XIV. THE PEACE OF AMIENS…

XIV. THE PEACE OF AMIENS

The previous chapter dealt in the main with the internal affairs of France and the completion of Napoleon's power: it touched on foreign affairs only so far as to exhibit the close connection between the First Consul's diplomatic victory over England and his triumph over the republican constitution in his adopted country. But it is time now to review the course of the negotiations which led up to the Treaty of Amiens.

In order to realize the advantages which France then had over England, it will be well briefly to review the condition of our land at that time. Our population was far smaller than that of the French Republic. France, with her recent acquisitions in Belgium, the Rhineland, Savoy, Nice, and Piedmont, numbered nearly 40,000,000 inhabitants: but the census returns of Great Britain for 1801 showed only a total of 10,942,000 souls, while the numbers for Ireland, arguing from the rather untrustworthy return of 1813, may be reckoned at about six and a half millions. The prodigious growth of the English-speaking people had not as yet fully commenced either in the motherland, the United States, or in the small and struggling settlements of Canada and Australia. Its future expansion was to be assured by industrial and social causes, and by the events considered in this and in subsequent chapters. It was a small people that had for several months faced with undaunted front the gigantic power of Bonaparte and that of the Armed Neutrals.

This population of less than 18,000,000 souls, of which nearly one-third openly resented the Act of Union recently imposed on Ireland, was burdened by a National Debt which amounted to £537,000,000, and entailed a yearly charge of more than £20,000,000 sterling. In the years of war with revolutionary France the annual expenditure had risen from £19,859,000 (for 1792) to the total of £61,329,000, which necessitated an income tax of 10 per cent. on all incomes of £200 and upwards. Yet, despite party feuds, the nation was never stronger, and its fleets had never won more brilliant and solid triumphs. The chief naval historian of France admits that we had captured no fewer than 50 ships of the line, and had lost to our enemies only five, thereby raising the strength of our fighting line to 189, while that of France had sunk to 47.[181] The prowess of Sir Arthur Wellesley was also beginning to revive in India the ancient lustre of the British arms; but the events of 1802-3 were to show that our industrial enterprise, and the exploits of our sailors and soldiers, were by themselves of little avail when matched in a diplomatic contest against the vast resources of France and the embodied might of a Napoleon.

Men and institutions were everywhere receiving the imprint of his will. France was as wax under his genius. The sovereigns of Spain, Italy, and Germany obeyed his fiat. Even the stubborn Dutch bent before him. On the plea of defeating Orange intrigues, he imposed a new constitution on the Batavian Republic whose independence he had agreed to respect. Its Directory was now replaced by a Regency which relieved the deputies of the people of all responsibility. A plébiscite showed 52,000 votes against, and 16,000 for, the new régime; but, as 350,000 had not voted, their silence was taken for consent, and Bonaparte's will became law (September, 1801).

We are now in a position to appreciate the position of France and Great Britain. Before the signature of the preliminaries of peace at London on October 1st, 1801, our Government had given up its claims to the Cape, Malta, Tobago, Martinique, Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice, and Curaçoa, retaining of its conquests only Trinidad and Ceylon.

A belated attempt had, indeed, been made to retain Tobago. The Premier and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, were led by the French political agent in London, M. Otto, to believe that, in the ensuing negotiations at Amiens, every facility would be given by the French Government towards its retrocession to us, and that this act would be regarded as the means of indemnifying Great Britain for the heavy expense of supporting many thousands of French and Dutch prisoners. The Cabinet, relying on this promise as binding between honourable men, thereupon endeavoured to obtain the assent of George III. to the preliminaries in their ultimate form, and only the prospect of regaining Tobago by this compromise induced the King to give it. When it was too late, King and Ministers realized their mistake in relying on verbal promises and in failing to procure a written statement.[182]

The abandonment by Ministers of their former claim to Malta is equally strange. Nelson, though he held Malta to be useless as a base for the British fleet watching Toulon, made the memorable statement: "I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India." But a despatch from St. Petersburg, stating that the new Czar had concluded a formal treaty of alliance with the Order of St. John settled in Russia, may have convinced Addington and his colleagues that it would be better to forego all claim to Malta in order to cement the newly won friendship of Russia. Whatever may have been their motive, British Ministers consented to cede the island to the Knights of St. John under the protection of some third Power.

The preliminaries of peace were further remarkable for three strange omissions. They did not provide for the renewal of previous treaties of peace between the late combatants. War is held to break all previous treaties; and by failing to require the renewal of the treaties of 1713, 1763, and 1783, it was now open to Spain and France to cement, albeit in a new form, that Family Compact which it had long been the aim of British diplomacy to dissolve: the failure to renew those earlier treaties rendered it possible for the Court of Madrid to alienate any of its colonies to France, as at that very time was being arranged with respect to Louisiana.

The second omission was equally remarkable. No mention was made of any renewal of commercial intercourse between England and France. Doubtless a complete settlement of this question would have been difficult. British merchants would have looked for a renewal of that enlightened treaty of commerce of 1786-7, which had aroused the bitter opposition of French manufacturers. But the question might have been broached at London, and its omission from the preliminaries served as a reason for shelving it in the definitive treaty--a piece of folly which at once provoked the severest censure from British manufacturers, who thereby lost the markets of France, and her subject States, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa, and Etruria.

And, finally, the terms of peace provided no compensation either for the French royal House or for the dispossessed House of Orange. Here again, it would have been very difficult to find a recompense such as the Bourbons could with dignity have accepted; and the suggestion made by one of the royalist exiles to Lord Hawkesbury, that Great Britain should seize Crete and hand it over to them, will show how desperate was their case.[183] Nevertheless, some effort should have been made by a Government which had so often proclaimed its championship of the legitimist cause. Still more glaring was the omission of any stipulation for an indemnity for the House of Orange, now exiled from the Batavian Republic. That claim, though urged at the outset, found no place in the preliminaries; and the mingled surprise and contempt felt in the salons of Paris at the conduct of the British Government is shown in a semi-official report sent thence by one of its secret agents:

"I cannot get it into my head that the British Ministry has acted in good faith in subscribing to preliminaries of peace, which, considering the respective position of the parties, would be harmful to the English people.... People are persuaded in France that the moderation of England is only a snare put in Bonaparte's way, and it is mainly in order to dispel it that our journals have received the order to make much of the advantages which must accrue to England from the conquests retained by her; but the journalists have convinced nobody, and it is said openly that if our European conquests are consolidated by a general peace, France will, within ten years, subjugate all Europe, Great Britain included, despite all her vast dominions in India. Only within the last few days have people here believed in the sincerity of the English preliminaries of peace, and they say everywhere that, after having gloriously sailed past the rocks that Bonaparte's cunning had placed in its track, the British Ministry has completely foundered at the mouth of the harbour. People blame the whole structure of the peace as betraying marks of feebleness in all that concerns the dignity and the interests of the King; ... and we cannot excuse its neglect of the royalists, whose interests are entirely set aside in the preliminaries. Men are especially astonished at England's retrocession of Martinique without a single stipulation for the colonists there, who are at the mercy of a government as rapacious as it is fickle. All the owners of colonial property are very uneasy, and do not hide their annoyance against England on this score."[184]

This interesting report gives a glimpse into the real thought of Paris such as is rarely afforded by the tamed or venal Press. As Bonaparte's spies enabled him to feel every throb of the French pulse, he must at once have seen how great was the prestige which he gained by these first diplomatic successes, and how precarious was the foothold of the English Ministers on the slippery grade of concession to which they had been lured. Addington surely should have remembered that only the strong man can with safety recede at the outset, and that an act of concession which, coming from a master mind, is interpreted as one of noble magnanimity, will be scornfully snatched from a nerveless hand as a sign of timorous complaisance. But the public statements and the secret avowals of our leaders show that they wished "to try the experiment of peace," now that France had returned to ordinary political conditions and Jacobinism was curbed by Bonaparte. "Perhaps," wrote Castlereagh, "France, satisfied with her recent acquisitions, will find her interest in that system of internal improvement which is necessarily connected with peace."[185] There is no reason for doubting the sincerity of this statement. Our policy was distinctly and continuously complaisant: France regained her colonies: she was not required to withdraw from Switzerland and Holland. Who could expect, from what was then known of Bonaparte's character, that a peace so fraught with glory and profit would not satisfy French honour and his own ambition?

Peace, then, was an "experiment." The British Government wished to see whether France would turn from revolution and war to agriculture and commerce, whether her young ruler be satisfied with a position of grandeur and solid power such as Louis XIV. had rarely enjoyed. Alas! the failure of the experiment was patent to all save the blandest optimists long before the Preliminaries of London took form in the definitive Treaty of Amiens. Bonaparte's aim now was to keep our Government strictly to the provisional terms of peace which it had imprudently signed. Even before the negotiations were opened at Amiens, he ordered Joseph Bonaparte to listen to no proposal concerning the King of Sardinia and the ex-Stadholder of Holland, and asserted that the "internal affairs of the Batavian Republic, of Germany, of Helvetia, and of the Italian Republics" were "absolutely alien to the discussions with England." This implied that England was to be shut out from Continental politics, and that France was to regulate the affairs of central and southern Europe. This observance of the letter was, however, less rigid where French colonial and maritime interests were at stake. Dextrous feelers were put forth seawards, and it was only when these were repulsed that the French negotiators encased themselves in their preliminaries.

The task of reducing those articles to a definitive treaty devolved, on the British side, on the Marquis Cornwallis, a gouty, world-weary old soldier, chiefly remembered for the surrender which ended the American War. Nevertheless, he had everywhere won respect for his personal probity in the administration of Indian affairs, and there must also have been some convincing qualities in a personality which drew from Napoleon at St. Helena the remark: "I do not believe that Cornwallis was a man of first-rate abilities: but he had talent, great probity, sincerity, and never broke his word.... He was a man of honour--a true Englishman."

Against Lord Cornwallis, and his far abler secretary, Mr. Merry, were pitted Joseph Bonaparte and his secretaries. The abilities of the eldest of the Bonapartes have been much underrated. Though he lacked the masterful force and wide powers of his second brother, yet at Lunéville Joseph proved himself to be an able diplomatist, and later on in his tenure of power at Naples and Madrid he displayed no small administrative gifts. Moreover, his tact and kindliness kindled in all who knew him a warmth of friendship such as Napoleon's sterner qualities rarely inspired. The one was loved as a man: for the other, even his earlier acquaintances felt admiration and devotion, but always mingled with a certain fear of the demi-god that would at times blaze forth. This was the dread personality that urged Talleyrand and Joseph Bonaparte to their utmost endeavours and steeled them against any untoward complaisance at Amiens.

The selection of so honourable a man as Cornwallis afforded no slight guarantee for the sincerity of our Government, and its sincerity will stand the test of a perusal of its despatches. Having examined all those that deal with these negotiations, the present writer can affirm that the official instructions were in no respect modified by the secret injunctions: these referred merely to such delicate and personal topics as the evacuation of Hanover by Prussian troops and the indemnities to be sought for the House of Orange and the House of Savoy. The circumstances of these two dispossessed dynasties were explained so as to show that the former Dutch Stadholder had a very strong claim on us, as well as on France and the Batavian Republic; while the championship of the House of Savoy by the Czar rendered the claims of that ancient family on the intervention of George III. less direct and personal than those of the Prince of Orange. Indeed, England would have insisted on the insertion of a clause to this effect in the preliminaries had not other arrangements been on foot at Berlin which promised to yield due compensation to this unfortunate prince. Doubtless the motives of the British Ministers were good, but their failure to insert such a clause fatally prejudiced their case all through the negotiations at Amiens.

The British official declaration respecting Malta was clear and practical. The island was to be restored to the Knights of the Order of St. John and placed under the protection of a third Power other than France and England. But the reconstitution of the Order was no less difficult than the choice of a strong and disinterested protecting Power. Lord Hawkesbury proposed that Russia be the guaranteeing Power. No proposal could have been more reasonable. The claims of the Czar to the protectorate of the Order had been so recently asserted by a treaty with the knights that no other conclusion seemed feasible. And, in order to assuage the grievances of the islanders and strengthen the rule of the knights, the British Ministry desired that the natives of Malta should gain a foothold in the new constitution. The lack of civil and political rights had contributed so materially to the overthrow of the Order that no reconstruction of that shattered body could be deemed intelligent, or even honest, which did not cement its interests with those of the native Maltese. The First Consul, however, at once demurred to both these proposals. In the course of a long interview with Cornwallis at Paris,[186] he adverted to the danger of bringing Russia's maritime pressure to bear on Mediterranean questions, especially as her sovereigns "had of late shown themselves to be such unsteady politicians." This of course referred to the English proclivities of Alexander I., and it is clear that Bonaparte's annoyance with Alexander was the first unsettling influence which prevented the solution of the Maltese question. The First Consul also admitted to Cornwallis that the King of Naples, despite his ancient claims of suzerainty over Malta, could not be considered a satisfactory guarantor, as between two Great Powers; and he then proposed that the tangle should be cut by blowing up the fortifications of Valetta.

The mere suggestion of such an act affords eloquent proof of the difficulties besetting the whole question. To destroy works of vast extent, which were the bulwark of Christendom against the Barbary pirates, would practically have involved the handing over of Valetta to those pests of the Mediterranean; and from Malta as a new base of operations they could have spread devastation along the coasts of Sicily and Italy. This was the objection which Cornwallis at once offered to an other-wise specious proposal: he had recently received papers from Major-General Pigot at Malta, in which the same solution of the question was examined in detail. The British officer pointed out that the complete dismantling of the fortifications would expose the island, and therefore the coasts of Italy, to the rovers; yet he suggested a partial demolition, which seems to prove that the British officers in command at Malta did not contemplate the retention of the island and the infraction of the peace.

Our Government, however, disapproved of the destruction of the fortifications of Valetta as wounding the susceptibilities of the Czar, and as in no wise rendering impossible the seizure of the island and the reconstruction of those works by some future invader. In fact, as the British Ministry now aimed above all at maintaining good relations with the Czar, Bonaparte's proposal could only be regarded as an ingenious device for sundering the Anglo-Russian understanding. The French Minister at St. Petersburg was doing his utmost to prevent the rapprochement of the Czar to the Court of St James, and was striving to revive the moribund league of the Armed Neutrals. That last offer had "been rejected in the most peremptory manner and in terms almost bordering upon derision." Still there was reason to believe that the former Anglo-Russian disputes about Malta might be so far renewed as to bring Bonaparte and Alexander to an understanding. The sentimental Liberalism of the young Czar predisposed him towards a French alliance, and his whole disposition inclined him towards the brilliant opportunism of Paris rather than the frigid legitimacy of the Court of St. James. The Maltese affair and the possibility of reopening the Eastern Question were the two sources of hope to the promoters of a Franco-Russian alliance; for both these questions appealed to the chivalrous love of adventure and to the calculating ambition so curiously blent in Alexander's nature. Such, then, was the motive which doubtless prompted Bonaparte's proposal concerning Valetta; such also were the reasons which certainly dictated its rejection by Great Britain.

In his interview with the First Consul at Paris, and in the subsequent negotiations at Amiens with Joseph Bonaparte, the question of Tobago and England's money claim for the support of French prisoners was found to be no less thorny than that of Malta. The Bonapartes firmly rejected the proposal for the retention of Tobago by England in lieu of her pecuniary demand. A Government which neglected to procure the insertion of its claim to Tobago among the Preliminaries of London could certainly not hope to regain that island in exchange for a concession to France that was in any degree disputable. But the two Bonapartes and Talleyrand now took their stand solely on the preliminaries, and politely waved on one side the earlier promises of M. Otto as unauthorized and invalid, They also closely scrutinized the British claim to an indemnity for the support of French prisoners. Though theoretically correct, it was open to an objection, which was urged by Bonaparte and Talleyrand with suave yet incisive irony. They suggested that the claim must be considered in relation to a counter-claim, soon to be sent from Paris, for the maintenance of all prisoners taken by the French from the various forces subsidized by Great Britain, a charge which "would probably not leave a balance so much in favour of His [Britannic] Majesty as His Government may have looked forward to." This retort was not so terrible as it appeared; for most of the papers necessary for the making up of the French counterclaim had been lost or destroyed during the Revolution. Yet the threat told with full effect on Cornwallis, who thereafter referred to the British claim as a "hopeless debt."[187] The officials of Downing Street drew a distinction between prisoners from armies merely subsidized by us and those taken from foreign forces actually under our control; but it is clear that Cornwallis ceased to press the claim. In fact, the British case was mismanaged from beginning to end: the accounts for the maintenance of French and Dutch prisoners were, in the first instance, wrongly drawn up; and there seems to have been little or no notion of the seriousness of the counter-claim, which came with all the effect of a volley from a masked battery, destructive alike to our diplomatic reputation and to our hope of retaining Tobago.

It is impossible to refer here to all the topics discussed at Amiens. The determination of the French Government to adopt a forward colonial and oceanic policy is clearly seen in its proposals made at the close of the year 1801. They were: (1) the abolition of salutes to the British flag on the high seas; (2) an absolute ownership of the eastern and western coasts of Newfoundland in return for a proposed cession of the isles of St. Pierre and Miquelon to us--which would have practically ceded to France in full sovereignty all the best fishing coasts of that land, with every prospect of settling the interior, in exchange for two islets devastated by war and then in British hands; (3) the right of the French to a share in the whale fishery in those seas; (4) the establishment of a French fishing station in the Falkland Isles; and (5) the extension of the French districts around the towns of Yanaon and Mahé in India.[188] To all these demands Lord Cornwallis opposed an unbending opposition. Weak as our policy had been on other affairs, it was firm as a rock on all maritime and Indian questions. In fact, the events to be described in the next chapter, which led to the consolidation of British power in Hindostan, would in all probability never have occurred but for the apprehensions excited by these French demands; and our masterful proconsul in Bengal, the Marquis Wellesley, could not have pursued his daring and expensive schemes of conquest, annexation, and forced alliances, had not the schemes of the First Consul played into the hands of the soldiers at Calcutta and weakened the protests of the dividend-hunters of Leadenhall Street.

The persistence of French demands for an increase of influence in Newfoundland and the West and East Indies, the vastness of her expedition to Saint Domingo and the thinly-veiled designs of her Australian expedition (which we shall notice in the next chapter), all served to awaken the suspicions of the British Government. The negotiations consequently progressed but slowly. From the outset they were clogged by the suspicion of bad faith. Spain and Holland, smarting under the conditions of a peace which gave to France all the glory and to her allies all the loss, delayed sending their respective envoys to the conferences at Amiens, and finally avowed their determination to resist the surrender of Trinidad and Ceylon. In fact, pressure had to be exerted from Paris and London before they yielded to the inevitable. This difficulty was only one of several: there then remained the questions whether Portugal and Turkey should be admitted to share in the treaty, as England demanded; or whether they should sign a separate peace with France. The First Consul strenuously insisted on the exclusion of those States, though their interests were vitally affected by the present negotiations, He saw that a separate treaty with the Sublime Porte would enable him, not only to extract valuable trading concessions in the Black Sea trade, but also to cement a good understanding with Russia on the Eastern Question, which was now being adroitly reopened by French diplomacy. Against the exclusion of Turkey from the negotiations at Amiens, Great Britain firmly but vainly protested. In fact, Talleyrand had bound the Porte to a separate agreement which promised everything for France and nothing for Turkey, and seemed to doom the Sublime Porte to certain humiliation and probable partition.[189]

Then there were the vexed questions of the indemnities claimed by George III. for the Houses of Orange and of Savoy. In his interview with Cornwallis, Bonaparte had effusively promised to do his utmost for the ex-Stadholder, though he refused to consider the case of the King of Sardinia, who, he averred, had offended him by appealing to the Czar. The territorial interests of France in Italy doubtless offered a more potent argument to the First Consul: after practically annexing Piedmont and dominating the peninsula, he could ill brook the presence on the mainland of a king whom he had already sacrificed to his astute and masterful policy. The case of the Prince of Orange was different. He was a victim to the triumph of French and democratic influence in the Dutch Netherlands. George III. felt a deep interest in this unfortunate prince and made a strong appeal to the better instincts of Bonaparte on his behalf. Indeed, it is probable that England had acquiesced in the consolidation of French influence at the Hague, in the hope that her complaisance would lead the First Consul to assure him some position worthy of so ancient a House. But though Cornwallis pressed the Batavian Republic on behalf of its exiled chief, yet the question was finally adjourned by the XVIIIth clause of the definitive Treaty of Amiens; and the scion of that famous House had to take his share in the forthcoming scramble for the clerical domains of Germany.[190]

For the still more difficult cause of the House of Savoy the British Government made honest but unavailing efforts, firmly refusing to recognize the newest creations of Bonaparte in Italy, namely, the Kingdom of Etruria and the Ligurian Republic, until he indemnified the House of Savoy. Our recognition was withheld for the reasons that prompt every bargainer to refuse satisfaction to his antagonist until an equal concession is accorded. This game was played by both Powers at Amiens, and with little other result than mutual exasperation. Yet here, too, the balance of gain naturally accrued to Bonaparte; for he required the British Ministry to recognize existing facts in Etruria and Liguria, while Cornwallis had to champion the cause of exiles and of an order that seemed for ever to have vanished. To pit the non-existent against the actual was a task far above the powers of British statesmanship; yet that was to be its task for the next decade, while the forces of the living present were to be wielded by its mighty antagonist. Herein lay the secret of British failures and of Napoleon's extraordinary triumphs.

