ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE
1792-1801
[Sidenote: England and the Revolutionists.]
That the war with Germany would widen into a vast European struggle, a
struggle in which the peoples would rise against their oppressors, and
the freedom which France had won diffuse itself over the world, no
French revolutionist doubted for an hour. Nor did they doubt that in
this struggle England would join them. It was from England that they had
drawn those principles of political and social liberty which they
believed themselves to be putting into practice. It was to England that
they looked above all for approbation and sympathy, and on the aid of
England that they confidently counted in their struggle with a despotic
and priest-ridden Europe. Absorbed in the mighty events about them, and
utterly ignorant of the real set of English feeling or the real meaning
of Pitt's policy, they were astonished and indignant at his firm refusal
of their alliance and his resolve to stand apart from the struggle. It
was in vain that Pitt strove to allay this irritation by demanding only
that Holland should remain untouched, and promising neutrality even
though Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he
strengthened these pledges by a reduction of military forces, and by
bringing forward in 1792 a peace-budget which rested on a large
remission of taxation. To the revolutionists at Paris the attitude of
England remained unintelligible and irritating. Instead of the aid they
had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the
sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly
across the Channel, a reserve passing into disapproval. The pen of Burke
was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles
on which English liberty rested. The priests and nobles who had fled
from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English shores. And
now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its
peoples from their kings, England stood coldly apart. To men frenzied
with a passionate enthusiasm, and frenzied yet more with a sudden terror
at the dangers they were encountering, such an attitude of neutrality in
such a quarter seemed like a stab in the back.
[Sidenote: Their efforts in England.]
But that this attitude was that of the English people as a whole was
incredible to the French enthusiasts. Conscious as no Englishman could
be conscious of the great evils they had overthrown, of the great
benefits they had won for their country, they saw in the attitude of
England only the sympathy of an aristocracy with the aristocracy they
had struck down. The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them
across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless
and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the
hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and
superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be
emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work
therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England
which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic
government which held it down. But this was far from being all the work
they looked to accomplishing. The aristocracy which oppressed the people
at home oppressed, as they believed, great peoples beyond the bounds of
England itself. It was subjecting to its sway nation after nation in
India. Its rule over Ireland was a masterpiece of tyranny. To rouse
India, to rouse Ireland to a struggle which should shake off the English
yoke, became necessary steps to the establishment of freedom in England
itself. From the moment therefore that the opposition between the two
countries declared itself, French agents were busy "sowing the
revolution" in each quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication
with the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts of the
native princes, and above all at the court of Mysore. Meanwhile in
England itself they strove through a number of associations, which had
formed themselves under the name of Constitutional Clubs, to rouse the
same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy,
Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this
correspondence as seditious.
[Sidenote: The Coalition attacks France.]
Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common
resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends
of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox,
that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was
inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its
foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of
style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm
throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes
to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists,"
he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he
sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary
terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the
two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all
hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke
of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France,
though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless;
her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful
rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at
large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's
advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August;
and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was
suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following
September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations
was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne,
bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded
the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new
Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat
of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an
advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by
Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the
panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the
Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all
nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies,"
cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of
treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by
England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government
resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms
the opening of the Scheldt.
[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]
To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already
pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres of
September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to
estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke.
But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment
of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung
stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end
through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the
best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of
Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and passionless
before the growth of national passion, and refused to bow to the
gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September massacres could
only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of
conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French
agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic.
At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady
neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace
from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch
left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure
a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United
Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching partition of
Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid
Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and
pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease
from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately
as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the
Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the
general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's
execution showed the growing ardour for the contest. The rejection of
his last offers indeed made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from
diplomatic communications, and in February 1793 France issued her
Declaration of War.
[Sidenote: The Panic.]
From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable
firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at
the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide
of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the
country broke out in a fit of passion and panic which rivalled the
passion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions
as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen
themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few
handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling
themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was
going on across the Channel. But in the mass of Englishmen the dread of
these revolutionists passed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk
of the Whig party believed property and the constitution to be in peril,
and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the
Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of
Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head,
followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself,
though little touched by the political reaction which was to constitute
the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pittites," was shaken
by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about
him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the
existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the
throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no
fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a passage from the
_Rights of Man_, in which that author had vindicated the principles of
the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I
should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London
burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to
the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other
English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the
Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have
fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of
war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted
it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the
progress of "French principles" in England itself.
The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in
which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill
against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting,
and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution
after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some
dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of
sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of
this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only
offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to
transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret
that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into
disuse. But the panic soon passed away for sheer want of material to
feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the
last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the
French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of
tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the
dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the
leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy
with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason,
their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was
the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional
riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social
disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which
lay before it. But though the public terror passed, it left a terrible
legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung
from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a
quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which
threatened change to an existing institution, beneficial though the
change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly
characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of
revolution.
Easy however as Pitt found it to deal with "French principles" at home,
he found it less easy to deal with French armies abroad. The very
excellences of his character indeed unfitted him for the conduct of a
war. He was at heart a Peace Minister; he was forced into war by a panic
and enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree; and he was
utterly destitute of his father's gift of entering instinctively into
the sympathies and passions around him, and of rousing passions and
sympathies in return. At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France.
When the campaign of 1793 opened she was girt in along her whole
frontier by a ring of foes. The forces of the House of Austria, of the
Empire, and of the King of Prussia, pressed her to the north and the
east; those of Spain and Sardinia attacked her in the south; and the
accession of England to this league threatened to close the sea against
her. The efforts of these foreign foes were seconded too by civil war.
