XXXVII. ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION…

XXXVII. ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

1789-1802.

[Sidenote: =The meeting of the States General.=]

In the year 1789, when Pitt was in the zenith of his power, strong in the confidence of the nation and the king, signs of trouble began to appear across the British Channel, which attracted the attention of all intelligent men. The great French Revolution was commencing:--in May, 1789, King Lewis XVI. summoned the States General of France to meet at Versailles, in order to consult with him on measures for averting the impending bankruptcy of the realm. It was nearly two centuries since the last States General had assembled, and nothing but dire necessity drove the king to call into being the assembly which his despotic ancestors had so carefully prevented from meeting. But France was in a desperate condition: the greedy and autolatrous Lewis XIV. and the vicious spendthrift Lewis XV. had piled up a mountain of debts which the nation could no longer support. The existing king, though personally he was mild and unenterprising, had been drawn into the war of American independence, and wasted on it many millions more. The only way out of the difficulty was to persuade the nation to submit to new imposts, and most especially to induce the nobles to surrender their old feudal privilege of exemption from taxation.

[Sidenote: =France under the Ancien Régime.=]

The king and his ministers were only thinking of the financial trouble; but by summoning the States General they gave the power of speech to discontented France, and found themselves confronted by a much larger problem. The realm had been grossly misgoverned for the last century by a close ring of royal ministers, who constituted a bureaucracy of the most narrow-minded sort. Lewis XIV. had crushed out all local institutions and liberties, in order to impose his royal will on every man. The lesser kings who followed had allowed the power to slip from their own hands into those of the close oligarchy of bureaucrats whom the Grand Monarque had organized. France under the Ancien Régime was suffering all the evils that result from over-centralization and "red tape." The smallest provincial affairs had to be referred to the ministers at Paris, who tried to settle everything, but only succeeded in meddling, and delaying all local improvements. The most hopeless feature of the time was that the nobility and gentry were excluded from all political power by the Parisian bureaucrats, though suffered to retain all their old feudal privileges and exemptions. Thus they were objects of jealousy to the other classes, yet had no share in the governance of the realm, or opportunity to temper the despotism of the royal ministers. Two old mediaeval abuses survived, to make the situation of the country yet more unbearable: offices of all kinds were openly bought and sold, while taxation was not raised directly by the state, but leased out to greedy tax-farmers, who mulcted the public of far more than they paid into the national treasury.

[Sidenote: =Growth of discontent.--Voltaire and Rousseau.=]

While the government was in this deplorable condition, public opinion had of late been growing more and more restive. All the educated classes of France were permeated with deep discontent. Ideals of constitutional government, borrowed originally from English political writers, were in the air. The recent alliance with America had familiarized many Frenchmen with republican institutions and notions of self-government. The opposition was headed by the chief literary men of the age. The stinging sarcasms of Voltaire were aimed against all ancient shams and delusions. Nothing was safe from his criticism, and most of all did he ridicule the corrupt Gallican Church, with its hierarchy of luxurious and worldly prelates and its bigoted and superstitious lower clergy. While Voltaire was decrying old institutions and teaching men to be sceptical of all ancient beliefs, his younger contemporary, the sentimental and visionary Rousseau, was advocating a return to the "state of nature." He taught that man was originally virtuous and happy, and that all evil was the result of over-government, the work of priests and kings. He dreamed of a renewal of the Golden Age, and the abolition of laws and states. All men were to be brothers, and to live free and equal without lord or master. Smarting under the narrow and stupid rule of the Ancien Régime, many Frenchmen took these Utopian ideas seriously, and talked of setting up the reign of reason and humanity. Hence it came that all the claims and aspirations of the French Revolution were inspired by vague and visionary ideas of the rights of man, and demanded the destruction of old institutions, unlike our English agitations for reform, which from Magna Carta downwards have always claimed a restoration of ancient liberties, not the setting up of a new constitution.

[Sidenote: =The National Assembly.=]

When the dull but well-intentioned Lewis XVI. had once summoned the States General of 1789, he soon found that he had given himself a master. For the deputies of the Tiers Etat, or Commons, instead of proceeding to vote new taxes, began to clamour for the redress of grievances of all kinds. When the king, like Charles I., threatened to dissolve them, their spokesman answered, "We are here by the will of the people of France, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall disperse us." King Lewis was too weak and slow to send the bayonets. He drew back, and allowed the States General to organize themselves into a National Assembly, and to claim to represent the French nation.

[Sidenote: =Storming of the Bastille.=]

The obvious weakness of the king encouraged the friends of revolution all over France to assert themselves. On July 14, 1789, the mob of Paris stormed the Bastille--the old state prison of the capital--and massacred the garrison. The king made no attempt to resent this riot and murder. Then followed a rapid series of constitutional decrees, by which the Assembly, backed by the pikes of the Parisian mob, abolished all the ancient despotic and feudal customs of the realm. It seemed for a moment as if a solid constitutional monarchy might be established. But the king was too feeble, and the reformers too rash and wild. The taint of riot and murder hung about all their doings, and they were constantly calling in the mob to their aid. Foreseeing a catastrophe, the greater part of the French royal family and noblesse fled the realm. Ere long the king became little better than a prisoner in his own palace.

[Sidenote: =English sympathy with the Revolution.=]

These doings across the Channel keenly interested England. At first they met with general approval. It looked as if France was about to become a limited monarchy; and as the personal and dynastic ambition of the Bourbons had always been the cause of our wars with them, English public opinion looked with favour on the substitution of the power of the National Assembly for that of the king. It was thought that France, under a constitutional government founded on English models, could not fail to become the friend of England. Pitt expressed in a guarded way his approbation of the earlier stages of the Revolution. Fox became its vehement admirer and panegyrist; he exclaimed that the storming of the Bastille was the greatest and best event in modern history, conveniently ignoring the cold-blooded massacre of its garrison which had followed. The greater part of the Whig party followed their chief, and expressed unqualified praise for the doings of the French. Some of the more enthusiastic members of the party visited France and corresponded with the leaders of the Revolution; others formed political clubs to encourage and support the reformers across the Channel.

[Sidenote: =The reaction.--Criticisms of Burke.=]

But the mood of generous admiration and universal approval could not last for long. As the Revolution went on developing, while the outbursts of mob violence in France grew more frequent, and the National Assembly plunged into all manner of violence and arbitrary legislation, there began to be a schism in English public opinion. Fox and the more vehement Whigs still persisted in finding nothing to blame across the Channel, explaining the violent deeds of the Parisians as mere effervescence of the mercurial French temperament. But, curiously enough, it was a Whig, and one who never tired of singing the praises of our own Revolution of 1688, who was the first prophet of evil for the French movement. Edmund Burke, Fox's old colleague and ally, was an exponent of that view of constitutional liberty which looked on mob-law as even worse than the despotism of kings. He fixed his eyes on the murderous riots in Paris and the spectacle of the humiliation of Lewis XVI., not on the fair promises of a golden age made by the milder French reformers. The prospect of anarchy shocked him, and he used his unrivalled eloquence to warn the English nation to have nothing to do with a people of assassins and atheists. "When a separation once appears between liberty and law, neither is safe" was his cry. And, unlikely as it appeared at first, Burke was entirely in the right. Nothing which he predicted of the French Revolution could exceed the realities which ere long came to pass.

[Sidenote: =Attempted flight of Lewis XVI.=]

The consciousness of their own uncontrolled power was turning the brain of the French Assembly, and maddening the Parisian populace. They were irritated, but not checked, by the weak resistance and futile evasions of Lewis XVI. At last they persuaded themselves that the king and the nobility were conspiring to take away their newly won liberties, while in reality Lewis and his nobles alike were paralyzed with dread, and only thinking of saving themselves. In the summer of 1791 the unfortunate king took the fatal step of trying to escape by stealth from Paris. He stole away in disguise with his wife and children, and had got half-way to the eastern frontier before his absence was discovered. A chance caused his stoppage and discovery at Varennes; he was seized and sent back to Paris, where he was for the future treated as a prisoner, not as a king.

[Sidenote: =Intervention of Austria and Prussia.=]

From this moment it was the fixed belief in France that Lewis had been about to fly to Germany, in order to incite the despotic monarchs of Austria and Prussia against his country. In the Assembly the wilder party began to come to the front, preaching republicanism, and crying that France could not be saved by constitutional reforms, but required blood-letting. Ere long the symptoms of violence and anarchy, which had frightened Burke in England, exercised a still stronger effect on the rulers of the continent. Francis of Austria and Frederic William II. of Prussia, alarmed as to the republican propaganda in France, and warned by the fate of their fellow-king, began to concentrate their armies on the Rhine, and to concert measures for putting down the Revolution. On learning their plans, the French Assembly declared war on them in April, 1792. But at first their raw levies fared ill against the Germans; defeat--as always in France--was followed by the cry of treason, and on the 10th of August the Parisian mob stormed the Tuileries, slew the king's guards, and called for his deposition.

[Sidenote: =A Republic proclaimed.--The September massacres.=]

The democratic National Convention, which now superseded the Assembly, proclaimed a Republic, after the populace had massacred many hundreds of persons who were rightly or wrongly supposed to be the king's friends (September 2, 1792). The Convention gave its tacit sanction to these atrocities, in which some of its more violent members were personally implicated.

[Sidenote: =Attitude of Pitt.=]

The news of the September massacres and the proclamation of the Republic cleared up for ever the doubts of the English people as to the character of the French Revolution. Pitt's judicial attitude towards the movement had at last changed. In 1790 he had doubted whether it were good or bad; by 1792 he was convinced that it was dangerous, anarchic, and detestable, but still hoped to avoid coming into actual conflict with it. He was in his heart a peace-minister, and it was circumstances, not his own will, which were to make him the fomenter of leagues and confederacies against France for nine long years of war. When Austria and Prussia invited him to join them in their attack, he had at first refused. But he was much disturbed by the bombastic "Edict of Fraternity," which the Convention published, appealing to all the nations of Europe. "All governments are our enemies, all peoples our friends," said this document, and the multitude in every land were invited to overthrow kings and ministers, and receive the aid which France would give. Pitt looked upon this as an appeal to anarchy addressed to the discontented classes in England, and was much disturbed when he found that it was welcomed by some of the Whigs of the more popular and democratic section. A small but compact body of these extreme politicians were doing their best to frighten England into a frenzy of reaction by their unwise and unpatriotic conduct. Two clubs called the Corresponding Society and the Constitutional Society were founded in London for the propagation of revolutionary doctrines. They were composed of men of no weight or importance, visionary politicians with a craze for republicanism, men of disappointed ambitions who longed for a political crisis to bring them into notice, mob-orators, and such like. These bodies deserved contempt rather than notice, but in view of the doings over seas, they attracted attention, and their noisy declamations in favour of the wilder doctrines of the French Revolution frightened the public. Especially was an outcry raised by the books and pamphlets of the celebrated free-thinker and republican writer, Tom Paine, the most blatant apologist of the atrocities in Paris.

[Sidenote: =Panic in England.--Repressive legislation.=]

The average Englishman was sufficiently disgusted by the language of these home-grown revolutionaries from the first, but when more and more blood was shed in France, a measure of alarm was mixed with his dislike of the noisy clubs. Men began to remember the permanent existence in London of a large body of the dangerous classes; it was easy to assume a connection between the French government, the English revolutionary societies, and the dregs of the London streets. And indeed a few wild spirits do seem to have talked to French agents of foolish plans for starting riots, setting fire to the capital, and seizing the Tower arsenal, in order to arm the mobs who, as they thought, would follow them. But the thousands of rioters and anarchists had no existence save in the brains of the French government and the alarmed and indignant English Tories. Their supposed designs, however, led to an unhappy panic in English legislation; the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, the right of free meeting restricted, even free speech in a measure fettered, by a wholly unnecessary series of Government measures, which were in reality directed against a few hundred silly but noisy fanatics. It was like using a sledge-hammer to crush a wasp.

[Sidenote: =The moderate Whigs join Pitt.=]

Unfortunately, the ultimate effects of this scare were destined to endure throughout the twenty-two years of the coming war, and even after its end. The atrocities committed by the French revolutionists, and the foolish talk of their English admirers, were the cause of the cessation of liberal legislation in England for a quarter of a century. Pitt himself, who had hitherto led the party of reform, felt the revulsion. His long series of wise and enlightened bills ceases in 1791, and his name becomes, unhappily, connected with stern and repressive laws of unnecessary severity. But it was not to be wondered at that he should act so, when we find that the larger half of the Whigs, the professors of an exaggerated zeal for liberty and popular government, now joined the Tories. After a continuous existence of a century, the Whig party suffered complete shipwreck. The majority of its members followed Burke in concluding an alliance with Pitt. Only a minority remained in opposition with Fox. In a party division, taken before the actual commencement of the French war, Fox was followed by only 50 of his own party when he attempted to oppose a warlike address to the Crown. It may be worth noting that this wave of revulsion against the French revolution is reflected in the English literature of the times. The younger authors of the day, such as Wordsworth and Southey, are liberal, and even republican, when they begin to write; but after the worse side of the French movement developed, they rapidly slide into enthusiastic patriotism, and denunciations of French anarchy and wickedness.

[Sidenote: =Lewis XVI. executed.--France declares war on England.=]

When this was the state of English public feeling, two events conspired to urge the nation into the war for which men had gradually been preparing themselves. The first was the trial and execution of the unfortunate king of France. The "Jacobin" party, the followers of the bloodthirsty Marat, the blatant Danton, and the coldly ferocious Robespierre, were now swaying the Convention. They impeached Lewis, not so much for any definite acts of his, as to show that they were determined to be rid of monarchy. "The coalized kings of Europe threaten us," said Danton; "let us hurl at their feet as a gage the head of a king." Lewis was sent to the guillotine on the most empty and frivolous charges (January 21, 1793). His unfortunate wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, followed him thither a few months after. Pitt immediately withdrew the English ambassador from Paris, and began to prepare for war. But the actual casus belli was the determination of the French, who had now overrun Belgium, to open the Scheldt, and make Antwerp a great naval arsenal. When Pitt protested, the Convention declared war on George III., under the vain belief that the English people would take their side, and overturn Pitt and his master. "The king and his Parliament mean to make war on us," wrote a French minister, "but the Republicans of England will not permit it. Already these freemen show their discontent, and refuse to bear arms against their brethren. We will fly to their succour. We will lodge 50,000 caps of liberty in England; and when we stretch out our arm to these Republicans, the tyranny of their monarchy will be overthrown."

So, on February 8, 1793, began the great war, which was to last, with two short intervals, till July 7, 1815. If England and France alone had been engaged in the struggle, the famous saying about the impossibility of a duel between the whale and the elephant might have been applicable. France, with her new levies just rushing into the field, had an army of something like 500,000 men. The English regular troops, available for war over-seas, were, in 1792, about 30,000 strong. On the other hand, the English fleet had 153 line-of-battle ships, the French only 86. The one nation was almost as superior by sea as the other by land. It was evident that we could only attack the French by land if we had continental allies, while France could not harm us by sea until she had secured assistance from other powers to increase her navy. But if with our limited army we could not hope to equal in the field the legions of France, we had one means of attacking her on land--the use of our power as the richest nation in Europe. Austria, Prussia, and the German states had large armies, but little money; England had much money, if few men. Accordingly, it was by liberal subsidies to the military powers of the continent that we from first to last fought France on land. History records nine separate coalitions which Pitt and his successors drew together and cemented with English gold, in order to stay the progress, first of the French Republic, then of the great man who inherited its position.

[Sidenote: =English naval supremacy.--Lord Howe's victory.=]

The moment that the war began, the naval supremacy of England enabled her to seize most of the outlying French colonies. At the same time our fleets moved down to blockade the great naval arsenals of Brest, Toulon, and Rochefort, where the French navy was cooped up. So thoroughly were the hostile fleets held in restraint, that there was only one important sea-fight in the first three years of the war. In the summer of 1794 the Brest squadron came out to convoy a merchant fleet, and was caught and completely beaten by Lord Howe on "the glorious First of June."

[Sidenote: =Vigorous government of the Convention.--The Reign of Terror.=]

The years 1793-1794 were the hardest part of the war for the French. The coalition against them now comprised England, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and Sardinia. Assailed on every frontier by foreign enemies, they had also to face a formidable royalist rising in La Vendée and Brittany. Yet the Convention made head against all its foes. The Jacobin faction, headed by the ruthless Robespierre, put a fearful energy into its generals, by the summary method of sending every officer who failed to the guillotine. The sanguinary despotism which they exercised was a thing of which the most tyrannical monarch would never have dreamed. They had impeached and slain the Girondists, or moderate Republicans, in the summer of 1793. Six months later, Robespierre, determined to be supreme, had seized and executed his colleague and rival Danton, and all his faction. The "Reign of Terror" made Paris a perfect shambles: 1400 prisoners were guillotined in six weeks, and Robespierre called for yet more blood.

[Sidenote: =Military success of the French.=]

But these horrors within were accompanied by vigour without. Quickened by the axe hanging over their necks, the generals did their best, and finally succeeded in beating back the allies, whose motley armies failed to co-operate with each other, and had no one commander who could direct the whole course of the war to a single end.

[Sidenote: =English reverses in Flanders and at Toulon.=]

England's part in these early years of the war was neither important nor glorious. The Duke of York, the second son of George III., was sent with 20,000 men to aid the Austrians in Flanders. But he was a very incapable commander, got beaten by the French at Hondeschoote near Dunkirk, and was forced back into Holland, and at last chased as far as Hanover (1793-94). Another failure was seen at Toulon in the same year. The royalist inhabitants of that town called in the English to their aid, and surrendered its arsenal and fleet. But the place was indifferently defended by General O'Hara, and fell back into the hands of the Republicans after a short siege, mainly owing to the ability displayed by a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. The only compensating advantage was that, before evacuating the place, the English were able to burn the French fleet and arsenal.

[Sidenote: =Fall of Robespierre.--The Directory.=]

Pitt had said that when all Europe united against a nation of wild beasts and madmen, two campaigns would settle the business. But at the end of 1794 things seemed further from a settlement than ever. For the coalition against France, after faring ill in the field, both in Flanders and on the Rhine, began to show signs of breaking up. That this was possible came from the fact that the "Reign of Terror" and the domination of the implacable Robespierre were at last ended. The time had come when he and his associates, having guillotined all available Royalists and Moderates, were reduced to preying upon their own party, in their insane desire to find imaginary conspirators against the Republic. Robespierre fell at the hands of the rank and file of the Jacobins, who found the rule of the dictator intolerable, when it began to imperil their own necks. Having long shared in his misdoings, they sent him to the guillotine, when he began to terrify them (July, 1794). Tallien, Barrère, Barras, and the other leaders in Robespierre's overthrow were, if less ferocious than their master, full of vices of which he could never be accused, profligate, venal, and corrupt. But, however bad they were, they yet reversed Robespierre's policy. The executions and massacres ceased, and the reign of the guillotine came to an end. The Convention dissolved itself in 1795, and gave place to the government of the "Directory," a committee of five ministers, of whom Barras was chief.

[Sidenote: =Prussia and Spain acknowledge the Republic.=]

This "Directory," though venal and greedy, was a settled government, with which foreign powers could treat, not a gang of bloodthirsty madmen like Robespierre and his crew. When the Jacobin propaganda of murder and massacre was ended, several of the powers of the coalition determined to make peace with France. Prussia and Spain had drawn no profit from the war, and had lost men and money in it. Accordingly they withdrew their armies and acknowledged the Republic. Holland had been overrun by the French in 1794, after the Duke of York's defeat, and forced to become the ally of her conqueror. Hence the strong and well-equipped Dutch fleet is found for the rest of the war on the side of France.

[Sidenote: =Policy of the Directory.--Alliance with Spain.=]

Thus England, Austria, and Sardinia alone remained of the original confederates, and the war began to grow more like the old struggles in the early years of the century. It ceased to be a war of opinion between England as representing constitutional monarchy, and France as representing rampant and militant democracy. We find the Directory taking up the old policy of the Bourbons, claiming the frontier of the Rhine on land, and aiming at breaking the strength of England at sea, in order to seize our colonies and ruin our commerce. For the future, the French government was not set on stirring up the London mob, and deposing George III., but on fomenting war in India, and rebellion in Ireland, so as to break our national strength. The likeness of the struggle to the old times of the "Family Compact" became still more notable when, in 1796, Spain, from reasons of old commercial jealousy, was induced to declare war on England, and join France. We had now to face the united fleets of France, Holland, and Spain, a much more formidable task than had hitherto been our lot.

[Sidenote: =Bonaparte in Italy.--Treaty of Campo Formio.=]

Things seemed almost desperate for England in 1797, when we lost our last continental allies. The Directory had made Napoleon Bonaparte commander of the army of Italy in 1796. In two campaigns that marvellous general overran the Austrian and Sardinian dominions in the valley of the Po, and then pushing on, crossed the Alps and invaded Austria from the south. When he was less than a hundred miles from Vienna, the emperor asked for peace, and obtained it from Bonaparte by the Treaty of Campo Formio, at the price of surrendering Belgium and Lombardy (October, 1797).

[Sidenote: =England threatened with invasion.=]

Thus England was left alone to face France, Holland, and Spain, whose fleets, if united, outnumbered our own. For the next three years the safety of England hung on the power of our admirals to keep the junction from taking place. Six English fleets were always at sea, facing the six great naval ports of the allies, the Texel, Brest, Ferrol, Cadiz, Cartagena, and Toulon. It was clear that if one or more of the blockaded fleets got away and joined another, the English would be outnumbered at the critical point and if once beaten could not prevent an invasion of England. If only the command of the Channel were lost, there was nothing to prevent the victorious armies that had overrun Germany, Holland, and Italy, from coming ashore in Kent or Sussex.