Leaving, for a space, the negotiations at Amiens, we turn to consider the events which transpired at Lyons in the early weeks of 1802, events which influenced not only the future of Italy, but the fortunes of Bonaparte.

It will be remembered that, after the French victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden, Austria agreed to terms of peace whereby the Cisalpine, Ligurian, Helvetic, and Batavian Republics were formally recognized by her, though a clause expressly stipulated that they were to be independent of France. A vain hope! They continued to be under French tutelage, and their strongholds in the possession of French troops.

It now remained to legalize French supremacy in the Cisalpine Republic, which comprised the land between the Ticino and the Adige, and the Alps and the Rubicon. The new State received a provisional form of government after Marengo, a small council being appointed to supervise civil affairs at the capital, Milan. With it and with Marescalchi, the Cisalpine envoy at Paris, Bonaparte had concerted a constitution, or rather he had used these men as a convenient screen to hide its purely personal origin. Having, for form's sake, consulted the men whom he had himself appointed, he now suggested that the chief citizens of that republic should confer with him respecting their new institutions. His Minister at Milan thereupon proposed that they should cross the Alps for that purpose, assembling, not at Paris, where their dependence on the First Consul's will might provoke too much comment, but at Lyons. To that city, accordingly, there repaired some 450 of the chief men of Northern Italy, who braved the snows of a most rigorous December, in the hope of consolidating the liberties of their long-distracted country. And thus was seen the strange spectacle of the organization of Lombardy, Modena, and the Legations being effected in one provincial centre of France, while at another of her cities the peace of Europe and the fortunes of two colonial empires were likewise at stake. Such a conjunction of events might well impress the imagination of men, bending the stubborn will of the northern islanders, and moulding the Italian notables to complete complaisance. And yet, such power was there in the nascent idea of Italian nationality, that Bonaparte's proposals, which, in his absence, were skilfully set forth by Talleyrand, met with more than one rebuff from the Consulta at Lyons.

Bitterly it opposed the declaration that the Roman Catholic religion was the religion of the Cisalpine Republic and must be maintained by a State budget. Only the first part of this proposal could be carried: so keen was the opposition to the second part that, as a preferable plan, property was set apart for the support of the clergy; and clerical discipline was subjected to the State, on terms somewhat similar to those of the French Concordat.[191]

Secular affairs gave less trouble. The apparent success of the French constitution furnished a strong motive for adopting one of a similar character for the Italian State; and as the proposed institutions had been approved at Milan, their acceptance by a large and miscellaneous body was a foregone conclusion. Talleyrand also took the most unscrupulous care that the affair of the Presidency should be judiciously settled. On December 31st, 1801, he writes to Bonaparte from Lyons:

"The opinion of the Cisalpines seems not at all decided as to the choice to be made: they will gladly receive the man whom you nominate: a President in France and a Vice-President at Milan would suit a large number of them."

Four days later he confidently assures the First Consul:

"They will do what you want without your needing even to show your desire. What they think you desire will immediately become law."[192]

The ground having been thus thoroughly worked, Bonaparte and Josephine, accompanied by a brilliant suite, arrived at Lyons on January 11th, and met with an enthusiastic reception. Despite the intense cold, followed by a sudden thaw, a brilliant series of fêtes, parades, and receptions took place; and several battalions of the French Army of Egypt, which had recently been conveyed home on English ships, now passed in review before their chief. The impressionable Italians could not mistake the aim of these demonstrations; and, after general matters had been arranged by the notables, the final measures were relegated to a committee of thirty. The desirability of this step was obvious, for urgent protests had already been raised in the Consulta against the appointment of a foreigner as President of the new State. When a hubbub arose on this burning topic:

"Some officers of the regiments in garrison at Lyons appeared in the hall and imposed silence upon all parties. Notwithstanding this, Count Melzi was actually chosen President by the majority of the Committee of Thirty; but he declined the honour, and suggested in significant terms that, to enable him to render any service to the country, the committee had better fix upon General Bonaparte as their Chief Magistrate. This being done, Bonaparte immediately appointed Count Melzi Vice-President."[193]

Bonaparte's determination to fill this important position is clearly seen in his correspondence. On the 2nd and 4th of Pluviôse (January 22nd and 24th), he writes from Lyons:

"All the principal affairs of the Consulta are settled. I count on being back at Paris in the course of the decade."

"To-morrow I shall review the troops from Egypt. On the 6th [of Pluviôse] all the business of the Consulta will be finished, and I shall probably set out on my journey on the 7th."

The next day, 5th Pluviôse, sees the accomplishment of his desires:

"To-day I have reviewed the troops on the Place Bellecour; the sun shone as it does in Floréal. The Consulta has named a committee of thirty individuals, which has reported to it that, considering the domestic and foreign affairs of the Cisalpine, it was indispensable to let me discharge the first magistracy, until circumstances permit and I judge it suitable to appoint a successor."

These extracts prove that the acts of the Consulta could be planned beforehand no less precisely than the movements of the soldiery, and that even so complex a matter as the voting of a constitution and the choice of its chief had to fall in with the arrangements of this methodizing genius. Certainly civilization had progressed since the weary years when the French people groped through mists and waded in blood in order to gain a perfect polity: that precious boon was now conferred on a neighbouring people in so sure a way that the plans of their benefactor could be infallibly fixed and his return to Paris calculated to the hour.

The final address uttered by Bonaparte to the Italian notables is remarkable for the short, sharp sentences, which recall the tones of the parade ground. Passing recent events in rapid review, he said, speaking in his mother tongue:

"...Every effort had been made to dismember you: the protection of France won the day: you have been recognized at Lunéville. One-fifth larger than before, you are now more powerful, more consolidated, and have wider hopes. Composed of six different nations, you will be now united under a constitution the best possible for your social and material condition. ... The selections I have made for your chief offices have been made independently of all idea of party or feeling of locality. As for that of President, I have found no one among you with sufficient claims on public opinion, sufficiently free from local feelings, and who had rendered great enough services to his country, to intrust it to him.... Your people has only local feelings: it must now rise to national feelings."

In accordance with this last grand and prophetic remark, the name Italian was substituted for that of Cisalpine: and thus, for the first time since the Middle Ages, there reappeared on the map of Europe that name, which was to evoke the sneers of diplomatists and the most exalted patriotism of the century. If Bonaparte had done naught else, he would deserve immortal glory for training the divided peoples of the peninsula for a life of united activity.

The new constitution was modelled on that of France; but the pretence of a democratic suffrage was abandoned. The right of voting was accorded to three classes, the great proprietors, the clerics and learned men, and the merchants. These, meeting in their several "Electoral Colleges," voted for the members of the legislative bodies; a Tribunal was also charged with the maintenance of the constitution. By these means Bonaparte endeavoured to fetter the power of the reactionaries no less than the anti-clerical fervour of the Italian Jacobins. The blending of the new and the old which then began shows the hand of the master builder, who neither sweeps away materials merely because they are old, nor rejects the strength that comes from improved methods of construction: and, however much we may question the disinterestedness of his motives in this great enterprise, there can be but one opinion as to the skill of the methods and the beneficence of the results in Italy.[194]

The first step in the process of Italian unification had now been taken at Lyons. A second soon followed. The affairs of the Ligurian Republic were in some confusion; and an address came from Genoa begging that their differences might be composed by the First Consul. The spontaneity of this offer may well be questioned, seeing that Bonaparte found it desirable, in his letter of February 18th, 1802, to assure the Ligurian authorities that they need feel no disquietude as to the independence of their republic. Bonaparte undertook to alter their constitution and nominate their Doge.

That the news of the events at Lyons excited the liveliest indignation in London is evident from Hawkesbury's despatch of February 12th, 1802, to Cornwallis:

"The proceedings at Lyons have created the greatest alarm in this country, and there are many persons who were pacifically disposed, who since this event are desirous of renewing the war. It is impossible to be surprised at this feeling when we consider the inordinate ambition, the gross breach of faith, and the inclination to insult Europe manifested by the First Consul on this occasion. The Government here are desirous of avoiding to take notice of these proceedings, and are sincerely desirous to conclude the peace, if it can be obtained on terms consistent with our honour."

Why the Government should have lagged behind the far surer instincts of English public opinion it is difficult to say. Hawkesbury's despatch of four days later supplies an excuse for his contemptible device of pretending not to see this glaring violation of the Treaty of Lunéville. Referring to the events at Lyons, he writes:

"Extravagant and unjustifiable as they are in themselves, [they] must have led us to believe that the First Consul would have been more anxious than ever to have closed his account with this country."

Doubtless that was the case, but only on condition that England remained passive while French domination was extended over all neighbouring lands. If our Ministers believed that Bonaparte feared the displeasure of Austria, they were completely in error. Thanks to the utter weakness of the European system, and the rivalry of Austria and Prussia, he was now able to concentrate his ever-increasing power and prestige on the negotiations at Amiens, which once more claim our attention.

Far from being sated by the prestige gained at Lyons, he seemed to grow more exacting with victory. Moreover, he had been cut to the quick by some foolish articles of a French émigré named Peltier, in a paper published at London: instead of treating them with the contempt they deserved, he magnified these ravings of a disappointed exile into an event of high policy, and fulminated against the Government which allowed them. In vain did Cornwallis object that the Addington Cabinet could not venture on the unpopular act of curbing freedom of the Press in Great Britain. The First Consul, who had experienced no such difficulty in France, persisted now, as a year later, in considering every uncomplimentary reference to himself as an indirect and semiofficial attack.

To these causes we may attribute the French demands of February 4th: contradicting his earlier proposal for a temporary Neapolitan garrison of Malta, Bonaparte now absolutely refused either to grant that necessary protection to the weak Order of St. John, or to join Great Britain in an equal share of the expenses--£20,000 a year--which such a garrison would entail. The astonishment and indignation aroused at Downing Street nearly led to an immediate rupture of the negotiations; and it needed all the patience of Cornwallis and the suavity of Joseph Bonaparte to smooth away the asperities caused by Napoleon's direct intervention. It needs only a slight acquaintance with the First Consul's methods of thought and expression to recognize in the Protocol of February 4th the incisive speech of an autocrat confident in his newly-consolidated powers and irritated by the gibes of Peltier.[195]

The good sense of the two plenipotentiaries at Amiens before long effected a reconciliation. Hawkesbury, writing from Downing Street, warned Cornwallis that if a rupture were to take place it must not be owing to "any impatience on our part": and he, in his turn, affably inquired from Joseph Bonaparte whether he had any more practicable plan than that of a Neapolitan garrison, which he had himself proposed. No plan was forthcoming other than that of a garrison of 1,000 Swiss mercenaries; and as this was open to grave objections, the original proposal was finally restored. On its side, the Court of St. James still refused to blow up the fortifications at Valetta; and rather than destroy those works, England had already offered that the independence of Malta should be guaranteed by the Great Powers--Great Britain, France, Austria, Russia, Spain, and Prussia: to this arrangement France soon assented. Later on we demanded that the Neapolitan garrison should remain in Malta for three years after the evacuation of the island by the British troops; whereas France desired to limit the period to one year. To this Cornwallis finally assented, with the proviso that, "if the Order of St. John shall not have raised a sufficient number of men, the Neapolitan troops shall remain until they shall be relieved by an adequate force, to be agreed upon by the guaranteeing Powers." The question of the garrison having been arranged, other details gave less trouble, and the Maltese question was settled in the thirteen conditions added to Clause X. of the definitive treaty.

Though this complex question was thus adjusted by March 17th, other matters delayed a settlement.

Hawkesbury still demanded a definite indemnity for the Prince of Orange, but Cornwallis finally assented to Article XVIII. of the treaty, which vaguely promised "an adequate compensation." Cornwallis also persuaded his chief to waive his claims for the direct participation of Turkey in the treaty. The British demand for an indemnity for the expense of supporting French prisoners was to be relegated to commissioners--who never met. Indeed, this was the only polite way of escaping from the untenable position which our Government had heedlessly taken upon this topic.

It is clear from the concluding despatches of Cornwallis that he was wheedled by Joseph Bonaparte into conceding more than the British Government had empowered him to do; and, though the "secret and most confidential" despatch of March 22nd cautioned him against narrowing too much the ground of a rupture, if a rupture should still occur, yet three days later, and after the receipt of this despatch, he signed the terms of peace with Joseph Bonaparte, and two days later with the other signatory Powers.[196] It may well be doubted whether peace would ever have been signed but for the skill of Joseph Bonaparte in polite cajolery and the determination of Cornwallis to arrive at an understanding. In any case the final act of signature was distinctly the act, not of the British Government, but of its plenipotentiary.

That fact is confirmed by his admission, on March 28th, that he had yielded where he was ordered to remain inflexible. At St. Helena, Napoleon also averred that after Cornwallis had definitely pledged himself to sign the treaty as it stood on the night of March 24th, he received instructions in a contrary sense from Downing Street; that nevertheless he held himself bound by his promise and signed the treaty on the following day, observing that his Government, if dissatisfied, might refuse to ratify it, but that, having pledged his word, he felt bound to abide by it. This story seems consonant with the whole behaviour of Cornwallis, so creditable to him as a man, so damaging to him as a diplomatist. The later events of the negotiation aroused much annoyance at Downing Street, and the conduct of Cornwallis met with chilling disapproval.

The First Consul, on the other hand, showed his appreciation of his brother's skill with unusual warmth; for when they appeared together at the opera in Paris, he affectionately thrust his elder brother to the front of the State box to receive the plaudits of the audience at the advent of a definite peace. That was surely the purest and noblest joy which the brothers ever tasted.

With what feelings of pride, not unmixed with awe, must the brothers have surveyed their career. Less than nine years had elapsed since their family fled from Corsica, and landed on the coast of Provence, apparently as bankrupt in their political hopes as in their material fortunes. Thrice did the fickle goddess cast Napoleon to the ground in the first two years of his new life, only that his wondrous gifts and sublime self-confidence might tower aloft the more conspicuously, bewildering alike the malcontents of Paris, the generals of the old Empire, the peoples of the Levant, and the statesmen of Britain. Of all these triumphs assuredly the last was not the least. The Peace of Amiens left France the arbitress of Europe, and, by restoring to her all her lost colonies, it promised to place her in the van of the oceanic and colonizing peoples.

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XV. A FRENCH COLONIAL EMPIRE

ST. DOMINGO--LOUISIANA--INDIA--AUSTRALIA

"Il n'y a rien dans l'histoire du monde de comparable aux forces navales de l'Angleterre, à l'étendue et à la richesse de son commerce, à la masse de ses dettes, de ses défenses, de ses moyens, et à la fragilité des bases sur lesquelles repose l'édifice immense de sa fortune."--BARON MALOUET, Considérations historiques sur l'Empire de la Mer.

There are abundant reasons for thinking that Napoleon valued the Peace of Amiens as a necessary preliminary to the restoration of the French Colonial Empire. A comparison of the dates at which he set on foot his oceanic schemes will show that they nearly all had their inception in the closing months of 1801 and in the course of the following year. The sole important exceptions were the politico-scientific expedition to Australia, the ostensible purpose of which insured immunity from the attacks of English cruisers even in the year 1800, and the plans for securing French supremacy in Egypt, which had been frustrated in 1801 and were, to all appearance, abandoned by the First Consul according to the provisions of the Treaty of Amiens. The question whether he really relinquished his designs on Egypt is so intimately connected with the rupture of the Peace of Amiens that it will be more fitly considered in the following chapter. It may not, however, be out of place to offer some proofs as to the value which Bonaparte set on the valley of the Nile and the Isthmus of Suez. A letter from a spy at Paris, preserved in the archives of our Foreign Office, and dated July 10th, 1801, contains the following significant statement with reference to Bonaparte: "Egypt, which is considered here as lost to France, is the only object which interests his personal ambition and excites his revenge." Even at the end of his days, he thought longingly of the land of the Pharaohs. In his first interview with the governor of St. Helena, the illustrious exile said emphatically: "Egypt is the most important country in the world." The words reveal a keen perception of all the influences conducive to commercial prosperity and imperial greatness. Egypt, in fact, with the Suez Canal, which his imagination always pictured as a necessary adjunct, was to be the keystone of that arch of empire which was to span the oceans and link the prairies of the far west to the teeming plains of India and the far Austral Isles.

The motives which impelled Napoleon to the enterprises now to be considered were as many-sided as the maritime ventures themselves. Ultimately, doubtless, they arose out of a love of vast undertakings that ministered at once to an expanding ambition and to that need of arduous administrative toils for which his mind ever craved in the heyday of its activity. And, while satiating the grinding powers of his otherwise morbidly restless spirit, these enterprises also fed and soothed those imperious, if unconscious, instincts which prompt every able man of inquiring mind to reclaim all possible domains from the unknown or the chaotic. As Egypt had, for the present at least, been reft from his grasp, he turned naturally to all other lands that could be forced to yield their secrets to the inquirer, or their comforts to the benefactors of mankind. Only a dull cynicism can deny this motive to the man who first unlocked the doors of Egyptian civilization; and it would be equally futile to deny to him the same beneficent aims with regard to the settlement of the plains of the Mississippi, and the coasts of New Holland.

The peculiarities of the condition of France furnished another powerful impulse towards colonization. In the last decade her people had suffered from an excess of mental activity and nervous excitement. From philosophical and political speculation they must be brought back to the practical and prosaic; and what influence could be so healthy as the turning up of new soil and other processes that satisfy the primitive instincts? Some of these, it was true, were being met by the increasing peasant proprietary in France herself. But this internal development, salutary as it was, could not appease the restless spirits of the towns or the ambition of the soldiery. Foreign adventures and oceanic commerce alone could satisfy the Parisians and open up new careers for the Prætorian chiefs, whom the First Consul alone really feared.

Nor were these sentiments felt by him alone. In a paper which Talleyrand read to the Institute of France in July, 1797, that far-seeing statesman had dwelt upon the pacifying influences exerted by foreign commerce and colonial settlements on a too introspective nation. His words bear witness to the keenness of his insight into the maladies of his own people and the sources of social and political strength enjoyed by the United States, where he had recently sojourned. Referring to their speedy recovery from the tumults of their revolution, he said: "The true Lethe after passing through a revolution is to be found in the opening out to men of every avenue of hope.--Revolutions leave behind them a general restlessness of mind, a need of movement." That need was met in America by man's warfare against the forest, the flood, and the prairie. France must therefore possess colonies as intellectual and political safety-valves; and in his graceful, airy style he touched on the advantages offered by Egypt, Louisiana, and West Africa, both for their intrinsic value and as opening the door of work and of hope to a brain-sick generation.

Following up this clue, Bonaparte, at a somewhat later date, remarked the tendency of the French people, now that the revolutionary strifes were past, to settle down contentedly on their own little plots; and he emphasized the need of a colonial policy such as would widen the national life. The remark has been largely justified by events; and doubtless he discerned in the agrarian reforms of the Revolution an influence unfavourable to that racial dispersion which, under wise guidance, builds up an oceanic empire. The grievances of the ancien régime had helped to scatter on the shores of the St. Lawrence the seeds of a possible New France. Primogeniture was ever driving from England her younger sons to found New Englands and expand the commerce of the motherland. Let not France now rest at home, content with her perfect laws and with the conquest of her "natural frontiers." Let her rather strive to regain the first place in colonial activity which the follies of Louis XV. and the secular jealousy of Albion had filched from her. In the effort she would extend the bounds of civilization, lay the ghost of Jacobinism, satisfy military and naval adventures, and unconsciously revert to the ideas and governmental methods of the age of le grand monarque.

The French possessions beyond the seas had never shrunk to a smaller area than in the closing years of the late war with England. The fact was confessed by the First Consul in his letter of October 7th, 1801, to Decrès, the Minister for the Navy and the Colonies: "Our possessions beyond the sea, which are now in our power, are limited to Saint Domingo, Guadeloupe, the Isle of France (Mauritius), the Isle of Bourbon, Senegal, and Guiana." After rendering this involuntary homage to the prowess of the British navy, Bonaparte proceeded to describe the first measures for the organization of these colonies: for not until March 25th, 1802, when the definitive treaty of peace was signed, could the others be regained by France.