The peasants of Poitou and Brittany, estranged from the revolution by
its attack on the clergy, rose in revolt against the government at
Paris; while Marseilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the
violent leaders who now seized on power in the capital. The campaign
opened therefore with a series of terrible reverses. In spite of the
efforts of General Dumouriez the French were foiled in their attack on
Holland and driven, after a disastrous defeat at Neerwinden, from the
Netherlands. At the moment when the Duke of York with ten thousand
English troops joined the Austrian army on the northern border of
France, a march upon Paris would have crushed the revolution. But the
chance was lost. At this moment indeed the two German powers were far
from wishing honestly for the suppression of the Republic and the
re-establishment of a strong monarchy in France. Such a restoration
would have foiled their projects of aggrandizement in Eastern Europe.
The strife on the Rhine had set Russia free, as Pitt had foreseen, to
carry out her schemes of aggression; and Austria and Prussia saw
themselves forced, in the interest of a balance of power, to share in
her annexations at the cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland
would have become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration of
its monarchy to take up again its natural position in Europe, and to
accept the alliance which Pitt would in such a case have offered her.
The policy of the German courts therefore was to prolong an anarchy
which left them free for the moment to crush Poland, and which they
counted on crushing in its turn at a more convenient time; and the
allied armies which might have marched upon Paris were purposely
frittered away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine.
[Sidenote: The revival of France.]
Such a policy gave France all that she needed to recover from the shock
of her past disasters: it gave her time. Whatever were the crimes and
tyranny of her leaders, the country felt in spite of them the value of
the Revolution, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. The
strength of the revolt in La Vendee was broken. The insurrection in the
south was drowned in blood. The Spanish invaders were held at bay at the
foot of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese were driven from Nice and
Savoy. At the close of the year a fresh blow fell upon the struggling
country in the revolt of Toulon, the naval station of its Mediterranean
fleet. The town called for foreign aid against the government at Paris;
and Lord Hood entered the port with an English squadron, while a force
of 11,000 men, gathered hastily from every quarter, was despatched under
General O'Hara as a garrison. But the successes against Spain and Savoy
freed the hands of France at this critical moment: the town was at once
invested, and the seizure of a promontory which commanded the harbour, a
step counselled by a young artillery officer, Napoleon Buonaparte,
brought about the withdrawal of the garrison and the surrender of
Toulon. The success was a prelude of what was to come. At the opening of
1794 a victory at Fleurus, which again made the French masters of the
Netherlands, showed that the tide had turned. France was united within
by the cessation of the Terror and of the tyranny of the Jacobins, while
on every border victory followed the gigantic efforts with which she
met the coalition against her. The coalition indeed was fast breaking
up. Spain sued for peace. Prussia, more intent on her gains in the east
than on any battle with the revolution on the west, prepared to follow
Spain's example by the withdrawal of her armies from the Rhine. It was
only by English subsidies that Austria and Sardinia were still kept in
the field; and the Rhine provinces were wrested from the first, while
the forces of Sardinia were driven back from the Riviera and the
Maritime Alps into the plain of Piedmont. Before the year ended Holland
was lost. Pichegru crossed the Waal in midwinter with an overwhelming
force, and the wretched remnant of ten thousand men who had followed the
Duke of York to the Netherlands, thinned by disease and by the hardships
of retreat, re-embarked for England.
[Sidenote: Howe's victory.]
In one quarter only had the fortune of war gone against the French
republic. The victories of Rodney at the close of the strife with
America had concentrated English interest on the fleet. Even during the
peace, while the army was sacrificed to financial distress, great
efforts were made to preserve the efficiency of the navy; and the recent
alarms of war with Russia and Spain had ended in raising it to a
strength which it had never reached before. But France was as eager as
England herself to dispute the sovereignty of the seas, and almost
equal attention had been bestowed on the navy which crowded the great
harbours of Toulon and Brest. In force as in number of ships it was
equal in effective strength to that of England; and both nations looked
with hope to the issue of a contest at sea. No battle marked the first
year of the war; but, as it ended, the revolt of Toulon gave a fatal
wound to the naval strength of France in the almost total destruction of
her Mediterranean fleet. That of the Channel however remained unhurt;
and it was this which Lord Howe at last encountered, off Brest in 1794,
in the battle which is known by the name of the day on which it was
fought--The "First of June." The number of ships on either side was
nearly the same, and the battle was one of sheer hard fighting, unmarked
by any display of naval skill. But the result was a decisive victory for
England, and the French admiral, weakened by a loss of seven vessels and
three thousand men, again took refuge in Brest.
[Sidenote: Break-up of the Coalition.]
The success of Lord Howe did somewhat to counteract the discouragement
which sprang from the general aspect of the war. At the opening of 1795
the coalition finally gave way. Holland had been detached from it by
Pichegru's conquest, and the Batavian republic which he set up there was
now an ally of France. In the spring Prussia bought peace at Basle by
the cession of her possessions west of the Rhine. Peace with Spain
followed in the summer, while Sweden and the Protestant cantons of
Switzerland recognized the republic. These terrible blows were hardly
met by the success of the Austrian army in relieving Maintz, or by the
colonial acquisitions of England. The latter indeed were far from being
inconsiderable. Most of the West-Indian Islands which had been held by
France now fell into British hands; and the alliance of Holland with the
French threw open to English attack the far more valuable settlements of
the Dutch. The surrender of Cape Town in September gave England the
colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the nucleus of what has since grown
into a vast southern settlement which is destined to play a great part
in the history of Africa. At the close of the year the Island of Ceylon
was added to our Indian dependencies. Both of these acquisitions were
destined to remain permanently attached to England, though at the moment
their value was eclipsed by the conquest of the Dutch colonies in the
Pacific, the more famous Spice Islands of the Malaccas and Java. But,
important as these gains were in their after issues, they had no
immediate influence on the war. The French armies prepared for the
invasion of Italy; while in France itself discord came well-nigh to an
end. A descent by a force of French emigrants on the coast of Brittany
ended in their massacre at Quiberon and in the final cessation of the
war in La Vendee; while the royalist party in Paris was crushed as soon
as it rose against the Convention by the genius of Napoleon Buonaparte.
