Vitoria,--the brilliant commencement of the campaign of 1813.
Wellington had now determined to drive the French out of Spain. They
still had a force of 160,000 men, including the army of Suchet,
35,000. Joseph, with Jourdan, fearing to be outflanked, moved with
70,000 men towards the Pyrenees. On the 16th of May, Wellington
crossed the Douro. On the 21st of June he fought the battle of
Vittoria, with the loss of 6000 to the enemy, 150 guns, all their
baggage, and the plunder of Madrid. For this great victory Wellington
was appointed field-marshal.
The march itself was a memorable instance of "enterprise." It was a
movement of four hundred miles, through one of the most difficult
portions of the Peninsula, by a route never before attempted by
an army, and which, probably, no other general in Europe would
have attempted. Its conduct was so admirable, that it was scarcely
suspected by the French; its movement was so rapid, that it
outstripped them; and its direction was so skilful, that King Joseph
and his marshal had scarcely encamped, and thought themselves out of
the reach of attack, when they saw the English columns overtopping
the heights surrounding the valley of the Zadora.
In his last Spanish battle, the victory of the Pyrenees, where
he had to defend a frontier of sixty miles, he drove Soult over
the mountains, and was the first of all the generals engaged in
Continental hostilities, to plant his columns on French ground!
Those are the facts of _seven years_ of the most perilous war,
against the most powerful monarch whom Europe had seen for a thousand
years. The French army in the Peninsula had varied from 150,000 to
300,000 men. It was constantly recruited from a national force of
600,000. It was under the authority of a great military sovereign,
wholly irresponsible, and commanding the entire resources of the most
populous, warlike, and powerful of Continental states. The British
general, on the other hand, was exposed to every difficulty which
could embarrass the highest military skill. He had to guide the
councils of the two most self-willed nations in existence. He had
to train native armies, which scoffed at English discipline; he had
the scarcely less difficult task of contending with the fluctuating
opinions of public men in England: yet he never shrank; he never was
shaken in council, and he never was defeated in the field.
But by what means were all this succession of unbroken victories
achieved? Who can listen to the French babbling, which tells us that
it was done, simply by _standing still to be beaten_? The very nature
of the war, with an army composed of the raw battalions of England,
which had not seen a shot fired since the invasion of Holland in
1794, a period of fourteen years; his political anxieties from his
position with the suspicious governments of Spain and Portugal,
and not less with his own fluctuating Legislature; his encounters
with a force quadruple his own, commanded by the most practised
generals in Europe, and under the supreme direction of the conqueror
of the Continent--A condition of things so new, perplexing, and
exposed to perpetual hazard, in itself implies _enterprise_, a
character of sleepless activity, unwearied resource, and unhesitating
intrepidity--all the very reverse of passiveness.
That this illustrious warrior did not plunge into conflict on
every fruitless caprice; that he was not for ever fighting for the
Gazette; that he valued the lives of his brave men; that he never
made a march without a rational object, nor ever fought a battle
without a rational calculation of victory--all this is only to say,
that he fulfilled the duties of a great officer, and deserved the
character of a great man. But, that he made more difficult campaigns,
fought against a greater inequality of force, held out against more
defective means, and accomplished more decisive successes, than any
general on record, is mere matter of history.
His last and greatest triumph was Waterloo,--a victory less over an
army than an empire,--a triumph gained less for England than for
Europe,--the glorious termination of a contest for the welfare of
mankind. Waterloo was a defensive battle. But it was not the rule,
but the exception. The object of the enemy was Brussels: "To-night
you shall sleep in Brussels," was the address of the French Emperor
to his troops. Wellington's was but the wing of a great army spread
over leagues to meet the march of the French to Brussels. His force
consisted of scarcely more than 40,000 British and Hanoverians,
chiefly new troops; the rest were foreigners, who could scarcely be
relied on. The enemy in front of him were 80,000 veterans, commanded
by Napoleon in person. The left wing of the Allied force--the
Prussians--could not arrive till seven in the evening; after the
battle had continued eight hours. The British general, under those
circumstances, could not move; but he was not to be beaten. If he had
80,000 British troops, he would have finished the battle in an hour.