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First in importance came the re-establishment of French authority in the large and fertile island of Hayti, or St. Domingo. It needs an effort of the imagination for the modern reader to realize the immense importance of the West Indian islands at the beginning of the century, whose close found them depressed and half bankrupt. At the earlier date, when the name Australia was unknown, and the half-starved settlement in and around Sydney represented the sole wealth of that isle of continent; when the Cape of Good Hope was looked on only as a port of call; when the United States numbered less than five and a half million souls, and the waters of the Mississippi rolled in unsullied majesty past a few petty Spanish stations--the plantations of the West Indies seemed the unfailing mine of colonial industry and commerce. Under the ancien régime, the trade of the French portion of San Domingo is reported to have represented more than half of her oceanic commerce. But during the Revolution the prosperity of that colony reeled under a terrible blow.

The hasty proclamation of equality between whites and blacks by the French revolutionists, and the refusal of the planters to recognize that decree as binding, led to a terrible servile revolt, which desolated the whole of the colony. Those merciless strifes had, however, somewhat abated under the organizing power of a man, in whom the black race seemed to have vindicated its claims to political capacity. Toussaint l'Ouverture had come to the front by sheer sagacity and force of character. By a deft mixture of force and clemency, he imposed order on the vapouring crowds of negroes: he restored the French part of the island to comparative order and prosperity; and with an army of 20,000 men he occupied the Spanish portion. In this, as in other matters, he appeared to act as the mandatory of France; but he looked to the time when France, beset by European wars, would tacitly acknowledge his independence. In May, 1801, he made a constitution for the island, and declared himself governor for life, with power to appoint his successor. This mimicry of the consular office, and the open vaunt that he was the "Bonaparte of the Antilles," incensed Bonaparte; and the haste with which, on the day after the Preliminaries of London, he prepared to overthrow this contemptible rival, tells its own tale.

Yet Corsican hatred was tempered with Corsican guile. Toussaint had requested that the Haytians should be under the protection of their former mistress. Protection was the last thing that Bonaparte desired; but he deemed it politic to flatter the black chieftain with assurances of his personal esteem and gratitude for the "great services which you have rendered to the French people. If its flag floats over St. Domingo it is due to you and your brave blacks"--a reference to Toussaint's successful resistance to English attempts at landing. There were, it is true, some points in the new Haytian constitution which contravened the sovereign rights of France, but these were pardonable in the difficult circumstances which had pressed on Toussaint: he was now, however, invited to amend them so as to recognize the complete sovereignty of the motherland and the authority of General Leclerc, whom Bonaparte sent out as captain-general of the island. To this officer, the husband of Pauline Bonaparte, the First Consul wrote on the same day that there was reported to be much ferment in the island against Toussaint, that the obstacles to be overcome would therefore be much less formidable than had been feared, provided that activity and firmness were used. In his references to the burning topic of slavery, the First Consul showed a similar reserve. The French Republic having abolished it, he could not, as yet, openly restore an institution flagrantly opposed to the Rights of Man. Ostensibly therefore he figured as the champion of emancipation, assuring the Haytians in his proclamation of November 8th, 1801, that they were all free and all equal in the sight of God and of the French Republic: "If you are told, 'These forces are destined to snatch your liberty from you,' reply, 'The Republic has given us our liberty: it will not allow it to be taken from us.'" Of a similar tenor was his public declaration a fortnight later, that at St. Domingo and Guadeloupe everybody was free and would remain free. Very different were his private instructions. On the last day of October he ordered Talleyrand to write to the British Government, asking for their help in supplying provisions from Jamaica to this expedition destined to "destroy the new Algiers being organized in American waters"; and a fortnight later he charged him to state his resolve to destroy the government of the blacks at St. Domingo; that if he had to postpone the expedition for a year, he would be "obliged to constitute the blacks as French"; and that "the liberty of the blacks, if recognized by the Government, would always be a support for the Republic in the New World." As he was striving to cajole our Government into supporting his expedition, it is clear that in the last enigmatic phrase he was bidding for that support by the hint of a prospective restoration of slavery at St. Domingo. A comparison of his public and private statements must have produced a curious effect on the British Ministers, and many of the difficulties during the negotiations at Amiens doubtless sprang out of their knowledge of his double-dealing in the West Indies.

The means at the First Consul's disposal might have been considered sufficient to dispense with these paltry devices; for when the squadrons of Brest, Lorient, Rochefort, and Toulon had joined their forces, they mustered thirty-two ships of the line and thirty-one frigates, with more than 20,000 troops on board. So great, indeed, was the force as to occasion strong remonstrances from the British Government, and a warning that a proportionately strong fleet would be sent to watch over the safety of our West Indies.[197] The size of the French armada and the warnings which Toussaint received from Europe induced that wily dictator to adopt stringent precautionary measures. He persuaded the blacks that the French were about to enslave them once more, and, raising the spectre of bondage, he quelled sedition, ravaged the maritime towns, and awaited the French in the interior, in confident expectation that yellow fever would winnow their ranks and reduce them to a level with his own strength.

His hopes were ultimately realized, but not until he himself succumbed to the hardihood of the French attack. Leclerc's army swept across the desolated belt with an ardour that was redoubled by the sight of the mangled remains of white people strewn amidst the negro encampments, and stormed Toussaint's chief stronghold at Crête-à-Pierrot. The dictator and his factious lieutenants thereupon surrendered (May 8th, 1802), on condition of their official rank being respected--a stipulation which both sides must have regarded as unreal and impossible. The French then pressed on to secure the subjection of the whole island before the advent of the unhealthy season, which Toussaint eagerly awaited. It now set in with unusual virulence; and in a few days the conquerors found their force reduced to 12,000 effectives. Suspecting Toussaint's designs, Leclerc seized him. He was empowered to do so by Bonaparte's orders of March 16th, 1802:

"Follow your instructions exactly, and as soon as you have done with Toussaint, Christopher, Dessalines, and the chief brigands, and the masses of the blacks are disarmed, send to the continent all the blacks and the half-castes who have taken part in the civil troubles."

Toussaint was hurried off to France, where he died a year later from the hardships to which he was exposed at the fort of Joux among the Juras.

Long before the cold of a French winter claimed the life of Toussaint, his antagonist fell a victim to the sweltering heats of the tropics. On November 2nd, 1802, Leclerc succumbed to the unhealthy climate and to his ceaseless anxieties. In the Notes dictated at St. Helena, Napoleon submitted Leclerc's memory to some strictures for his indiscretion in regard to the proposed restoration of slavery. The official letters of that officer expose the injustice of the charge. The facts are these. After the seeming submission of St. Domingo, the First Consul caused a decree to be secretly passed at Paris (May 20th, 1802), which prepared to re-establish slavery in the West Indies; but Decrès warned Leclerc that it was not for the present to be applied to St. Domingo unless it seemed to be opportune. Knowing how fatal any such proclamation would be, Leclerc suppressed the decree; but General Richepanse, who was now governor of the island of Guadeloupe, not only issued the decree, but proceeded to enforce it with rigour. It was this which caused the last and most desperate revolts of the blacks, fatal alike to French domination and to Leclerc's life. His successor, Rochambeau, in spite of strong reinforcements of troops from France and a policy of the utmost rigour, succeeded no better. In the island of Guadeloupe the rebels openly defied the authority of France; and, on the renewal of war between England and France, the remains of the expedition were for the most part constrained to surrender to the British flag or to the insurgent blacks. The island recovered its so-called independence; and the sole result of Napoleon's efforts in this sphere was the loss of more than twenty generals and some 30,000 troops.

The assertion has been repeatedly made that the First Consul told off for this service the troops of the Army of the Rhine, with the aim of exposing to the risks of tropical life the most republican part of the French forces. That these furnished a large part of the expeditionary force cannot be denied; but if his design was to rid himself of political foes, it is difficult to see why he should not have selected Moreau, Masséna, or Augereau, rather than Leclerc. The fact that his brother-in-law was accompanied by his wife, Pauline Bonaparte, for whom venomous tongues asserted that Napoleon cherished a more than brotherly affection, will suffice to refute the slander. Finally, it may be remarked that Bonaparte had not hesitated to subject the choicest part of his Army of Italy and his own special friends to similiar risks in Egypt and Syria. He never hesitated to sacrifice thousands of lives when a great object was at stake; and the restoration of the French West Indian Colonies might well seem worth an army, especially as St. Domingo was not only of immense instrinsic value to France in days when beetroot sugar was unknown, but was of strategic importance as a base of operations for the vast colonial empire which the First Consul proposed to rebuild in the basin of the Mississippi.

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The history of the French possessions on the North American continent could scarcely be recalled by ardent patriots without pangs of remorse. The name Louisiana, applied to a vast territory stretching up the banks of the Mississippi and the Missouri, recalled the glorious days of Louis XIV., when the French flag was borne by stout voyageurs up the foaming rivers of Canada and the placid reaches of the father of rivers. It had been the ambition of Montcalm to connect the French stations on Lake Erie with the forts of Louisiana; but that warrior-statesman in the West, as his kindred spirit, Dupleix, in the East, had fallen on the evil days of Louis XV., when valour and merit in the French colonies were sacrificed to the pleasures and parasites of Versailles. The natural result followed. Louisiana was yielded up to Spain in 1763, in order to reconcile the Court of Madrid to cessions required by that same Peace of Paris. Twenty years later Spain recovered from England the provinces of eastern and western Florida; and thus, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the red and yellow flag waved over all the lands between California, New Orleans, and the southern tip of Florida.[198]

Many efforts were made by France to regain her old Mississippi province; and in 1795, at the break up of the First Coalition, the victorious Republic pressed Spain to yield up this territory, where the settlers were still French at heart. Doubtless the weak King of Spain would have yielded; but his chief Minister, Godoy, clung tenaciously to Louisiana, and consented to cede only the Spanish part of St. Domingo--a diplomatic success which helped to earn him the title of the Prince of the Peace. So matters remained until Talleyrand, as Foreign Minister, sought to gain Louisiana from Spain before it slipped into the horny fists of the Anglo-Saxons.

That there was every prospect of this last event was the conviction not only of the politicians at Washington, but also of every iron-worker on the Ohio and of every planter on the Tennessee. Those young but growing settlements chafed against the restraints imposed by Spain on the river trade of the lower Mississippi--the sole means available for their exports in times when the Alleghanies were crossed by only two tracks worthy the name of roads. In 1795 they gained free egress to the Gulf of Mexico and the right of bonding their merchandise in a special warehouse at New Orleans. Thereafter the United States calmly awaited the time when racial vigour and the exigencies of commerce should yield to them the possession of the western prairies and the little townships of Arkansas and New Orleans. They reckoned without taking count of the eager longing of the French for their former colony and the determination of Napoleon to give effect to this honourable sentiment.

In July, 1800, when his negotiations with the United

States were in good train, the First Consul sent to Madrid instructions empowering the French Minister there to arrange a treaty whereby France should receive Louisiana in return for the cession of Tuscany to the heir of the Duke of Parma. This young man had married the daughter of Charles IV. of Spain; and, for the aggrandizement of his son-in-law, that roi fainéant, was ready, nay eager, to bargain away a quarter of a continent; and he did so by a secret convention signed at St. Ildefonso on October 7th, 1800.

But though Charles rejoiced over this exchange, Godoy, who was gifted with some insight into the future, was determined to frustrate it. Various events occurred which enabled this wily Minister, first to delay, and then almost to prevent, the odious surrender. Chief among these was the certainty that the transfer from weak hands to strong hands would be passionately resented by the United States; and until peace with England was fully assured, and the power of Toussaint broken, it would be folly for the First Consul to risk a conflict with the United States. That they would fight rather than see the western prairies pass into the First Consul's hands was abundantly manifest. It is proved by many patriotic pamphlets. The most important of these--"An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French," published at Philadelphia in 1802--quoted largely from a French brochure by a French Councillor of State. The French writer had stated that along the Mississippi his countrymen would find boundless fertile prairies, and as for the opposition of the United States--"a nation of pedlars and shopkeepers"--that could be crushed by a French alliance with the Indian tribes. The American writer thereupon passionately called on his fellow-citizens to prevent this transfer: "France is to be dreaded only, or chiefly, on the Mississippi. The Government must take Louisiana before it passes into her hands. The iron is now hot: command us to rise as one man and strike." These and other like protests at last stirred the placid Government at Washington; and it bade the American Minister at Paris to make urgent remonstrances, the sole effect of which was to draw from Talleyrand the bland assurance that the transfer had not been seriously contemplated.[199]

By the month of June, 1802, all circumstances seemed to smile on Napoleon's enterprise: England had ratified the Peace of Amiens, Toussaint had delivered himself up to Leclerc: France had her troops strongly posted in Tuscany and Parma, and could, if necessary, forcibly end the remaining scruples felt at Madrid; while the United States, with a feeble army and a rotting navy, were controlled by the most peaceable and Franco-phil of their presidents, Thomas Jefferson. The First Consul accordingly ordered an expedition to be prepared, as if for the reinforcement of Leclerc in St. Domingo, though it was really destined for New Orleans; and he instructed Talleyrand to soothe or coerce the Court of Madrid into the final act of transfer. The offer was therefore made by the latter (June 19th) in the name of the First Consul that in no case would Louisiana ever be alienated to a Third Power. When further delays supervened, Bonaparte, true to his policy of continually raising his demands, required that Eastern and Western Florida should also be ceded to him by Spain, on condition that the young King of Etruria (for so Tuscany was now to be styled) should regain his father's duchy of Parma.[200]

A word of explanation must here find place as to this singular proposal. Parma had long been under French control; and, in March, 1801, by the secret Treaty of Madrid, the ruler of that duchy, whose death seemed imminent, was to resign his claims thereto, provided that his son should gain Etruria--as had been already provided for at St. Ildefonso and Lunéville. The duke was, however, allowed to keep his duchy until his death, which occurred on October 9th, 1802; and it is stated by our envoy in Paris to have been hastened by news of that odious bargain.[201] His death now furnished Bonaparte with a good occasion for seeking to win an immense area in the New World at the expense of a small Italian duchy, which his troops could at any time easily overrun. This consideration seems to have occurred even to Charles IV.; he refused to barter the Floridas against Parma. The re-establishment of his son-in-law in his paternal domains was doubtless desirable, but not at the cost of so exacting a heriot as East and West Florida.

From out this maze of sordid intrigues two or three facts challenge our attention. Both Bonaparte and Charles IV. regarded the most fertile waste lands then calling for the plough as fairly exchanged against half a million of Tuscans; but the former feared the resentment of the United States, and sought to postpone a rupture until he could coerce them by overwhelming force. It is equally clear that, had he succeeded in this enterprise, France might have gained a great colonial empire in North America protected from St. Domingo as a naval and military base, while that island would have doubly prospered from the vast supplies poured down the Mississippi; but this success he would have bought at the expense of a rapprochement between the United States and their motherland, such as a bitter destiny was to postpone to the end of the century.

The prospect of an Anglo-American alliance might well give pause even to Napoleon. Nevertheless, he resolved to complete this vast enterprise, which, if successful, would have profoundly affected the New World and the relative importance of the French and English peoples. The Spanish officials at New Orleans, in pursuance of orders from Madrid, now closed the lower Mississippi to vessels of the United States (October, 1802). At once a furious outcry arose in the States against an act which not only violated their treaty rights, but foreshadowed the coming grip of the First Consul. For this outburst he was prepared: General Victor was at Dunkirk, with five battalions and sixteen field-pieces, ready to cross the Atlantic, ostensibly for the relief of Leclerc, but really in order to take possession of New Orleans.[202] But his plan was foiled by the sure instincts of the American people, by the disasters of the St. Domingo expedition, and by the restlessness of England under his various provocations. Jefferson, despite his predilections for France, was compelled to forbid the occupation of Louisiana: he accordingly sent Monroe to Paris with instructions to effect a compromise, or even to buy outright the French claims on that land. Various circumstances favoured this mission. In the first week of the year 1803 Napoleon received the news of Leclerc's death and the miserable state of the French in St. Domingo; and as the tidings that he now received from Egypt, Syria, Corfu, and the East generally, were of the most alluring kind, he tacitly abandoned his Mississippi enterprise in favour of the oriental schemes which were closer to his heart. In that month of January he seems to have turned his gaze from the western hemisphere towards Turkey, Egypt, and India. True, he still seemed to be doing his utmost for the occupation of Louisiana, but only as a device for sustaining the selling price of the western prairies.

When the news of this change of policy reached the ears of Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte, it aroused their bitterest opposition. Lucien plumed himself on having struck the bargain with Spain which had secured that vast province at the expense of an Austrian archduke's crown; and Joseph knew only too well that Napoleon was freeing himself in the West in order to be free to strike hard in Europe and the East. The imminent rupture of the Peace of Amiens touched him keenly: for that peace was his proudest achievement. If colonial adventures must be sought, let them be sought in the New World, where Spain and the United States could offer only a feeble resistance, rather than in Europe and Asia, where unending war must be the result of an aggressive policy.

At once the brothers sought an interview with Napoleon. He chanced to be in his bath, a warm bath perfumed with scents, where he believed that tired nature most readily found recovery. He ordered them to be admitted, and an interesting family discussion was the result. On his mentioning the proposed sale, Lucien at once retorted that the Legislature would never consent to this sacrifice. He there touched the wrong chord in Napoleon's nature: had he appealed to the memories of le grand monarque and of Montcalm, possibly he might have bent that iron will; but the mention of the consent of the French deputies roused the spleen of the autocrat, who, from amidst the scented water, mockingly bade his brother go into mourning for the affair, which he, and he alone, intended to carry out. This gibe led Joseph to threaten that he would mount the tribune in the Chambers and head the opposition to this unpatriotic surrender. Defiance flashed forth once more from the bath; and the First Consul finally ended their bitter retorts by spasmodically rising as suddenly falling backwards, and drenching Joseph to the skin. His peals of scornful laughter, and the swooning of the valet, who was not yet fully inured to these family scenes, interrupted the argument of the piece; but, when resumed a little later, à sec, Lucien wound up by declaring that, if he were not his brother, he would be his enemy. "My enemy! That is rather strong," exclaimed Napoleon. "You my enemy! I would break you, see, like this box"--and he dashed his snuff-box on the carpet. It did not break: but the portrait of Josephine was detached and broken. Whereupon Lucien picked up the pieces and handed them to his brother, remarking: "It is a pity: meanwhile, until you can break me, it is your wife's portrait that you have broken."[203]

To Talleyrand, Napoleon was equally unbending: summoning him on April 11th, he said:

"Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season. I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede: it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon. I have proved the importance I attach to this province, since my first diplomatic act with Spain had the object of recovering it. I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly. I direct you to negotiate the affair."[204]

After some haggling with Monroe, the price agreed on for this territory was 60,000,000 francs, the United States also covenanting to satisfy the claims which many of their citizens had on the French treasury. For this paltry sum the United States gained a peaceful title to the debatable lands west of Lake Erie and to the vast tracts west of the Mississippi. The First Consul carried out his threat of denying to the deputies of France any voice in this barter. The war with England sufficed to distract their attention; and France turned sadly away from the western prairies, which her hardy sons had first opened up, to fix her gaze, first on the Orient, and thereafter on European conquests. No more was heard of Louisiana, and few references were permitted to the disasters in St. Domingo; for Napoleon abhorred any mention of a coup manqué, and strove to banish from the imagination of France those dreams of a trans-Atlantic Empire which had drawn him, as they were destined sixty years later to draw his nephew, to the verge of war with the rising republic of the New World. In one respect, the uncle was more fortunate than the nephew. In signing the treaty with the United States, the First Consul could represent his conduct, not as a dexterous retreat from an impossible situation, but as an act of grace to the Americans and a blow to England. "This accession of territory," he said, "strengthens for ever the power of the United States, and I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride."[205]

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In the East there seemed to be scarcely the same field for expansion as in the western hemisphere. Yet, as the Orient had ever fired the imagination of Napoleon, he was eager to expand the possessions of France in the Indian Ocean. In October, 1801, these amounted to the Isle of Bourbon and the Isle of France; for the former French possessions in India, namely, Pondicherry, Mahé, Karikal, Chandernagore, along with their factories at Yanaon, Surat, and two smaller places, had been seized by the British, and were not to be given back to France until six months after the definitive treaty of peace was signed. From these scanty relics it seemed impossible to rear a stable fabric: yet the First Consul grappled with the task. After the cessation of hostilities, he ordered Admiral Gantheaume with four ships of war to show the French flag in those seas, and to be ready in due course to take over the French settlements in India. Meanwhile he used his utmost endeavours in the negotiations at Amiens to gain an accession of land for Pondicherry, such as would make it a possible base for military enterprise. Even before those negotiations began he expressed to Lord Cornwallis his desire for such an extension; and when the British plenipotentiary urged the cession of Tobago to Great Britain, he offered to exchange it for an establishment or territory in India.[206] Herein the First Consul committed a serious tactical blunder; for his insistence on this topic and his avowed desire to negotiate direct with the Nabob undoubtedly aroused the suspicions of our Government.

