wonderful military genius. Most of all his foes, he hated England;
because, to the eternal honour of our country, be it remembered, England
took the lead in rousing the other nations of Europe to resist him.
England was the banker of almost every coalition that was formed against
him. She supplied men, armies, and armed ships, where she could, and she
supplied money to carry on war against Napoleon everywhere. Our great
minister, William Pitt, threw himself and all the wealth and power of
England into this great struggle against Napoleon. Again and again he
revived the spirit of resistance among the other Powers. The rulers and
representatives of other countries allowed themselves to be flattered
and bribed and threatened into lending themselves to the objects of
Napoleon’s inordinate ambition. The Czar consented to meet him on
intimate and friendly terms; the Emperor of Austria, notwithstanding the
cruel humiliations he had suffered, consented to give his daughter to
take the place of the unjustly divorced wife of the Corsican upstart;
the less important German princes cringed before him. The hostility of
England alone was implacable and unceasing, and what made her even more
hated, successful.
There is little doubt that Napoleon fully recognised that England was
the main obstacle in the way of the fulfilment of his dream of universal
dominion. His most darling project was to crush the power of England,
and in 1804-5 he made preparations for the invasion of our country,
assembling a vast army at Boulogne for that purpose. So fast did his
ambition outrun the bounds of fact and common sense, that he actually
had a medal struck to commemorate the conquest of England. On one side
was his own head crowned with the laurel wreath of victory; on the
other, was a representation of Hercules strangling a giant, with the
lying inscription, “Struck in London, 1804.” He wrote to the admiral of
the French fleet, which was destined about two months later to be
completely destroyed by our great Nelson at Trafalgar: “Set out, lose
not a moment, bring our united squadron into the Channel and _England is
ours_.” It was at this moment of supreme suspense and danger that
Wordsworth wrote that stirring sonnet to the men of Kent, the words of
which vibrated through the nation like a trumpet call.
Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that doth advance
Her haughty brow against the coast of France,
Now is the time to prove your hardiment!
To France be words of invitation sent!
They from their fields can see the countenance
Of your fierce war, may ken the glittering lance,
And hear you shouting forth your brave intent.
Left single, in bold parley, ye, of yore,
Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath;
Confirmed the charters that were yours before;—
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!
England’s immediate relief from the danger of invasion did not come from
Nelson’s great victory, but from Pitt once more rousing the powers of
Austria and Russia to combine against Napoleon. Pitt insisted, in the
spring of 1805, on pain of losing the subsidies promised by England,
that Austria should at once declare war upon France; and Napoleon was
thereupon obliged to withdraw the forces he had assembled in great
numbers at Boulogne to meet the new combination that had been formed
against him. It was now a question how strong that combination should
be. The two great Powers of Austria and Russia had already joined it;
the smaller German princes went, some on this side and some on that. The
only important Power that showed indecision at this critical moment was
Prussia. The King of Prussia, Frederick William III, was a grand-nephew
of Frederick the Great; but he bore no resemblance to that sovereign. He
was weak and undecided in character, wishing to strengthen and enlarge
his kingdom, but without force of character sufficient to decide on a
wise line of conduct and to adhere to it. He and his minister, Haugwitz,
cast longing eyes upon Hanover, the Electorate of which was then united
with the crown of England. The French had seized Hanover, and the
possession of this coveted territory was skilfully dangled by Napoleon
before the eyes of the King of Prussia. Frederick William III could not
arrive at a decision whether he should serve his own interests best by
joining the coalition or by remaining friends with Napoleon. While he
was hesitating, Napoleon, with his customary disregard of all law,
violated a neutral territory, belonging to the Kingdom of Prussia, by
taking his army across it. It was like offering one hand in friendship,
and boxing the ears of your friend with the other. Angry as the whole of
Prussia was by the insult thus offered her, she did not bring herself
boldly to join the coalition of England, Austria, and Russia against
Napoleon. The vacillating character of the King and the intriguing
diplomacy of Haugwitz stood in the way; but it must not be supposed that
in the general body of the Prussian people there was not a feeling of
shame, anger, and resentment at the policy that had been adopted by
their Government.