[Sidenote: =Financial panic in England.=]

In return, Pitt called on England for a great effort; the war expenditure was increased to £42,000,000 a year, and every nerve was strained to keep up the fleet. This enormous outpouring of money drained the exchequer to such a degree that public confidence began to fail, and in February, 1797, there almost occurred the national disaster of the bankruptcy of the Bank of England. A long and steady demand for hard cash, by creditors who feared the worst, drained the bank reserve till there was no more gold left. A crash was only staved off by Pitt passing in a single night a bill for suspending payments in gold, and for making bank-notes legal tender to any amount, so that no one could demand as a right from the bank five guineas for his five-guinea note. This state of things lasted till 1819, when cash payments were renewed.

[Sidenote: =The Mutiny at the Nore.=]

But this trouble was nothing, compared to the awful danger three months later, when the Channel and North Sea fleets burst out into mutiny in April, 1797. These mutinies were early examples of the phenomena which we know so well in our own days under the name of "strikes." The sailors had suffered greatly from the long blockading service, which kept them perpetually at sea, off the French and Dutch ports. Their pay was low, their food bad, and their commanders in many cases harsh and cruel. They had, therefore, much excuse for themselves, when they demanded a better diet, higher pay, a fairer distribution of prize-money, and the dismissal of certain tyrannous officers. But the time they chose for their strike was inexcusable, for, while they lay idle at the Nore and Spithead, the French and Dutch might have sailed out, joined, and mastered the Channel. At first it was feared that the navy had been corrupted by French principles, and was about to declare for a republic, and join the enemy. But it was soon found that with a few exceptions the men were loyal, and only wanted redress of grievances. Pitt wisely granted their demands, and they returned to duty, refusing to follow a few wild spirits who wished to begin a political insurrection. Few or none protested when Parker, the sailor-demagogue, was hanged, and the fleet, which had been in mutiny in the summer, went out in the autumn to victory.

[Sidenote: =Battles of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent.=]

Some weeks after their opportunity was passed, the Dutch fleet came out of the Texel, hoping to find the North Sea still unguarded. But Admiral Duncan absolutely annihilated his enemies at the hard-fought battle of Camperdown (October, 1797). Some time earlier another decisive victory had crushed the Spanish fleet. The Cadiz squadron of twenty-seven line-of-battle ships had slipped out to sea. But Admiral Jervis, well seconded by his great lieutenant Nelson, followed them, and beat them off Cape St. Vincent, though he had only fourteen ships with him. This was the most extraordinary victory in the whole war, when the disparity of numbers is taken into consideration.

The victories of St. Vincent and Camperdown were the salvation of England, for the naval crisis was tided over, and the union of the hostile fleets prevented. During the remainder of the war the French often threatened invasion, but were never able to get that command of the Channel which they might have seized without trouble during the mutiny at the Nore. The restored dominion of England at sea was all the more important because of the danger in Ireland, which was now impending.

[Sidenote: =Ireland under the Parliament of 1782.=]

Though Ireland had obtained her Home Rule Parliament in 1782, her troubles were as far from an end as ever. The government of the island was still in the hands of the Protestants of the Church of Ireland alone, and the Romanists and Protestant dissenters were still excluded from many political rights. Thus six-sevenths of the people had no part in governing themselves, and the five-sevenths who were Romanists were even yet subject to many of the repressive laws against their religion, passed in the reign of William III.[52] Though in 1792 they were at last granted freedom of public worship, and allowed to vote for members of Parliament, they could not sit therein. The rule of the Irish Tories was harsh and arbitrary. From the outbreak of the French Revolution onward, they had suspected--and with justice--that the French would endeavour to raise trouble in Ireland. For there alone in the British Isles was to be found a discontented population, held down by a minority which governed entirely in its own interests, and took no heed of the desires of its subjects. There had always been close communication between France and Ireland since the old Jacobite days, and many Irish exiles were living beyond the seas. Hence it was not strange that first the discontented Protestant dissenters and afterwards the Roman Catholics put themselves into communication with the French--the latter more reluctantly than the former, for they were the most bigoted of Papists, and much disliked the atheists and free-thinkers who guided the Revolution. From 1793 to 1798 Ireland was being undermined with secret societies, much like the Fenians of our own days, whose intrigues the Tory government strove in vain to detect and frustrate.

[Sidenote: =The "United Irishmen."=]

The chief of these associations was called the "United Irishmen," because it worked for the combination of the Dissenters of the north and the Romanists of the south in the common end of rebellion. The original leaders in the conspiracy were all hot-headed Radical politicians, who had been fired with the enthusiasm of the French Revolution. Their chiefs were Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a young nobleman of republican proclivities, Wolfe Tone, a violent party pamphleteer, who had hitherto called himself a Whig, and Bond, a Dublin tradesman.

[Sidenote: =Hoche's attempt to invade Ireland.=]

These conspirators did not at first intend to rise without getting aid from France, and till 1796 there was never much chance of their friends over-sea being able to send them help. But when the fleets of France, Spain, and Holland were united, it seemed possible to send an expedition to Ireland. In December, 1796, the Brest squadron took on board 16,000 men, under the young and vigorous General Hoche, and made a dash for the coast of Munster. Slipping out while the English blockading squadron was blown off by a storm, Hoche's fleet got safely to sea. But the ships met with a hurricane, and were so beaten about and dispersed that only half of them reached their rendezvous at Bantry Bay in County Kerry. Hoche, their leader, never appeared, and Grouchy, his lieutenant--the man who in later years was Napoleon's unlucky marshal--shrank from landing with 7000 men in an unknown country where he could detect no signs of the promised insurrection. He lost heart and returned to Brest, without having been met or molested by the English. If he had landed, there is no doubt that the whole south of Ireland would have risen to join him. In the next year there was an even greater peril of invasion while the English fleet was in mutiny. The Dutch squadron, which was beaten at Camperdown, had been given Ireland as its goal, and might have got there unopposed if it had started six weeks earlier.

[Sidenote: =Harsh measures of the Irish Government.=]

Conscious of the danger which it was incurring, the Irish government was stirred up to vigorous measures. All the loyalists of Ireland--the Orangemen, as they were now called[53]--had already been embodied in regiments of yeomanry, and were ready to move at the first alarm of rebellion. Lord Lake, the commander-in-chief in Ireland, was directed to disarm the whole Catholic population, and to search everywhere for concealed arms. The order was carried out with more vigilance than mercy, as the task of finding the weapons was entrusted to the Orangemen of the yeomanry corps, who were determined to crush their rebellious countrymen at any cost. They employed the roughest measures to elicit information, flogging the suspected peasants and torturing them with pitch-caps and pointed stakes, till they revealed the hiding-place of their weapons. But, if cruel, Lake's measures were completely successful. In Ulster, where the search began, no less than 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes were seized, and if the same energy had been displayed in other parts of Ireland, the rebellion of 1798 would have been impossible. But the outcry caused in the Irish and English Parliaments by the rough doings of the yeomanry prevented the full execution of the disarmament, and the United Irishmen of the south retained their concealed weapons, and waited for the signal of revolt.

[Sidenote: =Outbreak of the Rebellion.=]

The crisis came in the spring of 1798, when the government were at last put by an informer on the track of the central committee of the United Irishmen. The leaders and organizers who had so long eluded them were at last caught and lodged in Dublin Castle, save Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who fought with the police who came to arrest him, slew two, and was himself killed in the struggle. The seizure of the chiefs, instead of wrecking the conspiracy, caused it to burst out with sudden violence, for the Irish thought that all was discovered, and that rebellion was the only way to save their necks. An abortive rising in Ulster was easily put down, but in the south-east of Ireland the whole countryside rose in arms, and great bodies of insurgents attacked not only the loyal yeomanry but every Protestant family in the district. The rebels were under no central control, and were headed only by village ruffians and ignorant and bigoted priests. Acts worthy of the Parisian mob were perpetrated by the peasantry of Wexford, where the rebellion was strongest. They shot the Bishop of Ferns, and many other noncombatants, including women and children. On Wexford bridge they put several scores of persons to death by tossing them in the air and catching them on pikes. At Scullabogue they burnt alive a whole barnful of prisoners.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Vinegar Hill.=]

For a fortnight there was sharp fighting in the south, for the rebels showed as much courage as ferocity. But the Orange yeomanry were stirred to frantic wrath by the atrocities of their enemies, and put down the insurrection with little aid from the regular troops. The decisive fight was at the fortified camp of Vinegar Hill, the chief stronghold of the rebels. When it was stormed, and when Father Murphy, the leader of the Wexford men, had fallen, the peasants dispersed. The atrocities which they had committed were promptly avenged, and the triumphant Orangemen hanged or shot hundreds of prisoners, with small attentions to the forms of justice.

[Sidenote: =General Humbert's expedition.=]

Two months after the battle of Vinegar Hill, a small French expedition succeeded in slipping out of Rochefort and landed in Connaught. But the back of the rebellion was broken, and though General Humbert routed some militia at Castlebar, he was soon surrounded and captured by Lord Cornwallis, the Lord-Lieutenant, who beset him with a tenfold superiority of numbers.

[Sidenote: =Pitt's scheme for uniting England and Ireland.=]

The Great Rebellion of 1798 led to the legislative union of England and Ireland. Pitt and his lieutenant, Cornwallis, thought, rightly enough, that the rising had come from the fact that the large majority of the Irish were handed over, without representation or political rights, to be governed by the minority. They devised two schemes for bettering the state of the land--the Romanists were to receive "Emancipation," that is, the same rights as their neighbours of the Church of Ireland--and at the same time an end was to be put to the Dublin Parliament, and the Irish members incorporated in the Parliament of Great Britain. For Emancipation without union would have given the Romanists a majority in the Dublin Parliament and led to a bitter struggle between them and their old masters, which must have ended in a second civil war.

[Sidenote: =The Act of Union passed.=]

The process of persuading or bribing the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy to give up their national Parliament took two years. They bitterly disliked the idea, and were only induced to yield by a liberal shower of titles and pensions, and a goodly compensation in cash distributed among the chief borough owners and peers. It was not till February 18, 1800, twenty months after the rebellion had been crushed, that the Irish Houses voted their own destruction. For the future Ireland was represented by thirty-two peers and one hundred commoners in the Parliament of the "United Kingdom."

After completing the Union, Pitt began to take in hand his scheme of Catholic Emancipation. But he was not destined to carry it through--a fact which was in a short time to have a widely felt influence on English politics.

[Sidenote: =Bonaparte in Egypt.=]

Meanwhile the French war was still raging. Having failed to win command of the seas, and having been equally disappointed in their plans for causing rebellion in Ireland, the French Directory tried another scheme for injuring England. Napoleon Bonaparte, the young general who had conquered Italy in 1796-7, was now the first man in France. He had lately formed a grandiose scheme for erecting a great empire in the Levant. From thence he intended to strike a blow at the English dominions in India, which he regarded as the chief source of our wealth. The venal and incapable members of the Directory feared Bonaparte, and were glad to get him out of France. They at once fell in with his plan, and gave him the Toulon fleet and an army of 30,000 men. Keeping his destination a profound secret, Bonaparte sailed from Toulon in May, 1798. He piratically seized Malta from the Knights of St. John as he passed, to make it a half-way house to his intended goal. Then, pushing on eastwards, he landed at Alexandria, and in a few weeks overran the whole of Egypt, though France had never declared war on the Sultan of Turkey, the ruler of that land. Once seated there, he began to develop a gigantic scheme for the conquest of the whole East, vowing that he would build up an Oriental empire and "attack Europe from the rear." His first care was to send emissaries to Tippoo Sultan, the son of our old Indian enemy Haider Ali, bidding him to attack the English in India with the assurance of French support.

[Sidenote: =Battle of the Nile.=]

Soon after Bonaparte had taken Cairo, he heard that the ships which had brought him to Egypt had been destroyed. Admiral Nelson, the commander of the English Mediterranean fleet, had arrived too late to prevent the French army from disembarking. But, finding their squadron lying in Aboukir Bay, he determined to destroy it. The enemy lay moored in shallow water, close to the land, but Nelson resolved to follow them into their anchorage. Sending half his ships to slip in between the enemy and the shore, he led the other half to attack them on the side of the open sea. This difficult manoeuvre was carried out with perfect success; first the van, then the centre, then the rear of the French fleet was beset on two sides. The squadrons were exactly equal in numbers, each counting thirteen line-of-battle ships. But so great was the superiority of the English seamanship and gunnery, that eleven out of the thirteen French vessels were sunk or taken in a few hours. This brilliant feat of naval tactics had the important result of cutting off Bonaparte's power to return to France. He was penned up in Egypt as in an island, with no way of egress save by the desert route to Syria. Nor could any further reinforcements reach him from France, since the victory of the Nile gave Nelson complete command of the Mediterranean. But Bonaparte did not at first show any dismay; he was firmly established in Egypt, and had resolved to persevere in his attempt to conquer the whole East with his own army.

[Sidenote: =Siege of Acre.=]

In the winter of 1798-99 he crossed the desert and flung himself upon Syria. He turned the Turks out of the southern part of the land, and won a great victory over them at Mount Tabor. But before the walls of the seaport of Acre he was brought to a standstill, not so much by the gallantry of the Turkish garrison, as by the activity of a small English squadron under Sir Sidney Smith, which harassed the besiegers, threw supplies into the town, and landed men to assist the pasha when the French tried to take the place by storm. Bonaparte used to say in later days that but for Sidney Smith he might have died as Emperor of the East. At last he was forced to raise the siege and to retreat on Egypt, where he found startling news awaiting him [May, 1799].

[Sidenote: =Renewed coalition against France.=]

While he was absent in the East, Pitt had found means to start a new coalition against France, in which both Russia and Austria were engaged. The imbecile Directory was quite unable to keep these foes at bay. An Austro-Russian army drove the French completely out of Italy, and at the same time another Austrian army defeated them in Germany and thrust them back to the Rhine, while an English force, under the Duke of York, landed in Holland, to threaten the northern frontiers of the Republic.

[Sidenote: =Return of Bonaparte.=]

Bonaparte had expected something of the kind, knowing the imbecility of the Directory, and he was now ready to pose as the saviour of France, and to make a bid for supreme power, for his ambition ran far beyond that of being merely the chief of French generals. Leaving his army in Egypt, he ran the gauntlet of the English fleet, and safely reached France.

[Sidenote: =Bonaparte "First Consul."=]

The accusations of mismanagement which he brought against the Directory were supported by French public opinion, especially by that of the army. With small difficulty Bonaparte dethroned the Directory, and dispersed by force of arms the "Council of Five Hundred" which represented parliamentary government. He then instituted a new form of constitution, which was in reality, though not in shape, a military despotism. Under the title of "First Consul" he became the supreme ruler of France (November, 1799).

[Sidenote: =Battles of Marengo and Hohenlinden.--Peace of Luneville.=]

The nation acquiesced in this change because Bonaparte had pledged himself to save France from the coalition, if he was entrusted with a dictatorship. He kept his word. Crossing the Alps by the pass of the Great St. Bernard, where no large army had crossed before, he got into the rear of the Austrians in Italy, and then beat them at the battle of Marengo (June, 1800). Cut off from their retreat, the Austrians had to surrender, and all Italy fell back into the hands of Bonaparte. Later in the same year the French won an equally crushing victory in South Germany, at Hohenlinden, where General Moreau annihilated the Austrian army of the north. Russia had already withdrawn from the coalition, for the eccentric Czar Paul had conceived a great admiration for Bonaparte, and did not object to a despot though he hated a republic. The Duke of York had been driven out of Holland long before, and France was triumphant all along the line. Austria, threatened with invasion at once on the west and the south, was forced to ask for peace, and by the peace of Luneville recognized Napoleon as ruler of France (1801).

[Sidenote: =Lord Wellesley and Tippoo Sultan.--Southern India subdued.=]

Thus England was once more left alone, to fight out her old duel with France, or rather with the vigorous and able despot who had made France his own. But the struggle was no longer so dangerous as in 1797-98. In every quarter of the globe the English held their own in the years 1799-1801. In India the intrigues of Bonaparte had caused Sultan Tippoo of Mysore to attack the Madras Presidency. But he was opposed by a man of great ability, Lord Wellesley, the new Governor-General of India, the first statesman who boldly proposed to make the whole peninsula of Hindustan subject or vassal to England. Wellesley dealt promptly and sternly with the Sultan of Mysore. He was beaten in battle, chased back to his capital of Seringapatam, and slain at the gate of his palace as he strove to resist the English stormers. It was in this siege that Wellesley's brother, Arthur Wellesley, the great Duke of Wellington of a later day, first distinguished himself. On Tippoo's death, half Mysore was annexed, the other half given back to the old Hindu rajahs whom Tippoo's father had deposed (May, 1799). The complete subjection of Southern India was shortly afterwards carried out by the annexation of the Carnatic, where the descendants of our old ally Mohammed Ali had fallen into utter effeteness; they had, moreover, been detected in intrigues with Tippoo during the late war.

[Sidenote: =Capture of Malta.--The French expelled from Egypt.=]

The conquest of Mysore was not the only English success that resulted from Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt. In 1800 we took Malta from the garrison which he had left there. In 1801 the more important task of reconquering Egypt itself was undertaken. Sir Ralph Abercrombie landed at Aboukir with 20,000 men. He twice defeated the French in front of Alexandria, but fell just as he had won the second battle. He had, however, done his work so thoroughly that the hostile army was compelled to capitulate, and to evacuate Egypt, which England then restored to the Turks (March-August, 1801).

[Sidenote: =The "Armed Neutrality."--Battle of Copenhagen.=]

Bonaparte had still one card to play. He used the personal influence which he had acquired over the eccentric autocrat of Russia, to endeavour to stir up trouble for England in the north. At his prompting, Czar Paul induced his smaller neighbours Denmark and Sweden to form the "Armed Neutrality," with the object of excluding English trade from the Baltic. England at once sent a great fleet to the north. It moored before Copenhagen, the Danish capital, which commands the main entrance to the Baltic, and summoned the Danes to abandon the Armed Neutrality, and permit the English to pass. The Prince Regent of Denmark refused, and the battle of Copenhagen followed. The slow and pedantic admiral, Sir Hyde Parker, was proceeding to dilatory tactics, but his hand was forced by his second in command, Nelson, the victor of the Nile. Disregarding his superior's orders to hold back, Nelson forced his way up the Strait to Copenhagen, sunk or took nearly the whole Danish fleet, and silenced the shore-batteries. When he threatened to bombard the city, the Prince Regent asked for an armistice, and abandoned the Armed Neutrality (April, 1801).

[Sidenote: =Death of the Czar Paul.=]

Nelson now entered the Baltic, and would have attacked Russia, but the death of Czar Paul saved him the trouble. The tyrant had so maddened his nobles by his caprices and cruelty, that he was slain by conspirators in his own bed-chamber. His son, Alexander I., promptly came to terms with England, and abandoned his French alliance.

[Sidenote: =Pitt and Catholic Emancipation.=]

Just before the battle of Copenhagen had been fought, England lost the minister who had guided her in peace and war for the last seventeen years--"the pilot who weathered the storm," as a popular song of the day called him. Pitt resigned his place on a point of honour. In the spring of 1801 there met the first United Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, and before this new assembly the premier intended to lay his promised bill for the relief of Roman Catholics from their political disabilities. This measure was destined to cause the great statesman's fall. The bigoted and stubborn old king whom he had served so faithfully, had a stronger prejudice against justice for Catholics than against any other reform that could be mooted. He imagined that any measure giving them Emancipation would be against the terms of his coronation oath, and openly said that he would never make himself a perjurer by giving his royal assent to Pitt's bill. The prime minister had an exaggerated view of the duty of loyalty, and a great personal regard for his old master. On the other hand, he had solemnly pledged himself to the Irish Romanists to back their cause as long as he was in power. Under the circumstances he thought himself bound to resign his office, and retired in March, 1801.

[Sidenote: =Addington succeeds Pitt.--Madness of the king.=]

George replaced his old servant by a man infinitely beneath him, Henry Addington, a commonplace Tory, one of Pitt's least able lieutenants. This vapid nonentity had the single merit of want of originality--he went on with Pitt's policy because he could devise no other. But his weakness and subservience to the crown might have induced George III. to revert to some of his former unconstitutional habits, if the old king had not gone mad soon after. He recovered his senses after some months, but was never the same man again, and was liable to recurring fits of insanity, which at last became permanent.

It was the feeble Addington who was fated to bring to an end the first epoch of the great war with France, though he had not been concerned in the labour of bearing its brunt. Bonaparte had failed in all his schemes against England, alike in Egypt, India, and the Baltic. The French navy was crushed; most of the French colonies were in English hands. He was accordingly glad to make peace, partly in order to take breath and build up a new naval power before assaulting England again, partly in order to find leisure to carry out his plans for making himself the permanent ruler of France; for he was set on becoming something more than First Consul, and needed time to perfect his plan.

[Sidenote: =The Peace of Amiens.=]

England was not less desirous of peace. The long stress of the war had wearied the nation, and the load of debt which had been piled up since 1793 appalled the ministers. When Bonaparte offered to treat, his proposals were eagerly accepted. Negotiations were begun in October, 1801, and peace was signed at Amiens on March 25, 1802, with France, Spain, and Holland. It was not unprofitable. Bonaparte undertook to withdraw the French armies from Naples, Rome, and Portugal, and to give up any claims to Egypt. He made his allies, the Dutch and Spaniards, surrender to us the rich islands of Ceylon and Trinidad. Malta, now in English hands, was to be restored to the Knights of St. John. On the other hand, England recognized Bonaparte as First Consul, and restored to him all the French colonies which we had conquered, from Martinique in the west to Pondicherry in the east. Considering the imminent danger which we had passed through in the last nine years, the nation was glad to obtain peace on these respectable if not brilliant terms. It was hoped that our struggle with France was at last ended.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] See p. 452.

[53] From their having enrolled themselves in clubs named after their hero, William of Orange.

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XXXVIII. ENGLAND AND BONAPARTE

1802-1815.