Still greater must have been their concern when they learnt that General Decaen was commissioned to receive back the French possessions in India; for that general in 1800 had expressed to Bonaparte his hatred of the English, and had begged, even if he had to wait ten years, that he might be sent where he could fight them, especially in India. As was his wont, Bonaparte said little at the time; but after testing Decaen's military capacity, he called him to his side at midsummer, 1802, and suddenly asked him if he still thought about India. On receiving an eager affirmative, he said, "Well, you will go." "In what capacity?" "As captain-general: go to the Minister of Marine and of the Colonies and ask him to communicate to you the documents relating to this expedition." By such means did Bonaparte secure devoted servants. It is scarcely needful to add that the choice of such a man only three months after the signature of the Treaty of Amiens proves that the First Consul only intended to keep that peace as long as his forward colonial policy rendered it desirable.[207]

Meanwhile our Governor-General, Marquis Wellesley, was displaying an activity which might seem to be dictated by knowledge of Bonaparte's designs. There was, indeed, every need of vigour. Nowhere had French and British interests been so constantly in collision as in India. In 1798 France had intrigued with Tippoo Sahib at Seringapatam, and arranged a treaty for the purpose of expelling the British nation from India. When in 1799 French hopes were dashed by Arthur Wellesley's capture of that city and the death of Tippoo, there still remained some prospect of overthrowing British supremacy by uniting the restless Mahratta rulers of the north and centre, especially Scindiah and Holkar, in a powerful confederacy. For some years their armies, numbering some 60,000 men, had been drilled and equipped by French adventurers, the ablest and most powerful of whom was M. Perron. Doubtless it was with the hope of gaining their support that the Czar Paul and Bonaparte had in 1800 formed the project of invading India by way of Persia. And after the dissipation of that dream, there still remained the chance of strengthening the Mahratta princes so as to contest British claims with every hope of success. Forewarned by the home Government of Bonaparte's eastern designs, our able and ambitious Governor-General now prepared to isolate the Mahratta chieftains, to cut them off from all contact with France, and, if necessary, to shatter Scindiah's army, the only formidable native force drilled by European methods.

Such was the position of affairs when General Decaen undertook the enterprise of revivifying French influences in India.

The secret instructions which he received from the First Consul, dated January 15th, 1803, were the following:

"To communicate with the peoples or princes who are most impatient under the yoke of the English Company.... To send home a report six months after his arrival in India, concerning all information that he shall have collected, on the strength, the position, and the feeling of the different peoples of India, as well as on the strength and position of the different English establishments; ... his views, and hopes that he might have of finding support, in case of war, so as to be able to maintain himself in the Peninsula.... Finally, as one must reason on the hypothesis that we should not be masters of the sea and could hope for slight succour,"

Decaen is to seek among the French possessions or elsewhere a place serving as a point d'appui, where in the last resort he could capitulate and thus gain the means of being transported to France with arms and baggage. Of this point d'appui he will

"strive to take possession after the first months ... whatever be the nation to which it belongs, Portuguese, Dutch, or English.... If war should break out between England and France before the 1st of Vendémiaire, Year XIII. (September 22nd, 1804), and the captain general is warned of it before receiving the orders of the Government, he has carte blanche to fall back on the Ile de France and the Cape, or to remain in India.... It is now considered impossible that we should have war with England without dragging in Holland. One of the first cares of the captain-general will be to gain control over the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish establishments, and of their resources. The captain-general's mission is at first one of observation, on political and military topics, with the small forces that he takes out, and an occupation of comptoirs for our commerce: but the First Consul, if well informed by him, will perhaps be able some day to put him in a position to acquire that great glory which hands down the memory of men beyond the lapse of centuries."[208]

Had these instructions been known to English statesmen, they would certainly have ended the peace which was being thus perfidiously used by the First Consul for the destruction of our Indian Empire. But though their suspicions were aroused by the departure of Decaen's expedition and by the activity of French agents in India, yet the truth remained half hidden, until, at a later date, the publication of General Decaen's papers shed a flood of light on Napoleon's policy.

Owing to various causes, the expedition did not set sail from Brest until the beginning of March, 1803. The date should be noticed. It proves that at this time Napoleon judged that a rupture of peace was not imminent; and when he saw his miscalculation, he sought to delay the war with England as long as possible in order to allow time for Decaen's force at least to reach the Cape, then in the hands of the Dutch. The French squadron was too weak to risk a fight with an English fleet; it comprised only four ships of war, two transports, and a few smaller vessels, carrying about 1,800 troops.[209] The ships were under the command of Admiral Linois, who was destined to be the terror of our merchantmen in eastern seas. Decaen's first halt was at the Cape, which had been given back by us to the Dutch East India Company on February 21st, 1803. The French general found the Dutch officials in their usual state of lethargy: the fortifications had not been repaired, and many of the inhabitants, and even of the officials themselves, says Decaen, were devoted to the English. After surveying the place, doubtless with a view to its occupation as the point d'appui hinted at in his instructions, he set sail on the 27th of May, and arrived before Pondicherry on the 11th of July.[210]

In the meantime important events had transpired which served to wreck not only Decaen's enterprise, but the French influence in India. In Europe the flames of war had burst forth, a fact of which both Decaen and the British officials were ignorant; but the Governor of Fort St. George (Madras), having, before the 15th of June, "received intelligence which appeared to indicate the certainty of an early renewal of hostilities between His Majesty and France," announced that he must postpone the restitution of Pondicherry to the French, until he should have the authority of the Governor-General for such action.[211]

The Marquis Wellesley was still less disposed to any such restitution. French intervention in the affairs of Switzerland, which will be described later on, had so embittered Anglo-French relations that on October the 17th, 1802, Lord Hobart, our Minister of War and for the Colonies, despatched a "most secret" despatch, stating that recent events rendered it necessary to postpone this retrocession. At a later period Wellesley received contrary orders, instructing him to restore French and Dutch territories; but he judged that step to be inopportune considering the gravity of events in the north of India. So active was the French propaganda at the Mahratta Courts, and so threatening were their armed preparations, that he redoubled his efforts for the consolidation of British supremacy. He resolved to strike at Scindiah, unless he withdrew his southern army into his own territories; and, on receiving an evasive answer from that prince, who hoped by temporizing to gain armed succours from France, he launched the British forces against him. Now was the opportunity for Arthur Wellesley to display his prowess against the finest forces of the East; and brilliantly did the young warrior display it. The victories of Assaye in September, and of Argaum in November, scattered the southern Mahratta force, but only after desperate conflicts that suggested how easily a couple of Decaen's battalions might have turned the scales of war.

Meanwhile, in the north, General Lake stormed Aligarh, and drove Scindiah's troops back to Delhi. Disgusted at the incapacity and perfidy that surrounded him, Perron threw up his command; and another conflict near Delhi yielded that ancient seat of Empire to our trading Company. In three months the results of the toil of Scindiah, the restless ambition of Holkar, the training of European officers, and the secret intrigues of Napoleon, were all swept to the winds. Wellesley now annexed the land around Delhi and Agra, besides certain coast districts which cut off the Mahrattas from the sea, also stipulating for the complete exclusion of French agents from their States. Perron was allowed to return to France; and the brusque reception accorded him from Bonaparte may serve to measure the height of the First Consul's hopes, the depth of his disappointment, and his resentment against a man who was daunted by a single disaster.[212]

Meanwhile it was the lot of Decaen to witness, in inglorious inactivity, the overthrow of all his hopes. Indeed, he barely escaped the capture which Wellesley designed for his whole force, as soon as he should hear of the outbreak of war in Europe; but by secret and skilful measures all the French ships, except one transport, escaped to their appointed rendezvous, the Ile de France. Enraged by these events, Decaen and Linois determined to inflict every possible injury on their foes. The latter soon swept from the eastern seas British merchantmen valued at a million sterling, while the general ceased not to send emissaries into India to encourage the millions of natives to shake off the yoke of "a few thousand English."

These officers effected little, and some of them were handed over to the English authorities by the now obsequious potentates. Decaen also endeavoured to carry out the First Consul's design of occupying strategic points in the Indian Ocean. In the autumn of 1803 he sent a fine cruiser to the Imaum of Muscat, to induce him to cede a station for commercial purposes at that port. But Wellesley, forewarned by our agent at Bagdad, had made a firm alliance with the Imaum, who accordingly refused the request of the French captain. The incident, however, supplies another link in the chain of evidence as to the completeness of Napoleon's oriental policy, and yields another proof of the vigour of our great proconsul at Calcutta, by whose foresight our Indian Empire was preserved and strengthened.[213]

Bonaparte's enterprises were by no means limited to well-known lands. The unknown continent of the Southern Seas appealed to his imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by French energy into a second fatherland. Australia, or New Holland, as it was then called, had long attracted the notice of French explorers, but the English penal settlements at and near Sydney formed the only European establishment on the great southern island at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Bonaparte early turned his eyes towards that land. On his voyage to Egypt he took with him the volumes in which Captain Cook described his famous discoveries; and no sooner was he firmly installed as First Consul than he planned with the Institute of France a great French expedition to New Holland. The full text of the plan has never been published: probably it was suppressed or destroyed; and the sole public record relating to it is contained in the official account of the expedition published at the French Imperial Press in 1807.[214] According to this description, the aim was solely geographical and scientific. The First Consul and the Institute of France desired that the ships should proceed to Van Diemen's Land, explore its rivers, and then complete the survey of the south coast of the continent, so as to see whether behind the islands of the Nuyts Archipelago there might be a channel connecting with the Gulf of Carpentaria, and so cutting New Holland in half. They were then to sail west to "Terre Leeuwin," ascend the Swan River, complete the exploration of Shark's Bay and the north-western coasts, and winter in Timor or Amboyne. Finally, they were to coast along New Guinea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, and return to France in 1803.

In September, 1800, the ships, having on board twenty-three scientific men, set sail from Havre under the command of Commodore Baudin. They received no molestation from English cruisers, it being a rule of honour to give Admiralty permits to all members of genuinely scientific and geographical parties. Nevertheless, even on its scientific side, this splendidly-equipped expedition produced no results comparable with those achieved by Lieutenant Bass or by Captain Flinders. The French ships touched at the Ile de France, and sailed thence for Van Diemen's Land. After spending a long time in the exploration of its coasts and in collecting scientific information, they made for Sydney in order to repair their ships and gain relief for their many invalids. Thence, after incidents which will be noticed presently, they set sail in November, 1802, for Bass Strait and the coast beyond. They seem to have overlooked the entrance to Port Phillip--a discovery effected by Murray in 1801, but not made public till three years later--and failed to notice the outlet of the chief Australian river, which is obscured by a shallow lake.

There they were met by Captain Flinders, who, on H.M.S. "Investigator," had been exploring the coast between Cape Leeuwin and the great gulfs which he named after Lords St. Vincent and Spencer. Flinders was returning towards Sydney, when, in the long desolate curve of the bay which he named from the incident Encounter Bay, he saw the French ships. After brief and guarded intercourse the explorers separated, the French proceeding to survey the gulfs whence the "Investigator" had just sailed; while Flinders, after a short stay at Sydney and the exploration of the northern coast and Torres Strait, set out for Europe.[215]

Apart from the compilation of the most accurate map of Australia which had then appeared, and the naming of several features on its coasts--e.g., Capes Berrouilli and Gantheaume, the Bays of Rivoli and of Lacépède, and the Freycinet Peninsula, which are still retained--the French expedition achieved no geographical results of the first importance.

Its political aims now claim attention. A glance at the accompanying map will show that, under the guise of being an emissary of civilization, Commodore Baudin was prepared to claim half the continent for France. Indeed, his final inquiry at Sydney about the extent of the British claims on the Pacific coast was so significant as to elicit from Governor King the reply that the whole of Van Diemen's Land and of the coast from Cape Howe on the south of the mainland to Cape York on the north was British territory. King also notified the suspicious action of the French Commander to the Home Government; and when the French sailed away to explore the coast of southern and central Australia he sent a ship to watch their proceedings. When, therefore, Commodore Baudin effected a landing on King Island, the Union Jack was speedily hoisted and saluted by the blue-jackets of the British vessel; for it was rumoured that French officers had said that King Island would afford a good station for the command of Bass Strait and the seizure of British ships. This was probably mere gossip. Baudin in his interviews with Governor King at Sydney disclaimed any intention of seizing Van Diemen's Land; but he afterwards stated that he did not know what were the plans of the French Government with regard to that island.[216]

Long before this dark saying could be known at Westminster, the suspicions of our Government had been aroused; and, on February 13th, 1803, Lord Hobart penned a despatch to Governor King bidding him to take every precaution against French annexations, and to form settlements in Van Diemen's Land and at Port Phillip. The station of Risden was accordingly planted on the estuary of the Derwent, a little above the present town of Hobart; while on the shores of Port Phillip another expedition sent out from the mother country sought, but for the present in vain, to find a suitable site. The French cruise therefore exerted on the fortunes of the English and French peoples an influence such as has frequently accrued from their colonial rivalry: it spurred on the island Power to more vigorous efforts than she would otherwise have put forth, and led to the discomfiture of her continental rival. The plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land and the middle of Australia had an effect like that which the ambition of Montcalm, Dupleix, Lally, and Perron has exerted on the ultimate destiny of many a vast and fertile territory.

Still, in spite of the destruction of his fleet at Trafalgar, Napoleon held to his Australian plans. No fact, perhaps, is more suggestive of the dogged tenacity of his will than his order to Péron and Freycinet to publish through the Imperial Press at Paris an exhaustive account of their Australian voyage, accompanied by maps which claimed half of that continent for the tricolour flag. It appeared in 1807, the year of Tilsit and of the plans for the partition of Portugal and her colonies between France and Spain. The hour seemed at last to have struck for the assertion of French supremacy in other continents, now that the Franco-Russian alliance had durably consolidated it in Europe. And who shall say that, but for the Spanish Rising and the genius of Wellington, a vast colonial empire might not have been won for France, had Napoleon been free to divert his energies away from this "old Europe" of which he professed to be utterly weary?

His whole attitude towards European and colonial politics revealed a statesmanlike appreciation of the forces that were to mould the fortunes of nations in the nineteenth century. He saw that no rearrangement of the European peoples could be permanent. They were too stubborn, too solidly nationalized, to bear the yoke of the new Charlemagne. "I am come too late," he once exclaimed to Marmont; "men are too enlightened, there is nothing great left to be done." These words reveal his sense of the artificiality of his European conquests. His imperial instincts could find complete satisfaction only among the docile fate-ridden peoples of Asia, where he might unite the functions of an Alexander and a Mahomet: or, failing that, he would carve out an empire from the vast southern lands, organizing them by his unresting powers and ruling them as oekist and as despot. This task would possess a permanence such as man's conquests over Nature may always enjoy, and his triumphs over his fellows seldom or never. The political reconstruction of Europe was at best one of an infinite number of such changes, always progressing and never completed; while the peopling of new lands and the founding of States belonged to that highest plane of political achievement wherein schemes of social beneficence and the dictates of a boundless ambition could maintain an eager and unending rivalry. While a strictly European policy could effect little more than a raking over of long-cultivated parterres, the foundation of a new colonial empire would be the turning up of the virgin soil of the limitless prairie.

If we inquire by the light of history why these grand designs failed, the answer must be that they were too vast fitly to consort with an ambitious European policy. His ablest adviser noted this fundamental defect as rapidly developing after the Peace of Amiens, when "he began to sow the seeds of new wars which, after overwhelming Europe and France, were to lead him to his ruin." This criticism of Talleyrand on a man far greater than himself, but who lacked that saving grace of moderation in which the diplomatist excelled, is consonant with all the teachings of history. The fortunes of the colonial empires of Athens and Carthage in the ancient world, of the Italian maritime republics, of Portugal and Spain, and, above all, the failure of the projects of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. serve to prove that only as the motherland enjoys a sufficiency of peace at home and on her borders can she send forth in ceaseless flow those supplies of men and treasure which are the very life-blood of a new organism. That beneficent stream might have poured into Napoleon's Colonial Empire, had not other claims diverted it into the barren channels of European warfare. The same result followed as at the time of the Seven Years' War, when the double effort to wage great campaigns in Germany and across the oceans sapped the strength of France, and the additions won by Dupleix and Montcalm fell away from her flaccid frame.

Did Napoleon foresee a similar result? His conduct in regard to Louisiana and in reference to Decaen's expedition proves that he did, but only when it was too late. As soon as he saw that his policy was about to provoke another war with Britain long before he was ready for it, he decided to forego his oceanic schemes and to concentrate his forces on his European frontiers. The decision was dictated by a true sense of imperial strategy. But what shall we say of his sense of imperial diplomacy? The foregoing narrative and the events to be described in the next chapters prove that his mistake lay in that overweening belief in his own powers and in the pliability of his enemies which was the cause of his grandest triumphs and of his unexampled overthrow.

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XVI. NAPOLEON'S INTERVENTIONS

War, said St. Augustine, is but the transition from a lower to a higher state of peace. The saying is certainly true for those wars that are waged in defence of some great principle or righteous cause. It may perhaps be applied with justice to the early struggles of the French revolutionists to secure their democratic Government against the threatened intervention of monarchical States. But the danger of vindicating the cause of freedom by armed force has never been more glaringly shown than in the struggles of that volcanic age. When democracy had gained a sure foothold in the European system, the war was still pushed on by the triumphant republicans at the expense of neighbouring States, so that, even before the advent of Bonaparte, their polity was being strangely warped by the influence of military methods of rule. The brilliance of the triumphs won by that young warrior speedily became the greatest danger of republican France; and as the extraordinary energy developed in her people by recent events cast her feeble neighbours to the ground, Europe cowered away before the ever-increasing bulk of France. In their struggles after democracy the French finally reverted to the military type of Government, which accords with many of the cherished instincts of their race: and the military-democratic compromise embodied in Napoleon endowed that people with the twofold force of national pride and of conscious strength springing from their new institutions.

With this was mingled contempt for neighbouring peoples who either could not or would not gain a similar independence and prestige. Everything helped to feed this self-confidence and contempt for others. The venerable fabric of the Holy Roman Empire was rocking to and fro amidst the spoliations of its ecclesiastical lands by lay princes, in which its former champions, the Houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, were the most exacting of the claimants. The Czar, in October, 1801, had come to a profitable understanding with France concerning these "secularizations." A little later France and Russia began to draw together on the Eastern Question in a way threatening to Turkey and to British influence in the Levant.[217] In fact, French diplomacy used the partition of the German ecclesiastical lands and the threatened collapse of the Ottoman power as a potent means of busying the Continental States and leaving Great Britain isolated. Moreover, the great island State was passing through ministerial and financial difficulties which robbed her of all the fruits of her naval triumphs and made her diplomacy at Amiens the laughing-stock of the world. When monarchical ideas were thus discredited, it was idle to expect peace. The struggling upwards towards a higher plane had indeed begun; democracy had effected a lodgment in Western Europe; but the old order in its bewildered gropings after some sure basis had not yet touched bottom on that rock of nationality which was to yield a new foundation for monarchy amidst the strifes of the nineteenth century. Only when the monarchs received the support of their French-hating subjects could an equilibrium of force and of enthusiasms yield the long-sought opportunity for a durable peace.[218]

The negotiations at Amiens had amply shown the great difficulty of the readjustment of European affairs. If our Ministers had manifested their real feelings about Napoleon's presidency of the Italian Republic, war would certainly have broken forth. But, as has been seen, they preferred to assume the attitude of the ostrich, the worst possible device both for the welfare of Europe and the interests of Great Britain; for it convinced Napoleon that he could safely venture on other interventions; and this he proceeded to do in the affairs of Italy, Holland, and Switzerland.