The embodiment of this strong national feeling was found in the person
of the beautiful young Queen Louisa, a princess of the House of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Her character was a complete contrast to that of
her husband. She had the decision, vivacity, and high courage which he
so much lacked. The two were sincerely devoted to one another; but from
the essential differences in their dispositions, they became
respectively the heads of the two opposing parties in the State; the
party who wished to join the coalition and resist Napoleon, and the
party who wished merely to look on and try to reap some advantage from
whichever side was favoured by the fortunes of war. It seemed at one
time as if the Queen’s influence with her husband had prevailed, and
that Prussia was going to join the alliance; but just at this time came
the news of the first of Napoleon’s great victories in this campaign,
the capitulation of Ulm, and all the fears of the timid party were
renewed. Then came the great catastrophe of Austerlitz; Napoleon’s
forces had completely crushed the combined armies of Russia and Austria,
and Pitt’s last supreme effort against Napoleon had failed. Austerlitz
is said to have killed Pitt. He was only forty-seven; but his health had
long been feeble, and this last blow to all his hopes was fatal. He died
a few weeks after the news reached him, on the 23d January 1806. He
attributed the failure of the coalition to the indecision of Prussia. If
he was right in this he had a terrible revenge. It is one of the most
extraordinary episodes in history that Prussia, which had hesitated to
join one of the most powerful alliances that had ever been formed
against Napoleon, was destined within a few months to match itself
against the conqueror almost single-handed.
Very soon after the battle of Austerlitz the Prussian minister,
Haugwitz, waited upon Napoleon and renewed negotiations with him.
Napoleon offered Prussia the choice between immediate war, or alliance
and the possession of Hanover. A treaty was drawn up accepting the
latter alternative; Haugwitz agreed to it, and carried it back to his
master for ratification. When the terms of the treaty became known in
Berlin, the anger of the patriotic party was unbounded. They felt they
were bound by ties of blood and kindred to espouse the cause of their
German brethren. They looked upon the proffered bribe of Hanover as
hush-money, which was to close their lips from protesting against the
oppression of Germany by Napoleon. When Haugwitz returned to Berlin he
was treated with marked coldness by the Queen. On receiving the
disastrous news of the defeat of Austerlitz, she had called to her side
her two elder boys, the younger of whom became the late aged Emperor of
Germany, and adjured them to think, from that time forth, only of
avenging their unhappy brethren. The King’s brothers sympathised with
the Queen’s views, as did also the patriotic statesmen Stein and
Hardenburg, and a brave young prince, Louis Ferdinand, the King’s
cousin. Miss Hudson, who has written a life of Queen Louisa, says in
reference to her position at this crisis, “The Queen did not desire or
endeavour to take a leading part, but she did not dissemble her feelings
and aspirations, and her name was put foremost by popular report, on
account of her superior rank. The Queen did not play any conspicuous
part, but she was a constant incentive to the best of the nation to work
for their country’s deliverance. It was what she was, not what she did,
that made her name a watchword for the enemies of Napoleon.”
Haugwitz had never dreamed that his master would refuse to ratify the
treaty; but the outburst of popular anger against it had been so marked,
and the advantages it offered to Prussia were in fact so small, that the
King declined to sign, and demanded modifications. His vacillation had
placed him in a cleft stick. If he refused Napoleon’s terms, he would
have to fight with the victorious French army; if he accepted them, and
Hanover with them, he would have to fight with England; for it was not
probable that the latter country would calmly allow Hanover to be
appropriated by another Power without a struggle. While this was the
situation of affairs, the King of Prussia, having sent back the treaty
to Napoleon to ask for modifications, one of which was to obtain the
consent of England to the cession of Hanover, the news came to all the
world that Pitt, the most powerful and the most pertinacious of
Napoleon’s enemies, was dead. England had lost Nelson and Pitt within a
few months. It seemed as if they had been removed to make the pathway of
ambition smooth for Napoleon.
