their twenties and early thirties, unfettered by the caste prejudices and follies of the elderly aristocrats who misdirected their enemies.
Now at last the great liberating expedition was at sea, led by the splendid young giant, Lazare Hoche—himself agog with zeal to drive the odious English usurpers back to their own doomed island —and the gallant old Admiral, Morard de Galles, whom Hoche had substituted for the timid Villaret Joyeuse. As Hoche and Carnot had planned it, it
was to be the first stage in eli
minating the islanders from their own watery element. Controlling Ireland the Republic would not only be able to invade England and deny her those valiant Hibernian fighters who, according to Tone, constituted the greater part of her Navy and Army, but could strangle her commerce. Straddling the western approaches from Ireland to Finisterre, the combined French and Spanish fleets would cut the trade routes through which the City money spiders sucked the blood of Asia, Africa and America.
Already a grand Latin fleet of more than thirty Spanish and French battleships had left Toulon: its advance-guard under Villeneuve was expected daily at Brest. The remnant of Britain's former Mediterranean Fleet cowered at Gibraltar. The storm that had blown the British squadron from its station off Brest, had driven three of Jervis's
battle
ships from their anchors in Gibraltar Bay, wrecking one of them on the coast of Morocco. Britannia,, it seemed; no longer ruled the waves.