On September 21st, 1802, appeared a senatus consultum ordering the incorporation of Piedmont in France. This important territory, lessened by the annexation of its eastern parts to the Italian Republic, had for five months been provisionally administered by a French general as a military district of France. Its definite incorporation in the great Republic now put an end to all hopes of restoration of the House of Savoy. For the King of Sardinia, now an exile in his island, the British Ministry had made some efforts at Amiens; but, as it knew that the Czar and the First Consul had agreed on offering him some suitable indemnity, the hope was cherished that the new sovereign, Victor Emmanuel I., would be restored to his mainland possessions. That hope was now at an end. In vain did Lord Whitworth, our ambassador at Paris, seek to help the Russian envoy to gain a fit indemnity. Sienna and its lands were named, as if in derision; and though George III. and the Czar ceased not to press the claims of the House of Savoy, yet no more tempting offer came from Paris, except a hint that some part of European Turkey might be found for him; and the young ruler nobly refused to barter for the petty Siennese, or for some Turkish pachalic, his birthright to the lands which, under a happier Victor Emmanuel, were to form the nucleus of a United Italy.[219] A month after the absorption of Piedmont came the annexation of Parma. The heir to that duchy, who was son-in-law to the King of Spain, had been raised to the dignity of King of Etruria; and in return for this aggrandizement in Europe, Charles IV. bartered away to France the whole of Louisiana. Nevertheless, the First Consul kept his troops in Parma, and on the death of the old duke in October, 1802, Parma and its dependencies were incorporated in the French Republic.

The naval supremacy of France in the Mediterranean was also secured by the annexation of the Isle of Elba with its excellent harbour of Porto Ferrajo. Three deputies from Elba came to Paris to pay their respects to their new ruler. The Minister of War was thereupon charged to treat them with every courtesy, to entertain them at dinner, to give them 3,000 francs apiece, and to hint that on their presentation to Bonaparte they might make a short speech expressing the pleasure of their people at being united with France. By such deft rehearsals did this master in the art of scenic displays weld Elba on to France and France to himself.

Even more important was Bonaparte's intervention in Switzerland. The condition of that land calls for some explanation. For wellnigh three centuries the Switzers had been grouped in thirteen cantons, which differed widely in character and constitution. The Central or Forest Cantons still retained the old Teutonic custom of regulating their affairs in their several folk-moots, at which every householder appeared fully armed. Elsewhere the confederation had developed less admirable customs, and the richer lowlands especially were under the hereditary control of rich burgher families. There was no constitution binding these States in any effective union. Each of the cantons claimed a governmental sovereignty that was scarcely impaired by the deliberations of the Federal Diet. Besides these sovereign States were others that held an ill-defined position as allies; among these were Geneva, Basel, Bienne, Saint Gall, the old imperial city of Mühlhausen in Alsace, the three Grisons, the principality of Neufchâtel, and Valais on the Upper Rhone. Last came the subject-lands, Aargau, Thurgau, Ticino, Vaud, and others, which were governed in various degrees of strictness by their cantonal overlords. Such was the old Swiss Confederacy: it somewhat resembled that chaotic Macedonian league of mountain clans, plain-dwellers, and cities, which was so profoundly influenced by the infiltration of Greek ideas and by the masterful genius of Philip. Switzerland was likewise to be shaken by a new political influence, and thereafter to be controlled by the greatest statesman of the age.

On this motley group of cantons and districts the French Revolution exerted a powerful influence; and when, in 1798, the people of Vaud strove to throw off the yoke of Berne, French troops, on the invitation of the insurgents, invaded Switzerland, quelled the brave resistance of the central cantons, and ransacked the chief of the Swiss treasuries. After the plunderers came the constitution-mongers, who forthwith forced on Switzerland democracy of the most French and geometrical type: all differences between the sovereign cantons, allies, and subject-lands were swept away, and Helvetia was constituted as an indivisible republic--except Valais, which was to be independent, and Geneva and Mühlhausen, which were absorbed by France. The subject districts and non-privileged classes benefited considerably by the social reforms introduced under French influence; but a constitution recklessly transferred from Paris to Berne could only provoke loathing among a people that never before had submitted to foreign dictation. Moreover, the new order of things violated the most elementary needs of the Swiss, whose racial and religious instincts claimed freedom of action for each district or canton.

Of these deep-seated feelings the oligarchs of the plains, no less than the democrats of the Forest Cantons, were now the champions; while the partisans of the new-fangled democracy were held up to scorn as the supporters of a cast-iron centralization. It soon became clear that the constitution of 1798 could be perpetuated only by the support of the French troops quartered on that unhappy land; for throughout the years 1800 and 1801 the political see-saw tilted every few months, first in favour of the oligarchic or federal party, then again towards their unionist opponents. After the Peace of Lunéville, which recognized the right of the Swiss to adopt what form of government they thought fit, some of their deputies travelled to Paris with the draft of a constitution lately drawn up by the Chamber at Berne, in the hope of gaining the assent of the First Consul to its provisions and the withdrawal of French troops. They had every reason for hope: the party then in power at Berne was that which favoured a centralized democracy, and their plenipotentiary in Paris, a thorough republican named Stapfer, had been led to hope that Switzerland would now be allowed to carve out its own destiny. What, then, was his surprise to find the First Consul increasingly enamoured of federalism. The letters written by Stapfer to the Swiss Government at this time are highly instructive.[220]

On March 10th, 1801, he wrote:

"What torments us most is the cruel uncertainty as to the real aims of the French Government. Does it want to federalize us in order to weaken us and to rule more surely by our divisions: or does it really desire our independence and welfare, and is its delay only the result of its doubts as to the true wishes of the Helvetic nation?"

Stapfer soon found that the real cause of delay was the non-completion of the cession of Valais, which Bonaparte urgently desired for the construction of a military road across the Simplon Pass; and as the Swiss refused this demand, matters remained at a standstill. "The whole of Europe would not make him give up a favourite scheme," wrote Stapfer on April 10th; "the possession of Valais is one of the matters closest to his heart."

The protracted pressure of a French army of occupation on that already impoverished land proved irresistible; and some important modifications of the Swiss project of a constitution, on which the First Consul insisted, were inserted in the new federal compact of May, 1801. Switzerland was now divided into seventeen cantons; and despite the wish of the official Swiss envoys for a strongly centralized government, Bonaparte gave large powers to the cantonal authorities. His motives in this course of action have been variously judged. In giving greater freedom of movement to the several cantons, he certainly adopted the only statesmanlike course: but his conduct during the negotiation, his retention of Valais, and the continued occupation of Switzerland by his troops, albeit in reduced numbers, caused many doubts as to the sincerity of his desire for a final settlement.

The unionist majority at Berne soon proceeded to modify his proposals, which they condemned as full of defects and contradictions; while the federals strove to keep matters as they were. In the month of October their efforts succeeded, thanks to the support of the French ambassador and soldiery; they dissolved the Assembly, annulled its recent amendments; and their influence procured for Reding, the head of the oligarchic party, the office of Landamman, or supreme magistrate. So reactionary, however, were their proceedings, that the First Consul recalled the French general as a sign of his displeasure at his help recently offered to the federals. Their triumph was brief: while their chiefs were away at Easter, 1802, the democratic unionists effected another coup d'état--it was the fourth--and promulgated one more constitution. This change seems also to have been brought about with the connivance of the French authorities:[221] their refusal to listen to Stapfer's claims for a definite settlement, as well as their persistent hints that the Swiss could not by themselves arrange their own affairs, argued a desire to continue the epoch of quarterly coups d'état.

The victory of the so-called democrats at Berne now brought the whole matter to the touch. They appealed to the people in the first Swiss plébiscite, the precursor of the famous referendum. It could now be decided without the interference of French troops; for the First Consul had privately declared to the new Landamman, Dolder, that he left it to his Government to decide whether the foreign soldiery should remain as a support or should evacuate Switzerland.[222] After many searchings of heart, the new authorities decided to try their fortunes alone--a response which must have been expected at Paris, where Stapfer had for months been urging the removal of the French forces. For the first time since the year 1798 Switzerland was therefore free to declare her will. The result of the plébiscite was decisive enough, 72,453 votes being cast in favour of the latest constitution, and 92,423 against it. Nothing daunted by this rebuff, and, adopting a device which the First Consul had invented for the benefit of Dutch liberty, the Bernese leaders declared that the 167,172 adult voters who had not voted at all must reckon as approving the new order of things. The flimsiness of this pretext was soon disclosed. The Swiss had had enough of electioneering tricks, hole-and-corner revolutions, and paper compacts. They rushed to arms; and if ever Carlyle's appeal away from ballot-boxes and parliamentary tongue-fencers to the primæval mights of man can be justified, it was in the sharp and decisive conflicts of the early autumn of 1802 in Switzerland. The troops of the central authorities, marching forth from Berne to quell the rising ferment, sustained a repulse at the foot of Mont Pilatus, as also before the walls of Zürich; and, the revolt of the federals ever gathering force, the Helvetic authorities were driven from Berne to Lausanne. There they were planning flight across the Lake of Geneva to Savoy, when, on October 15th, the arrival of Napoleon's aide-de-camp, General Rapp, with an imperious proclamation dismayed the federals and promised to the discomfited unionists the mediation of the First Consul for which they had humbly pleaded.[223]

Napoleon had apparently viewed the late proceedings in Switzerland with mingled feelings of irritation and amused contempt. "Well, there you are once more in a Revolution" was his hasty comment to Stapfer at a diplomatic reception shortly after Easter; "try and get tired of all that." It is difficult, however, to believe that so keen-sighted a statesman could look forward to anything but commotions for a land that was being saddled with an impracticable constitution, and whence the controlling French forces were withdrawn at that very crisis. He was certainly prepared for the events of September: many times he had quizzingly asked Stapfer how the constitution was faring, and he must have received with quiet amusement the solemn reply that there could be no doubt as to its brilliant success. When the truth flashed on Stapfer he was dumbfoundered, especially as Talleyrand at first mockingly repulsed any suggestion of the need of French mediation, and went on to assure him that his master had neither counselled nor approved the last constitution, the unfitness of which was now shown by the widespread insurrection. Two days later, however, Napoleon altered his tone and directed Talleyrand vigorously to protest against the acts and proclamations of the victorious federals as "the most violent outrage to French honour." On the last day of September he issued a proclamation to the Swiss declaring that he now revoked his decision not to mingle in Swiss politics, and ordered the federal authorities and troops to disperse, and the cantons to send deputies to Paris for the regulation of their affairs under his mediation. Meanwhile he bade the Swiss live once more in hope: their land was on the brink of a precipice, but it would soon be saved! Rapp carried analogous orders to Lausanne and Berne, while Ney marched in with a large force of French troops that had been assembled near the Swiss frontiers.

So glaring a violation of Swiss independence and of the guaranteeing Treaty of Lunéville aroused indignation throughout Europe. But Austria was too alarmed at Prussian aggrandizement in Germany to offer any protest; and, indeed, procured some trifling gains by giving France a free hand in Switzerland.[224] The Court of Berlin, then content to play the jackal to the French lion, revealed to the First Consul the appeals for help privately made to Prussia by the Swiss federals:[225] the Czar, influenced doubtless by his compact with France concerning German affairs, and by the advice of his former tutor, the Swiss Laharpe, offered no encouragement; and it was left to Great Britain to make the sole effort then attempted for the cause of Swiss independence. For some time past the cantons had made appeals to the British Government, which now, in response, sent an English agent, Moore, to confer with their chiefs, and to advance money and promise active support if he judged that a successful resistance could be attempted.[226] The British Ministry undoubtedly prepared for an open rupture with France on this question. Orders were immediately sent from London that no more French or Dutch colonies were to be handed back; and, as we have seen, the Cape of Good Hope and the French settlements in India were refused to the Dutch and French officers who claimed their surrender.

Hostilities, however, were for the present avoided. In face of the overwhelming force which Ney had close at hand, the chiefs of the central cantons shrank from any active opposition; and Moore, finding on his arrival at Constance that they had decided to submit, speedily returned to England. Ministers beheld with anger and dismay the perpetuation of French supremacy in that land; but they lacked the courage openly to oppose the First Consul's action, and gave orders that the stipulated cessions of French and Dutch colonies should take effect.

The submission of the Swiss and the weakness of all the Powers encouraged the First Consul to impose his will on the deputies from the cantons, who assembled at Paris at the close of the year 1802. He first caused their aims and the capacity of their leaders to be sounded in a Franco-Swiss Commission, and thereafter assembled them at St. Cloud on Sunday, December 12th. He harangued them at great length, hinting very clearly that the Swiss must now take a far lower place in the scale of peoples than in the days when France was divided into sixty fiefs, and that union with her could alone enable them to play a great part in the world's affairs: nevertheless, as they clung to independence he would undertake in his quality of mediator to end their troubles, and yet leave them free. That they could attain unity was a mere dream of their metaphysicians: they must rely on the cantonal organization, always provided that the French and Italian districts of Vaud and the upper Ticino were not subject to the central or German cantons: to prevent such a dishonour he would shed the blood of 50,000 Frenchmen: Berne must also open its golden book of the privileged families to include four times their number. For the rest, the Continental Powers could not help them, and England had "no right to meddle in Swiss affairs." The same menace was repeated in more strident tones on January 29th:

"I tell you that I would sacrifice 100,000 men rather than allow England to meddle in your affairs: if the Cabinet of St. James uttered a single word for you, it would be all up with you, I would unite you to France: if that Court made the least insinuation of its fears that I would be your Landamman, I would make myself your Landamman."

There spake forth the inner mind of the man who, whether as child, youth, lieutenant, general, Consul, or Emperor, loved to bear down opposition.[227]

In those days of superhuman activity, when he was carving out one colonial Empire in the New World and preparing to found another in India, when he was outwitting the Cardinals, rearranging the map of Germany, breathing new life into French commerce and striving to shackle that of Britain, he yet found time to utter some of the sagest maxims as to the widely different needs of the Swiss cantons. He assured the deputies that he spoke as a Corsican and a mountaineer, who knew and loved the clan system. His words proved it. With sure touch he sketched the characteristics of the French and Swiss people. Switzerland needed the local freedom imparted by her cantons: while France required unity, Switzerland needed federalism: the French rejected this last as damaging their power and glory; but the Swiss did not ask for glory; they needed "political tranquillity and obscurity": moreover, a simple pastoral people must have extensive local rights, which formed their chief distraction from the monotony of life: democracy was a necessity for the forest cantons; but let not the aristocrats of the towns fear that a wider franchise would end their influence, for a people dependent on pastoral pursuits would always cling to great families rather than to electoral assemblies: let these be elected on a fairly wide basis. Then again, what ready wit flashed forth in his retort to a deputy who objected to the Bernese Oberland forming part of the Canton of Berne: "Where do you take your cattle and your cheese?"--"To Berne."--"Whence do you get your grain, cloth, and iron?"--"From Berne."--"Very well: 'To Berne, from Berne'--you consequently belong to Berne." The reply is a good instance of that canny materialism which he so victoriously opposed to feudal chaos and monarchical ineptitude.

Indeed, in matters great as well as small his genius pierced to the heart of a problem: he saw that the democratic unionists had failed from the rigidity of their centralization, while the federals had given offence by insufficiently recognizing the new passion for social equality.[228] He now prepared to federalize Switzerland on a moderately democratic basis; for a policy of balance, he himself being at the middle of the see-saw, was obviously required by good sense as well as by self-interest. Witness his words to Roederer on this subject:

"While satisfying the generality, I cause the patricians to tremble. In giving to these last the appearance of power, I oblige them to take refuge at my side in order to find protection. I let the people threaten the aristocrats, so that these may have need of me. I will give them places and distinctions, but they will hold them from me. This system of mine has succeeded in France. See the clergy. Every day they will become, in spite of themselves, more devoted to my government than they had foreseen."

How simple and yet how subtle is this statecraft; simplicity of aim, with subtlety in the choice of means: this is the secret of his success.

After much preliminary work done by French commissioners and the Swiss deputies in committee, the First Consul summed up the results of their labours in the Act of Mediation of February 19th, 1803, which constituted the Confederation in nineteen cantons, the formerly subject districts now attaining cantonal dignity and privileges. The forest cantons kept their ancient folk-moots, while the town cantons such as Berne, Zürich, and Basel were suffered to blend their old institutions with democratic customs, greatly to the chagrin of the unionists, at whose invitation Bonaparte had taken up the work of mediation.

The federal compact was also a compromise between the old and the new. The nineteen cantons were to enjoy sovereign powers under the shelter of the old federal pact. Bonaparte saw that the fussy imposition of French governmental forms in 1798 had wrought infinite harm, and he now granted to the federal authorities merely the powers necessary for self-defence: the federal forces were to consist of 15,200 men--a number less than that which by old treaty Switzerland had to furnish to France. The central power was vested in a Landamman and other officers appointed yearly by one of the six chief cantons taken in rotation; and a Federal Diet, consisting of twenty-five deputies--one from each of the small cantons, and two from each of the six larger cantons--met to discuss matters of general import, but the balance of power rested with the cantons: further articles regulated the Helvetic debt and declared the independence of Switzerland--as if a land could be independent which furnished more troops to the foreigner than it was allowed to maintain for its own defence. Furthermore, the Act breathed not a word about religious liberty, freedom of the Press, or the right of petition: and, viewing it as a whole, the friends of freedom had cause to echo the complaint of Stapfer that "the First Consul's aim was to annul Switzerland politically, but to assure to the Swiss the greatest possible domestic happiness."

I have judged it advisable to give an account of Franco-Swiss relations on a scale proportionate to their interest and importance; they exhibit, not only the meanness and folly of the French Directory, but the genius of the great Corsican in skilfully blending the new and the old, and in his rejection of the fussy pedantry of French theorists and the worst prejudices of the Swiss oligarchs. Had not his sage designs been intertwined with subtle intrigues which assured his own unquestioned supremacy in that land, the Act of Mediation might be reckoned among the grandest and most beneficent achievements. As it is, it must be regarded as a masterpiece of able but selfish statecraft, which contrasts unfavourably with the disinterested arrangements sanctioned by the allies for Switzerland in 1815.

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XVII. THE RENEWAL OF WAR

The re-occupation of Switzerland by the French in October, 1802, was soon followed by other serious events, which convinced the British Ministry that war was hardly to be avoided. Indeed, before the treaty was ratified, ominous complaints had begun to pass between Paris and London.

Some of these were trivial, others were highly important. Among the latter was the question of commercial intercourse. The British Ministry had neglected to obtain any written assurance that trade relations should be resumed between the two countries; and the First Consul, either prompted by the protectionist theories of the Jacobins, or because he wished to exert pressure upon England in order to extort further concessions, determined to restrict trade with us to the smallest possible dimensions. This treatment of England was wholly exceptional, for in his treaties concluded with Russia, Portugal, and the Porte, Napoleon had procured the insertion of clauses which directly fostered French trade with those lands. Remonstrances soon came from the British Government that "strict prohibitions were being enforced to the admission of British commodities and manufactures into France, and very vigorous restrictions were imposed on British vessels entering French ports"; but, in spite of all representations, we had the mortification of seeing the hardware of Birmingham, and the ever-increasing stores of cotton and woollen goods, shut out from France and her subject-lands, as well as from the French colonies which we had just handed back.

In this policy of commercial prohibition Napoleon was confirmed by our refusal to expel the Bourbon princes. He declined to accept our explanation that they were not officially recognized, and could not be expelled from England without a violation of the rights of hospitality; and he bitterly complained of the personal attacks made upon him in journals published in London by the French émigrés. Of these the most acrid, namely, those of Peltier's paper, "L'Ambigu," had already received the reprobation of the British Ministry; but, as had been previously explained at Amiens, the Addington Cabinet decided that it could not venture to curtail the liberty of the Press, least of all at the dictation of the very man who was answering the pop-guns of our unofficial journals by double-shotted retorts in the official "Moniteur." Of these last His Majesty did not deign to make any formal complaint; but he suggested that their insertion in the organ of the French Government should have prevented Napoleon from preferring the present protests.

This wordy war proceeded with unabated vigour on both sides of the Channel, the British journals complaining of the Napoleonic dictatorship in Continental affairs, while the "Moniteur" bristled with articles whose short, sharp sentences could come only from the First Consul. The official Press hitherto had been characterized by dull decorum, and great was the surprise of the older Courts when the French official journals compared the policy of the Court of St. James with the methods of the Barbary rovers and the designs of the Miltonic Satan.[229] Nevertheless, our Ministry prosecuted and convicted Peltier for libel, an act which, at the time, produced an excellent impression at Paris.[230]

But more serious matters were now at hand. Newspaper articles and commercial restrictions were not the cause of war, however much they irritated the two peoples.

The general position of Anglo-French affairs in the autumn of 1802 is well described in the official instructions given to Lord Whitworth when he was about to proceed as ambassador to Paris. For this difficult duty he had several good qualifications. During his embassy at St. Petersburg he had shown a combination of tact and firmness which imposed respect, and doubtless his composure under the violent outbreaks of the Czar Paul furnished a recommendation for the equally trying post at Paris, which he filled with a sang froid that has become historic. Possibly a more genial personality might have smoothed over some difficulties at the Tuileries: but the Addington Ministry, having tried geniality in the person of Cornwallis, naturally selected a man who was remarkable for his powers of quiet yet firm resistance.