Pitt was succeeded in the Ministry by his great rival Fox, the professed
admirer of the French Revolution, a man whose measure Napoleon thought
he had taken, and whom the Emperor believed he could dupe with fine
phrases about universal brotherhood and a union of hearts. Napoleon
instantly saw the advantage this change might bring to him. With
audacity unparalleled, except by himself, he commenced negotiations with
the English Government and offered _them_ Hanover, notwithstanding that
the ink was hardly dry on the treaty in which he had offered it to
Prussia. Napoleon, intent for the moment on this fresh project of
pacifying England, received Haugwitz, when he presented his master’s
modifications of the treaty, with harsh and contemptuous insolence. The
conditions of the treaty were made still more onerous than before on
Prussia. Napoleon now wanted to force a quarrel between England and
Prussia, of which he himself would in any result reap the advantages. He
carried on this project for a time so successfully that England did
actually declare war against Prussia, but hostilities between them never
actually took place, because it became evident that Prussia had only
been a cat’s paw in the hand of Napoleon. The new treaty which Napoleon
returned to Frederick William was so humiliating to Prussia, that
Haugwitz did not dare to take it to Berlin himself, but sent it by
another hand. The King was so weak and foolish as to sign it, and from
that moment Napoleon poured insult after insult upon the unhappy
government which had consented to its own slavery. One of his first acts
was to insist on the dismissal of Hardenberg, one of the most trusted of
the Prussian ministers. Under the pretext of a new Confederation of the
Rhine, it became evident that Napoleon meant to entirely alter the whole
constitution of Germany without consulting Prussia, or any of the Powers
chiefly concerned. The French ambassador had orders to state that “his
master no longer recognised the Germanic constitution.” Under these new
humiliations, the war fever burst out more strongly than ever, all over
Prussia. Unequal as the contest was, all that was best in the nation
preferred any risk to the humble acceptance of the galling tyranny that
oppressed them. The young men in Berlin showed what their feelings were
by assembling in crowds outside the house of the French ambassador, and
sharpening their swords on his doorstep and window sills.
It may very well be believed that Fox, if he had lived, would have
carried out Pitt’s policy in resisting Napoleon. Already his eyes must
have been opened by the perfidious transactions about Hanover; but while
the process of disillusion was proceeding, Fox died, in September 1806,
a few months after his great rival. Napoleon stated, in after years,
that he considered the death of Fox, at this juncture, was the first
great blow his power had received. “Fox’s death,” he often said at St.
Helena, “was one of the fatalities of my career.” The English policy of
resistance to Napoleon had hardly received more than a temporary check
by Fox’s accession to office, and when Prussia finally decided on
fighting with Napoleon, she was promised assistance both from Russia and
England. The struggle, however, took place under cruel disadvantages to
the weaker side. Napoleon was at the head of 200,000 veterans confident
of victory, and of the irresistible genius of their commander. Moreover,
the French army, or a great portion of it, was even then on Prussian
soil. It was impossible that the Prussian army could rely on Frederick
William, as the French army relied on its great general. The Queen did
all she could by joining the army, and living in camp, with her husband,
to the very eve of the battle, to encourage the spirit of the troops,
and above all to prevent any change of front at the last moment. The
most experienced of the Prussian generals begged the Queen to remain
with the army. One of them wrote, “Pray say all you can to induce her to
remain. I know what I am asking; her presence with us is quite
necessary.”
The final spark which caused the combustible material to burst into the
flame of war, was the cruel murder of the Nuremberg bookseller, Palm, by
Napoleon, for selling a pamphlet called, “The Humiliation of Germany.”