When the treaty of Amiens had been signed, the English people firmly believed that the great war was ended, that the period of stress and anxiety, of heavy taxation and huge armaments, of threatened invasions and domestic strife, was finally closed. Bonaparte, who needed an interval of peace for the working out of his domestic policy, had affected a frank, liberal, and conciliatory spirit in dealing with our diplomatists, and had produced on them the impression that a reasonable as well as strong man was now at the helm at Paris. The France with which we had come to terms was no longer the wild and militant republic of the old Jacobin days, but a well-ordered and strongly centralized monarchy, though its ruler did not yet bear the title of king. If Bonaparte had really intended to accept the situation, and dwell in peace beside us as a loyal neighbour, the treaty of Amiens would have needed no defence. But Addington and his fellows had not gauged the First Consul's true character or the peculiarities of his position. He had risen to power by war; his power depended on his military prestige, and a permanent peace would have ruined his control over his army, which he had gorged with plunder and glory, and turned into a greedy and arrogant military caste. But it was hard to expect English statesmen to see through the character and designs of a man whom the French themselves had not yet learnt to know. And when an honourable peace was proffered, it would have been wrong to refuse it: the internal condition of England called for rest and retrenchment.

[Sidenote: =Schemes of Bonaparte.=]

But the First Consul's real objects in concluding the peace of Amiens were purely personal and selfish. He wished to recover the lost French colonies, and to rebuild the ruined French navy. He needed peace to reorganize the control of France over her vassal states in Holland, Italy, and Switzerland, which she had bound to her chariot-wheels during the late wars. Most of all he required a space of leisure to prepare for that assumption of monarchical power which he had been plotting ever since his return from Egypt.

[Sidenote: =His conduct towards England.=]

While England was thinking only of peace, and while thousands of English were embarking on the continental travel which had been denied them for nine years, Bonaparte was already beginning to show the cloven hoof. In the autumn of 1802 he annexed to France the continental half of the dominions of our old ally the King of Sardinia, and the Duchy of Parma. He sent 30,000 men into Switzerland to occupy the chief passes of the Alps. He ordered the vassal republics in Holland and North Italy to place prohibitive duties on English merchandise. These actions, though irritating, were not actual breaches of the peace, but things grew more serious when he made the impudent request that we should expel from our shores the exiled princes of the old royal house of France, and that our government should suppress certain newspapers which criticized his rule in France too sharply. These demands were of course refused; the First Consul then began to harp on the question of the evacuation of Malta. That island was still garrisoned by English troops, as its old masters, the Knights of St. John, were not yet in a position to resume their dominion there. When England refused to evacuate Malta at once, and ventured to remonstrate about the annexation of Piedmont and Parma, Bonaparte assumed a most offensive attitude. He summoned Lord Whitworth, our ambassador at Paris, into his presence, and in the midst of a large assembly at the Tuileries delivered an angry harangue to him, declaring that the English cabinet had no respect for honour or treaties, and was wishing to drive him to a new war. He did not wish to fight, he said, but if he once drew the sword, it should never be sheathed till England was crushed.

[Sidenote: =War declared.--Seizure of English subjects in France.=]

This insulting message roused even the feeble Addington to anger. With extreme reluctance and dismay, the cabinet began to contemplate the possibility of a renewed war with France. A royal message was laid before Parliament asking for increased votes for the army and navy, which had just been cut down on account of the peace. Bonaparte, on the other hand, began to move masses of troops towards the shores of the English Channel, and to order the building of many ships of war. Addington attempted further negotiations for staving off a collision, but met no response from the First Consul, who refused to listen to any offers till we should have evacuated Malta, and recognized the legality of his annexations in Italy and Switzerland. Nothing could be done to bring him to reason, and on May 12, 1803, our ambassador left Paris, and war was declared, only thirteen months after the signing of the peace of Amiens. Bonaparte had, perhaps, been intent on bullying the English cabinet, and had fancied that they would yield to his hectoring. He showed intense irritation when war was declared, and committed a flagrant breach of international law by seizing all the English tourists and travellers who were passing through France on business or pleasure, and imprisoning them as if they were prisoners of war. They were about 10,000 in number, and Bonaparte had the cruelty to keep them confined during the whole of the war. Another sign of his malice was that he kept accusing the English government of instigating assassins to murder him--there was, indeed, hardly a crime which he did not lay to the account of his enemies.

The second act of the great drama of the French war had now begun: the first had lasted nine years, this was to endure for eleven--from May, 1803, to March, 1814. The whole war is indeed one, if we regard it as the last struggle for commercial and maritime supremacy between England and her old rival, and compare it with the Seven Years' War and the war of American Independence.

[Sidenote: =Nature of the contest between England and France.=]

But, on the other hand, the aspect of the strife was greatly changed by the fact that England had no longer the principles of the Revolution to fight, but was engaged in a struggle against an ambitious despot, a world-conqueror who had no parallel save Cæsar or Alexander the Great. The France of Bonaparte only resembled the France of Robespierre in the unscrupulous vigour of her assaults on her enemies. She was no longer professing to fight for a principle--the deliverance of oppressed peoples from the yoke of monarchy and the proclamation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all men. Though Bonaparte still made a parade of being a beneficent liberator, yet France was now fighting to make herself the tyrant-state of Europe, to win power and plunder, not to carry out the principles of the Revolution. In the long struggles that followed the declaration of war in 1803, Bonaparte at one time and another struck down every government in Europe that dared to stand against him, but England he could never subdue. From the moment when Sidney Smith turned him back from the walls of Acre, down to the moment when Wellington drove him a broken and defeated adventurer from the hillside of Waterloo, it was always England that stood between him and complete success. Hence it came that he honoured her with a venomous hatred such as he never bestowed on any other foe. It may be said with much truth that his whole career after 1803 was a crusade against England, and that all his actions were directed to secure her ruin, whether that ruin was to be brought about in the open strife of contending fleets, or in the slow but deadly working of laws aimed against English commerce and industries. When Bonaparte was meeting and beating the Austrian, the Prussian, or the Russian, he felt that he was fighting the hired soldiers of England; for every confederacy against him was cemented with English gold. The final object of all his continental wars was to crush us; his victories were all means to that end.

In a contest between a single despot and a free state, the former has in many ways the advantage. He has no Parliament to criticize his actions, no public opinion before which he is bound to justify his every deed. He can work out his schemes in his own brain, and give them the unity that a single master-mind inspires. He can secure the implicit obedience of his lieutenants, because he alone can make or mar their career. On the other hand, the policy dictated by an English cabinet of a dozen men was prone to lack consistency and singleness of aim, and their plans and projects were divulged to Parliament, criticized by opponents, and trumpeted out to all Europe by the Press, before they were well set in hand. It was no light responsibility that the Addington ministry took upon themselves when they declared war on the unscrupulous First Consul.

The long struggle which followed may be divided into four epochs. In the first--1803-1805--Bonaparte strove to settle the national duel by an actual invasion of England, and lamentably failed. In the second--1805-1808--England fought by subsidizing foreign allies, while Bonaparte struck at his enemy by the "Continental System," a plan for starving English trade. In the third period--1808-1814--a new aspect was given to the struggle by the interference of England on land. Instead of relying on subsidies, we poured troops into Spain, and met the French face to face. At the same time the intolerable oppression which Bonaparte exercised over all the states of the continent, led to national risings against him, which finally, in 1814, wrought his downfall. The fourth period comprises only the "Hundred Days" of March-June, 1815, in which the tyrant tried to seize once more his old place and power, and suffered his final defeat at Waterloo.

[Sidenote: =Bonaparte resolves to invade England.=]

In the first opening months of the war, Bonaparte set his mind on bringing the struggle to a rapid conclusion, by crossing the Channel and invading England. He despatched 120,000 veteran troops to the coast between Dunkirk and St. Valery, and fixed his own head-quarters at Boulogne, where the cliffs of Folkestone and Dover were actually in sight. "The Channel is but a ditch," he said, "and any one can cross it who has but the courage to try." A fog might enable his whole army to slip across unseen, or a fortunate gale might drive away the English fleet for the short twenty-four hours that he required. Hundreds, and afterwards thousands, of flat-bottomed boats were collected at Boulogne and the neighbouring ports, and fitted up, some as armed gunboats, some as transports. The troops were trained to embark with extraordinary speed, so that they might not lose a minute when the signal for sailing should be given. But from June, 1803, to September, 1805, they waited--and yet the signal was never given.

[Sidenote: =Defensive measures.--The Volunteer Movement.--Recall of Pitt.=]

England faced the trial with wonderful courage. The nation was so wrathful at the wanton renewal of the war by Bonaparte, and at his arrogant threat of invasion, that it made efforts such as had never been dreamed of before. While the Addington ministry were doubting how best to meet the projected attack, the nation itself solved the problem by the great Volunteer Movement. Almost every able-bodied man in England and Scotland offered himself for service. By the autumn of 1803 there were 347,000 volunteers under arms, besides 120,000 regular troops and 78,000 militia. This was a marvellous effort for a kingdom which then only counted 15,000,000 souls.[54] The volunteers, it is true, were imperfectly trained, often insufficiently officered, and unprovided with a proper proportion of cavalry and artillery. But when we consider their numbers and enthusiasm, it is only fair to conclude that even if Bonaparte had thrown across his 120,000 or 150,000 men into Kent or Sussex, he would have been able to do little against such a vast superiority of numbers. Not contented with enrolling men for land service, the government displayed great energy in strengthening our first line of defence, the fleet. The dockyards were worked with such zeal and speed that 166 new vessels were added to the navy before the year was over. Blockading squadrons were hastily sent out to face all the French and Dutch naval ports, as they had done in the old war. Not the least of the signs of national enthusiasm was that, in obedience to the public voice, Pitt--whose name was now bound up with a vigorous war-policy--was recalled to the helm of state with the king's consent, while the weak Addington retired into the background.

[Sidenote: =Attempted Irish rebellion.--English success in India.=]

While Bonaparte was drilling his army for rapid embarkation, and multiplying his gunboats, he utilized the time to stir up trouble for England in all parts of the world. He gave his approval to a wild scheme for an Irish rebellion, headed by the rash young revolutionary, Robert Emmet, whose only achievement was to cause a riot in Dublin, murder Lord Kilwarden, the Chief Justice of Ireland, and get himself promptly hung. A more dangerous blow was aimed at our empire in India. French military adventurers had been many and prosperous in the native courts of that country ever since the days of Dupleix, and the First Consul hoped by their aid to stir up the Nizam and the Mahratta powers against England. But he had to deal with the able and vigorous Lord Wellesley, the greatest Governor-General that India has known since Warren Hastings. Wellesley forced the Nizam to dismiss his French officers, and allied himself with the Peishwah, the nominal head of the Mahratta confederacy, against the other chiefs of that nation. In 1803 Lord Lake conquered Delhi and the Doab from the French mercenaries of Scindiah, the most powerful of these rulers, while Arthur Wellesley, the Governor-General's brother, was fighting further to the south against Scindiah himself and the Rajah of Berar. In the brilliant battles of Assaye and Argaum this young general beat the Mahratta hosts, though they were nine to one against him. The two hostile princes were forced to make peace, and cede to the East India Company their outlying dominions, Scindiah's fortresses in the north, which became the nucleus of our "North-Western Provinces," and the Rajah of Berar's province of Orissa, which was added to Bengal (1804).

[Sidenote: =Bonaparte assumes the title of Emperor.=]

In the winter of 1803-4, Bonaparte began to doubt the wisdom of attacking England with his flotilla of gunboats and transports only, and resolved to wait till he could concentrate in the Straits a fleet of line-of-battle ships, capable of beating off the English Channel squadron. While this plan was being worked out, he brought the internal affairs of France to a crisis. In the spring of 1804, an abortive royalist conspiracy against him was detected, and he took advantage of it to assume a higher and firmer position in the state than that of First Consul. Accordingly, his servile senate requested him to accept the title of Emperor. In May, 1804, he forced the Pope, who stood in mortal dread of annexation, to come up to Paris and preside at his coronation, a great and costly pageant, which marked the end of even the shadow of liberty in France. Bonaparte assumed the title of Napoleon I., thus making his own strange Christian name notable for the first time since history begins.

[Sidenote: =He determines to employ the Spanish fleet.=]

When his coronation festivities were over, Napoleon set his mind seriously to the task of concentrating a great fleet in the Channel, to cover the crossing of his army. In the autumn of 1804, the days of the old naval leagues against England in 1782 and 1797 were renewed, when the Emperor forced Spain to join him, demanding either a money contribution or an auxiliary fleet. The feeble Charles IV. chose to give the money, but the vessels which bore the treasure were seized by an English squadron, and Pitt promptly declared war on Spain. By utilizing the large Spanish fleet, Napoleon thought that he could gather together an armament strong enough to keep the Channel open for the crossing of the legions which lay at Boulogne. But, meanwhile, English blockading vessels were already watching Cartagena, Cadiz, and Ferrol, as well as Toulon and Brest, and a hard task lay before the Emperor, when he determined to concentrate the scattered naval forces of France and Spain.

While Napoleon was busy with this scheme, Pitt had been returning to his old policy of finding continental allies for England, and stirring them up against France. Austria and Russia had been greatly displeased by the same reckless annexations in 1803 which had driven England into war; but their grudges might not have grown into an anti-French coalition, if it had not been for the energy of Pitt's diplomacy and the large subsidies which he offered.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon's naval scheme.=]

In the spring of 1805, things came to a head. On the one hand, the French Emperor's scheme for the invasion of England was ready; on the other, Pitt's continental allies were secretly arming. Napoleon's plan was complicated but ingenious; its strength lay in the fact that it was not easy for the English to judge what exactly would be his method, or to provide against it. He ordered the French Mediterranean fleet at Toulon to take advantage of the first rough weather, and to escape from its harbour, whenever the English blockading squadron, now headed by the ever-active and vigilant Nelson, should be blown out to sea. Then his chief admiral, Villeneuve, was to slip past Gibraltar, and to join the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, driving off the English ships which were watching that port. The united Franco-Spanish armament was then to sail right across the Atlantic, to the West Indies, as if to attack our colonies there. But the real object of this demonstration was to entice Nelson, who was certain to chase them when he found their route, far away from Europe. For when they had reached the West Indies, the allied fleet were to turn sharply back again, and steer across the Atlantic for Brest, where they would find another large French fleet, blockaded by Admiral Cornwallis and the English Channel squadron. Villeneuve, as the Emperor calculated, would be able to deliver the Brest fleet some weeks before Nelson could appear in Europe. He would then have seventy ships to oppose the thirty-five with which England guarded the Channel, and with such overwhelming superiority would be able to clear the Dover Straits, and convoy across the army which had been waiting so long at Boulogne.

[Sidenote: =Villeneuve escapes to the West Indies.=]

In the first part of this great naval campaign, the Emperor's elaborate scheme worked well. Villeneuve slipped out of Toulon while Nelson's fleet was blown away by rough weather. He hurried away to Cadiz, liberated the Spaniards there, and was off to the West Indies before Nelson could find out what had become of him. Very tardily the great English admiral discovered his route, and hurried across the Atlantic in pursuit. In due pursuance of the scheme of Napoleon, Villeneuve turned back and steered for Brest, while his pursuer was seeking him off Barbados.

[Sidenote: =Battle off Cape Finisterre.=]

But here the good fortune of the French ended, and a combination of chance and skill saved England. So slow was the Franco-Spanish fleet, and so bad its seamanship, that Nelson gained many days upon them. He luckily chanced upon a ship that had seen them turn back, hastily shifted his own course to follow, and sent to England to warn the Lords of the Admiralty that Villeneuve might be expected off Brest. With most commendable haste, a squadron under Admiral Calder was organized, to encounter Villeneuve before he could reach Europe. It sailed out just in time to meet him as he got into the Bay of Biscay, and fought him off Cape Finisterre. Villeneuve was not a man of nerve, and though Calder's squadron was far inferior to his own, he turned aside after an indecisive battle. So Napoleon heard in August, 1805, to his disgust and wild anger, that the fleet which was to enable him to cross the Channel, had not appeared off Brest, but had dropped into Ferrol to refit after the fight with Calder.

[Sidenote: =Villeneuve retires to Cadiz.--Return of Nelson.=]

Then to make things yet worse, Villeneuve sailed from Ferrol not for Brest, but for Cadiz, to strengthen himself yet further, with Spanish reinforcements. This delay enabled the eager Nelson to arrive in European waters, and at the critical moment he and Calder, with twenty-eight ships, lay outside Cadiz, while the thirty-five Franco-Spanish vessels were within its harbour. The Emperor's plan was therefore wrecked, and no chance remained of the longed-for fleet sailing up the Channel to meet the 150,000 men who sat idly waiting for it at Boulogne.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon abandons the plan of invasion.=]

Seeing his scheme shattered, while at the same time rumours of the Austro-Russian coalition had reached him, Napoleon dropped his long-cherished invasion scheme. He suddenly turned his back on the sea, and, declaring war on his continental enemies before they were ready for him, came rushing across France toward Germany with incredible speed. But before he started he sent his unfortunate admiral at Cadiz a bitter letter, in which he taunted him with cowardice for having turned away from Brest, and ruined the plan for invading England. Stung to the heart by the imputation of want of courage, Villeneuve came out of Cadiz to fight Nelson, in order to show that he was not afraid, not in order to secure any useful end, for the time for that was over.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Trafalgar.=]

Off Cape Trafalgar twenty-seven English ships met the thirty-three allied vessels, and at the great battle of that name completely destroyed Villeneuve's fleet. Nelson's splendid naval tactics easily compensated for the disparity of numbers. Seeing the enemy lying before him in a long line, he formed his own ships into two columns and swooped down on the centre of the Franco-Spanish Armada. He cut the enemy in two, and destroyed their midmost ships ere the wings could come up. Of the thirty-three hostile vessels nineteen were taken and one burnt, but in the moment of success, the great admiral fell; he had led the attacking column in his own ship, the Victory, and, pushing into the thickest of the enemy, was laid low by a musket-ball ere the fight was half over. But he lived long enough to hear that the day was won, and died contented (October 21, 1805). In her grief for Nelson, England half forgot her joy at the most decisive naval triumph that we had ever gained, for Napoleon was driven to own himself impotent at sea, and the spirits of the French seamen were so broken that they never dared again to put out to sea, save in small numbers for secret and hurried cruises. For the future the Emperor determined to strike at English commerce by decrees and embargos, not to attack England herself by armed force.

[Sidenote: =Ulm and Austerlitz.--End of the "Holy Roman Empire."=]

But, for the moment, to put down Austria and Russia was his task. Already, before Trafalgar had been fought, he had crushed the vanguard of the Austrians at Ulm, where the imbecile General Mack laid down his arms with nearly 40,000 men, while the Russians were still miles away, toiling up from Poland. Vienna fell into his hands before the allies were able to join their forces. A month later they met the French on the snow-covered hillside of Austerlitz, a village some eighty miles north-east of the Austrian capital. Here Napoleon beat them with awful slaughter. Left with only the wreck of an army, the Emperor Francis II. asked for peace, and got it on humiliating terms. He had to cede his Italian dominions, as well as the Tyrol, the very cradle of the Hapsburg dynasty. Moreover, he gave up his old title of head of the "Holy Roman Empire"--the imperial style which had lasted since the days of Charlemagne, and had remained in the Austrian line for 350 years--and was constrained to take the new and humbler name of Emperor of Austria.

[Sidenote: =Death of Pitt.--The Ministry of "All the Talents."=]

The news of this disaster to the coalition which had cost him so much trouble to knit together, and from which he had expected so much, broke Pitt's heart. He had been in ill-health ever since he took office in 1804, the constant stress of responsibility, while the invasion was impending, having shattered his nerves. He died on January 23, 1806, aged no more than forty-six. He had been prime minister for nearly half this short span of life, and had certainly done more for England in his tenure of office than any man who has ever occupied that position. The death of Pitt, and the public dismay at the break up of the coalition of 1805, led to a demand for a strong and united ministry that should combine all parties for the national defence. There was no man among the Tories great enough to take up Pitt's mantle, and Addington, the late prime minister, Lord Grenville and several other leaders of that party were ready to admit the long-exiled Whigs to a share in the administration. The king was discontented at having to receive his old foe, Charles James Fox, as a minister, but bowed to the force of public opinion. Thus came into being the short Fox-Grenville cabinet, which contemporary wits called the ministry of "All the Talents," on account of its broad and comprehensive character, for it included all shades of opinion, from Addington at the one end to Fox at the other.

[Sidenote: =Failure of negotiations with Napoleon.--Death of Fox.=]

Fox had always opposed war with France, and had maintained that if the late ministry had met Napoleon in an open and liberal spirit they might have secured an honourable peace. But when he himself was given the opportunity of testing the Corsican's real temper, he met with a bitter disappointment. Napoleon was too angry with England to think of any accommodation. He offered Fox terms which were absolutely insulting, considering that England had held her own and successfully kept off invasion. Fox died soon after, worn out by the hard work of office, to which he had been a stranger for twenty years (September, 1806).

[Sidenote: =End of the Grenville Ministry.--Abolition of the Slave Trade.=]

After his decease and the failure of the peace negotiations, the Grenville Ministry had no great reason for existence; it was forced to continue the war-policy of Pitt, but met with no success in several small expeditions that it sent out to vex the French and Spaniards. In March, 1807, the ministers resigned, after a quarrel with the king on the same point which had wrecked Pitt in 1802--the question of Catholic Emancipation. The only good work which this short administration had done in its thirteen months of office was to abolish the slave-trade. On the resignation of the Whigs the Tories came back into power. Their nominal chief was now William Bentinck, Duke of Portland, an aged man, one of the Whigs who had been made Tories by the French Revolution. But the shrewd and ambitious Spencer Perceval, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the real leader of the Tories. He was a narrow-minded man of moderate ability, whose only merit was that he clung to the policy of Pitt, and continued to hammer away at the French in spite of all checks and failures.

[Sidenote: =The Confederation of the Rhine.=]

After Austerlitz, Napoleon assumed the position of tyrant of all Central Europe. He created his younger brother Lewis king of Holland, and drove out the Spanish Bourbons from Naples, in order to make his eldest brother Joseph king of the Two Sicilies. He formed the smaller German states into the "Confederation of the Rhine," of which he declared himself protector.