[Sidenote: Pitt's effort for peace.]
But the fresh severities against the ultra-republicans which followed on
the establishment of a Directory after this success indicated the
moderate character of the new government, and Pitt seized on this change
in the temper of the French Government as giving an opening for peace.
The dread of a Jacobin propagandism was now all but at an end. In spite
of an outbreak of the London mob, whose cries meant chiefly impatience
of dear bread, but which brought about a fresh suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act and the introduction of a Bill "for the prosecution of
seditious meetings," the fear of any social disturbance or of the spread
of "French principles" in England was fast passing away from men's
minds. The new constitution which France accepted in 1795 showed that
the tendencies of the French themselves were now rather to order than to
freedom. The old grounds for the struggle therefore had ceased to exist;
while the pressure of it grew hourly more intolerable. Pitt himself was
sick of the strife. The war indeed had hardly begun when he found
himself without the means of carrying it on. The English navy was in a
high state of efficiency; but the financial distress which followed the
American war had brought with it a neglect of the army. The army was not
only small, but without proper equipment; and the want of military
experience among its soldiers was only equalled by the incapacity of
their leaders. "We have no general," Lord Grenville wrote bitterly, "but
some old woman in a red riband." Wretched, too, as had been the conduct
of the war, its cost was already terrible; for if England was without
soldiers she had wealth, and in default of nobler means of combating the
revolution Pitt had been forced to use wealth as an engine of war. He
became the paymaster of the coalition, and his subsidies kept the allied
armies in the field. But the immense loans which these called for, and
the quick growth of expenditure, undid all the financial reforms on
which the young minister prided himself. Taxation, which had reached its
lowest point at the outbreak of the contest, mounted ere a few years
were past to a height undreamed of before. The debt rose by leaps and
bounds. In three years nearly eighty millions had been added to it, a
sum greater than that piled up by the whole war with America, and in the
opening of 1796 votes were taken for loans which amounted to twenty-five
millions more.
[Sidenote: The dogged temper of England.]
Nor was this wreck of his financial hopes Pitt's only ground for
desiring a close of the war. From the first, as we have seen, he had
been keenly sensitive to the European dangers which the contest
involved; nor had he shown, even in his moment of social panic, the
fanatical blindness of men like Burke to the evils which had produced
the revolution, or to the good which it had wrought. But he could only
listen in silence while the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord Shelburne of
earlier days and the successor of Chatham as the advocate of a more
liberal policy, met the rhetoric of Burke by a cool demonstration of the
benefit which the recent change had brought to the mass of the French
people, and by pointing to the profit which Russia was drawing from the
struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs,
in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone.
Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred
between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up
fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a
resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war
with America at the blow which France had dealt England in that hour of
her weakness, and a disgust which only slowly grew fainter at her
overthrow of every social and political institution that Englishmen held
dear. On the dogged temper of the nation at large the failure of the
coalition produced little effect. It had no fear of fighting France
single-handed, nor could it understand Pitt's suggestion that a time
had come for opening negotiations with a view to peace. Public opinion
indeed went hotly with Burke in his denunciation of all purpose of
relaxing England's hostility against the revolution, a denunciation
which was embodied in his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," the last outcry
of that fanaticism which had done so much to plunge the world in blood.
[Sidenote: The Irish danger.]
But though Pitt stood all but alone, he was firm in his purpose to bring
the war, if he could, to a close. What specially moved him was not the
danger on the Continent, whether that danger sprang from French
victories or from aggression in the east. It was a danger in the west.
Vain as the expectations of the French revolutionists had proved in the
case of England, they had better ground for their hopes elsewhere. Even
before the outbreak of the war Pitt had shown how keen was his sense of
a possible danger from Ireland. In that wretched country the terrible
fruits of a century of oppression and wrong were still to reap. From the
close of the American war, when her armed Volunteers had wrung
legislative independence from the Rockingham ministry, Ireland had
continued to be England's difficulty. She was now "independent"; but her
independence was a mere name for the uncontrolled rule of a few noble
families. The victory of the Volunteers had been won simply to the
profit of "undertakers," who returned a majority of members in the
Irish House of Commons, while they themselves formed the Irish House of
Lords. The suspension of any effective control or interference from
England left Ireland at these men's mercy, and they soon showed that
they meant to keep it for themselves. When the Catholics claimed
admission to the franchise or to equal civil rights as a reward for
their aid in the late struggle, their claim was rejected. A similar
demand of the Presbyterians, who had formed a good half of the
Volunteers, for the removal of their disabilities was equally set aside.
Even Grattan, when he pleaded for a reform which would make the
Parliament at least a fair representative of the Protestant Englishry,
utterly failed. The ruling class found government too profitable to
share it with other possessors. It was only by hard bribery that the
English viceroys could secure their co-operation in the simplest
measures of administration. "If ever there was a country unfit to govern
itself," said Lord Hutchinson, "it is Ireland. A corrupt aristocracy, a
ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a divided people!"
[Sidenote: Irish Emancipation.]
The real character of this Parliamentary rule was seen in the rejection
of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's eyes the danger of Ireland lay
above all in the misery of its people. Although the Irish Catholics were
held down by the brute force of their Protestant rulers, he saw that
their discontent was growing fast into rebellion, and that one secret
at any rate of their discontent lay in Irish poverty, a poverty
increased if not originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of
Irish products from their natural markets in England itself. One of his
first commercial measures therefore, as we have seen, aimed at putting
an end to this exclusion by a bill which established freedom of trade
between the two islands. But though he met successfully the fears and
jealousies of the English farmers and manufacturers he was foiled by the
factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, and his bill was rejected by
the Irish Parliament. So utterly was he discouraged that for the moment
he ceased from all further attempts to improve the condition of Ireland.