His first instructions of September 10th, 1802, are such as might be drawn up between any two Powers entering on a long term of peace. But the series of untoward events noticed above overclouded the political horizon; and the change finds significant expression in the secret instructions of November 14th. He is now charged to state George III.'s determination "never to forego his right of interfering in the affairs of the Continent on any occasion in which the interests of his own dominions or those of Europe in general may appear to him to require it." A French despatch is then quoted, as admitting that, for every considerable gain of France on the Continent, Great Britain had some claim to compensation: and such a claim, it was hinted, might now be proffered after the annexation of Piedmont and Parma. Against the continued occupation of Holland by French troops and their invasion of Switzerland, Whitworth was to make moderate but firm remonstrances, but in such a way as not to commit us finally. He was to employ an equal discretion with regard to Malta. As Russia and Prussia had as yet declined to guarantee the arrangements for that island's independence, it was evident that the British troops could not yet be withdrawn.

"His Majesty would certainly be justified in claiming the possession of Malta, as some counterpoise to the acquisitions of France, since the conclusion of the definitive treaty: but it is not necessary to decide now whether His Majesty will be disposed to avail himself of his pretensions in this respect."

Thus between September 10th and November 14th we passed from a distinctly pacific to a bellicose attitude, and all but formed the decision to demand Malta as a compensation for the recent aggrandizements of France. To have declared war at once on these grounds would certainly have been more dignified. But, as our Ministry had already given way on many topics, a sudden declaration of war on Swiss and Italian affairs would have stultified its complaisant conduct on weightier subjects. Moreover, the whole drift of eighteenth-century diplomacy, no less than Bonaparte's own admission, warranted the hope of securing Malta by way of "compensation." The adroit bargainer, who was putting up German Church lands for sale, who had gained Louisiana by the Parma-Tuscany exchange, and still professed to the Czar his good intentions as to an "indemnity" for the King of Sardinia, might well be expected to admit the principle of compensation in Anglo-French relations when these were being jeopardized by French aggrandizement; and, as will shortly appear, the First Consul, while professing to champion international law against perfidious Albion, privately admitted her right to compensation, and only demurred to its practical application when his oriental designs were thereby compromised.

Before Whitworth proceeded to Paris, sharp remonstrances had been exchanged between the French and British Governments. To our protests against Napoleon's interventions in neighbouring States, he retorted by demanding "the whole Treaty of Amiens and nothing but that treaty." Whereupon Hawkesbury answered: "The state of the Continent at the period of the Treaty of Amiens, and nothing but that state." In reply Napoleon sent off a counterblast, alleging that French troops had evacuated Taranto, that Switzerland had requested his mediation, that German affairs possessed no novelty, and that England, having six months previously waived her interest in continental affairs, could not resume it at will. The retort, which has called forth the admiration of M. Thiers, is more specious than convincing. Hawkesbury's appeal was, not to the sword, but to law; not to French influence gained by military occupations that contravened the Treaty of Lunéville, but to international equity.

Certainly, the Addington Cabinet committed a grievous blunder in not inserting in the Treaty of Amiens a clause stipulating the independence of the Batavian and Helvetic Republics. Doubtless it relied on the Treaty of Lunéville, and on a Franco-Dutch convention of August, 1801, which specified that French troops were to remain in the Batavian Republic only up to the time of the general peace. But it is one thing to rely on international law, and quite another thing, in an age of violence and chicanery, to hazard the gravest material interests on its observance. Yet this was what the Addington Ministry had done: "His Majesty consented to make numerous and most important restitutions to the Batavian Government on the consideration of that Government being independent and not being subject to any foreign control."[231] Truly, the restoration of the Cape of Good Hope and of other colonies to the Dutch, solely in reliance on the observance of international law by Napoleon and Talleyrand, was, as the event proved, an act of singular credulity. But, looking at this matter fairly and squarely, it must be allowed that Napoleon's reply evaded the essence of the British complaint; it was merely an argumentum ad hominem; it convicted the Addington Cabinet of weakness and improvidence; but in equity it was null and void, and in practical politics it betokened war.

As Napoleon refused to withdraw his troops from Holland, and continued to dominate that unhappy realm, it was clear that the Cape of Good Hope would speedily be closed to our ships--a prospect which immensely enhanced the value of the overland route to India, and of those portals of the Orient, Malta and Egypt. To the Maltese Question we now turn, as also, later on, to the Eastern Question, with which it was then closely connected.

Many causes excited the uneasiness of the British Government about the fate of Malta. In spite of our effort not to wound the susceptibilities of the Czar, who was protector of the Order of St. John, that sensitive young ruler had taken umbrage at the article relating to that island. He now appeared merely as one of the six Powers guaranteeing its independence, not as the sole patron and guarantor, and he was piqued at his name appearing after that of the Emperor Francis![232] For the present arrangement the First Consul was chiefly to blame; but the Czar vented his displeasure on England. On April 28th, 1802, our envoy at Paris, Mr. Merry, reported as follows:

"Either the Russian Government itself, or Count Markoff alone personally, is so completely out of humour with us for not having acted in strict concert with them, or him, or in conformity to their ideas in negotiating the definitive treaty [of Amiens], that I find he takes pains to turn it into ridicule, and particularly to represent the arrangement we have made for Malta as impracticable and consequently as completely null."

The despatches of our ambassador at St. Petersburg, Lord St. Helens, and of his successor, Admiral Warren, are of the same tenor. They report the Czar's annoyance with England over the Maltese affair, and his refusal to listen even to the joint Anglo-French request, of November 18th, 1802, for his guarantee of the Amiens arrangements.[233] A week later Alexander announced that he would guarantee the independence of Malta, provided that the complete sovereignty of the Knights of St. John was recognized--that is, without any participation of the native Maltese in the affairs of that Order--and that the island should be garrisoned by Neapolitan troops, paid by France and England, until the Knights should be able to maintain their independence. This reopening of the question discussed, ad nauseam, at Amiens proved that the Maltese Question would long continue to perplex the world. The matter was still further complicated by the abolition of the Priories, Commanderies, and property of the Order of St. John by the French Government in the spring of 1802--an example which was imitated by the Court of Madrid in the following autumn; and as the property of the Knights in the French part of Italy had also lapsed, it was difficult to see how the scattered and impoverished Knights could form a stable government, especially if the native Maltese were not to be admitted to a share in public affairs. This action of France, Spain, and Russia fully warranted the British Government in not admitting into the fortress the 2,000 Neapolitan troops that arrived in the autumn of 1802. Our evacuation of Malta was conditioned by several stipulations, five of which had not been fulfilled.[234] But the difficulties arising out of the reconstruction of this moribund Order were as nothing when compared with those resulting from the reopening of a far vaster and more complex question--the "eternal" Eastern Question.

Rarely has the mouldering away of the Turkish Empire gone on so rapidly as at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Corruption and favouritism paralyzed the Government at Constantinople; masterful pachas, aping the tactics of Ali Pacha, the virtual ruler of Albania, were beginning to carve out satrapies in Syria, Asia Minor, Wallachia, and even in Roumelia itself. Such was the state of Turkey when the Sultan and his advisers heard with deep concern, in October, 1801, that the only Power on whose friendship they could firmly rely was about to relinquish Malta. At once he sent an earnest appeal to George III. begging him not to evacuate the island. This despatch is not in the archives of our Foreign Office; but the letter written from Malta by Lord Elgin, our ambassador at Constantinople, on his return home, sufficiently shows that the Sultan was conscious of his own weakness and of the schemes of partition which were being concocted at Paris. Bonaparte had already begun to sound both Austria and Russia on this subject, deftly hinting that the Power which did not early join in the enterprise would come poorly off. For the present both the rulers rejected his overtures; but he ceased not to hope that the anarchy in Turkey, and the jealousy which partition schemes always arouse among neighbours, would draw first one and then the other into his enterprise.[235]

The young Czar's disposition was at that period restless and unstable, free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest aspirations of the France of 1789. Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly free himself from the instincts of a line of conquering Czars; his frank blue eyes, his graceful yet commanding figure, his high broad forehead and close shut mouth gave promise of mental energy; and his splendid physique and love of martial display seemed to invite him to complete the campaigns of Catherine II. against the Turks, and to wash out in the waves of the Danube the remorse which he still felt at his unwitting complicity in a parricidal plot. Between his love of liberty and of foreign conquest he for the present wavered, with a strange constitutional indecision that marred a noble character and that yielded him a prey more than once to a masterful will or to seductive projects. He is the Janus of Russian history. On the one side he faces the enormous problems of social and political reform, and yet he steals many a longing glance towards the dome of St. Sofia. This instability in his nature has been thus pointedly criticised by his friend Prince Czartoryski:[236]

"Grand ideas of the general good, generous sentiments, and the desire to sacrifice to them a part of the imperial authority, had really occupied the Emperor's mind, but they were rather a young man's fancies than a grown man's decided will. The Emperor liked forms of liberty, as he liked the theatre: it gave him pleasure and flattered his vanity to see the appearances of free government in his Empire: but all he wanted in this respect was forms and appearances: he did not expect them to become realities. He would willingly have agreed that every man should be free, on the condition that he should voluntarily do only what the Emperor wished."

This later judgment of the well-known Polish nationalist is probably embittered by the disappointments which he experienced at the Czar's hands; but it expresses the feeling of most observers of Alexander's early career, and it corresponds with the conclusion arrived at by Napoleon's favourite aide-de-camp, Duroc, who went to congratulate the young Czar on his accession and to entice him into oriental schemes--that there was nothing to hope and nothing to fear from the Czar. The mot was deeply true.[237]

From these oriental schemes the young Czar was, for the time, drawn aside towards the nobler path of social reform. The saving influence on this occasion was exerted by his old tutor, Laharpe. The ex-Director of Switzerland readily persuaded the Czar that Russia sorely needed political and social reform. His influence was powerfully aided by a brilliant group of young men, the Vorontzoffs, the Strogonoffs, Novossiltzoff, and Czartoryski, whose admiration for western ideas and institutions, especially those of Britain, helped to impel Alexander on the path of progress. Thus, when Napoleon was plying the Czar with notes respecting Turkey, that young ruler was commencing to bestow system on his administration, privileges on the serfs, and the feeble beginnings of education on the people.

While immersed in these beneficent designs, Alexander heard with deep chagrin of the annexation of Piedmont and Parma, and that Napoleon refused to the King of Sardinia any larger territory than the Siennese. This breach of good faith cut the Czar to the quick. It was in vain that Napoleon now sought to lure him into Turkish adventures by representing that France should secure the Morea for herself, that other parts of European Turkey might be apportioned to Victor Emmanuel I. and the French Bourbons. This cold-blooded proposal, that ancient dynasties should be thrust from the homes of their birth into alien Greek or Moslem lands, wounded the Czar's monarchical sentiments. He would none of it; nor did he relish the prospect of seeing the French in the Morea, whence they could complete the disorder of Turkey and seize on Constantinople. He saw whither Napoleon was leading him. He drew back abruptly, and even notified to our ambassador, Admiral Warren, that England had better keep Malta.[238]

Alexander also, on January 19th, 1803 (O.S.), charged his ambassador at Paris to declare that the existing system of Europe must not be further disturbed, that each Government should strive for peace and the welfare of its own people; that the frequent references of Napoleon to the approaching dissolution of Turkey were ill-received at St. Petersburg, where they were considered the chief cause of England's anxiety and refusal to disarm. He also suggested that the First Consul by some public utterance should dispel the fears of England as to a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and thus assure the peace of the world.[239]

Before this excellent advice was received, Napoleon astonished the world by a daring stroke. On the 30th of January the "Moniteur" printed in full the bellicose report of Colonel Sebastiani on his mission to Algiers, Egypt, Syria, and the Ionian Isles. As that mission was afterwards to be passed off as merely of a commercial character, it will be well to quote typical passages from the secret instructions which the First Consul gave to his envoy on September 5th, 1802:

"He will proceed to Alexandria: he will take note of what is in the harbour, the ships, the forces which the British as well as the Turks have there, the state of the fortifications, the state of the towers, the account of all that has passed since our departure both at Alexandria and in the whole of Egypt: finally, the present state of the Egyptians.... He will proceed to St. Jean d'Acre, will recommend the convent of Nazareth to Djezzar: will inform him that the agent of the [French] Republic is to appear at Acre: will find out about the fortifications he has had made: will walk along them himself, if there be no danger."

Fortifications, troops, ships of war, the feelings of the natives, and the protection of the Christians--these subjects were to be Sebastiani's sole care. Commerce was not once named. The departure of this officer had already alarmed our Government. Mr. Merry, our chargé d'affaires in Paris, had warned it as to the real aims in view, in the following "secret despatch:

"PARIS, September 25th, 1802.

"... I have learnt from good authority that he [Sebastiani] was accompanied by a person of the name of Jaubert (who was General Bonaparte's interpreter and confidential agent with the natives during the time he commanded in Egypt), who has carried with him regular powers and instructions, prepared by M. Talleyrand, to treat with Ibrahim-Bey for the purpose of creating a fresh and successful revolt in Egypt against the power of the Porte, and of placing that country again under the direct or indirect dependence of France, to which end he has been authorized to offer assistance from hence in men and money. The person who has confided to me this information understands that the mission to Ibrahim-Bey is confided solely to M. Jaubert, and that his being sent with Colonel Sebastiani has been in order to conceal the real object of it, and to afford him a safe conveyance to Egypt, as well as for the purpose of assisting the Colonel in his transactions with the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli."[240]

Merry's information was correct: it tallied with the secret instructions given by Napoleon to Sebastiani: and our Government, thus forewarned, at once adopted a stiffer tone on all Mediterranean and oriental questions. Sebastiani was very coldly received by our officer commanding in Egypt, General Stuart, who informed him that no orders had as yet come from London for our evacuation of that land. Proceeding to Cairo, the commercial emissary proposed to mediate between the Turkish Pacha and the rebellious Mamelukes, an offer which was firmly declined.[241] In vain did Sebastiani bluster and cajole by turns. The Pacha refused to allow him to go on to Assouan, the headquarters of the insurgent Bey, and the discomfited envoy made his way back to the coast and took ship for Acre. Thence he set sail for Corfu, where he assured the people of Napoleon's wish that there should be an end to their civil discords. Returning to Genoa, and posting with all speed to Paris, he arrived there on January 25th, 1803. Five days later that gay capital was startled by the report of his mission, which was printed in full in the "Moniteur." It described the wretched state of the Turks in Egypt--the Pacha of Cairo practically powerless, and on bad terms with General Stuart, the fortifications everywhere in a ruinous state, the 4,430 British troops cantoned in and near Alexandria, the Turkish forces beneath contempt. "Six thousand French would at present be enough to conquer Egypt." And as to the Ionian islands, "I do not stray from the truth in assuring you that these islands will declare themselves French as soon as an opportunity shall offer itself."[242]

Such were the chief items of this report. Various motives have been assigned for its publication. Some writers have seen in it a crushing retort to English newspaper articles. Others there are, as M. Thiers, who waver between the opinion that the publication of this report was either a "sudden unfortunate incident," or a protest against the "latitude" which England allowed herself in the execution of the Treaty of Amiens.

A consideration of the actual state of affairs at the end of January, 1803, will perhaps guide us to an explanation which is more consonant with the grandeur of Napoleon's designs. At that time he was all-powerful in the Old World. As First Consul for Life he was master of forty millions of men: he was President of the Italian Republic: to the Switzers, as to the Dutch, his word was law. Against the infractions of the Treaty of Lunéville, Austria dared make no protest. The Czar was occupied with domestic affairs, and his rebuff to Napoleon's oriental schemes had not yet reached Paris. As for the British Ministry, it was trembling from the attacks of the Grenvilles and Windhams on the one side, and from the equally vigorous onslaughts of Fox, who, when the Government proposed an addition to the armed forces, brought forward the stale platitude that a large standing army "was a dangerous instrument of influence in the hands of the Crown." When England's greatest orator thus impaired the unity of national feeling, and her only statesman, Pitt, remained in studied seclusion, the First Consul might well feel assured of the impotence of the Island Power, and view the bickering of her politicians with the same quiet contempt that Philip felt for the Athens of Demosthenes.

But while his prospects in Europe and the East were roseate, the western horizon bulked threateningly with clouds. The news of the disasters in St. Domingo reached Paris in the first week of the year 1803, and shortly afterwards came tidings of the ferment in the United States and the determination of their people to resist the acquisition of Louisiana by France. If he persevered with this last scheme, he would provoke war with that republic and drive it into the arms of England. From that blunder his statecraft instinctively saved him, and he determined to sell Louisiana to the United States.

So unheroic a retreat from the prairies of the New World must be covered by a demonstration towards the banks of the Nile and of the Indus. It was ever his plan to cover retreat in one direction by brilliant diversions in another: only so could he enthrall the imagination of France, and keep his hold on her restless capital. And the publication of Sebastiani's report, with its glowing description of the fondness cherished for France alike by Moslems, Syrian Christians, and the Greeks of Corfu; its declamation against the perfidy of General Stuart; and its incitation to the conquest of the Levant, furnished him with the motive power for effecting a telling transformation scene and banishing all thoughts of losses in the West.[243]

The official publication of this report created a sensation even in France, and was not the bagatelle which M. Thiers has endeavoured to represent it.[244] But far greater was the astonishment at Downing Street, not at the facts disclosed by the report--for Merry's note had prepared our Ministers for them--but rather at the official avowal of hostile designs. At once our Government warned Whitworth that he must insist on our retaining Malta. He was also to protest against the publication of such a document, and to declare that George III. could not "enter into any further discussion relative to Malta until he received a satisfactory explanation." Far from offering it, Napoleon at once complained of our non-evacuation of Alexandria and Malta.

"Instead of that garrison [of Alexandria] being a means of protecting Egypt, it was only furnishing him with a pretence for invading it. This he should not do, whatever might be his desire to have it as a colony, because he did not think it worth the risk of a war, in which he might perhaps be considered the aggressor, and by which he should lose more than he could gain, since sooner or later Egypt would belong to France, either by the falling to pieces of the Turkish Empire, or by some arrangement with the Porte.... Finally," he asked, "why should not the mistress of the seas and the mistress of the land come to an arrangement and govern the world?"