On seeing the Prussian troops in a position to follow up success, he
gave the order to advance; and in a single charge swept the French
army, the Emperor, and his fortunes, from the field! Thus closed the
18th of June 1815.
Within _three days_, this "man of passiveness" crossed the French
frontier, (June 21,) took every town in his way, (and all the French
towns on that route are fortified,) and, on the 30th, the English
and Prussians invested Paris. On the 3d of July, the capitulation of
Paris, garrisoned by 50,000 regular troops and the national guard,
was signed at St Cloud, and the French army was marched to the Loire,
where it was disbanded.
We have now given the answer which common sense gives, and which
history will always give, to the childishness of accounting for
Wellington's unrivalled successes by his "doing nothing" until the
"invincible" French chose to grow weary of being invincible. The
historic fact is, that their generals met a superior general; that
their troops met Englishmen, commanded by an officer worthy of such
a command; and that "enterprise" of the most daring, sagacious, and
brilliant order, was the especial, peculiar, and unequalled character
of Wellington.
The volumes of M. Gravière are interesting; but he must unlearn his
prejudices; or, if that be nationally impossible, he must palliate
them into something like probability. He must do this even in
consideration of the national passion for "glory." To be beaten
by eminent military qualities softens the shame of defeat; but to
be beaten by mere _passiveness_,--to be driven from a scene of
possession by _phlegm_, and to be stript of laurels by the hand of
indolence and inaptitude,--must be the last aggravation of military
misfortune.
Yet, this stain they must owe to the pen of men who subscribe to the
doctrine, that the great soldier of England conquered simply by his
_incapacity for action_!
We think differently of the French people and of the French soldiery.
The people are intelligent and ingenious; the soldiery are faithful
and brave. England has _no_ prejudices against either. Willing to
do justice to the merits of all, she rejoices in making allies
of nations, whom she has never feared as _enemies_. She wants no
conquest, she desires no victories. _Her_ glory is the peace of
mankind.
But, she will not suffer the tombs of her great men to be defaced,
nor their names to be taken down from the temple consecrated to the
renown of their country.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] _Sketches of the Last Naval War_; from the French of Captain
GRAVIÈRE. By the Hon. Captain PLUNKET. 2 vols. Longman.
DANUBE AND THE EUXINE.
"Danube, Danube! wherefore comest thou
Red and raging to my caves?
Wherefore leap thy swollen waters
Madly through the broken waves?
Wherefore is thy tide so sullied
With a hue unknown to me?
Wherefore dost thou bring pollution
To the old and sacred sea?"
"Ha! rejoice, old Father Euxine!
I am brimming full and red;
Noble tidings do I carry
From my distant channel bed.
I have been a Christian river
Dull and slow this many a year,
Rolling down my torpid waters
Through a silence morne and drear;
Have not felt the tread of armies
Trampling on my reedy shore;
Have not heard the trumpet calling,
Or the cannon's gladsome roar;
Only listened to the laughter
From the village and the town,
And the church-bells, ever jangling,
As the weary day went down.
And I lay and sorely pondered
On the days long since gone by,
When my old primæval forests
Echoed to the war-man's cry;
When the race of Thor and Odin
Held their battles by my side,
And the blood of man was mingling
Warmly with my chilly tide.
Father Euxine! thou rememb'rest
How I brought thee tribute then--
Swollen corpses, gash'd and gory,
Heads and limbs of slaughter'd men!
Father Euxine! be thou joyful!
I am running red once more--
Not with heathen blood, as early,
But with gallant Christian gore!
For the old times are returning,
And the Cross is broken down,
And I hear the tocsin sounding
In the village and the town;
And the glare of burning cities
Soon shall light me on my way--
Ha! my heart is big and jocund
With the draught I drank to-day.