[Sidenote: =Prussia declares war on France.=]

These high-handed doings were certain to provoke further fighting, for Russia, though defeated at Austerlitz, did not consider herself beaten, and the strong military state of Prussia was bound to resent the ascendency of the French in Germany. Frederic William III., the rather irresolute monarch who swayed that country, had been half inclined to help Austria in 1805. But he delayed till the campaign of Austerlitz was over, and then found that he must fight Napoleon alone. Relying on the strength of his army and the old traditions of Frederic the Great, he declared war on France in 1806, hastily patching up treaties of alliance with Russia and England.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Jena.=]

Of all the disasters which befell the powers of the continent at Napoleon's hands, none was so sudden and crushing as that which Prussia suffered in 1806. Only a few weeks after the declaration of war, the Prussian monarchy was ruined. The Emperor's swiftness and power of concentration were never shown more brilliantly. After defeating the Prussians at Jena (October, 1806), he pursued them so furiously that he captured their whole army--more than 100,000 men--at Magdeburg, Lubeck, and Prenzlow. Nearly all the Prussian fortresses surrendered, and Frederic William escaped beyond the Vistula, with only 12,000 men, to join his Russian allies. After entering Berlin, Napoleon pushed on into Poland to meet the advancing forces of Czar Alexander. In the bitter cold of a Polish February, he fought the battle of Eylau with the Russians, and, for the first time in his life, failed to gain a decisive victory over these stubborn foes. But, in the following May, he finally settled the campaign by winning the bloody fight of Friedland, after which the Czar asked for peace.

[Sidenote: =The Treaty of Tilsit.--Dismemberment of Prussia.=]

At the treaty of Tilsit Napoleon dictated his terms to Russia and Prussia. Alexander was left comparatively unmolested; he was not stripped of territory, but only compelled to promise aid to Napoleon's schemes against England. But Prussia was absolutely crushed; half her territory was taken from her--the eastern districts to form a new Polish state called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the western to make, along with Hanover and Hesse, a new "kingdom of Westphalia" for Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome. In addition, all the Prussian fortresses received French garrisons, and a fine of £26,000,000 was imposed on the mutilated kingdom (June, 1807).

[Sidenote: =The Berlin Decrees.=]

Since Trafalgar the Emperor had been pondering over new schemes for ruining England. In a leisure moment during the Prussian campaign he devised the celebrated "Berlin Decrees." The English, as he thought, mainly lived upon the revenues that they earned by being the middlemen between Europe and the distant lands of Asia and America. Their carrying trade was the staple of their prosperity, and if he could destroy it England must go bankrupt. Accordingly, the Berlin Decrees declared a blockade against goods made or brought over by the English, in every country that France could influence. Now the idea of a naval blockade is familiar enough, but Napoleon's scheme contemplated its exact converse. He had resolved to station soldiers and custom-house officers round every mile of coast in Europe, to prevent English vessels from approaching the shore, and to see that not a pound's worth of English manufactures or colonial produce should be imported. The decrees declared the British Isles under blockade as regards the rest of Europe; no subject of France or of any vassal power was to trade with them. All Napoleon's unfortunate subject-allies, Prussia, Holland, Spain, and the powers of Italy were forced to assent to this strange edict, and the Czar of Russia was cajoled into accepting it. Napoleon thought that he had thereby struck a deadly blow at England, for every European state, save Sweden, Turkey, and Portugal, and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, was at his beck and call. But he had not calculated on the greatness of the sacrifice which he was asking his allies to make. They were to give up, in order to please him, many of the comforts, even the necessities of life--West Indian sugar and coffee, the tea, pepper, and spices of the East, the cloth and linen of England, the muslin of Hindustan.

[Sidenote: =The "Orders in Council" of 1807.=]

The English government boldly accepted the Emperor's challenge, and replied that if there was to be no English trade with the continent, there should not be any trade at all. By the "Orders in Council" of November, 1807, the whole coast-line of France and her allies was declared in a state of blockade, and the war-vessels of England were directed to seize as prizes all ships entering them, whether neutral or not, unless before sailing for the continent such vessels should have touched at an English port. Napoleon replied by the Milan Decrees (Dec. 17, 1807), which declared that any vessel belonging to a neutral power which had touched at any British port should be considered a lawful prize, and ordered all British merchandise found on the continent to be confiscated and burnt. Thus, between the Berlin Decrees and the Orders in Council, all the ports of Europe were formally closed. The one great neutral power, the United States of America, felt this blow bitterly, and bore a deep grudge against both parties in the strife.

[Sidenote: =Results of the "Continental System."=]

From the very first the result of the "Continental System," as the Emperor's plan was named, was very different from what he had expected. The English manufactures and colonial wares, which he intended to exclude, contrived to creep, nevertheless, within the bounds of his empire. All along the coasts of Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, there sprang up an extraordinary development of smuggling. From Heligoland, the Channel Isles, Gibraltar, and Sicily, hundreds of vessels sailed by night to land their cargoes in secret. But if the merchandize arrived, it came by such hazardous and circuitous ways that its price was vastly increased. Napoleon did not succeed in ruining the commerce of England, but he succeeded in making Germans and Russians and Italians pay monstrous prices for their coffee or their sugar, and got their well-earned curses for it.

[Sidenote: =The French invade Portugal.=]

Napoleon's restless energy in carrying out his scheme for the isolation and financial ruin of England, led him into new troubles in another part of Europe, less than three months after he had ended his Polish campaign by the peace of Tilsit. The little kingdom of Portugal was, with Turkey, almost the last state in Europe which had not accepted the Continental System. Loth to lose their valuable commerce with England, the Portuguese tried evasion, and returned shifty answers when Napoleon bade their prince-regent accept the Berlin Decrees. Without waiting for further provocation the tyrant, who had now grown impatient of the slightest remonstrance against his fiat, declared that "the house of Braganza had ceased to reign," and sent an army under General Junot across Spain to occupy Lisbon. The prince-regent was forced to fly by sea, and the French overran the whole of his kingdom.

[Sidenote: =Joseph Bonaparte proclaimed King of Spain.=]

But from the first moment of his interference in the Peninsula, it is probable that Napoleon had wider schemes than the mere conquest of Portugal. The crown of Spain was now worn by the imbecile and worthless old king Charles IV., who lived in constant strife with his cowardly and intriguing son and heir, the Infant Ferdinand. There was nothing to choose between them in the way of incompetence and effeteness. In 1807 this wretched pair were at the height of their domestic quarrels, and each was trying to curry favour with Napoleon. They were always carrying complaints about each other to him, and asking for his support. Then Napoleon, as if he were the recognized arbiter of kings, summoned the quarrelsome father and son to meet him at Bayonne on the French frontier, that he might settle their disputes. They came, each full of charges against his relative; but Napoleon, when he had them both safely under his hand, suddenly adopted a new tone, pronounced them both unfit to rule a great nation, and then declared that his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte (whom he had made ruler of Naples two years before), would be the best king for Spain. Accordingly, he forced the two Bourbons, half by threats, half by cajolery, to abdicate, and sent them into the interior of France. A few Spanish nobles who had accompanied them to Bayonne were induced to accept Joseph, and then Napoleon pretended that his brother was legally constituted King of Spain. There were many French troops in the Peninsula, who had been sent there under the pretence that they were to help Junot in conquering Portugal. At the concerted signal these regiments seized the neighbouring Spanish fortresses, and proclaimed Joseph king. After a rising of the populace of Madrid had been put down with much bloodshed by the French troops in the capital, it seemed as if Napoleon's piracy and kidnapping were to be crowned with success (June 15, 1808).

[Sidenote: =Resistance of the Spaniards.=]

This, however, was in reality far from being the case. As a matter of fact he had now succeeded in involving himself in the most protracted and exhausting war in which he was ever engaged. He had roused by his treachery the most revengeful and fanatical people in Europe, and had now to conquer a barren and arid country, "where large armies starve and small armies get beaten." Spain sprang to arms on the news of the crime of Bayonne. The great towns everywhere proclaimed Ferdinand VII. king, and though the central government was destroyed, "juntas" or revolutionary committees were formed in every province and began to raise troops to resist King Joseph.

[Sidenote: =England determines to aid the Spaniards.=]

The news of the Spanish insurrection was received with joy in England, more especially because it was the first really national rising against the Emperor that had yet been seen. Even the Whigs were enthusiastic for aiding Spain. "Hitherto," said Sheridan, "Bonaparte has contended with princes without dignity, numbers without ardour, and peoples without patriotism; he has yet to learn what it is to combat a nation animated by one spirit against him." Misled by their sympathy into over-estimating the strength of Spain and the valour of her raw provincial levies, the English government, influenced mainly by Canning, a disciple of Pitt, who was now the most prominent among the younger Tory statesmen, determined to strike a bold blow by land against Napoleon. For the last three years the very considerable body of regular troops in England, set free from the task of watching the Boulogne army, had been frittered away on small expeditions against outlying parts of the French and Spanish dominions, and had suffered nothing but checks. Now the cabinet determined to send a really formidable army to the Peninsula. It was resolved to throw 20,000 men ashore in Portugal to assail Junot, who was cut off from the rest of the French armies by the revolt in Spain. To the Spaniards were sent subsidies of arms and money, but no troops.

[Sidenote: =The Capitulation at Baylen.=]

Bonaparte's notion that Spain could be annexed by a proclamation, and held down by 80,000 men, was destined to receive a rude shock. Almost simultaneously, two disasters fell upon his armies. A corps had been sent southwards to conquer Andalusia, where the insurrection was at its strongest. Its leader, General Dupont, allowed himself to be surrounded by superior numbers of Spanish levies at Baylen, and after some grossly mismanaged fighting, laid down his arms with his whole force of 15,000 men (July 20, 1808).

[Sidenote: =Battle of Vimiero.--The Convention of Cintra.=]

Junot, in Portugal, suffered almost the same fate. The English began to land in Portugal a few days after the capitulation of Baylen. When their leading divisions were ashore, headed by Sir Arthur Wellesley, the victor of Assaye and Argaum, Junot marched against them to drive them into the sea. Finding Wellesley on the hillside of Vimiero, he attacked him recklessly (Aug. 21), for the French had not yet learnt to appreciate the worth of the British infantry. He received a crushing defeat, and his army would have been destroyed if Wellesley had been allowed to pursue him. But on the night of the battle, more troops arrived from England, and with them Sir Hew Dalrymple, who was in command of the whole expedition. The cautious veteran refused Wellesley permission to follow up the flying enemy, and Junot escaped to Lisbon. But the Frenchman had been so badly beaten, that by an agreement called the "Convention of Cintra" he gave up Lisbon and all Portugal in return for being granted a safe passage back to France. English public opinion was disappointed that Junot's whole army had not been captured, and Dalrymple and Wellesley were put on trial for not taking Lisbon by force. The former, the responsible person, was deprived of his command; the latter was acquitted and sent back to Portugal to repeat his triumph of Vimiero on larger fields of battle. Meanwhile, while he was being tried in England, Sir John Moore, an able and experienced general, received the command of the English army in the Peninsula.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon in Spain.--Sir John Moore's campaign.=]

The news of Baylen and Vimiero had roused Napoleon to fury, which grew still greater when he heard that his brother Joseph had evacuated Madrid and fallen back behind the Ebro. He determined to march in person against Spain with the "Grande Armée," nearly 250,000 veterans, the victors of Austerlitz and Jena. Proclaiming that he was "about to carry his victorious eagles to the Pillars of Hercules, and drive the British leopard into the sea," he hurried over the Pyrenees, and fell upon the raw Spanish levies who had now advanced to the line of the Ebro. With a few crushing blows, he scattered them to right and left, and entered Madrid (Dec. 4, 1808). All northern and central Spain were overrun, and Napoleon might have accomplished his boast, and advanced to Cadiz and Lisbon, but for the daring diversion made by Sir John Moore and his 25,000 English. When that able officer heard that the Emperor had passed southward and taken Madrid, he fell upon his line of communication, and threatened to cut off his connection with France. He knew that this act would bring overwhelming numbers against him, but he also knew that it would save Southern Spain for a space. When Napoleon learnt that Moore was in his rear, he hurriedly left Madrid and directed 100,000 men to chase the much-daring general. But Moore, satisfied to have drawn off the French, continually retreated before them in the most skilful manner, always offering battle to the French van, and retreating when their main body appeared. He thus drew Napoleon up into the extreme north-western corner of Spain, among the rugged hills of Galicia. While engaged in this pursuit the Emperor received unwelcome news which drew him hastily back to Paris.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon leaves Spain.--Battle of Corunna.=]

The English government had not been idle during the autumn of 1808, and had formed a new coalition with Austria, who in three years had begun to recover the disaster of Austerlitz, and to chafe against Napoleon's dictatorial ways and the inconveniences of the Continental System. Seeing the Emperor entangled in the Spanish war, Austria thought the opportunity of attacking him too good to be missed, and was preparing to send her armies into South Germany while Napoleon was chasing Moore into Galicia. The Emperor was forced to leave the greater part of his army in Spain, and to hurry off to the Danube with his guards and picked troops. Marshal Soult, whom he sent in pursuit of Moore, followed him as far as the sea, where an English fleet was waiting at Corunna to pick up the way-worn and jaded troops. To secure a safe embarkation, Moore turned sharply on the head of Soult's army, and drove it back at the battle of Corunna (Jan. 16, 1809). He fell in the moment of victory, but his efforts had not been in vain: his troops sailed away in safety, and the French invasion of Spain had been checked for four months by his bold stroke.

The English cabinet had resolved not to abandon Spain and Portugal; when Moore's regiments returned to England many of them were sent back to Lisbon, and placed under Wellesley, the victor of Vimiero, whose trial had ended in a triumphant acquittal. In April, 1809, began that wonderful series of campaigns which was to last till March, 1814, and to bear the English standard in triumph from the Tagus to the Garonne. Fettered by timid instructions from the home government, linked to rash and jealous allies, and starting with no more than 20,000 British troops, Wellesley was bidden to hold his own in the Peninsula, where more than 200,000 French troops were still encamped. He showed the rarest combination of prudence and daring, and brought his almost impossible task to a successful end, in spite of the tiresome stupidity of his Spanish confederates, and the inefficient support which the home government gave him. At any moment, during the first three years of his command, a single defeat would have caused the cabinet to recall him and withdraw his army from the Peninsula, but the defeat never came, and Wellesley at last won the confidence he merited, and was given adequate means to carry out his mighty schemes. The story of the war is the best proof of his abilities. A calm, stern, silent man, with an aquiline nose, clear grey eyes, and a slight, erect figure, he inspired implicit confidence, if his taciturnity and hatred of display or emotion prevented him from winning the love and enthusiasm of his troops as many lesser generals have done. "The sight of his long nose among us on a battle morning," wrote one of his veterans, "was worth 10,000 men of reinforcements any day."

[Sidenote: =Soult driven from Portugal.--Battle of Talavera.=]

While Napoleon was engaged in his Austrian war of 1809, Wellesley easily held his own in the Peninsula. He defeated Marshal Soult at Oporto, and drove him out of Portugal with the loss of all his artillery and baggage. Then, turning southward, he marched against Madrid in the company of the Spanish general Cuesta. But he found his allies almost useless. Cuesta was perverse and imbecile to an incredible degree, and his wretched provincial levies fled at the mere sound of the cannon, unless they were ensconced behind walls and trenches. At Talavera the allied armies beat Marshal Victor and King Joseph, but all the fighting fell on the English. Cuesta's troops, sheltered in the town of Talavera, refused to come out of their defences and left Wellesley's 20,000 men to repel the assaults of 40,000 French. After this experience of Spanish co-operation the victor vowed that he would never again share a campaign with a Spanish army (July 28, 1809).

[Sidenote: =Wellington retires to Portugal.--The Walcheren expedition.=]

The news of Talavera brought the French armies from all sides to aid the defeated marshal, and, beset by 100,000 men, Wellesley was obliged to retreat on Portugal. He got back in perfect safety, but his imbecile colleague Cuesta was caught and crushed by the pursuers. The result of the fighting at Talavera had given the English troops confidence, and the king conferred on the victor the title of Viscount Wellington. He would have preferred to receive reinforcements rather than honorary distinctions, but the cabinet had decreed otherwise. They had sent all the available troops in England, some 40,000 men, on an ill-judged expedition against Antwerp, which was too strongly fortified and lay too far inland to be readily taken by an army of such a size. The general placed in command was Lord Chatham, Pitt's elder brother, a dilatory commander who moved slowly and allowed himself to be detained in the siege of the minor fortresses which guarded the way to Antwerp. The army landed on the swampy isle of Walcheren and beleaguered Flushing for three weeks, but in the trenches the troops were smitten with marsh fever, and succumbed so rapidly that the expedition had to be given up, when 11,000 men were simultaneously in hospital. Flushing was destroyed, but the troops had to return to England, and had exercised no influence whatever on the fate of the war (July to August, 1809). If sent to Wellesley, they would have enabled him to crush King Joseph and take Madrid.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Wagram.--Marriage of Napoleon.=]

Meanwhile the Austrian war had ended in the triumph of Napoleon at the battle of Wagram (August, 1809), though the gallant efforts of the Archduke Charles, and the insurrection of the patriots of the Tyrol and Northern Germany, had seemed at first to shake his power. The Emperor of Austria was forced to cede all his Illyrian coast-line, that Napoleon might make his blockade of English goods the stricter, to surrender half his share of Poland, and to give--the bitterest drop in his cup--the hand of his daughter Maria Louisa to the conqueror. This unhallowed union was only made possible by the divorce of Josephine Beauharnais, the wife with whom Napoleon had lived for the last fourteen years (October, 1809).

[Sidenote: =The "Lines of Torres Vedras."--Masséna's retreat.=]

Freed from the Austrian war, and with his "Grande Armée" once more unoccupied, Napoleon resolved to make an end of the Spanish insurrection. He gave 70,000 fresh troops to Masséna, the ablest of his marshals, and bade him drive Wellington into the sea and conquer all Spain and Portugal. The English general had foreseen some such assault from the moment that he heard the news of the defeat of Austria. He spent the winter of 1809-1810 in constructing a triple series of fortifications across the peninsula on which Lisbon stands, the famous "Lines of Torres Vedras." When Masséna advanced against Portugal Wellington retired slowly before him, wasting the country and compelling all the people to take refuge in Lisbon. He turned at Busaco (September 29, 1810) to inflict a sharp check on the heads of Masséna's columns, but finally withdrew into his formidable lines. The French were brought to a stand before the unexpected obstacle, for they had no knowledge that Wellington had so strengthened his place of refuge. The position, armed with 600 pieces of artillery, and defended by 30,000 English, and the whole of the militia of Portugal, seemed too strong to be meddled with. Masséna lay in front of the lines for four months, sending in vain for reinforcements to Spain. But his colleague Soult, occupied in the conquest of Andalusia, and the sieges of Cadiz and Badajos, would not come to his aid. Masséna's army suffered bitter privations in the wasted and depopulated country, and at last, in March, 1811, he was fain to draw back and retreat from Portugal, after having lost more than 20,000 men by sword and famine. Wellington followed him, perpetually harassing his retreat, and took post again on the borders of Spain, from which he had been forced back six months before.

[Sidenote: =Battles of Fuentes d'Onoro and Albuera.=]

The triumphant defence of the lines of Torres Vedras was the turning point of the whole Peninsular War. The French were never again able to invade Portugal, and Wellington, strongly reinforced from England after his success was known, was for the future able to undertake bolder strokes and no longer forced to keep to the defensive. The last offensive movements of the French were stopped by two bloody actions fought in May, 1811, within a few days of each other. In the north Masséna attacked Wellington in order to try to save the beleaguered fortress of Almeida; but he was repulsed at Fuentes d'Onoro (May 5), and was shortly afterwards recalled in disgrace by his master. In the south Marshal Soult marched to relieve Badajos, which was being besieged by Lord Beresford, Wellington's second-in-command, aided by the Spanish general Blake. Beresford met the French at Albuera, and almost lost the battle, partly by his own unskilful generalship, partly by the sudden flight of his Spanish auxiliaries. But the day was saved by the celebrated charge of the "Fusilier Brigade," in which the 7th and 23rd Fusiliers, only 1500 strong, stormed a precipitous hill held by 7000 French, and forced Soult to retreat. This was the bloodiest fight which an English army ever gained. Beresford lost 4300 men out of 7500, yet his indomitable troops won the day for him (May 16).

[Sidenote: =Further Annexations by Napoleon.=]

The years 1810-1811 were the last years of Napoleon's ascendency in Europe. They are marked by his final attempt to make the Continental System effective, by the annexation of almost the whole coast-line of Central Europe. He had already taken Rome and Central Italy from the Pope in 1809. Now he expelled his own brother Lewis from Holland, and appropriated that country. He next added to his dominions the whole north coast of Germany as far as the Baltic, including the Hanseatic towns and the realms of four or five of his vassals, the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine. These wild and arbitrary seizures, which made the coast of France extend from Rome to Lubeck, were to Napoleon mere episodes in the struggle with England. The Dutch and Germans would not enforce the blockade against English goods as stringently as he wished, and so he annexed them to make their secret trade with England impossible. The Continental System was now in full swing; it was working in all Napoleon's own dominions, in France, Italy, and Illyria, in the lands of all his vassals--the German states, Poland, Denmark, Naples, Prussia--in Sweden, where one of his marshals, Bernadotte, had lately been made heir to the throne, and even in the territories of his reluctant allies the emperors of Austria and Russia. Yet, in spite of Napoleon's many assertions to the contrary, England was neither ruined nor likely to sue for peace.