But the efforts which the French revolutionists made to excite rebellion
amongst the Irish roused him to fresh measures of conciliation and good
government. The hopes of some reform of the Irish Parliament had been
fanned by the eloquence of Grattan and by the pressure of the United
Irishmen, an association which had sprung up in Ulster, where Protestant
dissenters, who were equally excluded with Catholics from any share in
political power, formed the strongest part of the population. These
hopes however were growing every day fainter. To the Irish aristocracy
parliamentary reform meant the close of a corrupt rule which had gone on
unchecked since the American war. But to the Irish Catholic it meant
far more; it meant his admission, not only to the electoral franchise,
but in the end to all the common privileges of citizenship from which he
was excluded, his "emancipation," to use the word which now became
common, from the yoke of slavery which had pressed on him ever since the
Battle of the Boyne.
[Sidenote: The United Irishmen.]
To such an emancipation Pitt was already looking forward. In 1792, a
year before the outbreak of war with France, he forced on the Irish
Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the electoral
franchise and to civil and military office within the island, which
promised a new era of religious liberty. But the promise came too late.
The hope of conciliation was lost in the fast rising tide of religious
and social passion. As the dream of obtaining Parliamentary reform died
away the United Irishmen of the North drifted into projects of
insurrection and a correspondence with France. The news of the French
Revolution fell with a yet more terrible effect on the Catholic
peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs. Their discontent
broke out in social disorder, in the outrages of secret societies of
"Defenders" and "Peep o' Day Boys," which spread panic among the ruling
classes. It was only by sheer terror and bloodshed that the Protestant
landowners, who banded together in "Orange" societies to meet the secret
societies about them, could hold the country down. Outrages on the one
side, tyranny on the other, deepened the disorder and panic every day,
and the hopes of the reformers grew fainter as the terror rose fast
around them. The maddened Protestants scouted all notions of further
concessions to men whom they looked upon as on the verge of revolt; and
Grattan's motions for reform were defeated by increasing majorities. On
the other hand the entry of the anti-revolutionary Whigs into Pitt's
ministry revived Grattan's hopes, for Burke and his followers were
pledged to a liberal policy towards Ireland, and Lord Fitzwilliam, who
came over as viceroy in 1794, encouraged Grattan to bring in a bill for
the entire emancipation of the Catholics at the opening of the next
year. Such a step can hardly have been taken without Pitt's assent; but
the minister was now swept along by a tide of feeling which he could not
control. The Orangemen threatened revolt, the Tories in Pitt's own
Cabinet recoiled from the notion of reform, and Lord Fitzwilliam was not
only recalled, but replaced by Lord Camden, an avowed enemy of all
change or concession to the Catholics. From that moment the United
Irishmen became a revolutionary society; and one of their leaders, Wolfe
Tone, made his way to France, in the spring of 1796, to seek aid in a
national rising.
[Sidenote: France and Ireland.]
It is probable that Tone's errand was known to Pitt; it is certain that
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, another of the patriot leaders, who had been
summoned to carry on more definite negotiations in Basle, revealed
inadvertently as he returned the secret of his hopes to an agent of the
English Cabinet. Vague as were the offers of the United Irishmen, they
had been warmly welcomed by the French Government. Masters at home, the
Directory were anxious to draw off the revolutionary enthusiasm which
the French party of order dreaded as much as Burke himself to the
channels of foreign conquest. They were already planning that descent of
their army in the Alps upon Lombardy which was to give a fatal blow to
one of their enemies, Austria; and they welcomed the notion of a French
descent upon Ireland and an Irish revolt, which would give as fatal a
blow to their other enemy, England. An army of 25,000 men under General
Hoche was promised, a fleet was manned, and preparations were being made
for the expedition during the summer. But the secret was ill kept, and
the news of such an attempt was, we can hardly doubt, the ground of the
obstinacy with which Pitt persisted in the teeth of the national feeling
and of Burke's invectives in clinging to his purpose of concluding a
peace. In October 1796 Lord Malmesbury was despatched to Paris and
negotiations were finally opened for that purpose. The terms which Pitt
offered were terms of mutual restitution. France was to evacuate
Holland and to restore Belgium to the Emperor. England on the other hand
was to restore the colonies she had won to France, Holland, and Spain.
As the English Minister had no power of dealing with the territories
already ceded by Prussia and other states, such a treaty would have left
France, as her eastern border, the line of the Rhine. But even had they
desired peace at all, the Directors would have scorned it on terms such
as these. While Malmesbury was negotiating indeed France was roused to
new dreams of conquest by the victories of Napoleon Buonaparte. The
genius of Carnot, the French Minister of War, had planned a joint
advance upon Vienna by the French armies of Italy and the Rhine, the one
under Buonaparte, the other under Moreau. The plan was only partly
successful. Moreau, though he pushed forward through every obstacle to
Bavaria, was compelled to fall back by the defeat of a lieutenant; and
was only enabled by a masterly retreat through the Black Forest to reach
the Rhine. But the disaster of Moreau was more than redeemed by the
victories of Buonaparte. With the army which occupied the Riviera and
the Maritime Alps the young general marched on Piedmont at the opening
of the summer, separated its army from the Austrian troops, and forced
the king of Sardinia to conclude a humiliating peace. A brilliant
victory at the bridge of Lodi brought him to Milan, and drove the
Austrians into the Tyrol. Lombardy was in the hands of the French, the
Duchies south of the Po pillaged, and the Pope driven to purchase an
armistice at enormous cost, before the Austrian armies, raised to a
force of 50,000 men, again descended from the Tyrol for the relief of
Mantua. But a fatal division of their forces by the Lake of Garda
enabled Buonaparte to hurl them back broken upon Trent, and to shut up
their general, Wurmser, in Mantua with the remnant of his men; while
fresh victories at the bridge of Arcola and at Bassano drove back two
new Austrian armies who advanced to Wurmser's rescue.
[Sidenote: The Terror of Ireland.]
