England in the nineteenth century

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Introduction

From the time of the venerable Bede onward all Western historians have been accustomed to date their annals by means of the centuries, counting forwards and backwards from that year i a.d. which Dionysius Exiguus wrongly fixed as the birth-date of our Lord. But it is only in comparatively modern times that we have begun to talk and think of those centuries as entities with individual characters and attributes. The usage by which we speak of a " nineteenth-century idea " or " a thoroughly seventeenth-century practice " would appear strange to a critic from the Middle Ages, whose landmarks in history were not connected with the centuries, and who reckoned by * indictions,' or the ' Seven Ages of the World,' or the dynasties of his native kingdom, or the time that had elapsed since Augustus or Charlemagne. To see how entirely artificial is our conception of the centuries, we have only to remember that to a Moslem the year 1900 appears as 131 7-1 8, while a Jew thinks of it as 5660. But during the last eight or nine generations the world has grown so familiar with the idea of the century as a real and natural division of time, that it is impossible for us to disregard it when dealing with history.

The practice of reckoning by the centuries has at least one excellent feature. It induces the historian from time to time to take stock of the current of events and the movement of the world during the last hundred years of the Christian era. When the century in which we have lived is slipping from us, we begin to endeavour to formulate our general views on its character, work, and meaning, even though its latter years are still too close to us to allow us to view them in accurate historical perspective.

vi INTRODUCTION.

Every generation has a point at which it places the beginnings of what it vaguely calls contemporary history, a date which marks the boundary between the period which has passed away to become the exclusive property of the historian, and the period in which our knowledge is not drawn entirely from books. Between the days which we can actually call our own and the time which has wholly gone from us, lies a middle period, whose events and general character are made real to us, not only by literature, but by the oral tradition of the generation that has immediately preceded us. The limits of the years known to us in this way are of course continually receding, but at present the line of division is just approaching the date which marks the end of the greatest war which England ever waged. There yet linger among us rare survivors who can tell us that their earliest memories are of the arrival of the news that Napoleon was dead, or even of the rejoicings which followed the crowning victory of Waterloo. But the survivors of that generation are few and far between : the England of the Reform Bill, and the Repeal of the Com Laws, and the Chartist Agitation, is still brought home to us in a way that is no longer possible for the times of George III. The peace of 1815 marks the division for us denizens of the last years of the nineteenth century, and beyond it lies a time when the conditions of life, the state of politics, the external relations and internal movement of the country, seem strange to us, so far do they differ from those of the England of our own day.

It is hard for us, who for forty-five years have never waged war in Europe, to realize an England which was for a whole generation engaged in an almost uninterrupted struggle — for existence as well as for empire — with her nearest continental neighbour ; an England who was not the preacher of peace among nations, but the untiring fomenter of war, keeping the struggle against Bonaparte alive by the unending subsidies which she continued to pour into the hands of the military powers of Central and Eastern Europe. It seems bewildering to our notions of English credit, when we try to picture to

INTRODUCTION. vii

ourselves a time when Consols went down to 60, to 50, nay, on one occasion to 47 ; when the Bank of England was on one black day so near breaking that it paid its customers in sixpences, while a Bill to suspend specie payments was being rapidly run through the House of Commons ; when, in consequence of the lavish issue of paper money, a five-pound note was only worth ^3 lys. lod. in hard cash; when the nation was taxed to the last halfpenny it could bear, and yet from ^20,000,000 to ^{^30, 000, 000 had to be borrowed every year to make expenditure and receipts balance.

Still stranger is it to endeavour to familiarize our minds with a time when Yorkshire artisans banded together to destroy all cotton-spinning machinery; when Birmingham mobs met to burn the houses of gentlemen suspected of advanced Liberal opinions ; when the farmers' prayer was for " a bloody war and a wet harvest/' and the landowner who enclosed common-land was counted a public benefactor as well as a sharp man of business.