[Sidenote: =Perceval and Lord Liverpool.--War policy of the Tories.=]

There had of late been many changes in the persons who ruled England, but the policy of Pitt was still maintained by his successors. The old king, George III., had gone mad in 1810, and the nominal control of the country was now in the hands of his worthless, vicious son George, Prince of Wales, the old ally of the Whigs. But the regency was given him guarded with so many checks and limitations, that he was completely in the hands of the ministry, and could not do much harm. First Perceval, and after he had been shot by a lunatic in 1812, Robert Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, swayed the policy of England as prime minister. Both were men of moderate abilities and narrow minds, but they had the saving virtue of obstinacy, and stuck to the old policy of war with France through thick and thin. Their task was no easy one: debt was accumulating in appalling loads from the expenses of the war; the taxes were increased year by year; trade was much hampered by the Continental System; a series of bad harvests raised the cost of corn to famine-price, and led to endless discontent and rioting both in town and country; our allies were beaten one by one on the continent. There was no compensating gain save Wellington's successes in Spain, and the fact that we had now full control of the seas and had absorbed the colonial trade of the whole world. Yet the Tories hardened their hearts, and hammered away at "the Corsican Ogre" with untiring zeal. Nor can it be doubted for a moment that they were right; Napoleon had to be put down, or England must perish. All honour therefore to the men, narrow-minded and prejudiced though they were, who carried out the struggle to the bitter end.

[Sidenote: =Russia and the Continental System.=]

They were at last about to be rewarded for their perseverance. Towards the end of 1811 Napoleon became involved in a third struggle with Russia, more deadly than those of 1805 and 1806-7. The cause of the quarrel was the inevitable Continental System. Hitherto England had been the largest buyer of Russian goods, and Russia had been wont to get her luxuries and colonial wares from England. The enforced prohibition of trade with her best customer did Russia untold harm, and the Czar Alexander found that every class of his subjects was groaning under the yoke of the Berlin Decrees. Discontent was rife, and Alexander knew well enough that Russia is "a despotism tempered by assassination," and remembered the fate of his own father. He saw at last that his empire was losing more from alliance with Napoleon than she could lose by open war against him. Finally the Russian government began to provoke the Emperor by an almost overt neglect of his wishes, and practically abandoned the Continental System.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon's Russian campaign.=]

Napoleon was at the height of his arrogance and autocratic insolence. Instead of making an end to the war in Spain--"the running sore" as he called it, from the drain which it caused on his resources--he resolved to impose his will on Russia by force, and declared war upon the Czar. A vast army of 600,000 men was concentrated in eastern Germany, and crossed the Niemen in June, 1812. But the Russians had taken example by the policy by which Wellington had foiled Masséna in 1810: instead of fighting on their frontier, they withdrew into the heart of their vast plains, wasting the country behind them, and leaving no food for the invader. The French army had lost half its horses and a third of its men, before it approached Moscow or fought a serious engagement. The Russians turned to bay at Borodino, in front of their ancient capital; but Napoleon stormed their entrenchments at the cost of 25,000 men, and entered Moscow. But he found it deserted by its inhabitants, and a few days after his arrival the whole city was burnt, whether by the deliberate resolve of the Russians, or by the carelessness of the French soldiery. Winter was now at hand, and for want of food and shelter the Emperor resolved to retire on Poland. But the season was too late, and he was surprised on his way by the snow. His harassed and half-starved soldiers died by thousands on the roadside: the Russians cut off every straggler, and less than a tenth of the magnificent army that had crossed the Niemen struggled back to Germany (Nov. 1812-Jan. 1813).

[Sidenote: =Storming of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos.=]

The fortune of war had at last turned, and Napoleon's first disaster was soon to be followed by his fall. Prussia and all his other unwilling subjects in northern Germany took arms when the fate of the "Grande Armée" became known, and to meet them the Emperor had to call up his last reserves of men, and especially to draw on the large force in the Spanish peninsula. But he found that little help could come from Spain, for 1812 had been as fatal to his marshals in the south as to himself in the far north. Early in the year Wellington had swooped down on Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos, the two fortresses in French hands which covered the Spanish frontier. He stormed each of them after a siege of a few days, making the desperate courage of his soldiery serve instead of a long bombardment, and paying for his rapid success by a heavy loss of men. Badajos was actually escaladed with ladders, the breaches having proved inaccessible. The French marshals came hurrying up to save their strongholds, but found them already fallen into English hands.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Salamanca.=]

There followed the decisive battle of Salamanca, in which Wellington defeated Marshal Marmont, and crushed the main army of the enemy. This fight was a splendid exhibition of his skill: his able adversary had for a moment put his left wing in a hazardous position. Before half an hour had elapsed, Wellington had pounced upon the isolated divisions, routed them, and attacked and scattered the main body. Thus, as was happily said, he "beat forty thousand men in forty minutes." In consequence of this victory Wellington was able to retake Madrid, after it had been four years in hostile hands. To check his further success the French marshals had to evacuate all southern and central Spain, and mass their forces against the victor. When they beset him with 100,000 men he was forced to retreat towards the Portuguese frontier for a space. But the net result of the campaign had been to deliver Andalusia and most of Castile from the enemy, and more was to follow. Napoleon had to withdraw so many of his veterans from Spain, to replace his losses in the Russian war, that in the next spring Wellington was no longer in his wonted inferiority of numbers. He used his opportunity with his usual skill and promptness.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Vittoria.--Last efforts of the French in Spain.=]

Attacking the French before they had concentrated from their scattered winter-quarters, he chased them before him in disorder all across northern Spain. It was only at Vittoria, close under the Pyrenees, that they could collect in numbers strong enough to face him. But there he fell upon them, routed Marshal Jourdan, cut off his retreat on France, and drove him into the mountains with the loss of every single cannon and waggon that the French army possessed (June 21, 1813). The autumn of the year was occupied in subduing St. Sebastian and Pampeluna, the two fortresses that guarded the French frontier, and in repulsing, at the "Battles of the Pyrenees," two gallant attempts made by Marshal Soult to relieve the beleaguered fortresses. At last they fell, and Wellington prepared to invade France in the next spring.

[Sidenote: =Fall of Napoleon.--Restoration of Louis XVIII.=]

Meanwhile, Napoleon, with a horde of conscripts and the few veteran troops that he could collect, had been fighting hard in Germany. Against the Russians and Prussians he held his ground for some time, but when his own father-in-law, Francis of Austria, joined the enemy, he was overwhelmed by numbers. The three-days' strife at Leipzig, which the Germans call the "battle of nations," sealed his fate. It was only with the wrecks of an army that he escaped across the Rhine in the autumn of 1813. The allies followed him without giving him a moment's respite, a wise strategy that they had learnt from his own earlier doings. The Emperor made a desperate fight in France, but the odds were too many against him. After some ephemeral successes he was defeated at Laon by one body of the allies, and their main army slipped past him and took Paris (April 4, 1814). On the news of the fall of the capital the French marshals compelled Napoleon to abdicate, and laid down their arms. The humbled despot vainly attempted to commit suicide, fearing death at the victors' hands. But they spared his life, gave him the little Tuscan island of Elba as an appanage, and bade the man who had been the ruler of all Europe to spend the rest of his life in governing a rock and 10,000 Italian peasants. The crown of France was given--with questionable wisdom--to the representative of the Bourbons, the eldest surviving grandson of Lewis XV. This shrewd and selfish old invalid, who was known as the Count of Provence, now took the title of Lewis XVIII. and mounted his martyred brother's long-lost throne.

[Sidenote: =Wellington in France.--Battle of Toulouse.=]

While the Austrians, Russians, and Prussians had been conquering Napoleon and capturing Paris, Wellington had not been idle. He had invaded France from the south, taken the great city of Bordeaux, and beaten Marshal Soult at the battle of Toulouse, when the news of Napoleon's abdication brought his brilliant campaign to a conclusion (April 14, 1814).

[Sidenote: =The American War.--Naval successes of the United States.=]

All Europe now began to disarm, dreaming that the deadly struggles of the last twenty-two years were over at last. Diplomatists from all nations were summoned to meet at Vienna, to rearrange the map of Europe and parcel out Napoleon's ill-gotten spoils. England alone was unable to disband her armies, for she had still got a war on hand. In 1812 Napoleon had succeeded in stirring up against us the United States of America. Their grievance was the Orders in Council, by which we had prohibited neutral ships from trading with France, in retaliation for the Emperor's Berlin Decrees against our own commerce. After five years of bickering and recrimination the Americans declared war on us--though they might with equally good logic have attacked Napoleon, whose conduct to them had been even more harsh and provoking than that of the Perceval cabinet. With all her attention concentrated on the Peninsula in 1812-13, England had little attention to spare for this minor war, and Canada was left much undermanned. But the small garrison and the Canadian militia fought splendidly, and three separate attempts to overrun the colony were beaten back, and two American armies forced to capitulate. But while so successful on land, the English were much vexed and surprised to suffer several small defeats at sea in duels between single vessels. The few frigates which the United States owned were very fine vessels, heavily armed and well manned; on three successive occasions an American frigate captured an English one of slightly inferior force in single combat, a feat which no French ship had ever been able to accomplish in the whole war.[55] In course of time the American vessels were hunted down and destroyed by our squadrons, but it was a great blow to English naval pride that the enemy had to be crushed by superiority of numbers instead of being beaten in equal fight. But the fact was that individually the American ships were larger and carried heavier guns than our own, so that the first defeats were no matter of shame to our navy.

[Sidenote: =Battles of Bladensburg and New Orleans.--End of the war.=]

When Napoleon had been crushed, England was able to turn serious attention to America, and to send many of the old Peninsular veterans over the Atlantic. But their arrival did not crush the enemy so easily as had been expected. One expedition under General Ross, landing in Maryland, beat the Americans at Bladensburg, and burnt Washington, the capital of the United States (1814). But two others failed: the imbecile Sir George Prevost invaded the State of New York, but turned back without having done any serious fighting. On the other hand, the overbold Sir Edward Pakenham, one of the bravest of Wellington's officers, was slain at New Orleans with 2000 of his followers because he endeavoured to storm from the front impregnable earthworks held by a steady foe (January 8, 1815). The war, however, had ceased just before Pakenham fell. Napoleon having abdicated, and the English having withdrawn the Orders in Council, the causes of our strife with America had been removed, and the two powers had signed the peace of Ghent on December 24, 1814. This agreement restored the old condition of affairs, each party surrendering its conquests, and agreeing to let bygones be bygones. But the struggle had bred much ill blood, not to be forgotten for many a year.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon escapes from Elba.=]

By the new year of 1815, when the treaty of Ghent had been signed, England was at peace with all men, and the Liverpool ministry began to take in hand the reduction of our army and navy, the restoration of finance, and the protection of English interests in the resettlement of Europe at the congress at Vienna, which had met in the previous autumn. All the diplomatists of the great powers were hard at work settling the new boundaries of their states, when suddenly the alarming news was heard that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and landed in France. The rule of the selfish old Lewis XVIII. and the elderly companions who had returned with him from a twenty years' exile, had irritated and disgusted the French, and most of all the army. When, therefore, Napoleon landed in Provence with seven hundred men, and called on his countrymen to rise in behalf of liberty and expel the imbecile Bourbons, his appeal met with a success such as he himself had hardly hoped for. Not a shot was fired against him; regiment after regiment went over to his side, and Lewis XVIII. had at last to fly from Paris and take refuge in Flanders (March, 1815). Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor once more, but promised the French a liberal constitution in place of his old autocratic rule. He also made overtures to the allied powers, saying that he was tired of war, and would accept any honourable terms. But they knew his lying tongue of old, and wisely refused to listen to his smooth speeches. One after another, all the monarchs of Europe declared war on him.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon enters Belgium.--Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras.=]

Napoleon's second tenure of power was only to last from March 13 till June 22, 1815, the "Hundred Days," as they are generally called. Forced to fight, he displayed his old energy, and resolved to strike at the allies before they could concentrate their scattered forces from the remotest ends of Europe. He called his old veterans to arms, and hastily organized an army of 130,000 men for an immediate attack on the nearest foe. By waiting longer he could have collected an army thrice as great, but, on the other hand, his enemies would have been able to mass their whole force against him. The only troops ready to oppose him by June, 1815, were two armies in Belgium, one of Prussians under the old Marshal Blücher, which lay about Namur, Liège, and Charleroi, the other a combined force of British, Germans, and Dutch under Wellington, now a duke, stationed round Brussels and Ghent. The Prussians were 120,000 strong, and Wellington had 30,000 English and 65,000 Hanoverians, Germans, and Dutch. Napoleon was therefore bound to be outnumbered, but he thought that he could crush one army before the other came to its aid, if he could only strike hard and fast enough. His advance into Belgium was rapid and skilful. He made for the point where the English left touched the Prussian right, near Charleroi, and thrust himself between them. On June 16 he engaged and beat Blücher's Prussians at Ligny, while his lieutenant, Marshal Ney, held back at Quatre Bras the front divisions of Wellington's army as they came marching up to try to join the Prussians.

The Prussians were severely beaten, but the indomitable old Blücher gathered together his defeated forces, and marched north to rejoin the English, while Napoleon vainly dreamed that he was flying eastward towards Germany. Thus it came to pass that the Emperor sent Marshal Grouchy and 33,000 men to pursue the Prussians on the wrong road, a mistake which allowed Blücher to execute an undisturbed retreat on Wavre, where he was again in touch with the duke.

Meanwhile, Napoleon, on the 17th, marched to join his lieutenant Ney, who had been forced back from Quatre Bras by the English, and needed his aid. The Emperor, believing that the Prussians were disposed of, thought he could now deal a crushing blow at Wellington's motley army, and was overjoyed when he found the duke offering him battle on the hillside of Mont St. Jean, twelve miles north of Quatre Bras, in a good position which covered the road to Brussels. On this hillside was fought next day (June 18, 1815) the decisive battle which the English call Waterloo, from the name of the village where Wellington wrote his despatch that same night.

[Sidenote: =The Battle of Waterloo.=]

The armies were not very different in numbers. Napoleon's 72,000 French were opposed to 67,000 troops in the allied army. But Wellington could only count on his 23,000 English and 22,000 Hanoverians and Brunswickers, for good and zealous service. He was hindered rather than helped by the presence of 20,000 raw Dutch and Belgian conscripts, who had no heart in the war, and would as soon have fought for Napoleon. His army was stretched along the gentle slope which is crossed by the Brussels road, with the infantry in the front line, and the cavalry partly in reserve, partly on the wings. In front of his position were the two farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, the former held by the English guards, the latter by a picked battalion of Hanoverians. Napoleon ranged his men on the opposite ridge, and launched them against the English in successive attacks. His first attempt to storm the farm of Hougoumont was manfully beaten back. He then sent four heavy columns against the English left, but they were utterly routed by the charge of Picton's infantry and Ponsonby's famous "Union Brigade" of dragoons, the Royals, Scots Greys and Inniskillens. His third effort was to break the English centre by the furious charges of 15,000 gallant horsemen, supported by a tremendous fire of artillery. But the English squares held fast, though assailed for five hours by constant onsets of cavalry and pounded in the intervals by an overwhelming force of cannon. Most of the Dutch and Belgians and some of the Germans retired from the field, and many fled to Brussels: but the indomitable squares held their own, even after the farm of La Haye Sainte had been stormed, and a gap opened in the English centre. In the thick of the fighting, Napoleon was surprised to see new troops coming up on his right: these were Blücher's Prussians, marching from Wavre to aid the English, according to a promise which the old marshal had made to the Duke on the previous day. To hold them back, Napoleon had to detach nearly all his reserves; but for a final stroke against Wellington he sent out 5000 men of the "Old Guard" to break through the long-tried English line. But this last effort was foiled by the steady fire of Maitland's English guards, and when the attacking columns were seen recoiling down the hillside and Wellington's last cavalry reserves came charging after them, the whole French army broke and fled.

[Sidenote: =Napoleon confined at St. Helena.=]

Never was a more complete rout seen. The defeated army disbanded itself: Napoleon could not rally a man, and fled to Paris, where he abdicated for a second time. Wellington and Blücher rapidly followed him and entered Paris (July 6). The ex-Emperor, fearing death at the hands of the infuriated Prussians, fled across France to Rochefort, and surrendered himself to the English man-of-war which blockaded that port. After much discussion the ministers resolved to send him as a prisoner to the desolate island of St. Helena, where he lived for six years, spending his time in dictating mendacious accounts of his life and campaigns, and in petty quarrels with the governor of the island.

[Sidenote: =Supremacy of the English mercantile marine.=]

Napoleon was now really disposed of, and the pacification of Europe was complete. The congress of Vienna had completed its work, and all the territorial changes which it dictated were carried out at leisure. England's share of the plunder in Europe was the islands of Malta and Heligoland and the Ionian Isles; beyond seas she got the French isle of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and the valuable Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope. But her real gain was the fact that she had absorbed, during the course of the war, nearly the whole of the carrying trade of the world. Twenty years of her ascendency at sea had destroyed the mercantile marines of France, Holland, Spain, and Italy, and it was many years before those countries could recover from their losses. The naval and commercial supremacy which we enjoy to-day is the direct result of the great wars of 1793-1815.

[Sidenote: =The resettlement of Europe.=]

This being so, the changes on the continent were of comparatively little moment to us. France was confined within her old boundaries of 1789. Russia took the greater part of Poland, Austria was given Lombardy and Venetia, Prussia annexed half Saxony and most of the small states along the Rhine. Belgium and Holland were joined in an unnatural union as the "Kingdom of the Netherlands," while the old despots of Central and Southern Italy returned to their long-lost thrones. These boundaries were to last, with little alteration, for half a century.

FOOTNOTES:

[54] And this including Ireland, where only the Protestants could be trusted with arms.

[55] In sixty-seven duels of single English frigates with French, Dutch, or Spanish vessels of the same rating, the adversary succumbed; in no single case was an English vessel taken by an enemy of equal force.

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XXXIX. REACTION AND REFORM

1815-1832.

The great struggle was now over, and a new period had commenced, in which European wars were to be as rare as they had of late been common, for between 1815 and 1848 there was no serious strife between any of the powers of Western and Central Europe, and the general peace was only interrupted by comparatively unimportant broils in the Balkan peninsula and in Spain.

England, whose troops were not destined to fire another shot in Europe for forty years, had full leisure to look around her and count up the cost of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The table of profit and loss was not at first sight a very cheerful one. The weight of debt and taxation was obvious to every man, while the compensating advantages, resulting from the firm establishment of our naval and commercial supremacy in all the seas of the world, were only just beginning to make themselves felt. The country and its governors were at the same time beginning to feel very uneasy at a silent change in the social life of England.

[Sidenote: =The industrial revolution.=]

For, noticeable as were the years 1793-1815 for the display of England's vigour abroad, they were even more remarkable for the social change which was taking place within. In those twenty-three years was consummated the transformation of England from an agricultural to a manufacturing community, a transformation the stranger because agriculture was being all the time artificially stimulated, by laws for the protection of the English farmer against foreign competition. So the change in the general character of the English state was due not to a decay in agriculture, but solely to an increase in manufactures. The war which, as Napoleon had trusted, would crush our industries, had only fostered them, by putting us beyond the reach of foreign competition, and throwing open to us alone every market and line of trade outside Europe. For instead of our prosperity being checked by the loss of our continental trade, continental prosperity had been checked by the loss of all maritime traffic with Asia and America, which passed entirely into our hands.

[Sidenote: =English manufacturing supremacy.=]

England, therefore, had become the manufacturer of the goods of the whole world, not merely owing to her monopoly of trade, but owing to the improved machinery, and methods of transit which she adopted long before the rest of Europe. She obtained such a start in the use of the means of industrial production, that no state has yet been able to catch her up in the race of commerce. Hence England was at the end of the war able to bear a weight of taxation and debt which must have ruined her in its earlier years. Nine hundred millions of National Debt, though a tremendous burden, turned out not to be, as many had feared, a ruinously heavy infliction. The forced paper currency, whose introduction in 1797 had appeared to mark a step on the downward road to national bankruptcy, was successfully taken off a few years after the war ended. The great army and navy which had been draining our exchequer were disbanded, when they had finished their duty of protecting us against the threatened invasions of the Revolution and the Empire, and had afterwards played the decisive part in exhausting Napoleon's resources, by that long struggle in the Spanish peninsula, which encouraged the rest of Europe to throw off the French yoke.

[Sidenote: =Poverty and discontent of the labouring classes.=]

But there were other aspects in which the results of the war had been less happy for England. If the increase of wealth had been enormous, the method of that wealth's distribution was not satisfactory. The new masses of population, which had been called into existence by the development of manufactures, were poor with a poverty which had been unknown in the days when England was still mainly an agricultural country. The introduction of improved machinery, great as was its ultimate benefit, caused during the years of transition much misery to the classes whose industry was superseded by it. While English manufactures were driving out foreign competition all over the world, English mobs were often wrecking the machinery which made these manufactures possible, in their rage at the ruin of the old handicrafts. Actual famine seemed several times during the war to be staring the lower classes in the face, for the largely increased population could no longer be supported on the food supply of England. Nevertheless, in their zeal to encourage English agriculture, the Tory governments of the early years of the century refused to allow the free introduction of the foreign corn which was really necessary for the increased consumption of the population. And while wheat was dear, because limited in quantity, owing to Protection, the agricultural classes were not being enriched in the manner which might have been expected. The enhanced profit passed entirely to the farmer and the landlord, not to the labouring population; and at the same moment at which the artisan was breaking machinery, the agricultural labourer was burning his employer's ricks. This unfortunate state of things, however, was due rather to misguided legislation than to any actual danger in the economic conditions of England, and could therefore be relieved by methods which cannot come into play when a real and not a fictitious crisis in the internal state of a country is at hand.

[Sidenote: =Poor Law administration.=]

The main cause of the degradation of the agricultural labourer in the early years of the nineteenth century was a series of unwise Poor-Laws, which had been passed at intervals since 1795. There had been much local distress in the early years of the revolutionary war, and to alleviate it many parishes had commenced a system of indiscriminate doles of money to poor residents, without much inquiry whether the recipients were deserving or idle, able-bodied or impotent. The old test of compelling paupers to enter the workhouse was entirely forgotten, and money was given to every one who chose to ask for it. Moreover, the rule was laid down that the larger the family, the more was it to draw from the rates in its weekly subsidy. This unwise scheme at once led to the evil of reckless marriages and enormous families, for the labourers saw that the more their children increased, the larger would be their dole from the parish.