It was the success of Buonaparte which told on the resolve of the
Directory to reject all terms of peace. After months of dilatory
negotiations the offers of Lord Malmesbury were definitely declined, and
the English envoy returned home at the end of the year. Every hour of
his stay in Paris had raised higher hopes of success against England in
the minds of the Directory. At the moment of his arrival Spain had been
driven to declare war as their ally against Britain; and the Spanish and
Dutch fleets were now at the French service for a struggle at sea. The
merciless exactions of Buonaparte poured gold into the exhausted
treasury; and the energy of Hoche rapidly availed itself of this supply
to equip a force for operations in Ireland. At the opening of December
he was ready to put to sea with a fleet of more than forty sail and
25,000 men; and the return of Lord Malmesbury was the signal for the
despatch of his expedition from Brest. The fleet at Toulon, which was
intended to co-operate with that at Brest, and which had sailed through
the Straits of Gibraltar for that purpose, was driven into Port l'Orient
by an English squadron: but contrary winds baffled the fleet which was
watching Hoche, and his armament slipped away with little hindrance
towards the Irish coast. Had it reached Ireland unbroken and under such
a general, the island might well have been lost to the English Crown.
But the winds fought against France, as they had fought against the
Armada of Spain; and the ships were parted from one another by a gale
which burst on them as they put to sea. Seventeen reached Bantry Bay,
but hearing nothing of their leader or of the rest, they sailed back
again to Brest, in spite of the entreaties of the soldiers to be
suffered to land. Another division reached the Shannon to be scattered
and driven home again by a second storm. Twelve vessels were wrecked or
captured, and the frigate in which Hoche had embarked returned to port
without having seen any of its companions. The invasion had failed, but
the panic which it roused woke passions of cruelty and tyranny which
turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry marched over the
country torturing and scourging the "croppies," as the Irish peasantry
were termed from their short-cut hair; robbing, ravishing, and murdering
at their will. The lightest suspicion, the most unfounded charges, were
taken as warrants for bloodshed. So hideous were these outrages that the
news of them as it reached England woke a thrill of horror in the minds
of even the blindest Tories; but by the landowners who formed the Irish
Parliament they were sanctioned in a Bill of Indemnity and protected for
the future by an Insurrection Act. The terror however only woke a
universal spirit of revolt. Ireland drank in greedily that hatred of
England and of English rule which all the justice and moderation of
later government has failed to destroy; and the United Irishmen looked
with more passionate longing than ever to France.
[Sidenote: The struggle for the Sea.]
Nor had France abandoned the design of invasion; while her victories
made such a design every day more formidable. The war was going steadily
in her favour. A fresh victory at Rivoli, the surrender of Mantua, and
an advance through Styria on Vienna, enabled Buonaparte to wring a peace
from England's one ally, Austria. The armistice was concluded in April
1797, and the final treaty which was signed at Campo Formio in October
not only gave France the Ionian Islands, a part of the old territory of
Venice (whose Italian possessions passed to the Emperor), as well as the
Netherlands and the whole left bank of the Rhine, but united Lombardy
with the Duchies south of the Po and the Papal States as far as the
Rubicon into a "Cisalpine Republic," which was absolutely beneath her
control. The withdrawal of Austria left France without an enemy on the
Continent, and England without an ally. The stress of the war was
pressing more heavily on her every day. A mutiny in the fleet was
suppressed with difficulty. The news of Hoche's expedition brought about
a run for gold which forced on the Bank a suspension of specie payments.
It was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke passed away,
protesting to the last against the peace which, in spite of his previous
failure, Pitt was again striving to bring about by fresh negotiations at
Lille. Peace seemed more needful than ever to him now that France was
free to attack her enemy with the soldiers who had fought at Arcola and
Rivoli. Their way, indeed, lay across the sea, and at sea Britain was
supreme. But her supremacy was threatened by a coalition of naval forces
such as had all but crushed her in the American war. Again the Dutch and
Spanish fleets were allied with the fleets of France; and it was
necessary to watch Cadiz and the Scheldt as well as Brest and Toulon. A
single victory of the three confederates, or even such a command of the
Channel as they had held for months during the war with America, would
enable the Directory to throw overwhelming armies not only on the shores
of England, but on the shores of Ireland, and whatever might be the
fate of the one enterprise, there could be little doubt of the success
of the other. The danger was real; but it had hardly threatened England
when it was dispelled by two great victories. The Spanish fleet, which
put out to sea with twenty-seven sail of the line, was met on the
fourteenth of February 1797 by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent with
a force of but fifteen; and driven back to Cadiz with a loss of four of
its finest vessels. Disheartened as they were, however, their numbers
still exceeded that of the force which blockaded them; and France
counted with confidence on the fleet of Holland, which was ordered to
join its own fleet at Brest. The aim of this union was to protect a
fresh force in its descent upon Ireland, where the United Irishmen now
declared themselves ready for revolt. But a yet sterner fortune awaited
the Dutch than that which had fallen on the Spaniards. Their admiral, De
Winter, who had quitted the Texel during a storm with eleven sail of the
line and four frigates, fell in on the eleventh of October with a far
larger fleet under Admiral Duncan off Camperdown. The Hollanders fought
with a stubborn courage worthy of their old renown, and it was only when
their ships were riddled with shot into mere wrecks that they fell into
the hands of the English.