A subtler diplomatist than Whitworth would probably have taken the hint for a Franco-British partition of the world: but the Englishman, unable at that moment to utter a word amidst the torrent of argument and invective, used the first opportunity merely to assure Napoleon of the alarm caused in England by Sebastiani's utterance concerning Egypt. This touched the First Consul at the wrong point, and he insisted that on the evacuation of Malta the question of peace or war must depend. In vain did the English ambassador refer to the extension of French power on the Continent. Napoleon cut him short: "I suppose you mean Piedmont and Switzerland: ce sont des----: vous n'avez pas le droit d'en parler à cette heure." Seeing that he was losing his temper, Lord Whitworth then diverted the conversation.[245]

This long tirade shows clearly what were the aims of the First Consul. He desired peace until his eastern plans were fully matured. And what ruler would not desire to maintain a peace so fruitful in conquests--that perpetuated French influence in Italy, Switzerland, and Holland, that enabled France to prepare for the dissolution of the Turkish Empire and to intrigue with the Mahrattas? Those were the conditions on which England could enjoy peace: she must recognize the arbitrament of France in the affairs of all neighbouring States, she must make no claim for compensation in the Mediterranean, and she must endure to be officially informed that she alone could not maintain a struggle against France.[246]

But George III. was not minded to sink to the level of a Charles II. Whatever were the failings of our "farmer king," he was keenly alive to national honour and interests. These had been deeply wounded, even in the United Kingdom itself. Napoleon had been active in sending "commercial commissioners" into our land. Many of them were proved to be soldiers: and the secret instructions sent by Talleyrand to one of them at Dublin, which chanced to fall into the hands of our Government, showed that they were charged to make plans of the harbours, and of the soundings and moorings.[247]

Then again, the French were almost certainly helping Irish conspirators. One of these, Emmett, already suspected of complicity in the Despard conspiracy which aimed at the King's life, had, after its failure, sought shelter in France. At the close of 1802 he returned to his native land and began to store arms in a house near Rathfarnham. It is doubtful whether the authorities were aware of his plans, or, as is more probable, let the plot come to a head. The outbreak did not take place till the following July (after the renewal of war), when Emmett and some of his accomplices, along with Russell, who stirred up sedition in Ulster, paid for their folly with their lives. They disavowed any connection with France, but they must have based their hope of success on a promised French invasion of our coasts.[248]

The dealings of the French commercial commissioners and the beginnings of the Emmett plot increased the tension caused by Napoleon's masterful foreign policy; and the result was seen in the King's message to Parliament on March 8th, 1803. In view of the military preparations and of the wanton defiance of the First Consul's recent message to the Corps Législatif, Ministers asked for the embodiment of the militia and the addition of 10,000 seamen to the navy. After Napoleon's declaration to our ambassador that France was bringing her forces on active service up to 480,000 men, the above-named increase of the British forces might well seem a reasonable measure of defence. Yet it so aroused the spleen of the First Consul that, at a public reception of ambassadors on March 13th, he thus accosted Lord Whitworth:

"'So you are determined to go to war.' 'No, First Consul,' I replied, 'we are too sensible of the advantage of peace.' 'Why, then, these armaments? Against whom these measures of precaution? I have not a single ship of the line in the French ports, but if you wish to arm I will arm also: if you wish to fight, I will fight also. You may perhaps kill France, but will never intimidate her.' 'We wish,' said I, 'neither the one nor the other. We wish to live on good terms with her.' 'You must respect treaties then,' replied he; 'woe to those who do not respect treaties. They shall answer for it to all Europe.' He was too agitated to make it advisable to prolong the conversation: I therefore made no answer, and he retired to his apartment, repeating the last phrase."[249]

This curious scene shows Napoleon in one of his weaker petulant moods: it left on the embarrassed spectators no impression of outraged dignity, but rather of the over-weening self-assertion of an autocrat who could push on hostile preparations, and yet flout the ambassador of the Power that took reasonable precautions in return. The slight offered to our ambassador, though hotly resented in Britain, had no direct effect on the negotiations, as the First Consul soon took the opportunity of tacitly apologizing for the occurrence; but indirectly the matter was infinitely important. By that utterance he nailed his colours to the mast with respect to the British evacuation of Malta. With his keen insight into the French nature, he knew that "honour" was its mainspring, and that his political fortunes rested on the satisfaction of that instinct. He could not now draw back without affronting the prestige of France and undermining his own position. In vain did our Government remind him of his admission that "His Majesty should keep a compensation out of his conquests for the important acquisitions of territory made by France upon the Continent."[250] That promise, although official, was secret. Its violation would, at the worst, only offend the officials of Whitehall. Whereas, if he now acceded to their demand that Malta should be the compensation, he at once committed that worst of all crimes in a French statesman, of rendering himself ludicrous. In this respect, then, the scene of March 13th at the Tuileries was indirectly the cause of the bloodiest war that has desolated Europe.

Napoleon now regarded the outbreak of hostilities as probable, if not certain. Facts are often more eloquent than diplomatic assurances, and such facts are not wanting. On March 6th Decaen's expedition had set sail from Brest for the East Indies with no anticipation of immediate war. On March 16th a fast brig was sent after him with orders that he should return with all speed from Pondicherry to the Mauritius. Napoleon's correspondence also shows that, as early as March 11th, that is, after hearing of George III.'s message to Parliament, he expected the outbreak of hostilities: on that day he ordered the formation of flotillas at Dunkirk and Cherbourg, and sent urgent messages to the sovereigns of Russia, Prussia, and Spain, inveighing against England's perfidy. The envoy despatched to St. Petersburg was specially charged to talk to the Czar on philosophic questions, and to urge him to free the seas from England's tyranny.

Much as Addington and his colleagues loved peace, they were now convinced that it was more hazardous than open war. Malta was the only effectual bar to a French seizure of Egypt or an invasion of Turkey from the side of Corfu. With Turkey partitioned and Egypt in French hands, there would be no security against Napoleon's designs on India. The British forces evacuated the Cape of Good Hope on February 21st, 1803; they set sail from Alexandria on the 17th of the following month. By the former act we yielded up to France the sea route to India--for the Dutch at the Cape were but the tools of the First Consul: by the latter we left Malta as the sole barrier against a renewed land attack on our Eastern possessions. The safety of our East Indian possessions was really at stake, and yet Europe was asked to believe that the question was whether England would or would not evacuate Malta. This was the French statement of the case: it was met by the British plea that France, having declared her acceptance of the principle of compensation for us, had no cause for objecting to the retention of an island so vital to our interests.

Yet, while convinced of the immense importance of Malta, the Addington Cabinet did not insist on retaining it, if the French Government would "suggest some other equivalent security by which His Majesty's object in claiming the permanent possession of Malta may be accomplished and the independence of the island secured conformably to the spirit of the 10th Article of the Treaty of Amiens."[251] To the First Consul was therefore left the initiative in proposing some other plan which would safeguard British interests in the Levant; and, with this qualifying explanation, the British ambassador was charged to present to him the following proposals for a new treaty: Malta to remain in British hands, the Knights to be indemnified for any losses of property which they may thereby sustain: Holland and Switzerland to be evacuated by French troops: the island of Elba to be confirmed to France, and the King of Etruria to be acknowledged by Great Britain: the Italian and Ligurian Republics also to be acknowledged, if "an arrangement is made in Italy for the King of Sardinia, which shall be satisfactory to him."

Lord Whitworth judged it better not to present these demands point blank, but gradually to reveal their substance. This course, he judged, would be less damaging to the friends of peace at the Tuileries, and less likely to affront Napoleon. But it was all one and the same. The First Consul, in his present state of highly wrought tension, practically ignored the suggestion of an equivalent security, and declaimed against the perfidy of England for daring to infringe the treaty, though he had offered no opposition to the Czar's proposals respecting Malta, which weakened the stability of the Order and sensibly modified that same treaty.

Talleyrand was more conciliatory; and there is little doubt that, had the First Consul allowed his brother Joseph and his Foreign Minister wider powers, the crisis might have been peaceably passed. Joseph Bonaparte urgently pressed Whitworth to be satisfied with Corfu or Crete in place of Malta; but he confessed that the suggestion was quite unauthorized, and that the First Consul was so enraged on the Maltese Question that he dared not broach it to him.[252] Indeed, all through these critical weeks Napoleon's relations to his brothers were very strained, they desiring peace in Europe so that Louisiana might even now be saved to France, while the First Consul persisted in his oriental schemes. He seems now to have concentrated his energies on the task of postponing the rupture to a convenient date and of casting on his foes the odium of the approaching war. He made no proposal that could reassure Britain as to the security of the overland routes; and he named no other island which could be considered as an equivalent to Malta.

To many persons his position has seemed logically unassailable; but it is difficult to see how this view can be held. The Treaty of Amiens had twice over been rendered, in a technical sense, null and void by the action of Continental Powers. Russia and Prussia had not guaranteed the state of things arranged for Malta by that treaty; and the action of France and Spain in confiscating the property of the Knights in their respective lands had so far sapped the strength of the Order that it could never again support the expense of the large garrison which the lines around Valetta required.

In a military sense, this was the crux of the problem; for no one affected to believe that Malta was rendered secure by the presence at Valetta of 2,000 troops of the King of Naples, whose realm could within a week be overrun by Murat's division. This obvious difficulty led Lord Hawkesbury to urge, in his notes of April 13th and later, that British troops should garrison the chief fortifications of Valetta and leave the civil power to the Knights: or, if that were found objectionable, that we should retain complete possession of the island for ten years, provided that we were left free to negotiate with the King of Naples for the cession of Lampedusa, an islet to the west of Malta. To this last proposal the First Consul offered no objection; but he still inflexibly opposed any retention of Malta, even for ten years, and sought to make the barren islet of Lampedusa appear an equivalent to Malta. This absurd contention had, however, been exploded by Talleyrand's indiscreet confession "that the re-establishment of the Order of St. John was not so much the point to be discussed as that of suffering Great Britain to acquire a possession in the Mediterranean."[253]

This, indeed, was the pith and marrow of the whole question, whether Great Britain was to be excluded from that great sea--save at Gibraltar and Lampedusa--looking on idly at its transformation into a French lake by the seizure of Corfu, the Morea, Egypt, and Malta itself; or whether she should retain some hold on the overland route to the East. The difficulty was frankly pointed out by Lord Whitworth; it was as frankly admitted by Joseph Bonaparte; it was recognized by Talleyrand; and Napoleon's desire for a durable peace must have been slight when he refused to admit England's claim effectively to safeguard her interests in the Levant, and ever fell back on the literal fulfilment of a treaty which had been invalidated by his own deliberate actions.

Affairs now rapidly came to a climax. On April 23rd the British Government notified its ambassador that, if the present terms were not granted within seven days of his receiving them, he was to leave Paris. Napoleon was no less angered than surprised by the recent turn of events. In place of timid complaisance which he had expected from Addington, he was met with open defiance; but he now proposed that the Czar should offer his intervention between the disputants. The suggestion was infinitely skilful. It flattered the pride of the young autocrat and promised to yield gains as substantial as those which Russian mediation had a year before procured for France from the intimidated Sultan; it would help to check the plans for an Anglo-Russian alliance then being mooted at St. Petersburg, and, above all, it served to gain time.

All these advantages were to a large extent realized. Though the Czar had been the first to suggest our retention of Malta, he now began to waver. The clearness and precision of Talleyrand's notes, and the telling charge of perfidy against England, made an impression which the cumbrous retorts of Lord Hawkesbury and the sailor-like diplomacy of Admiral Warren failed to efface.[254] And the Russian Chancellor, Vorontzoff, though friendly to England, and desirous of seeing her firmly established at Malta, now began to complain of the want of clearness in her policy. The Czar emphasized this complaint, and suggested that, as Malta could not be the real cause of dispute, the British Government should formulate distinctly its grievances and so set the matter in train for a settlement. The suggestion was not complied with. To draw up a long list of complaints, some drawn from secret sources and exposing the First Consul's schemes, would have exasperated his already ruffled temper; and the proposal can only be regarded as an adroit means of justifying Alexander's sudden change of front.

Meanwhile events had proceeded apace at Paris. On April 26th Joseph Bonaparte made a last effort to bend his brother's will, but only gained the grudging concession that Napoleon would never consent to the British retention of Malta for a longer time than three or four years. As this would have enabled him to postpone the rupture long enough to mature his oriental plans, it was rejected by Lord Whitworth, who insisted on ten years as the minimum. The evident determination of the British Government speedily to terminate the affair, one way or the other, threw Napoleon into a paroxysm of passion; and at the diplomatic reception of May 1st, from which Lord Whitworth discreetly absented himself, he vehemently inveighed against its conduct. Fretted by the absence of our ambassador, for whom this sally had been intended, he returned to St. Cloud, and there dictated this curious epistle to Talleyrand:

"I desire that your conference [with Lord Whitworth] shall not degenerate into a conversation. Show yourself cold, reserved, and even somewhat proud. If the [British] note contains the word ultimatum make him feel that this word implies war; if it does not contain this word, make him insert it, remarking to him that we must know where we are, that we are tired of this state of anxiety.... Soften down a little at the end of the conference, and invite him to return before writing to his Court."

But this careful rehearsal was to avail nothing; our stolid ambassador was not to be cajoled, and on May 2nd, that is, seven days after his presenting our ultimatum, he sent for his passports. He did not, however, set out immediately. Yielding to an urgent request, he delayed his departure in order to hear the French reply to the British ultimatum.[255] It notified sarcastically that Lampedusa was not in the First Consul's power to bestow, that any change with reference to Malta must be referred by Great Britain to the Great Powers for their concurrence, and that Holland would be evacuated as soon as the terms of the Treaty of Amiens were complied with. Another proposal was that Malta should be transferred to Russia--the very step which was proposed at Amiens and was rejected by the Czar: on that account Lord Whitworth now refused it as being merely a device to gain time. The sending of his passports having been delayed, he received one more despatch from Downing Street, which allowed that our retention of Malta for ten years should form a secret article--a device which would spare the First Consul's susceptibilities on the point of honour. Even so, however, Napoleon refused to consider a longer tenure than two or three years. And in this he was undoubtedly encouraged by the recent despatch from St. Petersburg, wherein the Czar promised his mediation in a sense favourable to France. This unfortunate occurrence completed the discomfiture of the peace party at the Consular Court, and in a long and heated discussion in a council held at St. Cloud on May 11th all but Joseph Bonaparte and Talleyrand voted for the rejection of the British demands.

On the next day Lord Whitworth left Paris. During his journey to Calais he received one more proposal, that France should hold the peninsula of Otranto for ten years if Great Britain retained Malta for that period; but if this suggestion was made in good faith, which is doubtful, its effect was destroyed by a rambling diatribe which Talleyrand, at his master's orders, sent shortly afterwards.[256] In any case it was looked upon by our ambassador as a last attempt to gain time for the concentration of the French naval forces. He crossed the Straits of Dover on May 17th, the day before the British declaration of war was issued.

On May 22nd, 1803, appeared at Paris the startling order that, as British frigates had captured two French merchantmen on the Breton coast, all Englishmen between eighteen and sixty years of age who were in France should be detained as prisoners of war. The pretext for this unheard-of action, which condemned some 10,000 Britons to prolonged detention, was that the two French ships were seized prior to the declaration of war. This is false: they were seized on May 18th, that is, on the day on which the British Government declared war, three days after an embargo had been laid on British vessels in French ports, and seven days after the First Consul had directed his envoy at Florence to lay an embargo on English ships in the ports of Tuscany.[257] It is therefore obvious that Napoleon's barbarous decree merely marked his disappointment at the failure of his efforts to gain time and to deal the first stroke. How sorely his temper was tried by the late events is clear from the recital of the Duchesse d'Abrantès, who relates that her husband, when ordered to seize English residents, found the First Consul in a fury, his eyes flashing fire; and when Junot expressed his reluctance to carry out this decree, Napoleon passionately exclaimed: "Do not trust too far to my friendship: as soon as I conceive doubt as to yours, mine is gone."

Few persons in England now cherished any doubts as to the First Consul's hatred of the nation which stood between him and his oriental designs. Ministers alone knew the extent of those plans: but every ploughboy could feel the malice of an act which cooped up innocent travellers on the flimsiest of pretexts. National ardour, and, alas, national hatred were deeply stirred.[258] The Whigs, who had paraded the clemency of Napoleon, were at once helpless, and found themselves reduced to impotence for wellnigh a generation; and the Tories, who seemed the exponents of a national policy, were left in power until the stream of democracy, dammed up by war in 1793 and again in 1803, asserted its full force in the later movement for reform.

Yet the opinion often expressed by pamphleteers, that the war of 1803 was undertaken to compel France to abandon her republican principles, is devoid of a shred of evidence in its favour. After 1802 there were no French republican principles to be combated; they had already been jettisoned; and, since Bonaparte had crushed the Jacobins, his personal claims were favourably regarded at Whitehall, Addington even assuring the French envoy that he would welcome the establishment of hereditary succession in the First Consul's family.[259] But while Bonaparte's own conduct served to refute the notion that the war of 1803 was a war of principles, his masterful policy in Europe and the Levant convinced every well-informed man that peace was impossible; and the rupture was accompanied by acts and insults to the "nation of shopkeepers" that could be avenged only by torrents of blood. Diatribes against perfidious Albion filled the French Press and overflowed into splenetic pamphlets, one of which bade odious England tremble under the consciousness of her bad faith and the expectation of swift and condign chastisement. Such was the spirit in which these nations rushed to arms; and the conflict was scarcely to cease until Napoleon was flung out into the solitudes of the southern Atlantic.

The importance of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens will be realized if we briefly survey Bonaparte's position after that treaty was signed. He had regained for his adopted country a colonial empire and had given away not a single French island. France was raised to a position of assured strength far preferable to the perilous heights attained later on at Tilsit. In Australia there was a prospect that the tricolour would wave over areas as great and settlements as prosperous as those of New South Wales and the infant town of Sydney. From the Ile de France and the Cape of Good Hope as convenient bases of operations, British India could easily be assailed; and a Franco-Mahratta alliance promised to yield a victory over the troops of the East India Company. In Europe the imminent collapse of the Turkish Empire invited a partition, whence France might hope to gain Egypt and the Morea. The Ionian Isles were ready to accept French annexation; and, if England withdrew her troops from Malta, the fate of the weak Order of St. John could scarcely be a matter of doubt.

For the fulfilment of these bright hopes one thing alone was needed, a policy of peace and naval preparation. As yet Napoleon's navy was comparatively weak. In March, 1803, he had only forty-three line-of-battle ships, ten of which were on distant stations; but he had ordered twenty-three more to be built--ten of them in Holland; and, with the harbours of France, Holland, Flanders, and Northern Italy at his disposal, he might hope, at the close of 1804, to confront the flag of St. George with a superiority of force. That was the time which his secret instructions to Decaen marked out for the outbreak of the war that would yield to the tricolour a world-wide supremacy.

These schemes miscarried owing to the impetuosity of their contriver. Hustled out of the arena of European politics, and threatened with French supremacy in the other Continents, England forthwith drew the sword; and her action, cutting athwart the far-reaching web of the Napoleonic intrigues, forced France to forego her oceanic plans, to muster her forces on the Straits of Dover, and thereby to yield to the English race the supremacy in Louisiana, India, and Australia, leaving also the destinies of Egypt to be decided in a later age. Viewed from the standpoint of racial expansion, the renewal of war in 1803 is the greatest event of the century.

[Since this chapter was printed, articles on the same subject have appeared in the "Revue Historique" (March-June, 1901) by M. Philippson, which take almost the same view as that here presented. I cannot, however, agree with the learned writer that Napoleon wanted war. I think he did not, until his navy was ready; but it was not in him to give way.]

NOTE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

M. Coquelle, in a work which has been translated into English by Mr. Gordon D. Knox (G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.), has shown clearly that the non-evacuation of Holland by Napoleon's troops and the subjection of that Republic to French influence formed the chief causes of war. I refer my readers to that work for details of the negotiations in their final stages.

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XVIII. EUROPE AND THE BONAPARTES

The disappointment felt by Napoleon at England's interruption of his designs may be measured, first by his efforts to postpone the rupture, and thereafter by the fierce energy which he threw into the war. As has been previously noted, the Czar had responded to the First Consul's appeal for mediation in notes which seemed to the British Cabinet unjustly favourable to the French case. Napoleon now offered to recognize the arbitration of the Czar on the questions in dispute, and suggested that meanwhile Malta should be handed over to Russia to be held in pledge: he on his part offered to evacuate Hanover, Switzerland, and Holland, if the British would suspend hostilities, to grant an indemnity to the King of Sardinia, to allow Britain to occupy Lampedusa, and fully to assure "the independence of Europe," if France retained her present frontiers. But when the Russian envoy, Markoff, urged him to crown these proposals by allowing Britain to hold Malta for a certain time, thereafter to be agreed upon, he firmly refused to do so on his own initiative, for that would soil his honour: but he would view with resignation its cession to Britain if that proved to be the award of Alexander. Accordingly Markoff wrote to his colleague at London, assuring him that the peace of the world was now once again assured by the noble action of the First Consul.[260]

Were these proposals prompted by a sincere desire to assure a lasting peace, or were they put forward as a device to gain time for the completion of the French naval preparations? Evidently they were completely distrusted by the British Government, and with some reason. They were nearly identical with the terms formulated in the British ultimatum, which Napoleon had rejected. Moreover, our Foreign Office had by this time come to suspect Alexander. On June 23rd Lord Hawkesbury wrote that it might be most damaging to British interests to place Malta "at the hazard of the Czar's arbitration"; and he informed the Russian ambassador, Count Vorontzoff, that the aim of the French had obviously been merely to gain time, that their explanations were loose and unsatisfactory, and their demands inadmissible, and that Great Britain could not acknowledge the present territories of the French Republic as permanent while Malta was placed in arbitration. In fact, our Government feared that, when Malta had been placed in Alexander's hands, Napoleon would lure him into oriental adventures and renew the plans of an advance on India. Their fears were well founded.

Napoleon's preoccupation was always for the East: on February 21st, 1803, he had charged his Minister of Marine to send arms and ammunition to the Suliotes and Maniotes then revolting against the Sultan; and at midsummer French agents were at Ragusa to prepare for a landing at the mouth of the River Cattaro.[261] With Turkey rent by revolt, Malta placed as a pledge in Russian keeping, and Alexander drawn into the current of Napoleon's designs, what might not be accomplished? Evidently the First Consul could expect more from this course of events than from barren strifes with Nelson's ships in the Straits of Dover. For us, such a peace was far more risky than war. And yet, if the Czar's offer were too stiffly repelled, public opinion would everywhere be alienated, and in that has always lain half the strength of England's policy.[262] Ministers therefore declared that, while they could not accept Russia's arbitration without appeal, they would accede to her mediation if it concerned all the causes of the present war. This reasonable proposal was accepted by the Czar, but received from Napoleon a firm refusal. He at once wrote to Talleyrand, August 23rd, 1803, directing that the Russian proposals should be made known to Haugwitz, the Prussian Foreign Minister:

"Make him see all the absurdity of it: tell him that England will never get from me any other treaty than that of Amiens: that I will never suffer her to have anything in the Mediterranean; that I will not treat with her about the Continent; that I am resolved to evacuate Holland and Switzerland; but that I will never stipulate this in an article."