But however unfamiliar many of the characteristics of the time of the great war of 17 93-1 815 may appear to us, it is in that period that we must look for the rise and development of most of the peculiar features of modern England. Within those twenty-three years, and as a direct consequence of the maritime war, we finally secured our commercial supremacy, and became the carriers of the world's merchandise. The frantic efforts of France to strike down our trade only resulted in creating and increasing a monopoly for us, where previously we had been merely the most important among a number of competitors. Equally within the compass of the years of the war lies the great revolution in English industry which made our country manufacturing rather than agricultural, a change which has altered all the conditions of life in a way which we hardly realize till we attempt to call up the details of lastcentury social economy. This transformation within was contemporaneous with a growth of the British Empire without, unparalleled before or since. In one generation our Indian territories swelled from being a single province and a few viii INTRODUCTION.

scattered ports, to a great land dominion stretching along tli upper waters of the Ganges and Jumna, and encroaching on to the great central tableland of the Deccan. In the two short viceroyalties of Cornwallis and Wellesley our possessions were doubled or even tripled in extent, and our influence rendered paramount over almost the whole peninsula. Simultaneously the colonies of France, Spain, and Holland fell before us, and the British flag waved from a hundred points on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans where it had previously been unknown. Australia saw the beginnings of the modest settlement of New South Wales, and in Canada the British began to preponderate by emigration over the French provincial element, so that the country became a colony rather than a military possession.

No less important is it that to the years of our struggle with France belongs the formation of political parties in England, which we can recognize as the progenitors of those of our own days. "Whig" and "Tory" at the end of the Great War mean something very different from " Whig " and " Tory " at its beginning. The political creeds of the rival statesmen of 1780 often seem incomprehensible to us. Those of their successors of 18 1 5 — differing though they may in many ways from those of the Liberals and Conservatives of to-day — show definitely the mark of the nineteenth century, and are manifestly capable of development into their later shapes. We may even note that the first popular use of the word " Radical," as applied to politicians, dates from the second decade of the period of which we are about to treat.

It is unfortunate, from the point of view of completeness, that the boundary of the century prevents us from dealing with the commencement of the struggle with France. Logically, we should start in 1793, and not on the ist of January, 1801, if we are thoroughly to understand the England of 181 5. But bound down by the prescribed limits of our subject, we must adhere to its strict chronology, and open our story in the year before the Treaty of Amiens, ere even the short breathing-space of peace in 1802-3 had broken the continuity of the great French war.

Contents

CHAPTER rAGB

II. The Struggle with Bonaparte : (i) The Naval

III. The Struggle with Bonaparte : (2) The Conti-

Chapter I. The Peace Of Amiens

When the nineteenth century opened, on New Year's Day 1 80 1, England was still engaged in the weary war with revolutionary France. The struggle had already raged for eight years, and seemed as far from an end as withVi^ce^ ever. It made little difference to its character that the governnjent with which the contest had to be fought out was no longer the corrupt Directory of Barras. The military despotism of the new First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was quite as hostile to England, and infinitely more formidable. Till he had tried his strength against her and learnt the limitations of his power, Bonaparte was not likely to come to terms.

Moreover, we had just ascertained that we should have to fight him single-handed. The last of our powerful isolation of continental allies was now about to withdraw from Great the struggle. Austria had already opened nego- "»^*^"* tiations for peace with the First Consul : since the defeat of

Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800) her position seemed untenable, and she was glad to be permitted to retire from the war, still retaining her ill-gotten gains in Italy, the lands of the unfortunate republic of Venice.

Bonaparte had resolved to let her off easily : not only did he wish to have his hands free for the duel with Great Britain and the internal reorganization of France, but he was ofLmf^lle. jealous lest Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, might dictate peace at the gates of Vienna, and so cast into the shade his own achievements at Marengo in the previous summer. Hence came the peace of Luneville (February 9, 1 801), which took Austria out of the struggle against Bonaparte for more than four years.