Ha! I feel my strength awaken'd,
And my brethren shout to me;
Each is leaping red and joyous
To his own awaiting sea.
Rhine and Elbe are plunging downward
Through their wild anarchic land,
Every where are Christians falling
By their brother Christians' hand!
Yea, the old times are returning,
And the olden gods are here!
Take my tribute, Father Euxine,
To thy waters dark and drear.
Therefore come I with my torrents,
Shaking castle, crag, and town;
Therefore, with the shout of thunder,
Sweep I herd and herdsman down;
Therefore leap I to thy bosom,
With a loud, triumphal roar--
Greet me, greet me, Father Euxine--
I am Christian stream no more!"
THE MEMOIRS OF LORD CASTLEREAGH.[9]
In the absence of any real history of Ireland, the memoirs of its
distinguished persons are of the first importance. They are the
landmarks within which the broad and general track of historic
narrative must be led. They fix character--the most necessary aid to
the larger views of the historian. They disclose to us those secret
springs which regulate the great social machinery; and by an especial
faculty, more valuable than all, they bring us face to face with
minds of acknowledged eminence, teach us the course which the known
conquerors of difficulties have pursued, and exhibit the training
by which the championship of nations is to be sustained. As the old
lawgiver commanded that beautiful statues should be placed before the
Spartan wives, to impress their infants with beauty of countenance
and stateliness of form, the study of greatness has a tendency to
elevate our nature; and though camps and councils may be above our
course, yet the light shed from those higher spheres may guide our
steps through the tangled paths of our humbler world.
The present memoir gives evidence of an additional merit in
biography: it assists justice; it offers the power of clearing
character, which might have been refused to the living; it brings
forward means of justification, which the dignity of the injured, his
contempt of calumny, or the circumstances of his time, might have
locked up in his bosom. It is an appeal from the passion of the hour
to the soberness of years. It has the sincerity and the sanctity of a
voice from the world of the future.
The Stewarts, ancestors of the Marquis of Londonderry, came
originally from Scotland, and, settling in Ireland in the reign of
James I., obtained large possessions among the forfeited lands in
Ulster. The family were Protestants, and distinguished themselves
by Protestant loyalty in the troubled times of Ireland--a country
where trouble seems to be indigenous. One of those loyalists was
Colonel William Stewart, who, during the Irish war, under James II.,
raised a troop of horse at his own expense, and skirmished vigorously
against the Popish enemy at the siege of Londonderry. For this good
service he was attainted, with all the chief gentry of the kingdom,
in the confiscating parliament of James. But the confiscation was
not carried into effect, and the estate remained to a long line of
successors.
The father of the late Marquis of Londonderry was the first of
the family who was ennobled. He was an active, intelligent, and
successful man. Representing his county in two parliaments, and,
acting with the government, he partook of that golden shower which
naturally falls from the treasury. He became in succession the
possessor of office and the possessor of title--baron, viscount,
earl, and marquis--and wisely allied himself with English nobility,
marrying, first, a daughter of the Earl of Hertford, and, secondly,
a sister of Lord Camden. The subject of this memoir was a son of the
first marriage, and was born in Ireland on the 18th of June 1769.
From boyhood he was remarkable for coolness and intrepidity, and was
said to have exhibited both qualities in saving a young companion in
the lake of Strangford. At the age of seventeen he was entered of St
John's College, Cambridge, where he seems to have applied himself
actively to the general studies of the place--elementary mathematics,
classics, logic, and moral philosophy. This sufficiently answers the
subsequent taunts at the narrowness of his education.
As his father had been a politician, his son and heir was naturally
intended for political life. The first step of his ambition was a
costly one. County elections in those days were formidable affairs.
The Hillsborough family had formerly monopolised the county. Young
Stewart was put forward, according to custom, as "the champion of
independence." He gained but half the day, for the Hillsboroughs
still retained one nominee. The young candidate became a member of
parliament, but this step cost £60,000.