[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]
The French project for an expedition to Ireland hung on the junction of
the Dutch fleet with that of Brest, and the command of the Channel
which this junction would have given them. Such a command became
impossible after the defeat of Camperdown. But the disappointment of
their hopes of foreign aid only drove the adherents of revolt in Ireland
to a rising of despair. The union of the national party, which had
lasted to some extent from the American war, was now broken up. The
Protestants of Ulster still looked for aid to France. The Catholics, on
the other hand, were alienated from the French by their attack on
religion and the priesthood; and the failure of the French expedition,
while it damped the hopes of the Ulstermen, gave force to the demands of
the Catholic party for a purely national rising. So fierce was this
demand that the leaders of the United Irishmen were forced to fix on the
spring of 1798 for the outbreak of an insurrection, in which Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, who had some small military experience, was to take the
command. But while yielding on this point to the Catholic section of
their party they conciliated the Protestants by renewed appeals for aid
to the Directory. In spite of its previous failures France again
promised help; and a division was prepared during the winter for service
in Ireland. But the passion of the nation was too intense to wait for
its arrival. The government too acted with a prompt decision in face of
the danger, and an arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald with three of their
chief leaders in February 1798 broke the plans of the insurgents. On the
23rd of May, however, the day fixed for the opening of the revolt, the
Catholic peasantry of the south rose in arms. Elsewhere their disorderly
gatherings were easily dispersed by the yeomanry; but Wexford
surrendered to 14,000 insurgents who marched on it, headed by a village
priest, and the town at once became the centre of a formidable revolt.
[Sidenote: Its failure.]
Fortunately for the English rule the old religious hatred which had so
often wrecked the hopes of Ireland broke out in the instant of this
triumph. The Protestant inhabitants of Wexford were driven into the
river or flung into prison. Another body of insurgents, frenzied by the
cruelties of the royal troops, massacred a hundred Protestants in cool
blood. The atrocities of the soldiers and the yeomanry were avenged with
a fiendish ruthlessness. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their
turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The result of
these outrages was fatal to the insurrection. The Ulster Protestants,
who formed the strength of the United Irishmen, stood sullenly aloof
from rebels who murdered Protestants. The Catholic gentry threw
themselves on the side of the government against a rising which
threatened the country with massacre and anarchy. Few in fact had joined
the insurgents in Wexford when Lord Lake appeared before their camp
upon Vinegar Hill with a strong force of English troops on the 21st of
May. The camp was stormed, and with the dispersion of its defenders the
revolt came suddenly to an end. But its suppression came only just in
time to prevent greater disasters; for a few weeks after the close of
the rebellion the long-expected aid arrived from France. The news of the
outbreak had forced the armament which was being equipped in the French
ports to put to sea with forces utterly inadequate to the task it had
set itself, but fresh aid was promised to follow, and the nine hundred
soldiers who landed in August under General Humbert on the coast of Mayo
showed by their first successes how formidable a centre they would have
given to the revolt had the revolt held its ground. But in the two
months which had passed since Vinegar Hill all trace of resistance to
the English rule had been trodden out in blood, and Humbert found
himself alone in a country exhausted and panic-stricken. He marched
however boldly on Castlebar, broke a force of yeomanry and volunteers
three times his number, and only surrendered when Lord Cornwallis, who
had succeeded to the Lord-Lieutenancy, faced him with thirty thousand
men.
[Sidenote: French designs on India.]
Of the threefold attack on which the Directory had relied for the ruin
of England two parts had now broken down. Humbert's surrender and the
failure of the native insurrection left little hope for future attack
on the side of Ireland. The naval confederacy which was to rob England
of the command of the seas had been foiled by the utter wreck of the
Dutch fleet, and the imprisonment of the Spanish fleet in Cadiz. But the
genius of Buonaparte had seized on the schemes for a rising against the
English rule in Hindostan, and widened them into a project of all but
world-wide conquest. At this time the strongest and most vigorous of the
Indian powers was that of Mysore, at the southern extremity of the
peninsula, where a Mussulman state had been built up by the genius of an
adventurer, Hyder Ali. In the days when the English were winning their
supremacy over the Carnatic, Hyder had been their chief difficulty; and
his attack had once brought them to the verge of ruin. The hostility of
his son Tippoo was even more bitter; but the victories of Lord
Cornwallis had taught the Sultan of Mysore that he was no match for the
British power single-handed; and his hopes, like those of the United
Irishmen, were fixed upon France. He was striving to get aid from the
Afghans and from the Nizam, but what he most counted on for the
expulsion of the English from the Carnatic was a force of thirty
thousand French soldiers. Letters requesting such a force were
despatched by him to France in 1797. Buonaparte had already fixed on
Mysore as a basis of operations against the British rule in Hindostan;
and after dismissing as impracticable a project suggested to him on his
return from Italy after the treaty of Campo Formio for a descent upon
England itself, he laid before the Directory a plan for the conquest and
occupation of Egypt as a preliminary to a campaign in Southern India.
Utterly as this plan was foiled in the future, it was far from being the
wild dream which it has often been considered. Both the Ministry and
East Indian Directors were roused into anxiety by the first news of
Buonaparte's expedition. The Earl of Mornington, Governor-General of
British India, was warned of a possible attack from the Red Sea. Four
thousand soldiers were hurried off to reinforce his army; while the
English fleet watched anxiously in the Mediterranean. But so perfect was
the secrecy with which the French plans were combined that Buonaparte
was able to put to sea in May 1798 with a force of 30,000 veterans drawn
from the army of Italy, and making himself master of Malta as he passed
to land near Alexandria at the close of June.
[Sidenote: The battle of the Nile.]
The conquest of Egypt proved as easy and complete as Buonaparte had
hoped. The Mamelukes were routed in the battle of the Pyramids; Cairo
was occupied; and the French troops pushed rapidly up the valley of the
Nile. Their general meanwhile showed his genius for government by a
masterly organization of the conquered country, by the conciliation of
his new subjects, and by measures for the enrolment of native soldiers
which would in a short time have placed him at the head of a formidable
army. Of his ultimate aim there can be little doubt; for he had hardly
landed at Alexandria when he despatched the news of his arrival and
promises of support to Tippoo. All chance however of success in his
projects hung on the maintenance of communications with France. With
Italy, with the Ionian Islands, with Alexandria in French holding, it
was all but impossible to prevent supplies of men and arms from being
forwarded to Egypt, so long as the French fleet remained in the waters
of the Mediterranean and kept the English force concentrated by the
necessity of watching its movements. But the French were hardly masters
of Egypt when their fleet ceased to exist. The thirteen men-of-war which
had escorted the expedition were found by Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay,
moored close to the coast in a line guarded at either end by gunboats
and batteries. Nelson resolved to thrust his ships between the French
and the shore. On the morning of the 1st of August his own flag-ship led
the way in this attack; and after a terrible fight of twelve hours, nine
of the French vessels were captured and destroyed, two were burned, and
five thousand French seamen were killed or made prisoners. "Victory,"
cried Nelson, "is not a name strong enough for such a scene." Few
victories indeed in history have produced more effective results than
the battle of the Nile. The French flag was swept from the waters of the
Mediterranean. All communication between France and Buonaparte's army
was cut off; and his hopes of making Egypt a starting-point for the
conquest of India fell at a blow. To hold Egypt itself soon became
difficult, for a desperate revolt broke out at the news of Nelson's
victory in the streets of Cairo, and a Turkish army advanced from Syria
to recover the valley of the Nile.