Russia, the other ally of England in the war of 1798-9, had already made her peace with France : the eccentric Czar P . . Paul had not only thrown over the British Armed alliance, but had ranged himself on the side of

Neutrality* Britain's enemies. Inspired by a perverse and wrong-headed admiration for the person of the First Consul, he had set himself to aid him by every means in his power. In December, 1800, he had formed a League of the Baltic Powers : Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia declared an " Armed Neutrality " during the remainder of the struggle between England and France. Though not nominally directed against the former power, the "Armed Neutrality" was practically a declaration of hostility against her, for the confederates undertook to oppose — if necessary, by force of arms — the English doctrine that a neutral flag did not cover the goods of a belligerent on the high seas. The theory that neutral ships might be searched for contraband merchandise has long been abandoned, but in 1801 it was strongly held by British statesmen, and had already caused much friction with Denmark and other powers. The hot-headed Czar had followed up his declaration of Armed Neutrality by seizing the English ships ice-bound in Russian ports, and throwing their crews into

GREAT BRITAIN IN 1801. 3

prison — proceedings which left no doubt as to his future poHcy.

In 1 80 1, therefore, England had to face not only her old enemy across the Channel, but the new league of the Baltic states. The prospect was not cheering, for the p. internal condition of the United Kingdom was difficulties of anything but satisfactory. The last throes of the ^"Sland. Irish rebellion had died down, and in 1800 Castlereagh had bribed and cajoled the Parliament on St. Stephen's Green to vote away its own legislative independence and consent to the Union with Great Britain. But if the position in Ireland was less desperate than it had been three years before, the general aspect of domestic affairs was gloomy. Dearth had prevailed all through 1800, and the rise in the price of bread had been followed by its usual consequences of discontent and riot. ^ The National Debt was piUng itself up at the most fearful rate — the revenue had been in 1800 only ;£^3 9,000,000, while the expenditure had been ;^63, 000,000; the immense difference between the two had to be made up by borrowing. The military enterprises of Great Britain had been uniformly unsuccessful, save indeed in India. The last of them, the invasion of Holland in 1799, had been perhaps the worst managed of the whole series. It was true that we had been as regularly victorious at sea as we had been unfortunate on land, but even our greatest triumphs — Camperdown, St. Vincent, and the Nile — had been defensive rather than offensive successes. We had prevented France and her allies from insulting our own shores, or from gaining a mastery in the waters of the Mediterranean. But Jervis, Duncan, and Nelson had been powerless to check the establishment of a French domination on the mainland of Western Europe. We had swept the mercantile marine of France, Spain, and Holland from the seas, and appropriated their carrying trade. Yet, since our great enemy had never been mainly dependent on its seaborne commerce, and since the woes of Dutch or Spanish merchants were not likely to touch Bonaparte's heart, we could bring comparatively little pressure to bear upon France. It was not till he tried his worst against Great Britain and found that he could not hope to deal her any serious blow, that the First Consul evinced any real desire for peace. Meanwhile he hoped to retain his new conquest of Egypt, and to bring to the aid of the shattered navies of France and Spain the fresh naval resources of the Baltic powers.

It was not under the guidance of William Pitt, whose unswerving hand had hitherto directed the foreign policy of

Great Britain, that the last year of the Revoluof^Pkt. " tionary war was destined to be fought out.

Early in 1801 he resigned his office, on a question which, important enough in itself, was yet but a side issue in this time of stress and peril. While negotiating the details of the Union with Ireland, he had pledged his word to the Irish Catholics to introduce in the new United Parliament legislation for the relief of their many political disabilities. This he was preparing to do, when he found that the old king was determined to put his veto on any such action. Of the many deeprooted prejudices of George III. none was more violent than his dislike for Romanists, and he had contrived to persuade himself that to give his assent to such a bill as Pitt was drafting would involve him in a breach of his Coronation Oath, " to defend the Protestant Church as by law established." When informed of the king's resolve, Pitt resigned (February, 1801) : his exaggerated sense of loyalty to his old master prevented him from forcing matters to the point of actual conflict between king and ministry. He has been much censured, both for leaving the helm of state when the foreign danger was still so great, and for refusing to bring stronger pressure on the king, who, in spite of his obstinacy, might have yielded at the actual moment of friction.