The sacrifice was enormous, and perhaps, in our day, might startle
the proudest rent-roll in England: but, seventy years ago, and in
Ireland, the real expenditure was probably equivalent to £100,000 in
our day. And it must have been still more distressing to the family,
from the circumstance, that the sum had been accumulated to build
a mansion; that the expense of the election also required the sale
of a fine old collection of family portraits; and that the old lord
was forced to spend the remainder of his life in what the biographer
states to be an old barn, with a few rooms added. But his son was
now launched on public life--that stream in which so many dashing
swimmers sink, but in which talent, guided by caution, seldom fails
to float along, until nature or weariness finishes the effort, and
the man disappears, like all who went before.
The young member, fresh from college, and flushed with triumph
over "parliamentary monopoly," was, of course, a Whig. _Plutarch's
Lives_, and the history of the classic commonwealths, make every
boy at school a Whig. It is only when they emerge from the cloudy
imaginations of republicanism, and the fabulous feats of Greek
championship, that they acquire common sense, and act according to
the realities of things. The future statesman commenced his career by
the ultra-patriotism of giving a "written pledge," on the hustings,
to the support of "parliamentary reform."
With this act of boyishness he was, of course, taunted in
after-life by the Whigs. But his answer was natural and just: it
was in substance, that he had been, in 1790, an advocate for Irish
reform; and if the Irish parliament had continued under the same
circumstances, he would be an advocate for its reform still. But in
1793 a measure had been carried, which made all change perilous: the
Popish peasantry had been suffered to obtain the right of voting; and
thenceforward he should not aid parliamentary reform.
It is to be observed, that this language was not used under
the temptation of office, for he did not possess any share in
administration until four years afterwards, in 1797.
The forty-shilling franchise was the monster evil of Ireland. Every
measure of corruption, of conspiracy, and of public convulsion,
originated in that most mischievous, factious, and false step. It
put the whole parliamentary power of the country into the hands of
faction; made public counsel the dictation of the populace; turned
every thing into a job; and finally, by the pampering of the rabble,
inflamed them into civil war, and, by swamping the constituency,
rendered the extinction of the parliament a matter of necessity to
the existence of the constitution.
To this measure--at once weak and ruinous, at once the triumph of
faction and the deathblow of Irish tranquillity; at once paralysing
all the powers of the legislature for good, and sinking the peasantry
into deeper degradation--we must give a few words.
The original condition of the peasantry in Ireland was serfdom. A
few hereditary chiefs, with the power of life and death, ruled the
whole lower population, as the master of the herd rules his cattle.
English law raised them from this condition, and gave them the
rights of Englishmen. But no law of earth could give the Celt the
industry, frugality, or perseverance of the Englishman. The result
was, that the English artificer, husbandman, and trader, became men
of property, while the Celt lingered out life in the idleness of his
forefathers. Robbery was easier than work, and he robbed; rebellion
was more tempting than loyalty, and he rebelled: the result was
the frequent forfeiture of the lands of chiefs, who, prompted by
their priests, excited by their passions, and urged by the hope of
plunder, were continually rebelling, and necessarily punished for
their rebellion. Portions of their lands were distributed as the pay
of the soldiery who conquered them; portions were given to English
colonists, transplanted for the express purpose of establishing
English allegiance, arts, and feelings in Ireland; and portions
devolved to the crown. But we are not to imagine that these were
transfers of smiling landscapes and propitious harvests--that this
was a renewal of the Goth and Vandal, invading flowery shores, and
sacking the dwellings of native luxury. Ireland, in the 16th and
17th centuries, was a wilderness; the fertility of the soil wasted
in swamps and thickets; no inns, no roads; the few towns, garrisons
in the midst of vast solitudes; the native baron, a human brute,
wallowing with his followers round a huge fire in the centre of a
huge wigwam, passing from intoxication to marauding, and from beaten
and broken marauding to intoxication again. A few of those barons had
been educated abroad, but even they, on their return, brought back
only the love of blood, the habit of political falsehood, and the
hatred to the English name, taught in France and Spain. The wars of
the League, the government of the Inquisition, the subtlety of the
Italian courts, thus added their share of civilised atrocity, to the
gross superstitions and rude revenge of Popish Ireland.