[Sidenote: =The farmers and the Poor Law.=]

But not the labourer only was to draw profit from the new Poor Laws. The farmers began to see that if they kept down the wages of their men, the parish could be trusted to make up the deficiency. It thus became easy for them to pay starvation-wages to the labourers, and then force the local rates to support them with a subsidy just sufficient to keep each family out of the workhouse. Thus the agricultural classes began to live, not on their natural wages, but on a pittance from their employer, supplemented by a weekly-grant from the parish. This suited the farmers well enough, but was ruinous to every one else, for well-nigh every labourer was forced to ask for local aid, and thereby to become a pauper. At the same time the rapid growth of population caused the burden on the parish to advance by leaps and bounds. At last the poor-rate became an intolerable drain on the resources of the less wealthy districts. A well-known case is quoted in Buckinghamshire, where the annual dole to the paupers grew till it actually exceeded the annual rating of the parish. And as long as every one who chose was able to demand outdoor relief, it was impossible to see where the trouble would end. In the years after the great war had ended actual bankruptcy seemed to be threatening scores of parishes, yet corn was high in price, and the profits of farming, if fairly distributed, ought to have sufficed to keep both landowner, farmer, and labourer in comfort.

In considering the political history of England in the years after 1815, this abject distress of the working class, both in town and in countryside, must be continually borne in mind. It was the discontent of the ignorant multitude, feeling its poverty but not understanding its cause, and ready to seek any scheme of redress, wise or unwise, that was at the bottom of the political trouble of the time. The discontent was really social, the result of unwise laws, and wrong conceptions of political economy. But it often took shape in political forms, and the government of the day thought that it heralded the approach of a catastrophe like the French Revolution.

[Sidenote: =Reactionary policy of the Tories.=]

Unfortunately for the prosperity of England, its rulers were at this moment committed to a stern and reactionary policy, and would listen to no proposals for change or reform of any kind. The generation of Tories who had grown up during the great French war, had forgotten the old liberal doctrines of their great leader Pitt. Of all the ministers, George Canning was almost the only one who remembered his old master's teaching, and was ready to think of introducing reforms, now that peace had once more been obtained. The majority of his colleagues, especially the premier, the narrow-minded Earl of Liverpool, and the harsh and unbending Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, set their faces against any change in the constitution, however small.

[Sidenote: =Renewed popularity of the Whigs.=]

Now the Tories had merited well of their country by carrying the war to a successful close, but when the war was over, it was time to be thinking of some way of alleviating the social ills which had been accumulating during its course. This they refused to do, quoting the fate of Lewis XVI. as the sample of what happens to rulers who yield one inch to the pressure of mob violence. They were still firm in office, for the Whig party had not yet recovered from the discredit which they had won from the hopeless failure of the Fox-Grenville cabinet of 1806-1807. But now that their ideas on foreign policy could do no harm, they began to be viewed with more favourable eyes. The ten years which followed the battle of Waterloo were marked by the gradual passing over of the great middle class to the Whig party. It was felt that the only hope for the introduction of any scheme of social and political reform lay with the Whigs, and that from them alone could England obtain the liberal measures which Pitt would have granted years ago, if the French Revolution had not intervened.

But the Whigs were still in a hopeless minority in Parliament, though they were gradually growing stronger in the ranks of the nation. It was not till fifteen years had elapsed since the end of the great war, that a Whig ministry once more received the seals of office.

[Sidenote: =Projects of reform.--Attitude of the Tories.=]

The general discontent of the lower classes in the years 1815-20 found vent in two very different ways. The wilder spirits talked of general insurrection, and an assault not only on the government but on all forms of property and all established institutions. A few mischievous demagogues set themselves to fan these rash and ignorant aspirations into a flame, and to bring about anarchy in order thereby to rid the nation of the existing social evils. The cooler and wiser heads were not influenced by these wild notions, but pinned their faith to the modification of the constitution in the direction of popular government. It was their belief that matters would improve the moment that England was governed by the people and for the people. And this end could only be secured by reform of the real governing body--the House of Commons. The idea of making the House truly representative of the nation had been one of Pitt's cherished plans; in 1785 he had actually brought forward a bill for doing away with the worst of the rotten boroughs, but had failed, owing to the factious opposition of the Whigs. But Pitt's successors at the head of the Tory party had contrived to forget his teaching; they owed much of their strength to the support of the great borough-mongers, and they now refused to take any measures tending to Parliamentary Reform. At the bottom of their hearts they did not trust the masses, and feared that a House of Commons really representing the nation would proceed to wild measures of radical reform, and sweep away all the institutions that they held dear.

[Sidenote: =The Whigs and reform.--Lord Grey.=]

Hence it came to pass that the Whigs alone supported the idea of Parliamentary Reform in the early years of the nineteenth century, and the multitudes who saw in that measure the panacea of all ills were bound to follow them. All the old chiefs of the Whigs were now gone: Fox had died in 1806; Sheridan in 1816; Grenville had retired from public life, and the party was now led by Charles Lord Grey, a very capable and moderate man, who fully shared the notion that Parliamentary Reform was the one pressing question of the day, but was careful not to go beyond the bounds of wisdom and law in pressing for it.

[Sidenote: =The royal family and the succession.=]

The Whigs got no help from their old friend the Prince of Wales; since he had obtained the regency in 1811 owing to his father's insanity, George had thrown himself into the hands of the Tories. Personally he disliked all reforms--for the person in England who most needed reforming was himself. He was now a man of fifty-five, but age had not improved him; to the last he was as false, vicious, and selfish as in his youth. For many years his quarrels with his foolish and flighty wife, Caroline of Brunswick, had been a public scandal. She was an intolerably vain and silly woman, but the provocation which he gave her would have driven a wiser head into rebellion. But George's health was weak, owing to his evil life, and it was hoped by many that he would not survive his aged father. At his death the crown would fall to his only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, an amiable and high-spirited young woman of whom all spoke well. But the princess, having married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg in 1816, died in childbirth before the next year was out, to the general grief of the nation. The next heir was Frederick, Duke of York, but as he--though married--had no children and was no stronger in health than his elder brother, it was clear that the crown would not stay long with him. Therefore all the younger sons of George III. hurried into wedlock in 1818, that their father's line might not be extinguished. William, Duke of Clarence, who afterwards reigned as William IV., married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen; Edward, Duke of Kent, was wedded to Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, and became by her the father of our present queen; Adolphus of Cambridge and Ernest of Cumberland also took wives and had issue, who are still among us.

[Sidenote: =The Government and the agitation.=]

The last days of the reign of George III. were full of trouble and disorder, provoked rather than repressed by the obstinate rigour with which Lord Liverpool's government put down all agitations, both harmless and dangerous. Some of the riots and risings of the years 1816-20 were remarkable for the violence and for the wild aims of those who led them. In December, 1816, a body of revolutionary enthusiasts, who called themselves "Spencean Philanthropists," raised a tumult in Spa fields, and tried to seize the Tower, to distribute arms from its arsenals among the mob. But they were as weak as they were wild, for though they shot one man dead, Lord Mayor Wood and a handful of constables turned them back in front of the Royal Exchange and dispersed them. In June, 1817, there was another rising near Derby, but five hundred armed rioters allowed themselves to be stopped and routed by eighteen hussars.

[Sidenote: =The Manchester massacre.=]

But the most celebrated riot of the time was that at Manchester in August, 1819; a great mob of 30,000 persons had assembled in St. Peter's Field to listen to addresses by a demagogue named Hunt. The magistrates attempted to arrest him, but being prevented from reaching him by the enormous crowd, rashly and cruelly ordered a regiment of cavalry to charge the unarmed multitude. There was no resistance made, but some four or five persons were crushed to death, and sixty or seventy injured, as they trod each other down in escaping from the horsemen. This event was called the "Manchester massacre" by the enemies of the government, who were made responsible for it because they commended the violent action of the magistrates.

[Sidenote: =The Cato Street conspiracy.=]

It was with the object of revenging the Manchester massacre that a bloodthirsty demagogue, named Arthur Thistlewood, one of the "Spencean Philanthropists" of 1816, formed a plot for murdering the whole cabinet. Hearing that the ministers were about to dine together on February 23, 1820, he collected a band of twenty-five desperadoes who vowed to slay them all. But one of the gang betrayed the scheme, and Thistlewood and his men were seized by the police, as they were arming at their trysting-place in Cato Street, Edgware Road. They resisted fiercely, and blood was shed on both sides, ere they were overpowered. Thistlewood and four of his associates were hung and then beheaded--being the last persons who suffered by the axe in England, for the horrid sight of their decapitation moved public opinion to demand the abolition of this ancient punishment of criminals guilty of treason.

Even after the mad Cato Street conspiracy had shocked all the wiser friends of reform, there were isolated outbreaks of rioting all over the north of England and the Scottish Lowlands, the last being a skirmish at Bonnymuir, near Glasgow, between some Lanarkshire mill hands and the local yeomanry (April, 1820).

[Sidenote: =The Six Acts.=]

The government dealt very harshly with all who gave it trouble, not merely with dangerous rioters, but with writers or speakers who did no more than protest against reactionary legislation or advocate radical reform. Their chief weapons against their enemies were the celebrated "Six Acts" of 1819, which Addington[56] and Castlereagh, the sternest members of the cabinet, had elaborated with much care. They imposed the heaviest penalties not only on persons caught drilling, or using arms, or engaging in riots, but on all who wrote what the government chose to consider seditious libels--a term that covered any newspaper article or pamphlet which abused themselves.

[Sidenote: =George IV. and Queen Caroline.=]

Repression was in full swing when the old king died, in the tenth year since he had gone mad (January 29, 1820). The prince-regent now began to rule as George IV., but his accession made no practical difference in politics. His conduct, however, soon gave his subjects one more additional reason for despising him. He brought his long quarrel with his foolish and reckless wife to a head, by refusing to acknowledge her as queen or allow her to be crowned. He accused her of adultery, and made Lord Liverpool bring in a "Bill of Pains and Penalties" to enable him to divorce her. George's life had been such that his attack on Queen Caroline, for conduct much less blameworthy than his own, provoked universal contempt and dislike. Lord Liverpool withdrew his bill in a panic, when all London was in an uproar in the queen's favour. More trouble would undoubtedly have followed if the unhappy Caroline had not died in August, 1821. Her funeral was the occasion of a bloody riot.

[Sidenote: =Addington resigns.--Suicide of Castlereagh.=]

The abortive bill against the queen had added the last straw to the unpopularity of the ministry--the best-hated cabinet that England has ever known. They felt the fact themselves: Addington resigned in 1821, and Castlereagh, the most harsh and unbending of them all, was so worn out by the stress of his responsibilities and the knowledge of the detestation in which he was held, that he cut his own throat in a fit of temporary insanity in September, 1822.

[Sidenote: =The Liverpool-Canning Ministry.=]

Lord Liverpool was helpless when deprived of the two men who had been the chief instigators of his reactionary measures. Abandoning his old policy, he took into partnership George Canning, the chief of the moderate Tories and the wisest disciple of Pitt. Canning took Castlereagh's place as Foreign Secretary, while Addington's place as Home Secretary was given to Robert Peel, a rising young politician with a turn for political economy and an open mind--a very different person from his case-hardened predecessor in the post. Shortly after, Huskisson, the first Free-Trader who had presided over our commercial policy since the younger Pitt, was made President of the Board of Trade.

[Sidenote: =Social tranquillity restored.=]

Thus the character of the Liverpool cabinet was completely changed, and for the last four years of its existence it dropped its old repressive measures, and became quite liberal in its legislation. The country at once began to grow quiet, and the old riots and risings ceased. The gradual growth of prosperity in the land, now that the effects of the great war were passing away, alleviated the violence of the social discontent. But there was a sense of impending change; the immediate domestic question was the removal of religious disabilities, but beyond this lay the questions of parliamentary and municipal reform, of freedom of trade, of simplifying law and legal procedure, and especially of humanizing the criminal law. Strange to say, the treatment of the Catholic claims to be represented in Parliament was regarded as an open question in Lord Liverpool's cabinet. Canning was in favour of the admission of the Catholics. Peel was their strenuous opponent.

[Sidenote: =Reform of the criminal law.=]

The rule of the Liverpool-Canning ministry was distinguished by the abolition of many old and oppressive laws, and the introduction of several reforms of great value. In 1823 Peel began the reform of the criminal law, and the reduction of that tangled mass, with its ghastly list of capital offences, to a shape more consistent with scientific order and common humanity. The old system, a monstrous survival from the Middle Ages, had worked very badly--for juries refused to convict persons who were clearly guilty, because they thought the offence did not deserve the fearful penalty of death. The abolition of capital punishment for so many minor offences put an end to this state of things, and in future the proportion of criminals escaping was marvellously reduced.

[Sidenote: =Huskisson's Free Trade policy.=]

In the province of trade and finance several valuable improvements were introduced by the influence of Huskisson. The old "Navigation Laws," dating from the time of Cromwell,[57] which impeded free trade with foreign countries, were abolished. The wise policy of reducing import duties on the raw materials needed for English manufactures was adopted, so that the cost of goods was perceptibly lowered, without any harm to the makers of them. Commercial treaties were concluded with several foreign powers, to the great benefit of both parties concerned. A considerable relief was given to the Exchequer by reducing the interest of the many loans raised during the great war from 5 or 4 per cent. to 3-1/2. Huskisson had also in hand measures for reducing the duty on the importation of foreign corn, and for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, but before they could be carried out the unhappy death of Canning in 1827 broke up the ministry.

[Sidenote: =The Holy Alliance.--Canning's foreign policy.=]

A word is needed as to the foreign policy of England. The main characteristic of European history from 1815 to 1830 was the renewed despotism of the continental monarchs, when the fear of Bonaparte had vanished from their minds. The Emperors of Austria and Russia and the King of Prussia had formed a league called the "Holy Alliance," for the putting down of liberal opinions and demands for popular government in their own and their neighbours' dominions. The restored Bourbon monarchy in France was equally narrow and reactionary. Not content with crushing liberty in their own realms, the Austrians invaded Naples and the French Spain, when the kings of those countries had been forced to grant constitutional government to their subjects. In each case the constitution was abolished and despotic rule restored. While Castlereagh was guiding the Foreign Office, the English ministry had refused to interfere with these continental troubles, and had allowed the members of the Holy Alliance to do what they pleased with their smaller neighbours. Canning's advent to power changed this policy. He protected Portugal from an invasion by the French and Spaniards, allied in the cause of despotism, and recognized the independence of the revolted Spanish colonies in America, "calling," as he said, "the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old."

[Sidenote: =The Greek insurrection.--Battle of Navarino.=]

But the sympathy of Canning, and of all men of generous mind in England, was most deeply stirred by the Greek insurrection against the grinding tyranny of the Turks, which had commenced in 1821, and had been struggling on, accompanied by all manner of atrocities and massacres, for six years. The resurrection of the ancient people of Hellas stirred all the memories of the past, and called forth much enthusiasm in England. Many English volunteers hastened to the East to aid the insurgents: Lord Cochrane took command of their fleet, and General Church headed some of their land forces. Even Lord Byron, the poet, roused himself from his mis-spent life of luxury in Italy, and went out to offer his sword and fortune to a people rightly struggling to be free. His death from marsh-fever at Missolonghi caused him to be looked on as the martyr of liberty, and gave England yet a further interest in the cause that he had championed. When the Turks failed to put down the rising, in spite of all their massacres, the Sultan called in the aid of his vassal Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, who landed his well-trained army in the Peloponnesus and overran half the peninsula. Canning then induced the Russian and French governments, who had their own private ends to serve, to join him in interfering, and an English fleet was sent out to the coast of Greece. When the Egyptian troops refused to quit the Peloponnesus, and the atrocities continued, Sir Edward Codrington, the English admiral, aided by a few French and Russian ships, sailed into the bay of Navarino--the ancient Pylos--where the Turkish and Egyptian fleets lay, and destroyed them all save a few vessels. In this he had exceeded his instructions, but he saved the independence of Greece, and English public opinion ratified his action (Oct. 20, 1827).

[Sidenote: =Death of Canning.=]

But ere Navarino had been fought, a new ministry was in power in England. Lord Liverpool had been stricken by paralysis in February, 1827, and Canning, as was natural, became prime minister. But the weakness of his position was soon apparent. Many Tories who opposed the Catholic claims deserted him; the Whigs would not join him; the strain of responsibility told fatally on his health, and he died on August 8, after less than five months' tenure of the premiership. The ministry which he had formed continued for a few months, under the leadership of the weak and fussy Lord Goderich, who found himself unable to manage Canning's motley following, and was forced to resign before the meeting of Parliament.

[Sidenote: =Wellington and the Greek insurgents.=]

The king then proposed that a strong head should be found for the ministry, in the person of a man universally respected and owning a splendid reputation for loyalty and stern sense of duty--the Duke of Wellington, the hero of the Peninsular War. The suggestion was an unhappy one, for Wellington had little political knowledge, had never managed Parliament, and was full of honest but obstinate prejudices. He was, however, made prime minister, and troubles soon began to follow. Almost the first utterance of the duke was to stigmatise the victory of Navarino as "an untoward event"--which gave great offence, for most men looked upon it as a righteous blow against tyranny and oppression. He refused to continue Canning's efforts in favour of Greece, and that country ultimately obtained her freedom from the not very disinterested hands of Russia. For in 1828 Czar Nicholas attacked the Turks, sent his armies across the Balkans, and imposed peace on Sultan Mahmoud, helping himself to a large slice of Ottoman territory in Asia at the same time that he stipulated for the recognition of Greek independence.

[Sidenote: =Wellington as prime minister.=]

Though the most upright and conscientious of men, Wellington proved a very unsatisfactory prime minister. His main fault was precisely the one that would least have been expected from an old soldier--a tendency to flinch from his resolves and engagements when he found that public opinion was set against him. Personally he was a Tory of the old school: for popular cries and magnificent programmes he had a rooted distrust, which he had picked up in the Peninsula, while dealing with the bombastic and incapable statesmen who led the liberal party in the Spanish Cortes. But, on the other hand, he had seen so much of the horrors of civil war, that he had imbibed a great dread of making himself responsible for any measure that might split the nation into hostile camps and cause domestic strife. These two conflicting impulses acted on his mind in strange and often abrupt alternations. He was always making reactionary declarations, and then receding from them when he found they were unpopular.

At first it seemed likely that he was about to make himself the mouthpiece of the stern and unbending Tories of the school of Castlereagh. Before he had been three months in office he had dismissed Huskisson, and the other disciples of Canning followed Huskisson into retirement.

[Sidenote: =Catholic Emancipation.--Daniel O'Connell.=]

But very soon he disappointed his more fanatical followers. In the summer of 1828 he was confronted with a great national agitation in Ireland. Since the Union, that country had been in its normal condition of unrest, but the main grievance which Irish agitators mooted was the non-fulfilment of the promise of Catholic Emancipation which Pitt had made in 1800, when he united the two Parliaments. The demand that the majority of the nation should be granted equality of political rights with the minority was obviously just, yet not only Irish Orangemen but English Tories had a violent prejudice against Romanism. It was evident that Emancipation would not be conceded without a struggle. But the Irish at this moment were headed by the adroit and capable Daniel O'Connell, a wealthy squire of old family, a platform orator of great power and pathos, and a skilful party leader, but vain, scurrilous, and noisy. He founded an "Association," the prototype of the Land Leagues and National Leagues of our own day, to forward the Catholic claims. He filled the land with monster public meetings, and frightened the champions of Protestant ascendency by vague threats of civil war. To his great credit he kept his followers from crime, a feat which his successors have not always accomplished. His power was shown by his triumphant return to Parliament, in defiance of the law, for County Clare. Under the influence of their priests, the Irish farmers had broken away from their old subservience to the great landlords, and placed themselves at O'Connell's disposal.

[Sidenote: =Wellington concedes Emancipation to the Catholics.=]

Wellington was by birth an Anglo-Irish Protestant, and he detested Romanism, but he detested civil war still more. When O'Connell's agitation grew formidable, and the old Tories urged him to repress it by force, he refused. At last his mind was made up to grant Emancipation. His own words explain his mental attitude, "I have passed a longer period of my life in war than most men, and principally in civil war, and I must say this, that if I could avert by any sacrifice even one month's civil war in the country to which I am attached, I would give my life to do it." In the spring of 1829 Wellington announced his intention of granting complete equality of civil rights to all Romanists. Many of his followers called him a weathercock and a turncoat, while the vicious old king pretended--in imitation of his father's action in 1801--that his conscience forbade him to violate his coronation oath. But Wellington carried his Emancipation bill with the aid of Whig support, and against the votes of all the narrower Tories. The king swallowed his scruples with cowardly haste, and the Act was made law (April 14, 1829). O'Connell and some scores of his followers, his "Tail" as the English called them, entered Parliament and allied themselves to the Whigs.

[Sidenote: =The Reform agitation renewed.=]

The Emancipation question being moved out of the way, the topic of Parliamentary Reform came once more to the front as the great difficulty of the day. When the Whigs began to moot it again, they found the time favourable, for the Wellington ministry was grown very weak. The duke had expelled the moderate Tories from his cabinet in 1828, he had angered the old Tories by his concession to the Romanists in 1829, and could no longer command the loyalty of either section of his party.

[Sidenote: =Europe in 1830.=]

The agitation for the reform of the Commons began to become formidable in the stormy year 1830. Unrest was in the air, and all over the world popular risings were rife. In July the French rose in arms, dethroned their dull and despotic king, Charles X., and replaced him by his popular cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans. The Poles raised an insurrection against the tyranny of Czar Nicholas. There were troubles in Italy and Germany, and open war in Belgium and Portugal; everywhere the partisans of the Holy Alliance and the old régime were being assailed by riot and insurrection. It was natural that England should feel the influence of this wave of discontent.