With Pitt some of his personal friends retired from office, but the Tories still retained their hold on the government, and

THE FRENCH EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. 5

continued to carry out Pitt's policy in every detail. The new prime minister was Henry Addington, Speaker ^^jdington of the House of Commons, a man of narrow prime views and limited ability, chiefly notable for his "^^"^^ ®^* subservience to the crown and his utter want of originality. Addington, and not Pitt, was the man destined to bring the great Revolutionary war to its end, though to his predecessor must be given the credit of devising the measures which finally brought it to a successful conclusion.

Before leavmg office Pitt had made arrangements for the carrying out of two great expeditions, both of which were destined to win complete success. The first was ^j^ Ee~voaimed against the new French colony in Egypt, tian expe- An English army concentrated in the Mediter- ^ ^°"* ranean was to land in the Delta and assail the French from the front, while a subsidiary force from India ascended the Red Sea, crossed the desert, and struck into the valley of the Nile south of Cairo. As it chanced, the Indian army arrived too late to take any part in the fighting, the larger expedition having done all the work.

The French general Menou, who had to face the attack, chanced to be wholly incompetent. He was an eccentric and histrionic personage, who had embraced Mohamet- -pj^^ French anism to please Bonaparte, and thought more of expelled his poses and of his proclamations than of strategy. ^^"^ ^^^ ' He divided his troops up into two bodies, so that the 20,000 English who landed at Aboukir, under Sir Ralph Abercromby, were superior to each fraction, though far inferior in number 'to the whole army of Egypt. Two fights in front of Alexandria broke the main force of the French, though the gallant Abercromby fell in the moment of victory. After short sieges the two halves of Menou's army, shut up the one in Cairo and the other in Alexandria, laid down their arms, and all Egypt was in our hands (March-July, 1801). Bonaparte's dream of an Eastern empire had come to a disastrous end. This was inevitable from the first; without command of the sea such an outlying possession could not possibly be maintained.

Not less complete was the success of the English in the Baltic against the signatories of the declaration of Armed

Neutrality. The bitter northern winter, which ^oediSon^ seals up the Russian and Swedish ports, prevented

the early concentration of the allied fleets. Before the ice had broken up, an English squadron had been sent off, with orders to throw itself between the scattered divisions of the enemy, and to destroy them in detail. Such a plan was absolutely necessary, for if the confederate navies could have massed themselves they might have taken the sea with more than fifty ships of the line, and the British squadron numbered no more than eighteen. Nelson sailed with them, but only as second-in-command : by some inexplicable stupidity of those in charge at the Admiralty, he had been placed under the orders of Sir Hyde Parker, a respectable veteran destitute of all initiative and dash. The squadron reached the Sound on March 30, and three days later attacked Copenhagen, while the Russians and Swedes were still wholly ignorant of their approach.

The Danes had protected their capital and arsenal by a line of floating batteries interspersed with ships of war. Parker

thought their front almost too formidable to be Copenhag-en. attacked, but finally gave Nelson permission to

go in with twelve ships and do his best. The approach lay up a narrow channel between sandbanks, on which more than one of the English ships went aground. But Nelson forced his way up to the enemy, and engaged with them in the most furious cannonade of the whole Revolutionary war. No other of England's enemies fought their ships with such splendid obstinacy as the Danes : for some time Nelson seemed to be making so little progress that his cautious superior hung out signals desiring him to draw off and retire. But Nelson turned his blind eye to the signals, and persisted in the fight

THE TREATY OF AMIENS. 7

till the Danish floating batteries were burnt or sunk. Although the shore forts still held out, the Prince Regent of Denmark then yielded to Nelson's summons, and consented to suspend his adherence to the Armed Neutrality. The British fleet was then directed against Cronstadt, but its presence in Russian waters turned out to be unnecessary. Ten days before the battle of Copenhagen the Czar Paul had fallen, the victim of a palace conspiracy. His constant petty tyranny and his mad caprices had driven his nobles to desperation, and on the night of March 23, 1801, he was strangled in his bedroom by a band of his own courtiers. His son and successor, Alexander, at once reversed his policy, released the English prisoners, and declared that the Baltic league was at an end.