We must get rid of the tinsel which has been scattered by poetry over
the past ages of Ireland. History shows, under the embroidered cloak,
only squalidness. Common sense tells us what _must_ be the condition
of a people without arts, commerce, or agriculture; perpetually
nurturing a savage prejudice, and exhibiting it in the shape of
a savage revenge; ground to the dust by poverty, yet abhorring
exertion; suffering under hourly tyranny, yet incapable of enjoying
the freedom offered to them; and looking on the vigorous and growing
prosperity of the English colonist, with only the feeling of malice,
and the determination to ruin him. The insurrection of 1641, in which
probably 50,000 Protestant lives were sacrificed, was only one of
the broader scenes of a havoc which every age was exemplifying on
a more obscure, but not less ferocious scale. The evidence of this
indolent misery is given in the narrowness of the population, which,
at the beginning of the last century, scarcely reckoned a million
of souls: and this, too, in a country of remarkable fertility, free
from all habitual disease, with a temperate climate, and a breadth
of territory containing at this hour eight millions, and capable of
supporting eight millions more.
The existing condition of Ireland, even with all the difficulties of
its own creation, is opulence, peace, and security, compared with its
wretchedness at the period of the English revolution.
The measure of giving votes for members of parliament to the Popish
peasantry was the immediate offspring of faction, and, like all its
offspring, exhibited the fallacy of faction. It failed in every
form. It had been urged, as a means of raising the character of the
peasantry--it instantly made perfidy a _profession_. It had been
urged, as giving the landlord a stronger interest in the comforts and
conciliation of his tenantry--it instantly produced the splitting
of farms for the multiplication of votes, and, consequently, all
the hopeless poverty of struggling to live on patches of tillage
inadequate for the decent support of life. It had been urged, as a
natural means of attaching the peasantry to the constitution--it
instantly exhibited its effects in increased disorder, in nightly
drillings and daylight outbreaks; in the assassination of landlords
and clergy, and in those more daring designs which grow out of
pernicious ignorance, desperate poverty, and irreconcilable
superstition. The populace--beginning to believe that concession had
been the result of fear; that to receive they had only to terrify;
and that they had discovered the secret of power in the pusillanimity
of parliament--answered the gift of privilege by the pike; and
the "forty-shilling freeholder" exhibited his new sense of right
in the insurrection of 1798--an insurrection which the writer of
these volumes--from his intelligence and opportunities a competent
authority--calculates to have cost 30,000 lives, and not less than
three millions sterling!
The forty-shilling franchise has since been abolished. Its practical
abominations had become too glaring for the endurance of a rational
legislature, and it perished. Yet the "snake was scotched, not
killed." The spirit of the measure remained in full action: it was
felt in the force which it gave to Irish agitation, and in the
insidiousness which it administered to English party. In Ireland it
raised mobs; in England it divided cabinets. In Ireland it was felt
in the erection of a rabble parliament; in England it was felt in
the pernicious principle of "open questions;" until the leaders of
the legislature, like all men who suffer themselves to tamper with
temptation, gave way; and the second great stage of national hazard
was reached, in the shape of the bill of 1829.
If the projected measure of "endowing the popery of Ireland"--in
other words, of establishing the worship of images, and bowing down
to the spiritual empire of the papacy--shall ever, in the fatuity
of British rulers and the evil hour of England, become law; a third
great stage will be reached, which may leave the country no farther
room for either advance or retrogression.
* * * * *
In the year 1796, the father of the young member had been raised to
the earldom of Londonderry, and his son became Viscount Castlereagh.
In the next year his career as a statesman began; he was appointed
by Lord Camden, (brother-in-law of the second Earl of Londonderry,)
Keeper of the Privy Seal of Ireland.