[Sidenote: =Accession of William IV.=]

In the midst of the year King George died, worn out by his evil living (June 26, 1830). He was succeeded by his third brother, William Duke of Clarence, for Frederick of York, the second son of George III., had died in 1827. The new king was an eccentric but good-natured old sailor. He was simple, patriotic, and kindly, and carried into all his doings something of the breezy geniality of his old profession. But his elevation almost turned his brain, and in the first months of his reign he was guilty of a dozen absurd actions and speeches which made men fear for his sanity. "It is a good sovereign," punned a contemporary wit, "but it is a little cracked." The best feature in William was that he was not a party man; he acted all through his reign as a constitutional monarch should, and his personal popularity did much to make the crisis of the reform agitation of 1830-1832 pass off without harm.

[Sidenote: =Fall of Wellington's ministry.=]

The fall of Wellington's ministry followed very closely on the accession of the new king. A general election in the autumn of 1830 was fatal to the duke's majority in the Commons. The old Tories refused to interest themselves in his fate, and would not work for him, while the Whigs made a great effort and swept off almost all the seats in which election was really free and open. No less than sixty out of eighty-two county seats in England were captured by them. Parliament reassembled on November 2, and on November 15 Wellington was beaten by a majority of twenty-nine in the Lower House and promptly resigned.

[Sidenote: =The Whigs return to office.=]

William IV. immediately took the proper constitutional step of sending for the leader of the opposition, Lord Grey. After an absence of twenty-three years from power the Whigs once more crossed to the treasury bench and took over the management of the realm. Their long exile from office had made them better at criticism than administration, and they found it hard to settle down into harness--more especially as some of the new ministry were wanting in restraint and gravity, notably the Lord Chancellor Brougham, one of the most versatile and able, but also one of the most eccentric and volatile men who has ever sat on the woolsack. But the cabinet was much strengthened by the adhesion of two of the Canningite Tories, Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, who became respectively Secretary for Ireland and Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The Whigs at once took in hand the chief item of their programme, Parliamentary Reform, though O'Connell was doing his best to bring another topic to the front by agitating for Home Rule, or "Repeal" as it was then called, and was enlisting all Catholic Ireland in a league for that end.

[Sidenote: =The Peers throw out the Reform Bill.=]

In March, 1831, Lord John Russell, a young member of one of the greatest Whig houses, and the great-grandson of the Bedford who was minister in 1763, brought forward his famous Reform Bill, which disfranchised most of the rotten boroughs, and distributed their seats among the large towns and the more populous counties. Owing to differences of opinion among the Whigs themselves as to the exact shape it should assume, the bill never reached its third reading in the Commons. The ministry then dissolved Parliament, in order to get a clear verdict from the constituencies on the Reform question. They came back to Westminster with a magnificent majority of 136. Lord John Russell again introduced his bill, which passed all its readings with ease, but was rejected by the Tory majority in the House of Lords on October 8, 1831.

[Sidenote: =Violent demonstrations against the Peers.=]

This rash action of the peers brought about such a quarrel between the two Houses as has never been seen before or since, and nearly wrecked the old order of the English constitution. For the peers had never before dared to cross such a crushing majority as the Whigs then possessed in the Commons, backed by the public opinion of the nation. Riotous demonstrations in favour of Reform burst out all over the country, often accompanied by violence. At Bristol there was a wild rising, ending in the burning and pillaging of many buildings, public and private. In London a "National Union" of reformers was formed to bring pressure to bear on the Lords. At Birmingham a local Radical named Attwood formed an association of 200,000 members, who swore to march on London and use force if their cry of "The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill," was denied.

Strengthened by these demonstrations of popular sympathy, the ministers brought in their bill for the third time, and again sent it up to the Lords. The Upper House was seriously frightened by the turmoil in the country, and allowed the bill to pass its second reading. But the more fanatical Tories made a final rally and mutilated the bill in committee by postponing the clauses which disfranchised the rotten boroughs (May 7, 1832).

[Sidenote: =Wellington refuses to take office.=]

This brought England within a measurable distance of civil war. The ministry resigned, throwing on the king and the Lords the responsibility for anything that might occur. King William, in strict constitutional form, asked the Duke of Wellington to form a Tory cabinet. The duke unwillingly essayed the task; but the feeling of the majority of the Tories was so strongly in favour of leaving to the Whigs the responsibility of facing the crisis, that the duke threw up the cards, and acknowledged his inability to form a ministry. This was fortunate, for the Radicals had been organizing armed multitudes, and threatened open insurrection. But the eventful ten days during which war was in the air passed over, and the Grey cabinet came back to power.

[Sidenote: =The Reform Bill carried.=]

In the end of May the bill was sent up to the Lords for the third time. The king promised Lord Grey that if the bill was again rejected, he would create enough new Whig peers to carry it against any opposition. The House of Lords was made aware of this promise, and, to avoid forcing the king to this extremity, Wellington and one hundred Tory peers solemnly left their seats, and allowed the Act to pass by a considerable majority (June 4, 1832).

[Sidenote: =The redistribution of seats.=]

The details of the measure in its final shape deserve a word of notice. It disfranchised all the absolutely rotten boroughs, i.e. all places with less than 2000 inhabitants--which were no less than 56 in number. It took away one member each from 30 boroughs more, which had more than 2000 but less than 4000 residents. This gave 143 seats for distribution among the unrepresented or under-represented districts. Of these 65 were given to the counties and 78 to new boroughs. In the former case the county was broken up into two or more divisions, each returning two members. In the latter, five London boroughs[58] and twenty-two large places (such as Birmingham and Manchester) received two members each, while twenty-one considerable towns of the second rank got one member each.

[Sidenote: =The new borough and county franchise.=]

At the same time the franchise was made regular all over England. Previously it had varied in the most arbitrary fashion; some towns had practically manhood suffrage; in others the corporation had been the only electors. Now, in the boroughs, the power to vote was given to all resident occupiers of premises of £10 yearly value--so that all the shopkeeping class and the wealthier artisans got the franchise, but not the poorer inhabitants. In the counties freeholders, copyholders, and holders of leases for 60 years to the annual value of £10, with occupiers paying a yearly rent of £50, were enfranchised. Thus the farmers and yeomen ruled the poll, and the agricultural labourers had no voice in the matter. The franchise in Ireland was assimilated to that in England, thus depriving of their power the £2 householders who had hitherto been allowed to vote in that country. In Scotland, on the other hand, the rule was slightly more liberal than in England, as occupiers of £10 farms were given the franchise, instead of £50 being left as the limit.

Thus the United Kingdom acquired its first representative Parliament. But the new body was as yet representative of the middle classes alone; it was thought, wisely enough, that the agricultural labourers and the town poor were as yet unfit to be electors. For thirty years no serious attempt to extend the limits of the franchise was made, and fifty were to elapse before simple household suffrage in town and county alike was to be made the rule. Meanwhile, the first Reform Bill amply justified itself, and gave England two generations of quiet and orderly government.

FOOTNOTES:

[56] Addington had been created Lord Sidmouth long before this, but to avoid confusion his better-known name is still used.

[57] See page 409.

[58] Lambeth, Greenwich, Marylebone, Finsbury, Tower Hamlets.

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XL. CHARTISM AND THE CORN LAWS

1832-52.

[Sidenote: =Fears excited by the Reform Bill.=]

The struggle over the Reform Bill had been so fierce, and the change in the House of Commons caused by it had been so sweeping, that it was generally supposed at the time that the immediate consequences of the triumph of the Whigs would be very marked and startling. The Tories prophesied the introduction, at no very distant date, of legislation on behalf of all the Radical cries which the more extreme followers of Lord Grey had adopted--such as manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, the abolition of the standing army, the disestablishment of the Church of England. Some even whispered that Great Britain would have ceased to be a monarchy within ten years.

[Sidenote: =Its actual results.=]

All these suspicions were unfounded. By the action of the Reform Bill, the power to make and unmake cabinets had passed, not into the hands of the masses, but into those of the middle classes--the shopkeepers of the towns and the farmers of the countryside. These were a very different body from the excited mobs who had rioted in the streets and threatened civil war in the years 1830-32. As a matter of fact, the bill had done comparatively little for those who supported it most violently, and caused grave disappointment to the wilder spirits among the followers of Lord Grey. It had put an end to borough-mongering; no ministry could henceforth hope to keep in office unless it had the support of the majority of the constituencies. It had placed the individual member much more under the control of the electors than had been the case in earlier years, so that the power of public opinion was greatly increased. It had modified the composition of the House of Commons, by bringing in a large number of new members of a different type from the old; for the great industrial centres in the North and Midlands, which now obtained representatives for the first time, had mostly returned wealthy local manufacturers and merchants to speak in their behalf.

But neither the newly enfranchised classes nor their members in Parliament were likely to be in favour of sudden and violent changes in the constitution or the social condition of the realm, such as had sometimes appeared imminent in the turbulent years between 1816 and 1832. The Whigs were no Radicals; it was more than thirty years before they began seriously to think of enfranchising the labouring classes, and facing all the problems of democracy. A sufficient indication of the character of Lord Grey's ministry is to be found in the fact that some of its most important members were recruited from the ranks of the moderate Tories; Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, had both been followers of Canning, and had joined the ranks of the Whigs only when they saw the Tories under Wellington finally committed to reactionary views. Perhaps Huskisson, Canning's minister of commerce, would have gone with them, but he had been killed--just before Lord Grey came into office--in the first railway accident that ever occurred in England.

[Sidenote: =The new Poor Law.=]

The Grey ministry held office for four years only, but did much for the country in that time. Its best piece of work was the new Poor Law of 1834, which put an end to the ruinous and degrading system of outdoor relief,[59] which had been crushing the agricultural labourer and loading the parishes with debt ever since the unwise legislation of 1795. The new law reimposed the old test of the workhouse on applicants for charity. Only aged and impotent persons were to receive doles of money and food at their own homes; able-bodied men were forced to enter the workhouse--which they naturally detested on account of its restraint--or to give up their weekly allowance. The result was to force the farmers to pay the whole of their labourers' wages, and to cease to expect the parish to find half of the amount. This was perfectly just and rational; the parish finances were at once lightened of their crushing burden, while the labourers ceased to be pauperized, and did not lose anything by the change of the method of payment. But if they lost nothing, they gained nothing, and the condition of the rural classes of England still remained much inferior to what it had been in the old days, before enclosure acts and high rents came into vogue in the second half of the eighteenth century. The new Poor Law compelled small neighbouring parishes to combine into "unions" to keep a common workhouse, and it was found that one large institution was worked both more efficiently and less expensively than several small ones. In seven years the total cost of the poor relief of England fell from nearly £8,000,000 to £4,700,000, an immense relief to the country.

[Sidenote: =Abolition of slavery.=]

Another splendid piece of work done by the ministry of Lord Grey was the final abolition of slavery in the English colonies. Though the slave-trade had long been prohibited, yet slavery itself still subsisted, and the West Indian planters were a body strong and wealthy enough to offer a vigorous opposition to the enfranchisement of their negroes. Many of the old Tories were narrow and misguided enough to lend them aid in Parliament, but the bill was carried. Twenty million pounds were set aside to compensate the owners, and on August 1, 1834, all the slaves became free, though they were bound to work as apprentices to their late masters for seven years--a period afterwards shortened to three.

[Sidenote: =The Municipal Corporations Act.=]

A third useful measure was the reform of the municipal corporations of England, of which many had hitherto been wholly unrepresentative bodies, not chosen by the people, but co-opting each other, and often worked by small and corrupt party or family rings. For this absurd arrangement the Act of 1835 substituted a popular and elective constitution, to the enormous improvement of the purity and respectability of the municipal bodies.

[Sidenote: =Palmerston's foreign policy,--France.=]

The European policy of the Whigs was in the hands of the brisk and self-reliant Lord Palmerston, who directed the foreign relations of England for nearly thirty years, with a few intervals of retirement from office. He had left the Tories because he disliked their policy of non-intervention in continental affairs, and because he nourished an active dislike for the despotic monarchies of the Holy Alliance. His end was to raise up a league in Western Europe which should support national liberties and constitutional government in each country, against the autocratic and reactionary powers of Central and Eastern Europe. He therefore allied himself with Louis Philippe of Orleans, the new King of France, who had been set up by the Liberal party in that country as a constitutional king after the expulsion of Charles X.

[Sidenote: =Spain and Portugal.=]

He actively assisted the parties in Spain and Portugal who were fighting for limited monarchy and the nation's right to choose its own sovereign. In each of those countries there was a civil war in progress between the Liberal party, backing a young queen with a parliamentary title to the crown, and the reactionary party, supported by the priesthood, and upholding a prince who claimed the throne under the Salic law, and appealed to the divine hereditary right of kings. Palmerston supported both Donna Maria in Portugal and Donna Isabella in Spain against their uncles Don Miguel and Don Carlos, by every means short of the actual sending of British troops to the Peninsula. But many officers were allowed to volunteer into the Portuguese and Spanish service, and the struggle was largely settled by their aid. The designs of Don Miguel in Portugal were finally frustrated by the defeat of his fleet by Admiral Napier, who commanded the young queen's ships (1831). In Spain the fighting lasted much longer, and the efforts of Sir De Lacy Evans' "British Legion" against the Carlists were not altogether successful (1835-38), but the war ultimately came to an end in the favour of Queen Isabella in 1840.

[Sidenote: =Holland and Belgium.=]

Palmerston also lent his support to the national party in a struggle nearer home. Holland and Belgium had been united into a single kingdom by the treaty of Vienna, and placed under the House of Orange, the old Stadtholders of the United Provinces. But the Belgians much disliked the arrangement; they were divided by religion from their northern kinsfolk, and had no national sympathy with them, or loyalty to their Dutch king. In 1830 they rose in arms and declared their independence; William I. of Holland endeavoured to subdue them, and perhaps might have succeeded but for the interference of England and of Louis Philippe, the new King of France. When the Dutch refused to come to terms, a French army entered Belgium and expelled the garrison of Antwerp, while an English fleet blockaded the Scheldt. On this pressure being applied, the Dutch yielded, and the kingdom of Belgium was established, its first sovereign being a prince well known in England, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of the much-lamented Princess Charlotte.[60]

Thus when France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium were in the hands of governments professing liberal principles and opposed to despotism, the reactionary monarchs of the Holy Alliance ceased to appear such a danger to the existence of constitutional monarchy in Europe.

[Sidenote: =Peel and the "Conservative" party.=]

While fairly successful alike in its foreign policy and its English legislation, the Grey cabinet was never so strong as might have been expected from its triumphant commencement of office. The Tory party, which had seemed shattered for ever by the Reform Bill, and had remained for some years in a broken and helpless condition, began gradually to reorganize itself under the wise and cautious leadership of Sir Robert Peel. Though Palmerston Melbourne, and the other Canningites who had quitted it in 1828, did not return to its ranks, and remained moderate Whigs, yet there were many others who gradually rallied themselves to the old "Church and State" party. The new voters whom the Reform Bill had created did not prove so universally devoted to Radical principles as had been expected. There was always much attachment to the old ideals in the middle classes. When Peel appeared as leader, in place of narrow old Tories of the type of Castlereagh and Addington, he was gradually enabled to collect a large body of followers, and to form an opposition commanding a respectable number of votes. About this time he wisely dropped the name of Tory, and called himself and his followers "Conservatives," in order to get rid of the unfortunate associations of the older party appellation.

[Sidenote: =The Tithe War.--Lord Grey resigns.=]

But the time was still far off when the Conservatives were to obtain a preponderance in the House of Commons. Lord Grey resigned in 1834, but only to give place to another Whig prime minister, who continued the policy and work of his predecessor with the aid of most of his cabinet. The change of premiers was due to a division among the Whigs caused by Irish affairs. The grant of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had completely failed to quiet Ireland. It only caused the Irish to substitute new demands for the old ones. O'Connell, flushed with his victory on the Emancipation question, had started two new agitations, combined with each other much as Home Rule and the Land Question are combined by modern Irish politicians. The first of them was the demand for "Repeal," that is, the abolition of the Union of 1800, and the establishment of a local Parliament in Dublin--the cry that is called Home Rule in our own day. The second was the Tithe War, a crusade against the payment by the Romanist peasantry of tithes for the support of the Established Church of Ireland, a body which they naturally detested. The Tithe War lasted for six or seven years, and was accompanied by much rioting and outrage; the peasantry withheld the tithe, and the Protestant clergy were in many cases absolutely ruined and reduced to starvation by being deprived of their sustenance. A coercion bill for the suppression of riots and violence was passed in 1833, and had some effect in restoring order.

But the ministry was divided on the question of the justice of continuing to extract money from the Romanist peasantry to support an alien Church. The premier proposed that the government should take over the collection of the tithe, but use it for such purposes, secular or otherwise, as might be deemed fit. But many of his colleagues objected to diverting Church money from its original uses, and the cabinet fell to pieces after a stormy scene in the House over a renewal of the Coercion Act. Grey retired, and the king sent for Sir Robert Peel, who at once dissolved Parliament, but the Whigs had a majority in the new House, and Peel fell, after holding office for four months only. Grey's colleague, Lord Melbourne, took over the conduct of affairs and rearranged the cabinet, excluding only the late premier, and his clever but eccentric Chancellor, Lord Brougham.

[Sidenote: =The Melbourne ministry.--=]

This ministry struggled on for six years, confronted always by the strong Conservative following and the master mind of Peel, and dependent on the uncertain support of O'Connell and his "Tail." Its chief achievement was the final passing of the Irish Tithe Act, which relieved the peasantry of the duty of paying that contribution to the Established Church, and transferred it to their landlords, so that the tithe was for the future a charge on rent. O'Connell accepted this compromise, and the Tithe War ended, but the Repeal agitation went on vigorously, and monster meetings all over Ireland were continually demanding Home Rule. O'Connell had the priests on his side to a man, and, using them as his instruments, could dictate orders to the countryside, and return all the members for the Catholic districts of Ireland. To his great credit, he kept the agitation clear of outrages, as he had already done in the case of Emancipation ten years before. Without having recourse to any such expedients, he was able to keep the government in continual hot water, and more than once to wrest concessions of importance from it.

[Sidenote: =Death of William IV.=]

The Melbourne cabinet was still wandering on its feeble way when on June 20, 1837, the worthy old king, William IV., died. His decease had no great effect on the politics of the realm, for when the election for a new Parliament took place--as was necessary on the sovereign's death--the ministry was found to have in the new House a small majority, of much the same numbers as that which they had enjoyed in the old.

[Sidenote: =Accession of Queen Victoria.--Hanover separated from England.=]

The successor of King William was his niece Victoria, daughter of Edward Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. She was a young girl of eighteen, who had been brought up very quietly at Kensington Palace by her widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. Little was known of her by the nation at large, and some of the baser spirits among the Tories whispered at first that she would prove a party-sovereign and a mere tool of the Whigs. But it was not long before the world discovered that the young queen was likely to be a model for constitutional monarchs. She was simple, straightforward, filled with a deep consciousness of the responsibility of her position, and anxious to discharge her duties with all possible regard for the well-being of her subjects. The more she was known, the more was she liked and respected, and there was accordingly a general feeling of relief that the throne had not gone to the next heir, the queen's unpopular uncle, Ernest Duke of Cumberland. That prince, moreover, now became ruler of Hanover, where the Salic law prevailed, and the kingdom was finally separated from England after a hundred and twenty-three years of union. Thus England was freed from all necessity for interfering in the internal politics of Germany.

[Sidenote: =The Queen and Lord Melbourne.=]

Lord Melbourne, behind an air of studied levity, possessed a strong will and a conscientious desire to do well by his country. He determined to place his experience at the disposal of the young queen, and to teach her the ways of constitutional monarchy. Until her marriage he acted as her private secretary, using his position for no party purpose. In the language of the Duke of Wellington, he "taught her to preside over the destinies of this great country."

[Sidenote: =The Government and the Radicals.=]

The Melbourne cabinet lasted till September, 1841, much vexed in its later years by social troubles in England, the result of the growing discontent among the working classes at the failure of the Reform Bill to bring about a golden age. They had thought that the creation of a representative House of Commons would be followed by all manner of Radical reforms, and were now complaining that the new government was little better than the old. "The Tories scourged us with whips, but the Whigs use scorpions," complained Cobbett, the Radical pamphleteer, while Lord Grey was still in power. There was this amount of truth in the complaint, that the Tories were always trying to interfere in social matters, and believed in "paternal government" and the duty of the State to care for the individual citizen; but the Whigs, under the influence of the rules of strict political economy, held that the State must not meddle with private men, that the rule of laissez faire, or non-intervention, was right, and that free competition between man and man was the true order of life. Now, Tory interference with social matters had generally been wrong-headed and disastrous, but Whig indifference and abstention was quite as exasperating to the masses.

[Sidenote: =The People's Charter.=]

The old delusion that men can be made happy by legislation and grants of political rights, was still universally prevalent, and the discontent of the labouring classes took shape--now, as in the last generation--in a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The new agitation got its name from the document called "the People's Charter," which was put forward as the programme of the movement. It contained five claims--(1) for manhood suffrage, (2) for the vote by ballot at elections, (3) for annual Parliaments, (4) for the payment of members, (5) for the throwing open of seats in the House of Commons to all men by the abolition of the property qualification, which was still required, in theory, to be possessed by members. It is curious to reflect how entirely useless all these five demands would have been to cure the social discontents of the day. The second and fifth clauses of the charter have long been granted, the first is practically conceded, and the fourth may be so ere long, yet the ills against which the Chartists were protesting are still with us. For the real end of the agitation was in truth purely social; it was much the same as the cry for the so-called "living wage" that is heard among us to-day. "The principle of the People's Charter," said one of its advocates in 1838, "is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. It means that every working man in the land has a right to a good coat, a good hat, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty." The demagogues--honest or dishonest--who led the Chartist movement insisted that the golden age would follow the introduction of universal suffrage and their other demands, though it is difficult to see how they can have been so simple as to hold such a view. But they were, for the most part, mere windy orators, with no grasp of the means or ends that they needed; the most prominent man of the whole band being Feargus O'Connor, an Irishman with an enormous flow of words and an ill-balanced brain, who ended his days in a lunatic asylum. Riotous public meetings, where threats of physical force were freely used, were rife all through the years 1838-42, and gave the Whig ministry no small trouble. But the movement was never so dangerous to law and order as the troubles of the years 1816-32 had been, for the Chartists were backed by neither of the great political parties, had no competent leaders, and were detested for their noisy turbulence by the whole of the middle classes, Whig and Tory alike. Parliament refused to take them seriously, even when they kept sending up monster petitions to the House of Commons, purporting to contain a million and a half or even three million signatures. One of these documents, as large in circumference as a cart-wheel, had to be carried by sixteen men, and stuck in the door of the House, so that it had to be cut up in order to allow it to enter. But petitions, riots, and wild talk had none of them any practical effect.