Thus the new and formidable weapon which Bonaparte had intended to turn against Great Britain was shattered, a few months before the last French garrison in Egypt Conclusion was driven to surrender. Foiled in both quarters, of the Treaty the First Consul at last began to make genuine of Amiens. overtures for peace : his earlier offers had no reality in them. Addington and his cabinet were far from realizing the bitter hatred of England which Bonaparte nourished in his heart, and believed that a permanent pacification with him presented no insuperable difficulties. The negotiations, which commenced in the summer of 1801, dragged on for many months, and the definite Treaty of Amiens was only signed on March 27, 1802.

By it England acknowledged the government of the First Consul, and accepted accomplished facts by recognizing the new boundaries of France and of her vassals, the Batavian, Helvetic, and Cisalpine Republics t^e^Trla^^^ — new names which cloaked the identity of the Seven United Provinces, of the Swiss Confederates, and of Lombardy. Great Britain restored to France all her lost colonies in the West and East Indies ; but Bonaparte — always liberal with the property of his unfortunate allies — allowed the conqueror to retain the Spanish island of Trinidad in the West, and in the East the important Dutch settlement of Ceylon. Charles IV. of Spain and the Batavian Republic, however, received back the rest of the possessions of which they had been stripped, the former recovering the island of Minorca, the latter the Cape of Good Hope, both points of high strategical importance which English statesmen surrendered with deep regret. One more among the numerous clauses of the treaty requires mention — England had just captured Malta, which Bonaparte, in 1798, had lawlessly seized from the Knights of St. John without any declaration of war. The treaty provided that this important island, the key of the central Mediterranean, should be evacuated by the British forces and restored to its original owners, when the Order should have been reconstituted and remodelled. Herein lay the germs of much future trouble.

By the Treaty of Amiens England, perhaps, gave up more than was absolutely necessary. Her position was a very Expediency strong one after the French failures in Egypt of the Treaty and the Baltic ; and it was only a genuine wish for peace, and a misplaced confidence m the good intentions of Bonaparte, which led the Addington ministry to give up so many valuable conquests. England, in spite of all her financial burdens, had still plenty of strength left in her. The expense of the war, monstrous as it had been, was almost made up to her by the extraordinary growth of English commerce since 1793. The destruction of the mercantile marine of France, Spain, and Holland had led to an unparalleled expansion in our trade. In 1793 the export of British manufactures had been to the value of ;z{^i 4,7 00,000 ; in 1801 it had risen to ;,^24, 4 00,000. Similarly, at the earlier date we had re-exported ^5,400,000 of foreign and colonial goods; in 1 80 1 the figures had tripled, and were recorded as ;^i 7,1 00,000. The number of British ships at sea had risen from 16,000 to 18,000, in spite of all French privateering.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA. 9

If we had failed to prevent the establishment of the French domination on the continent of Western Europe, France had failed quite as signally in her attempts to demolish our commercial and maritime supremacy. During the heat of the war we had grasped the control of Southern India, by putting down Bonaparte's ally, Tippoo Sultan of Mysore (1799); the " Great Proconsul " Wellesley was, at the very moment of the Treaty of Amiens, watching his opportunity to lay the foundations of British power in the central and northern regions of Hindostan by interfering in the affairs of the Mahratta states, a project which he was to take in hand before the year 1802 had expired.