He was decoyed upon neutral territory, and was shot on the 25th August
1806, without even the pretence of a legal trial. Rather more than a
month later, Prussia had declared war. Her army was very inferior to
that of France. The highest number at which it has been put, even with
the Russian auxiliaries, is 60,000. The troops from England did not
arrive in time to be of any use. In two great battles, Jena and
Auerstadt, fought on the same day, 16th October 1806, the power and
independence of Prussia were completely crushed. No wonder that all the
world at that moment thought them annihilated! A few days later Napoleon
made his triumphal entry into Berlin. He occupied the Royal Palaces
there and at Potsdam, from which the Queen had lately fled with her
children. It was then that Napoleon covered himself with everlasting
infamy by a series of bulletins published in an official gazette called
_The Telegraph_, in which he poured every kind of insult and calumny
upon the person, character, and influence of the Queen. He ransacked her
private apartments, read her correspondence, and sought eagerly, but in
vain, for evidence to support the monstrous charges he brought against
her. She was among the most womanly of women, devoted to her home, to
her children and husband. Every true woman is more sensitive on what
touches the honour and sanctity of her home than on any other subject.
It was here, therefore, that Napoleon struck at her with all the brute
violence and perfidy of his nature. M. Lanfrey, the French historian,
says that a volume might be filled with all that he wrote and published
against her. He wished to render her odious in the eyes of her people,
and held her up to ridicule as well as to calumny. He represented that
her pretended patriotism was only put on to hide her guilty passion for
“the handsome Emperor of Russia,” that nothing had aroused her from “the
grave occupations of dress, in which she had been hitherto absorbed,”
but the desire to bring about more frequent opportunities of intercourse
with her supposed lover. The stupidity of all this, repeated again and
again in bulletin after bulletin, is as wonderful as its wickedness. The
effect of it in the minds of the German people is almost as fresh to-day
as it was eighty years ago. They had loved and trusted their good, brave
Queen, before Napoleon tried to cover her with the mud of his impure
imagination. Afterwards, and to this day, they adored her as no modern
queen has ever been adored. No stranger can be many days in North
Germany now without being forced to ask, “Who is this Queen Louisa,
whose portrait is in every shop window, and after whom streets and
squares by the dozen are called?” Her name has become the symbol of all
that is best in German national life, simplicity of living, patriotism
and devotion to duty. M. Lanfrey, whose history of Napoleon has been
already quoted, says of the bulletins attacking the Queen, “Such
circumstances as these indicate the defect of Napoleon’s moral
organisation, amounting, in fact, to an absence of ordinary
intelligence. He outraged the most delicate scruples of the human
conscience, because such sentiments had no existence in his own heart.
He made a grave mistake in treating other men as if they were as utterly
devoid as he was himself of all sentiment of honour and morality. He did
not perceive that these base insinuations against a fugitive and
disarmed woman, by a man who commanded 500,000 soldiers, would produce
an effect exactly contrary to what he intended; that they were
calculated not only to excite disgust in all noble minds, but were
revolting even to the most vulgar.” How little did either the conqueror
or the conquered foresee what lay hidden in the womb of time! Prince
William, then a delicate child of eight years old, and a fugitive, with
his mother, before the victorious army of Napoleon, was destined to
become the most powerful sovereign in Europe, to bring to an end the
Napoleonic dynasty, and in the chief of the Royal Palaces of France, to
be crowned Emperor of a United Germany.
In 1806, however, the fortunes of Queen Louisa and her children were at
the lowest ebb. After having lost so much that was more precious than
the state and luxury of royalty, the privations of the fugitive Court
were not an insupportable trial; the kind peasants brought gifts of
money and provisions to their King and Queen, and many acts of
faithfulness and devotion cheered and consoled Frederick William and his
wife. Even ill-health, which now began to be visible in the Queen,
seemed a small misfortune compared with others she had endured. She
wrote at this period, June 1807, that her greatest unhappiness was being
unable to hope. “Those who have been torn up by the roots ... have lost
the faculty of hoping.” Still she felt sustained by the confidence that
Prussia, though humiliated, was not disgraced. The country had had
fearful odds against it, and had been vanquished, but it had striven to
do its duty. “Wrong and injustice on our side would have brought me down
to the grave,” she wrote.