[Sidenote: France and Europe.]
Secure against invasion at home as against rebellion in Ireland, secure
too against the dangers that threatened her rule in India, and mistress
of the seas, England was free in her turn to attack the assailant who
had so long threatened her very existence. And in such an attack she was
aided at this moment by the temper of the European powers, and by the
ceaseless aggressions of France. The treaties of Basle and Campo Formio
were far from being accepted by the Directory as a final settlement of
the relations of France with Europe. Some faint remnant of the older
dreams of freeing oppressed peoples may have lingered in the aid which
it gave to the rising of the subject districts of Basle and Vaud against
their Bernese masters in the opening of 1798. But mere greed of gold was
seen in the plunder of the treasury of Berne, a plunder which served to
equip the army that sailed with Buonaparte to the shores of Egypt, and
to recruit the exhausted treasury of the Directory; and an ambition, as
reckless as this greed, broke out in an attack on the mountain cantons,
states whose democratic institutions gave no such excuse for hostility
as had been afforded by the aristocracy of Berne. A French decree
abolished the Swiss Confederation, and the independence of its several
states, and established in their place an Helvetic Republic modelled on
a plan sent from Paris, and placed under the protection of France. The
mountain cantons rose against this overthrow of a freedom compared with
which the freedom of France was but of yesterday; but desperate as was
their struggle they were overwhelmed by numbers, and the men of Uri, of
Unterwalden and of Schwytz bowed for the first time to a foreign
conqueror.
[Sidenote: Russia and France.]
The overthrow of this immemorial house of freedom opened the eyes of the
blindest enthusiast to the real character of the French aggressions.
Even in the group of young English poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and
Southey, who had clung till now to the dream of the Revolution, of a
Europe freed and regenerated by the arms of the new republic, all belief
in such a dream passed finally away. But the France of the Directory
would have cared little for this alienation of the peoples, had it not
been backed by the revived hostility of their kings. What England
counted on in her efforts for a revival of the coalition was the
resentment of Austria at the aggressions which the Directory had ever
since the peace of Campo Formio been carrying on in Italy. In the
opening of 1798 a French force entered Rome, set up a Roman republic,
and carried off Pius VI. a prisoner to Siena; while the king of Sardinia
was driven to admit French garrisons into his fortresses. Austria
however was still too weak after her defeats to listen to Pitt's
advances, had Pitt stood alone. But Russia was now about to take a new
part in European affairs. Under Catharine the Second this power had
availed itself of the war against France in the west to carry out its
own projects of conquest in eastern Europe; and, as we have seen, Pitt
had watched its advance at the opening of the Revolution with far
greater dread than the movements in France. It was in fact the need
which the two German states felt of balancing the Russian annexations in
Poland by annexations of their own which had paralysed their armies on
the Rhine and saved France at the moment of her greatest danger in 1793.
It is probable that the Directory still counted on the persistence of
Russia in a similar policy, and believed that Catharine would see in
their attack on Egypt and the Turks only a fresh opportunity for
conquests on the Danube. But the sudden greatness of France had warned
Russia that its policy of selfishness had been carried too far. It had
allowed the Republic to tower into supremacy over the Continent, and if
once such a supremacy was firmly established it would prove a fatal
obstacle to the Russian advance. France would again, as under the
monarchy, aim at the restoration of Poland; she would again bar the way
to Constantinople; and her action would be backed by the weight of all
western Europe, which had been thrown into her scale by the policy of
the very state she defied. To avert such a result it was necessary to
restore that balance of the Continent by which France and the German
powers held one another in check; and with a view to this restoration
Russia suddenly declared itself an enemy of France. Catharine's
successor, the Czar Paul, set aside the overtures of the Directory. A
close alliance was formed with Austria, and while an Imperial army
gathered on the Bavarian frontier Russian troops hurried to the west.
[Sidenote: The Union with Ireland.]
The appearance of this new element in the struggle changed its whole
conditions; and it was with renewed hope that Pitt lavished subsidies on
the two allies at the close of 1798. But his preparations for the new
strife were far from being limited to efforts abroad. In England he had
found fresh resources in an Income-Tax, from which he anticipated an
annual return of ten millions. Heavy as the tax was, and it amounted to
ten per cent on all incomes above L200 a year, the dogged resolution of
the people to fight on was seen in the absence of all opposition to
this proposal. What was of even greater importance was to remove all
chance of fresh danger from Ireland. Pitt's temper was of too
statesmanlike a mould to rest content with the mere suppression of
insurrection or with the system of terrorism which for the moment held
the country down. His disgust at "the bigoted fury of Irish Protestants"
had backed Lord Cornwallis in checking the reprisals of his troops and
of the Orangemen; but the hideous cruelty which he was forced to witness
brought about a firm resolve to put an end to the farce of
"Independence" which left Ireland helpless in such hands. The political
necessity for a union of the two islands had been brought home to every
English statesman by the course of the Irish Parliament during the
disputes over the Regency. While England repelled the claims of the
Prince of Wales to the Regency as of right, the legislature of Ireland
admitted them. As the only union left between the two peoples since the
concession of legislative independence was their obedience to a common
ruler, such an act might conceivably have ended in their entire
severance; and the sense of this danger secured a welcome in England for
the proposal which Pitt made at the opening of 1799 to unite the two
Parliaments. The opposition of the Irish borough-mongers was naturally
stubborn and determined, and when the plan was introduced into the
Parliament at Dublin, it was only saved from rejection by a single
vote. But with men like these it was a sheer question of gold; and their
assent was bought with a million in money, and with a liberal
distribution of pensions and peerages. Base and shameless as were such
means, Pitt may fairly plead that they were the only means by which the
bill for the Union could have been passed. As the matter was finally
arranged in June 1800, one hundred Irish members became part of the
House of Commons at Westminster, and twenty-eight temporal peers chosen
by their fellows for life, with four spiritual peers succeeding in a
fixed rotation, took their seats in the House of Lords. Commerce between
the two countries was freed from all restrictions, and every trading
privilege of the one thrown open to the other, while taxation was
proportionately distributed between the two peoples.