Yet, even when all these facts are taken into consideration, there can be no doubt that Addington and his cabinet were fully justified in concluding peace with France. War is such a fearful burden, and its chances are so incalculable, that no government which is offered an honourable and not unprofitable peace should hesitate to accept it, merely because there is some prospect of obtaining yet better terms at some future date. The one mistake made was in thinking that Bonaparte was sincerely anxious for an equitable pacification, and wished to dwell beside us as a quiet neighbour. But the statesmen of 1 80 1 could not know his character as we know it after a study of his whole career ; they were quite excusable if they were deceived by his plausible verbiage, and allowed him some credit for the magnificent and praiseworthy sentiments which he professed.

CHAPTER IT.

TRI STRUGGLE WITH BONAPARTE : (l) THE NAVAL WA51.

1803-1806.

The peace from which so ranch had been hoped was to endure for no more than thirteen months. But in March, 1802, well-nigh all men on this side of the Channel believed that the struggle with France had reached its end, and thought that a period of rest, economy, and retrenchment had set in. Britain was to turn to account the complete sovereignty of the seas and the new Indian empire which she had gained, and, by a careful development of trade and manufactures, was to free herself from the burden of her vast national debt. The army and navy were reduced with a haste that was to produce much trouble ere the year was out. So great were the expectations that were entertained of the prosperity that was to result from the peace, that when the French ambassador arrived in London, his carriage was actually drawn through the streets by the populace, and a general illumination testified to the national joy. Great numbers of English at once embarked on continental travel — a pleasure which had been denied them for more than eight years, and for which many of them were to pay dearly in 1803.

Bonaparte's objects in coming to terms with England had been twofold. He wished for an interval of quiet in which to prepare for that assumption of regal power which he had already determined to carry out. But he also wished to

BONAPARTE'S ANNEXATIONS IN 1802. 11

recover the lost French colonies, and to gain time to rebuild the shattered French navy, which in 1802 had been reduced to less than forty ships of the policy ^^ ^ ^ line. In a few years he intended to create a new fleet, which should be able to dispute with that of Britain the mastery of the seas. Moreover, observing the enthusiasm with which peace was greeted in England, he fancied that our government would wink at several new aggressions which he was contemplating on the continent. Rather than renew the war, he imagined that the weak Addington would submit to many humiliations. In this respect he wholly misconceived the situation ; he underrated the wariness and national pride of his opponents to an absurd degree.

Only a few months had elapsed after the Treaty of Amiens had been signed, when the First Consul began to take in hand some measures which were certain to irritate pj.gsh England. In September he annexed to France annexations Piedmont and the rest of the continental terri- ^ ranee. tories of the King of Sardinia, though that unfortunate monarch had given him no provocation whatever. Parma was at the same time appropriated, though compensation was in this case given to the dispossessed Bourbon duke. Soon after Bonaparte sent 30,000 men into Switzerland, and overturned there a government which was not sufficiently subservient to his interests. When England protested against this high-handed action, he merely replied that she had no concern with continental affairs, since there was no mention of Piedmont or the Helvetic Republic in the Treaty of Amiens. On his part he began to declaim against our government because Malta had not yet been evacuated : we had agreed to restore the island to the Order of the Knights of St. John, but since they had not yet been reorganized, our troops were still in possession. However, actual preparations for their departure had begun when the First Consul's action caused them to be suspended.

Even before these matters of foreign policy had come to a head, Bonaparte had created much ill feeling in England by J |. , making some extraordinary demands from our

British government. He proposed that we should expel

Government, f^.^^ q^j- shores the princes of the old royal family of France and certain other refugees, a request for the violation of English hospitality which was naturally refused. He also made an astonishing demand for the suppression of certain English newspapers and pamphlets, wherein his conduct and policy were being discussed with the usual freedom of political papers. When Lord Hawkesbury made the natural reply that in England the press was free, and that it was not our wont to expel foreign exiles who had done nothing against our laws, the First Consul pretended to regard himself as outrageously insulted (August 17, 1802).