[Sidenote: =The Opium War.=]

There was little that was eventful in the foreign policy of the later years of the Melbourne cabinet. The only events of importance were our first war with China, and our interference in the Levant to prevent the break-up of the Turkish empire. The Chinese quarrel--the Opium War, as it was often called--arose from the destruction of a quantity of that drug belonging to English merchants by the mandarins of Canton, who had resolved not to allow it to be imported into their country. In consequence, an army was sent out to the far East, which, after some desultory fighting, compelled the Chinese to sue for peace, pay an indemnity of 21,000,000 dollars, and cede the island of Hong-Kong, which, in British hands, has since become one of the greatest ports of the world (1839-41).

[Sidenote: =England and Mehemet Ali.=]

The war in Syria was caused by the attempt of Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, to assert his independence, and to tear Syria and Asia Minor from his suzerain the Sultan. Thinking that the maintenance of Turkey was essential to British interests in the East, Lord Palmerston bade the rebel pasha retire within his own borders, and, on his refusal, bombarded and took Acre and Sidon. This brought Mehemet Ali to reason, and he acquiesced in an agreement which left him the position of a quasi-independent ruler in Egypt, but stripped him of his conquests beyond the Syrian desert (January, 1841).

[Sidenote: =The Prince Consort.=]

In the year which preceded this last war, England had been rejoiced to see her queen happily married. The young sovereign's choice had been her own first cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, whom the country knew so well first as "Prince Albert," then as the "Prince Consort." He was very young at the time of the marriage, being only in his twenty-first year, but from his earliest days in England showed a remarkable wisdom and power of adapting himself to his new surroundings. While carefully refraining from taking any ostensible part in politics, he was able in many ways to act as a useful counsellor both for his wife and his wife's ministers, for he had a large knowledge of foreign politics, and a sound and cautious judgment. His blameless private life and many amiable qualities endeared him to all who came into personal contact with him; but for many years he was not properly appreciated by the English people, who were vaguely suspicious of a foreign prince placed in such a difficult position as that of husband to a constitutional queen. All their suspicions of him and his influence were ungrounded, but it was not till after his death in 1861 that most men realized what a thoroughly wise and unselfish friend of England he had been.

[Sidenote: =The Conservatives in office.=]

The Melbourne ministry went out of power a few months after the queen's marriage. A general election took place in June-July, 1841, and a Conservative majority was returned to the House of Commons, whereupon Sir Robert Peel was called upon to take office in the due course of constitutional etiquette.

[Sidenote: =Peel as premier.=]

The Tories, now again in power after an interval of twelve years, were a very different party from what they had been in the old days before 1830. The whole body of them had moved slowly forward, but there were still, as always, a more and a less progressive section among them, as in the days of Canning and Castlereagh. Peel himself had generally been considered to belong to the former body, though he had been one of those who opposed Parliamentary Reform to the last. His own breeding and character account for his position; he was not a member of one of the old aristocratic Tory families, but the son of a wealthy Lancashire millowner, a representative of the Conservatism of the middle classes, not of the old landed interest. He was a firm, able, conscientious man, rather too masterful in dealing with his followers, and prone to command rather than to persuade. But in 1841 his authority over them seemed so firmly established, that men prophesied that he would rule for as many years as the younger Pitt. As a matter of fact, his ministry was only to last from September, 1841, to July, 1846, and, instead of establishing the Conservative party firmly in power, he was fated to break it up, and to condemn it to almost continuous exile from office for nearly thirty years.[61]

[Sidenote: =Peel's finance.--The income tax.=]

But Peel's early years of power promised well. His first achievement was to restore the national finances, which had been left in a most unsatisfactory condition by the Melbourne ministry. His budget of 1842 was long remembered as being the first important step in the direction of Free Trade that had been taken for many years. He reduced the import duties on nearly 750 articles of consumption, reasoning that the advantage to the consumer far outweighed the loss to the English manufacturer, whose interests were served by the protective duties which he removed. To make up the deficit in the revenue caused by these remissions of import duties, he imposed the income tax, under a pledge that it was to be an exceptional impost; five years, he said, would suffice to restore the revenue to its old amount, and it should then be dropped. Unfortunately for all persons with fixed incomes, Peel was out of office long before the five years were over, and none of his successors has ever redeemed his pledge. The income tax still remains with us, the easy and obvious method by which any impecunious Chancellor of the Exchequer can wring more money from the middle classes, by adding an extra "penny in the pound." It must, however, be granted that at its first imposition it tided England very successfully over a dangerous financial crisis.

[Sidenote: =The Chartist agitation.=]

The Melbourne cabinet had left the task of dealing with two troublesome agitations as a legacy to their successors. The Chartists were still thundering away at monster meetings, and bombarding Parliament with gigantic petitions. One sent to the House of Commons in 1842 purported to be signed by 3,000,000 persons, and was actually signed by, perhaps, a third of that number. It was couched in such seditious terms that the government refused to receive it, and were supported by a majority of 238, when certain Radical members pressed them to a division. But Peel's hand was known to be firm, and it was obvious that there was no chance of intimidating him; so the Chartist agitation, though it continued to simmer all through his time, never boiled up into any dangerous effervescence.

[Sidenote: =The "Young Ireland Party."=]

In Ireland matters seemed for a time more serious. Daniel O'Connell was still pressing on his campaign for Repeal. He was the master of the greater part of the Irish people, and had his well-disciplined "Tail" to follow him in the Commons. But as long as both Conservatives and Whigs refused to buy his aid at the price of granting his demands for Home Rule, he could do no more than bluster and declaim at public meetings. But O'Connell was joined, in the year 1842, by a body of recruits who refused to be fettered by his command to refrain from the use of physical force. A band of ardent young politicians, the political heirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Robert Emmet, bound themselves together to strive for Repeal by the old method of armed rebellion--when "England's extremity should be Ireland's opportunity." They called themselves the "Young Ireland Party," revived the old watchwords of the United Irishmen, and gloried in the principles of '98. The chiefs of this faction were Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Gavan Duffy. O'Connell was afraid of their rashness, and the priesthood, who acted as O'Connell's agents all over Ireland, viewed them with suspicion as possible republicans and atheists; but they gained considerable influence in the land.

[Sidenote: =O'Connell's influence declines.=]

The Repeal agitation came to a head in 1843, when O'Connell gathered several hundred thousand people together at a meeting at Tara, the old seat of the Kings of Ireland, and addressed them in an excited strain, promising them "a Parliament of their own on College Green within the year." But Peel had him and his chief lieutenants arrested, and tried for sedition. The whole agitation seemed to collapse when the government made a show of force, and, though O'Connell was ultimately acquitted, his hold on the Irish people was much shaken by the obvious uselessness for any practical end of all his meetings and harangues. The majority of his followers fell back into apathy, the minority resolved to join the "Young Irelanders," and to plot armed treason at some convenient date in the future. Meanwhile Repeal was dead, and O'Connell died a few years later, just before the miserable years 1846-7 revived the troubles of Ireland.

[Sidenote: =England and the United States.=]

English foreign policy in Peel's day continued on the good lines on which Palmerston had placed it, for the new Conservative party were vigilant to defend our interests abroad, and to resent the aggression of our neighbours. A very threatening dispute with the United States about the south-western boundaries of British America was settled in 1842, by a satisfactory treaty which gave England Vancouver's Island and all the coast north of the Straits of Juan da Fuca, taking the forty-ninth degree of latitude as the dividing-line from the Pacific to the end of Lake Superior. The Americans had claimed, but had to give up, the whole western shore of North America, up to the Russian province of Alaska.

[Sidenote: =England and France.=]

Twice England appeared likely to engage in war with France--in 1844 and 1846--while Peel was in power. The first quarrel was about the annexation of the island of Tahiti, in the Pacific, where a French admiral arrested the English consul, and seized the island in the most arbitrary way from its queen. But Louis Philippe did not wish for war with the only power in Europe that looked kindly on a constitutional monarchy in France, and forced his ministers to apologize to England and abandon Tahiti. In the second quarrel, the crafty and intriguing old king was himself to blame. He had formed a design for securing Spain for his younger son Anthony, Duke of Montpensier, by means of a marriage. The crown of that country was now worn by the young Queen Isabella, whose heiress was her still younger sister Louisa. Louis Philippe secured the marriage of the younger princess with his own son. At the same time, by disreputable intrigues with the Spanish queen-mother, Christina of Naples, and the factious parties in the Cortes, he got the unfortunate queen married to her cousin, Don Francisco, Duke of Cadiz, a wretched weakling, who--as he thought--was certain to die without heirs, so that the crown must ultimately fall to the Montpensiers (1846). This scheme reproduced the old danger that had brought about the war of the Spanish succession in the days of William III. and Anne,--the chance that the crowns of Spain and France might be united. The English government and people were bitterly provoked, high words passed between London and Paris, and there appeared for some time a danger that a rupture might ensue. But external events intervened to prevent such a misfortune. Peel's government lost office in 1846, and Louis Philippe was dethroned in 1848, after which the Spanish marriages ceased to have any importance.

[Sidenote: =Peel and the Free Trade movement.=]

While that question was at its height, England had been going through an unexpected political crisis, caused by Peel's sudden conversion to complete Free Trade. His budget of 1842 had shown that all his tendencies lay in that direction; but he had not yet touched the one point which was certain to bring him into collision with the majority of his own party--the question of Free Trade in corn. Since England had become a great manufacturing country, with a population that advanced by leaps and bounds, it was daily growing more impossible to feed the new mouths with English corn alone. But the heavy duties on imported grain, which survived from the last century, only allowed the foreign wheat to come in at an exorbitant price. Hence the poor man's loaf was always dear. Farmers and landlords profited by this protection of English agriculture, but, since the landed interest had ceased to be the most important element in the state, the Corn Laws injured many more persons than they benefited. For the last five or six years a vigorous agitation in favour of their abolition had been in progress, whose guiding spirit was Richard Cobden, "the prophet of Free Trade." It seemed more likely that the Whigs would be converted by him than the Conservatives, for the backbone of Peel's majority in the House of Commons was composed of the county members, who represented the farmers and landlords of England.

[Sidenote: =The Protectionists.--Disraeli and Lord G. Bentinck.=]

But in 1845, a famine in Ireland, caused by the failure of the potato-crop, called for a large importation of corn to feed the starving Irish cottiers. Peel proposed to suspend the Corn Laws as a temporary measure, to allow of the introduction of the needed supply of food at the cheapest possible rate. His colleagues in the ministry resolved to support the proposal, but they proved unable to persuade the whole of their party to follow them. About a hundred members of the House of Commons--the representatives of the corn-growing shires and the old Tory families--refused to be convinced by Peel's arguments. They were headed by two men of mark, neither of whom had as yet been taken very seriously by the House. The first was Lord George Bentinck, a younger son of the great ducal house of Portland, who had hitherto been seen more frequently on the racecourse than at St. Stephen's, but who showed an unexpected ability when he proceeded to attack his chief. The second was Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a Jewish man of letters, then known as a young and volatile member of the House, who combined high Tory notions on Church and State with extreme Radical views on certain social questions. But he had been hitherto more notorious for his eccentric and gorgeous dress, and his curious high-flown and bombastic novels, than for any serious political doings.

[Sidenote: =The Corn Laws repealed.=]

When Peel brought forward his bill for abolishing the Corn Laws, he found himself bitterly opposed by Bentinck and Disraeli and their protectionist followers, who scouted him as a turncoat and a traitor to the Tory cause. He carried the abolition of the obnoxious duties by the aid of the votes of his enemies, the Whigs (May 15, 1846). A month later the angry Protectionists took their revenge; on the question of an Irish coercion bill, Bentinck and Disraeli led some scores of Tory members into the opposition lobby, and left the prime minister in a minority of seventy-three (June 25, 1846).

[Sidenote: =Break up of the Conservative party.=]

Peel immediately resigned. He had carried his bill, but broken up his party, and the Whigs were now to have a fresh lease of office that lasted thirty years, for the two sections into which the Conservatives had broken up--the Peelites and the Protectionists--would never join again, so bitterly did they dislike each other. In the course of time most of the Peelites drifted over to the Whig camp, among them two who were destined to be prime ministers of England--Lord Aberdeen, who had been Peel's Foreign Secretary, and William Ewart Gladstone, then a rising young member, who had held the Presidency of the Board of Trade from 1843 to 1846.

[Sidenote: =Lord John Russell's ministry.=]

The Whigs, or the Liberal party, as they were now beginning to call themselves, came back to power with every advantage, as the opposition was divided into two irreconcilable sections, who would never join on account of their old grudge. Yet the new cabinet was never a very strong one, because the Whigs refused to put Lord Palmerston, their strongest and ablest man, at the head of affairs. Some of the party could never forget that he had once been a Canningite, and thought that he was not Liberal enough for them; others were afraid of his firm and incisive way of dealing with foreign powers, and prophesied that he would some day land England, unexpectedly, in the midst of a great war. Instead of Palmerston, Lord John Russell, the promoter of the great Reform Bill of 1832, was made premier. He was a much less notable personage than Palmerston, and not strong enough for his place, being nothing more than an adroit party tactician with no touch of genius about him. Yet he held power for six years, and made no great mistakes if he performed no great achievements at home; while, as the foreign policy of England was handed over to Palmerston, there was no lack of strong guidance in things abroad.

[Sidenote: =The famine in Ireland.=]

The chief problem which the Liberal cabinet found to trouble them when they took office was an Irish one. In 1845 there had been a partial failure of the potato-crop, the staple food of the Irish peasantry; this was followed in 1846, just after Lord John Russell came into power, by a far more dreadful disaster of the same kind. In August the whole potato harvest of Southern and Western Ireland was struck down by a sudden blight, such as had never been seen before or since, and 4,000,000 persons were suddenly brought to the verge of starvation. The disaster was aggravated by the hopeless state of the rural population. For the last half-century the population of Ireland had been advancing with disastrous rapidity; it had swelled from 5,000,000 to 8,000,000, yet there had been no corresponding increase either of improved cultivation, or of land taken under tillage. The improvident landlords had allowed the still more improvident tenantry to divide their farms into smaller and smaller fractions, till the land only fed its population in years of exceptional fertility. The greater part of Ireland was cut up into miserable slips of a few acres, where the cottier paid intermittently as much as he could of a rent which was rated at a higher amount than the wretched little farm could ever produce. The unexampled disaster of two successive years of blight brought the whole of the miserable peasantry to the edge of the grave. The workhouses were soon crammed, all local funds used up, and yet the people were dying by thousands from famine, or from the fevers which were bred by insufficient nourishment. The government paltered with the evil by establishing relief works, and refused for some time to face the fact that nothing but wholesale distribution of food would keep the wretched peasantry alive. It was not till 1847 that they faced the full horror of the problem, and established soup-kitchens and depôts for free food all over the land. By this time scores of thousands had died, and the bitterest feelings of wrath had been bred in the Irish mind at the neglect or incompetence of the cabinet.

[Sidenote: =Evictions and emigration.=]

When the famine was over, it was generally recognized that the worst of the disaster had been owing to the congested state of the population, who were trying to live on smaller farms than could really support them. This led to wholesale evictions by the landlords, who, half ruined by the famine themselves, wished to avoid another such experience by thinning off the pauperized cottiers, and throwing several farms into one. In many cases these evictions were carried out with ruthless haste and cruelty, for the proprietors--often absentees who did not know their tenants by sight--had no sympathy for the wretched peasants, and only wanted to be rid of them. The unwilling emigrants were driven out of Ireland by the hundred thousand, and retired for the most part to America, carrying away a fanatical hatred for the Anglo-Irish landholding classes who had evicted them, and for the English government which had sanctioned their expulsion.

[Sidenote: =Smith O'Brien's insurrection.=]

With such class rancour in the air, it was no wonder that troubles broke out in Ireland in 1848, the year after the famine was over. The chiefs of the "Young Ireland" party[62] thought that the times were ripe for open insurrection, and, seeing revolutions rife all over Europe, and the Chartist riots stirring again in England, resolved to strike at once. Their leader, Smith O'Brien, after using threatening language in the House of Commons, went over to Ireland and called the discontented to arms. But he proved a very incapable chief when he essayed the part of Catiline. Gathering together some hundreds of armed followers, he attacked fifty constables on Bonlagh common, in Tipperary. His men scattered after a few volleys, and he and his chief adherents fled to the hills, where they were soon caught (July, 1848). They were tried for treason and condemned, but the government commuted their punishment to exile, and a few years later they were given a free pardon.

[Sidenote: =Revolutionary agitation abroad.=]

This abortive revolt in Ireland was one of the least noteworthy events of 1848, the most turbulent year of the nineteenth century. The whole continent was ablaze with insurrections in favour of liberal ideas and national rights. The French drove out Louis Philippe, because he had grown reactionary in his old age, and refused to grant universal suffrage; on his expulsion they established a republic. Another great insurrection arose in Hungary, when the people tried to wrest a constitution by force of arms from their king Ferdinand, the Austrian Emperor. In the same year a great rising in Italy strove to win national unity by expelling the Austrians from Lombardy and Venetia, and making an end of the petty dukes and kings of Central and Southern Italy. Germany was at the same time convulsed by popular agitation, which demanded constitutional liberty from its many rulers, while the diet at Frankfort declared in favour of unifying the land on a republican basis.

[Sidenote: =End of the Chartist agitation.=]

All these troubles could not pass unnoticed in England, and the Chartists, whose movements had been small and unimportant for the last five years, once more began to stir up trouble. The last of their "monster petitions" was sent in to the House of Commons, and the "Five points" demanded more noisily than ever. Things came to a head when their chief, Feargus O'Connor, summoned a great meeting on Kennington Common, and threatened to march on Westminster with 500,000 men at his back. But the government refused to be cowed, and the middle classes, in fierce anger at the noisy agitation, took arms against the rioters. Two hundred thousand "special constables" were enrolled to face the rioters, the bridges leading to Westminster were manned with troops, and the great meeting was awaited with resolution. These preparations overawed the rioters; only a few thousand Chartists assembled, and Feargus O'Connor, frightened at the display of military force and the steady attitude of the special constables, bade his followers go home, and disappeared. This was the last outbreak of the Chartists, who proved to be a mere bugbear when they were once met and faced (April, 1848).

[Sidenote: =The continental insurrection.--Louis Napoleon.=]

For the future England was undisturbed, and, secure at home herself, could watch all the turmoil on the continent with composure. Palmerston did his best to favour the liberal and national parties abroad by all peaceful means, but would not commit England to war on their behalf. To his regret, Italy and Hungary were at last reconquered by their old masters, and the German liberals were also put down, so that the unification of their land was delayed for twenty years (1849). The French Republic proved weak and ill-governed; after several anarchist risings in Paris had frightened the French bourgeoisie, they took refuge under a military dictatorship, electing as president Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon I., and the son of his younger brother Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland. The new president's record was not encouraging; twice during the reign of Louis Philippe he had made hairbrained attempts to raise military revolts in France, trading on the great name of his uncle. On each occasion he had failed lamentably, his preparations having been entirely inadequate to carry out his purpose. He had acquired the reputation of a rash and wild adventurer, ready to embark in any scheme, yet the French, dazzled by the name of Bonaparte, and over-persuaded by his promises to give them peace and prosperity, were unwise enough to elect him as president.

[Sidenote:=The Second Empire.=]

Louis Napoleon soon strengthened himself by placing in office, both in the army and the ministry, a band of unscrupulous men whom he could trust to follow him in any dark scheme, if only they were well enough paid. When he had made his preparations, he seized and imprisoned most of the members of the Chamber of Deputies, shot down all who took arms to defend the Republic, and assumed despotic power (December 2, 1851). Soon afterwards he assumed the title of Emperor and the name of Napoleon III.

[Sidenote: =Palmerston's dismissal.=]

The French president's treacherous usurpation brought about Palmerston's dismissal from office, and ultimately the fall of the Russell cabinet. Immediately after Louis Bonaparte had perpetrated his coup d'état, the great foreign minister expressed to the French ambassador his acquiescence in the revolution. He had so much disliked the turbulent and anarchic Republic which the usurper had destroyed, that he was quite ready to acknowledge the new government, which was at any rate settled and strong for the moment. Palmerston took this action before he had consulted with his colleagues in the ministry, or obtained the formal permission of the queen to recognize the legality of Bonaparte's position. Both the sovereign and the cabinet were vexed at his acting without any consultation, and Lord John Russell dismissed him from office (January, 1852).

[Sidenote: =Fall of Lord John Russell's ministry.=]

But Palmerston had many friends and admirers, and was soon able to revenge himself. Less than a month after his dismissal, he led a section of the Whigs into the opposition lobby on a division concerning a bill to strengthen the militia, and put Russell in a minority. The ministry was therefore obliged to resign (February, 1852).

FOOTNOTES:

[59] See p. 635-6.

[60] See p. 639.

[61] Between 1846 and 1874 the Conservatives were only in power for four years in all.

[62] See p. 664.

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