[Sidenote: France and the Coalition.]
While the Union was being pushed slowly forward, the struggle abroad was
passing through strange vicissitudes. At the opening of 1799 the efforts
of the new coalition were crowned with success in every quarter. Though
Naples had been turned into a Parthenopean Republic at the close of the
previous year, and the French supremacy extended over the whole
peninsula, the descent of an Austrian army from the Tyrol at the end of
March, and a victory of the Russian and Austrian forces at Cassano,
compelled the French army to evacuate Southern Italy and Lombardy,
while a fresh defeat at Novi flung it back on the Maritime Alps. A
campaign conducted with more varying success drove the armies which
advanced into Germany back over the Rhine. In Switzerland however the
stubborn energy of Massena enabled his soldiers to hold their ground
against the combined attack of Russian and Austrian forces; and the
attempt of a united force of Russians and English to wrest Holland from
its French masters was successfully repulsed. Twelve of the thirty
thousand men who formed this army consisted of English troops; and Sir
Ralph Abercromby succeeded in landing at their head, in seizing what
remained of the Dutch fleet at the Texel, and in holding General Brune
at bay when he advanced with superior forces. But Abercromby was
superseded in his command by the Duke of York; and in another month the
new leader was glad to conclude a convention by which the safe
withdrawal of his troops was secured.
[Sidenote: Buonaparte in Syria.]
In the East however England was more successful. Even had Buonaparte not
been baffled in his plans of a descent on Southern India from the basis
of Egypt by the battle of the Nile, they would have been frustrated by
the energy of Lord Wellesley. Mysore was invaded, its capital stormed,
and Tippoo slain, before a French soldier could have been despatched to
its aid. But foiled as were his dreams of Indian conquest the daring
genius of the French general plunged into wilder projects. He conceived
the design of the conquest of Syria and of the creation of an army among
its warlike mountaineers. "With a hundred thousand men on the banks of
the Euphrates," he said years afterwards, "I might have gone to
Constantinople or India, I might have changed the face of the world."
Gaza was taken, Jaffa stormed, and ten thousand French soldiers advanced
under their young general on Acre. Acre was the key of Syria, and its
reduction was the first step in these immense projects. "Once possessed
of Acre," wrote Napoleon, "the army would have gone to Damascus and the
Euphrates. The Christians of Syria, the Druses, the Armenians, would
have joined us. The provinces of the Ottoman Empire were ready for a
change, and were only waiting for a man." But Acre was stubbornly held
by the Turks, the French battering train was captured at sea by an
English captain, Sir Sidney Smith, whose seamen aided in the defence of
the place, and after a loss of three thousand men by sword and plague,
the besiegers were forced to fall back upon Egypt.
[Sidenote: The Peace of Luneville.]
Egypt indeed was more than ever their own, for their army had now
penetrated to the cataracts of the Nile, and a Turkish force which
landed near Alexandria was cut to pieces by Buonaparte in the battle of
Aboukir. But the news of defeat at home and the certainty that all wider
hopes in the East were at an end, induced him only a month after his
victory to leave his army. With a couple of frigates he set sail for
France; and his arrival in Paris was soon followed by a change in the
government. The Directors were divided among themselves, while the
disasters of their administration made them hateful to the country; and
a revolution brought about by the soldiery on the 10th of November put
an end to their power. In the new system which followed three consuls
took the place of the Directors; but the system only screened the
government of a single man, for under the name of First Consul
Buonaparte became in effect sole ruler of the country. His energy at
once changed the whole face of European affairs. The offers of peace
which he made to England and Austria were intended to do little more
than to shake the coalition, and gain breathing time for the
organization of a new force which was gathering in secrecy at Dijon,
while Moreau with the army of the Rhine pushed again along the Danube.
The First Consul crossed the Saint Bernard with this army in the spring
of 1800, and on the 14th of June a victory at Marengo left the Austrian
army, which had just succeeded in reducing Genoa, helpless in his hands.
It was by the surrender of all Lombardy to the Oglio that the defeated
general obtained an armistice for his troops; and a similar truce
arrested the march of Moreau, who had captured Munich and was pushing
on to Vienna. The armistice only added to the difficulties of
Buonaparte's opponents, for Russia, as anxious not to establish a German
supremacy as she had been to weaken the supremacy of France, had
withdrawn from the contest as soon as the coalition seemed to be
successful; and Austria was only held back from peace by her acceptance
of English subsidies. But though she fought on, the resumption of the
war in the autumn failed to reverse the fortune of arms. The Austrians
were driven back on Vienna; and on the second of December Moreau crushed
their army on the Iser in the victory of Hohenlinden. But the aim of the
First Consul was only to wrest peace from his enemies by these triumphs;
while the expiration of her engagements with England left his opponent
free to lay down her arms. In February 1801 therefore the Continental
War was brought suddenly to an end by the Peace of Luneville.