A treaty of peace was now about to be drawn up. Napoleon, the Emperor of
Russia, and the King of Prussia, met in a grand ceremonial way at
Tilsit. The Emperor of Russia was considered by Napoleon sufficiently
powerful to be treated with flattery and consideration. The King of
Prussia, being helpless, was harshly dealt with; and when the terms of
the peace were discussed, Napoleon was inexorable in insisting on an
almost complete destruction of the power of Prussia. All the principal
fortified towns in Prussia, including Magdeburg, which commanded the
Elbe, were to remain in the hands of the French; and the standing army
of Prussia was to be limited to 42,000 men.
The idea appears to have occurred to the Emperor of Russia, that if
Queen Louisa joined her husband at Tilsit she could induce Napoleon to
modify these harsh conditions of peace. Frederick William concurred, and
wrote to the Queen, requesting her immediate presence to intercede with
Napoleon for more favourable terms. No wonder, when the King’s letter
was placed in her hands, that the Queen burst into tears, and said it
was the hardest thing she had ever been called upon to bear and do. All
her woman’s pride revolted against humbling herself to beg for favours
from the man who but the other day had so brutally insulted her. But she
thought, how could she, who had urged her sons to die for their country,
refuse to sacrifice her just and natural resentment for the same end?
She set out without delay, and the famous interview between herself and
Napoleon was speedily arranged. He now treated her with every outward
mark of respect, and was perhaps surprised to find the fancy picture he
had drawn of her, in his infamous bulletins, falsified in every
particular. She would not allow him to trifle with her, and lead the
conversation away to commonplaces, but went straight to the object which
had brought her to Tilsit, the granting of moderate terms of peace to
Prussia. She was calm, dignified, and courteous; once only her
self-command failed her: “When she spoke of the Prussian people, and of
her husband, she could not restrain her tears.” She begged the conqueror
at least to grant to Prussia the possession of Magdeburg. The French
minister, Talleyrand, who was present at the interview, thought that
Napoleon wavered; but a tiger with a kid in his claws does not easily
relinquish it, even if an archangel pleads with him. The interview was
brought to an end, with no concession promised. The Queen and Emperor
met again at a State banquet the same evening, and again the following
day at a smaller private gathering. But she had humbled her pride in
vain. Her first words after the final leavetaking were, “I have been
cruelly deceived.” Napoleon did not hesitate to misrepresent to his
wife, the Empress Josephine, the whole bearing of the Queen of Prussia
to him: “She is fond of coquetting with me,” he wrote; “but do not be
jealous.” But to Talleyrand, who could not be deceived, because he was
present at Tilsit at all the interviews that had taken place between the
two, Napoleon said, “I knew that I should see a beautiful woman, and a
Queen with dignified manners, but I found the most admirable Queen, and
at the same time the most interesting woman I had ever met with.” On
another occasion he remarked to Talleyrand that the “Queen of Prussia
attached too much importance to the dignity of her sex, and to the value
of public opinion.” From a man of Napoleon’s gross and low estimate of
womanhood, a greater compliment would be impossible.
The French army was withdrawn from Berlin in December 1808. The King and
Queen of Prussia did not re-enter their capital till December 1809. In
the following July, Louisa died. Spasms of the heart had come on, a
short time previously, during the illness of one of her children. They
returned with a violence which she had not strength to resist. Her
husband and her people felt that she had died of a broken heart. The
short-lived rejoicings that had greeted her return to Berlin were now
changed into devotion to her memory, and to the cause of German
patriotism with which her name will always be associated. The King, his
children, and his subjects mourned her loss with unceasing fidelity and
reverence. Four years after her death, Frederick William and his Russian
allies crushed Napoleon’s army at the battle of Leipzig. On his return
to Berlin, the King’s first thought was to lay the laurel wreath of
victory on his wife’s tomb. Queen Louisa’s eldest son directed that his
heart should be buried at the foot of his mother’s grave, and the same
spot was also selected as the last resting-place of her second son, the
Emperor William. It will long be remembered that it was here that the
late Emperor, then King William of Prussia, knelt alone, in silent
meditation and stern resolve, on the sixtieth anniversary of his
mother’s death, just at the time of the outbreak of the war of 1870
between France and Germany.