As for Russia, he continued, she talked much about the integrity of Turkey, but was violating it by the occupation of the Ionian Isles and her constant intrigues in Wallachia. These facts were correct: but the manner in which he stated them clearly revealed his annoyance that the Czar would not wholly espouse the French cause. Talleyrand's views on this question may be seen in his letter to Bonaparte, when he assures his chief that he has now reaped from his noble advance to the Russian Emperor the sole possible advantage--"that of proving to Europe by a grand act of frankness your love of peace and to throw upon England the whole blame for the war." It is not often that a diplomatist so clearly reveals the secrets of his chief's policy.[263]

The motives of Alexander were less questionable. His chief desire at that time was to improve the lot of his people. War would disarrange these noble designs: France would inevitably overrun the weaker Continental States: England would retaliate by enforcing her severe maritime code; and the whole world would be rent in twain by this strife of the elements.

These gloomy forebodings were soon to be realized. Holland was the first to suffer. And yet one effort was made to spare her the horrors of war. Filled with commiseration for her past sufferings, the British Government at once offered to respect her neutrality, provided that the French troops would evacuate her fortresses and exact no succour either in ships, men, or money.[264] But such forbearance was scarcely to be expected from Napoleon, who not only had a French division in that land, supported at its expense, but also relied on its maritime resources.[265] The proposal was at once set aside at Paris. Napoleon's decision to drag the Batavian Republic into the war arose, however, from no spasm of the war fever; it was calmly stated in the secret instructions issued to General Decaen in the preceding January. "It is now considered impossible that we could have war with England, without dragging Holland into it." Holland was accordingly once more ground between the upper and the nether millstone, between the Sea Power and the Land Power, pouring out for Napoleon its resources in men and money, and losing to the masters of the sea its ships, foreign commerce, and colonies.

Equally hard was the treatment of Naples. In spite of the Czar's plea that its neutrality might be respected, this kingdom was at once occupied by St. Cyr with troops that held the chief positions on the "heel" of Italy. This infraction of the Treaty of Florence was to be justified by a proclamation asserting that, as England had retained Malta, the balance of power required that France should hold these positions as long as England held Malta.[266] This action punished the King and Queen of Naples for their supposed subservience to English policy; and, while lightening the burdens of the French exchequer, it compelled England to keep a large fleet in the Mediterranean for the protection of Egypt, and thereby weakened her defensive powers in the Straits of Dover. To distract his foes, and compel them to extend their lines, was ever Napoleon's aim both in military and naval strategy; and the occupation of Taranto, together with the naval activity at Toulon and Genoa, left it doubtful whether the great captain determined to strike at London or to resume his eastern adventures. His previous moves all seemed to point towards Egypt and India; and the Admiralty instructions of May 18th, 1803, to Nelson, reveal the expectation of our Government that the real blow would fall on the Morea and Egypt. Six weeks later our admiral reported the activity of French intrigues in the Morea, which was doubtless intended to be their halfway house to Egypt--"when sooner or later, farewell India."[267] Proofs of Napoleon's designs on the Morea were found by Captain Keats of H.M.S. "Superb" on a French vessel that he captured, a French corporal having on him a secret letter from an agent at Corfu, dated May 23rd, 1803. It ended thus:

"I have every reason to believe that we shall soon have a revolution in the Morea, as we desire. I have close relations with Crepacchi, and we are in daily correspondence with all the chiefs of the Morea: we have even provided them with munitions of war."[268]

On the whole, however, it seems probable that Napoleon's chief aim now was London and not Egypt; but his demonstrations eastwards were so skilfully maintained as to convince both the English Government and Nelson that his real aim was Egypt or Malta. For this project the French corps d'armée in the "heel" of Italy held a commanding position. Ships alone were wanting; and these he sought to compel the King of Naples to furnish. As early as April 20th, 1803, our chargé d'affaires at Naples, Mr. à Court, reported that Napoleon was pressing on that Government a French alliance, on the ground that:

"The interests of the two countries are the same: it is the intention of France to shut every port to the English, from Holland to the Turkish dominions, to prevent the exportation of her merchandise, and to give a mortal blow to her commerce, for there she is most vulnerable. Our joint forces may wrest from her hands the island of Malta. The Sicilian navy may convoy and protect the French troops in the prosecution of such a plan, and the most happy result may be augured to their united exertions."

Possibly the King and his spirited but whimsical consort, Queen Charlotte, might have bent before the threats which accompanied this alluring offer; but at the head of the Neapolitan administration was an Englishman, General Acton, whose talents and force of will commanded their respect and confidence. To the threats of the French ambassador he answered that France was strong and Naples was weak; force might overthrow the dynasty; but nothing would induce it to violate its neutrality towards England. So unwonted a defiance aroused Napoleon to a characteristic revenge. When his troops were quartered on Southern Italy, and were draining the Neapolitan resources, the Queen wrote appealing to his clemency on behalf of her much burdened people. In reply he assured her of his desire to be agreeable to her: but how could he look on Naples as a neutral State, when its chief Minister was an Englishman? This was "the real reason that justified all the measures taken towards Naples."[269] The brutality and falseness of this reply had no other effect than to embitter Queen Charlotte's hatred against the arbiter of the world's destinies, before whom she and her consort refused to bow, even when, three years later, they were forced to seek shelter behind the girdle of the inviolate sea.

Hanover also fell into Napoleon's hands. Mortier with 25,000 French troops speedily overran that land and compelled the Duke of Cambridge to a capitulation. The occupation of the Electorate not only relieved the French exchequer of the support of a considerable corps; it also served to hold in check the Prussian Court, always preoccupied about Hanover; and it barred the entrance of the Elbe and Weser to British ships, an aim long cherished by Napoleon. To this we retorted by blockading the mouths of those rivers, an act which must have been expected by Napoleon, and which enabled him to declaim against British maritime tyranny. In truth, the beginnings of the Continental System were now clearly discernible. The shores of the Continent from the south of Italy to the mouth of the Elbe were practically closed to English ships, while by a decree of July 15th any vessel whatsoever that had cleared from a British port was to be excluded from all harbours of the French Republic. Thus all commercial nations were compelled, slowly but inevitably, to side with the master of the land or the mistress of the seas.

In vain did the King of Prussia represent to Napoleon that Hanover was not British territory, and that the neutrality of Germany was infringed and its interests damaged by the French occupation of Hanover and Cuxhaven. His protest was met by an offer from Napoleon to evacuate Hanover, Taranto and Otranto, only at the time when England should "evacuate Malta and the Mediterranean"; and though the special Prussian envoy, Lombard, reported to his master that Napoleon was "truth, loyalty, and friendship personified," yet he received not a word that betokened real regard for the susceptibilities of Frederick William III. or the commerce of his people.[270] For the present, neither King nor Czar ventured on further remonstrances; but the First Consul had sown seeds of discord which were to bear fruit in the Third Coalition.

Having quartered 60,000 French troops on Naples and Hanover, Napoleon could face with equanimity the costs of the war. Gigantic as they were, they could be met from the purchase money of Louisiana, the taxation and voluntary gifts of the French dominions, the subsidies of the Italian and Ligurian Republics, and a contribution which he now exacted from Spain.

Even before the outbreak of hostilities he had significantly reminded Charles IV. that the Spanish marine was deteriorating, and her arsenals and dockyards were idle: "But England is not asleep; she is ever on the watch and will never rest until she has seized on the colonies and commerce of the world."[271] For the present, however, the loss of Trinidad and the sale of Louisiana rankled too deeply to admit of Spain entering into another conflict, whence, as before, Napoleon would doubtless gain the glory and leave to her the burden of territorial sacrifices. In spite of his shameless relations to the Queen of Spain, Godoy, the Spanish Minister, was not devoid of patriotism; and he strove to evade the obligations which the treaty of 1796 imposed on Spain in case of an Anglo-French conflict. He embodied the militia of the north of Spain and doubtless would have defied Bonaparte's demands, had Russia and Prussia shown any disposition to resist French aggressions. But those Powers were as yet wholly devoted to private interests; and when Napoleon threatened Charles IV. and Godoy with an inroad of 80,000 French troops unless the Spanish militia were dissolved and 72,000,000 francs were paid every year into the French exchequer, the Court of Madrid speedily gave way. Its surrender was further assured by the thinly veiled threat that further resistance would lead to the exposure of the liaison between Godoy and the Queen. Spain therefore engaged to pay the required sum--more than double the amount stipulated in 1796--to further the interests of French commerce and to bring pressure to bear on Portugal. At the close of the year the Court of Lisbon, yielding to the threats of France and Spain, consented to purchase its neutrality by the payment of a million francs a month to the master of the Continent.[272]

Meanwhile the First Consul was throwing his untiring energies into the enterprise of crushing his redoubtable foe. He pushed on the naval preparations at all the dockyards of France, Holland, and North Italy; the great mole that was to shelter the roadstead at Cherbourg was hurried forward, and the coast from the Seine to the Rhine became "a coast of iron and bronze"--to use Marmont's picturesque phrase--while every harbour swarmed with small craft destined for an invasion. Troops were withdrawn from the Rhenish frontiers and encamped along the shores of Picardy; others were stationed in reserve at St. Omer, Montreuil, Bruges, and Utrecht; while smaller camps were formed at Ghent, Compiègne, and St. Malo. The banks of the Elbe, Weser, Scheldt, Somme, and Seine--even as far up as Paris itself--rang with the blows of shipwrights labouring to strengthen the flotilla of flat-bottomed vessels designed for the invasion of England. Troops, to the number of 50,000 at Boulogne under Soult, 30,000 at Etaples, and as many at Bruges, commanded by Ney and Davoust respectively, were organized anew, and by constant drill and exposure to the elements formed the tough nucleus of the future Grand Army, before which the choicest troops of Czar and Kaiser were to be scattered in headlong rout. To all these many-sided exertions of organization and drill, of improving harbours and coast fortifications, of ship-building, testing, embarking, and disembarking, the First Consul now and again applied the spur of his personal supervision; for while the warlike enthusiasm which he had aroused against perfidious Albion of itself achieved wonders, yet work was never so strenuous and exploits so daring as under the eyes of the great captain himself. He therefore paid frequent visits to the north coast, surveying with critical eyes the works at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk,

Ostend, and Antwerp. The last-named port engaged his special attention. Its position at the head of the navigable estuary of the Scheldt, exactly opposite the Thames, marked it out as the natural rival of London; he now encouraged its commerce and ordered the construction of a dockyard fitted to contain twenty-five battleships and a proportionate number of frigates and sloops. Antwerp was to become the great commercial and naval emporium of the North Sea. The time seemed to favour the design; Hamburg and Bremen were blockaded, and London for a space was menaced by the growing power of the First Consul, who seemed destined to restore to the Flemish port the prosperity which the savagery of Alva had swept away with such profit to Elizabethan London. But grand as were Napoleon's enterprises at Antwerp, they fell far short of his ulterior designs. He told Las Cases at St. Helena that the dockyard and magazines were to have been protected by a gigantic fortress built on the opposite side of the River Scheldt, and that Antwerp was to have been "a loaded pistol held at the head of England."

In both lands warlike ardour rose to the highest pitch. French towns and Departments freely offered gifts of gunboats and battleships. And in England public men vied with one another in their eagerness to equip and maintain volunteer regiments. Wordsworth, who had formerly sung the praises of the French Revolution, thus voiced the national defiance:

"No parleying now! In Britain is one breath; We all are with you now from shore to shore; Ye men of Kent, 'tis victory or death."

In one respect England enjoyed a notable advantage. Having declared war before Napoleon's plans were matured, she held the command of the seas, even against the naval resources of France, Holland, and North Italy. The first months of the war witnessed the surrender of St. Lucia and Tobago to our fleets; and before the close of the year Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo, together with < nearly the whole of the French St. Domingo force, had capitulated to the Union Jack. Our naval supremacy in the Channel now told with full effect. Frigates were ever on the watch in the Straits to chase any French vessels that left port. But our chief efforts were to blockade the enemy's ships. Despite constant ill-health and frequent gales, Nelson clung to Toulon. Admiral Cornwallis cruised off Brest with a fleet generally exceeding fifteen sail of the line and several smaller vessels: six frigates and smaller craft protected the coast of Ireland; six line-of-battle ships and twenty-three lesser vessels were kept in the Downs under Lord Keith as a central reserve force, to which the news of all events transpiring on the enemy's coast was speedily conveyed by despatch boats; the newly invented semaphore telegraphs were also systematically used between the Isle of Wight and Deal to convey news along the coast and to London. Martello towers were erected along the coast from Harwich to Pevensey Bay, at the points where a landing was easy. Numerous inventors also came forward with plans for destroying the French flotilla, but none was found to be serviceable except the rockets of Colonel Congreve, which inflicted some damage at Boulogne and elsewhere. Such were the dispositions of our chief naval forces: they comprised 469 ships of war, and over 700 armed boats, of all sizes.[273]

Our regular troops and militia mustered 180,000 strong; while the volunteers, including 120,000 men armed with pikes or similar weapons, numbered 410,000. Of course little could be hoped from these last in a conflict with French veterans; and even the regulars, in the absence of any great generals--for Wellesley was then in India--might have offered but a poor resistance to Napoleon's military machine. Preparations were, however, made for a desperate resistance. Plans were quietly framed for the transfer of the Queen and the royal family to Worcester, along with the public treasure, which was to be lodged in the cathedral; while the artillery and stores from Woolwich arsenal were to be conveyed into the Midlands by the Grand Junction Canal.[274]

The scheme of coast-defence which General Dundas had drawn up in 1796 was now again set in action. It included, not only the disposition of the armed forces, but plans for the systematic removal of all provisions, stores, animals, and fodder from the districts threatened by the invader; and it is clear that the country was far better prepared than French writers have been willing to admit. Indeed, so great was the expense of these defensive preparations that, when Nelson's return from the West Indies disconcerted the enemy's plans, Fox merged the statesman in the partisan by the curious assertion that the invasion scare had been got up by the Pitt Ministry for party purposes.[275] Few persons shared that opinion. The nation was animated by a patriotism such as had never yet stirred the sluggish veins of Georgian England. The Jacobinism, which Dundas in 1796 had lamented as paralyzing the nation's energy, had wholly vanished; and the fatality which dogged the steps of Napoleon was already discernible. The mingled hatred and fear which he inspired outside France was beginning to solidify the national resistance: after uniting rich and poor, English and Scots in a firm phalanx in the United Kingdom, the national principle was in turn to vivify Spain, Russia, and Germany, and thus to assure his overthrow.

Reserving for consideration in another chapter the later developments of the naval war, it will be convenient now to turn to important events in the history of the Bonaparte family.

The loves and intrigues of the Bonapartes have furnished material enough to fill several volumes devoted to light gossip, and naturally so. Given an ambitious family, styled parvenus by the ungenerous, shooting aloft swiftly as the flames of Vesuvius, ardent as its inner fires, and stubborn as its hardened lava--given also an imperious brother determined to marry his younger brothers and sisters, not as they willed, but as he willed--and it is clear that materials are at hand sufficient to make the fortunes of a dozen comediettas.

To the marriage of Pauline Bonaparte only the briefest reference need here be made. The wild humour of her blood showed itself before her first marriage; and after the death of her husband, General Leclerc, in San Domingo, she privately espoused Prince Borghese before the legal time of mourning had expired, an indiscretion which much annoyed Napoleon (August, 1803). Ultimately this brilliant, frivolous creature resided in the splendid mansion which now forms the British embassy in Paris. The case of Louis Bonaparte was somewhat different. Nurtured as he had been in his early years by Napoleon, he had rewarded him by contracting a dutiful match with Hortense Beauharnais (January, 1802); but that union was to be marred by a grotesquely horrible jealousy which the young husband soon conceived for his powerful brother.

For the present, however, the chief trouble was caused by Lucien, whose address had saved matters at the few critical minutes of Brumaire. Gifted with a strong vein of literary feeling and oratorical fire he united in his person the obstinacy of a Bonaparte, the headstrong feelings of a poet, and the dogmatism of a Corsican republican. His presumptuous conduct had already embroiled him with the First Consul, who deprived him of his Ministry and sent him as ambassador to Madrid.[276] He further sinned, first by hurrying on peace with Portugal--it is said for a handsome present from Lisbon--and later by refusing to marry the widow of the King of Etruria. In this he persisted, despite the urgent representations of Napoleon and Joseph: "You know very well that I am a republican, and that a queen is not what suits me, an ugly queen too!"--" What a pity your answer was not cut short, it would have been quite Roman," sneered Joseph at his younger brother, once the Brutus of the Jacobin clubs. But Lucien was proof against all the splendours of the royal match; he was madly in love with a Madame Jouberthon, the deserted wife of a Paris stockbroker; and in order to checkmate all Napoleon's attempts to force on a hated union, he had secretly married the lady of his choice at the village of Plessis-Chamant, hard by his country house (October 26th, 1803).

The letter which divulged the news of this affair reached the First Consul at St. Cloud on an interesting occasion.[277] It was during a so-called family concert, to which only the choicest spirits had been invited, whence also, to Josephine's chagrin, Napoleon had excluded Madame Tallien and several other old friends, whose reputation would have tainted the air of religion and morality now pervading the Consular Court. While this select company was enjoying the strains of the chamber music, and Napoleon alone was dozing, Lucien's missive was handed in by the faithful if indiscreet Duroc. A change came over the scene. At once Napoleon started up, called out "Stop the music: stop," and began with nervous strides and agitated gestures to pace the hall, exclaiming "Treason! it is treason!" Round-eyed, open-mouthed wonder seized on the disconcerted musicians, the company rose in confusion, and Josephine, following her spouse, besought him to say what had happened. "What has happened--why--Lucien has married his--mistress."[278]

The secret cause for this climax of fashionable comedy is to be sought in reasons of state. The establishment of hereditary power was then being secretly and anxiously discussed. Napoleon had no heirs: Joseph's children were girls: Lucien's first marriage also had naught but female issue: the succession must therefore devolve on Lucien's children by a second marriage. But a natural son had already been born to him by Madame Jouberthon; and his marriage now promised to make this bastard the heir to the future French imperial throne. That was the reason why Napoleon paced the hall at St. Cloud, "waving his arms like a semaphore," and exclaiming "treason!" Failing the birth of sons to the two elder brothers, Lucien's marriage seriously endangered the foundation of a Napoleonic dynasty; besides, the whole affair would yield excellent sport to the royalists of the Boulevard St. Germain, the snarling Jacobins of the back streets, and the newspaper writers of hated Albion.

In vain were negotiations set on foot to make Lucien divorce his wife. The attempt only produced exasperation, Joseph himself finally accusing Napoleon of bad faith in the course of this affair. In the following springtime Lucien shook off the dust of France from his feet, and declared in a last letter to Joseph that he departed, hating Napoleon. The moral to this curious story was well pointed by Joseph Bonaparte: "Destiny seems to blind us, and intends, by means of our own faults, to restore France some day to her former rulers." [279]

At the very time of the scene at St. Cloud, fortune was preparing for the First Consul another matrimonial trouble. His youngest brother, Jerome, then aged nineteen years, had shown much aptitude for the French navy, and was serving on the American station, when a quarrel with the admiral sent him flying in disgust to the shore. There, at Baltimore, he fell in love with Miss Paterson, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and sought her hand in marriage. In vain did the French consul remind him that, were he five years older, he would still need the consent of his mother. The headstrong nature of his race brooked no opposition, and he secretly espoused the young lady at her father's residence.

Napoleon's ire fell like a blasting wind on the young couple; but after waiting some time, in hopes that the storm would blow over, they ventured to come to Europe. Thereupon Napoleon wrote to Madame Mère in these terms:

"Jerome has arrived at Lisbon with the woman with whom he lives.... I have given orders that Miss Paterson is to be sent back to America.... If he shows no inclination to wash away the dishonour with which he has stained my name, by forsaking his country's flag on land and sea for the sake of a wretched woman, I will cast him off for ever."[280]

The sequel will show that Jerome was made of softer stuff than Lucien; and, strange to say, his compliance with Napoleon's dynastic designs provided that family with the only legitimate male heirs that were destined to sustain its wavering hopes to the end of the century.

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