Part 48

Such demands upon the public purse seemed very badly timed, when the working classes were suffering very heavily from depression of trade, from famine produced by two bad harvests, and from a constantly increasing burden of taxation. Discontent was in fact increasing widely, great political meetings were held in London and elsewhere to expose the abuses of monarchy and aristocracy. Riots and seditious writings were constantly on the increase, and the Government thought the state of affairs so critical that they determined upon an autumn session. Three days before Parliament met a monster meeting was held under the auspices of the Corresponding Society in Copenhagen Fields. The excitement thus produced found vent in an assault upon the King as he went to open Parliament, one of the windows of his state coach was broken by a stone or bullet; on his return his coach was again surrounded by an angry mob, with shouts of "Bread, bread! peace, peace!" and he only escaped with difficulty by driving rapidly in his private carriage from St. James's to Buckingham Palace. The King, who throughout showed great courage, showed himself in the evening at Covent Garden theatre, where he was on the whole well received. This act of violence produced two coercive Bills, one to suppress seditious meetings, the other to extend the law of treason. Every public meeting was to be advertised by a paper signed by resident householders, and all meetings were liable to be dispersed according to the Riot Act if any two justices thought them dangerous; while by the second law, writing, preaching, and speaking, were created overt acts, thus rendering the offender guilty of treason, and writing or speaking against the established Government was made a highly punishable crime. These Bills were commonly known as the Sedition and Treason Bills. They were not passed without strong opposition, and the use of language on the part of Fox so vehement as to excite still further the anger of the Tories. This party was now enjoying its selfish triumph to the utmost. It became necessary again to augment the taxes, and Pitt hit upon the expedient of levying duties upon legacies and successions. The country gentlemen had sufficient influence to confine the Bill to the succession of money and personal property only, and to exclude real property from the action of the Bill. This glaring injustice was not remedied till 1853.

[Sidenote: Changes in France give hopes of peace.]

The burden of taxation had much to do with the overtures for peace which were set on foot in 1796. Nearly all classes in the kingdom had become weary of the war. Pitt, as has been seen, had been forced into it against his natural tendencies, and though, when once embarked in the war of opinion, he had used language of the most overbearing character, he was eager, now that he found his hope of a speedy bankruptcy of France frustrated, to bring about an honourable peace. Such an opportunity was offered by the changed character of the French Government. The Directory had held its position for upwards of a year, and seemed to give promise of such stability as would render negotiation possible. This change in the Government of France had been the outcome of a series of revolutions which had followed each other in rapid succession.

[Sidenote: Retrospect of French affairs. 1793.]

[Sidenote: The Committee of Public Safety.]

The Girondins had, contrary to their conscientious opinions, voted for the death of the King. It was in fact an act of suicide. After this it was useless to oppose any demand of the Jacobins; the attempt only produced a violent struggle in the Convention, which ended in the complete overthrow of the Girondins by the insurrection of the 1st of June. In the place of the party thus annihilated the Jacobins found themselves supreme. Upon them henceforward lay the duty of saving the Revolution within and rescuing France from foreign assaults from without. The machinery of Government to which they trusted to obtain these ends was a Committee of Public Safety, in whose hands the full powers of the executive were lodged. As far as the external defence of France was concerned, the restless energy of the new rulers was completely successful. La Vendée, Toulon, and Lyons, the centres of opposition within France, were all reduced. Carnot struck out a new plan of warfare, and found means to employ with success the masses with which an almost unlimited conscription supplied the army, and from this time onwards the French were everywhere successful. But while exhibiting this energy abroad, in France the government of the Committee was in the last degree cruel and tyrannical. Nor could the Jacobins agree among themselves. On the one side was a party atheistical in their religion, communistic in their political views, foul and blasphemous in their language. This party, which predominated in the Commune, took its name from Hébert, the editor of an infamous paper called _Père Duchesne_. It shocked the feelings of the world by its excesses, abolishing religion, closing the churches, and holding a blasphemous service in Notre Dame in honour of Reason. On the other side was a party, headed by Danton, intent chiefly on success abroad, and inclined to believe that the work of destruction had gone far enough. Between the two was the party of the Purists, headed by Robespierre and St. Just, who looked with equal hatred on the scandalous and anarchical conduct of the Hébertists and the indulgent and somewhat loose lives of the followers of Danton. Robespierre was able to attack and destroy both these parties in turn. The Hébertists were the first to fall, but very shortly after the same fate befell the Dantonists.

[Sidenote: The Reign of Terror.]

[Sidenote: Fall of Robespierre.]

Atheists and indulgents being thus both removed, Robespierre and his party were virtually masters of France. Under them the Terror knew no relaxation. "The maxim of our policy," said Robespierre, "ought to be to guide the people by reason and the enemies of the people by terror." Whole batches of victims completely unknown to each other were sent off together to the guillotine under pretext of being accomplices in conspiracy. Between the 20th of June and the 27th of July 1400 people were executed. But Robespierre and his friends looked forward to some conclusion of this state of things, desiring to establish a purely moral, stoical, and deistical Republic. As a first step, the worship of the Supreme Being was decreed, and a great festivity held, where Robespierre, decked with flowers, officiated as priest. Thus, too, he began to shelter the priests and nobles. The idea of the cessation of the Revolution thoroughly frightened some of the worst among the Committee, and Robespierre's assumption of authority disgusted them. They contrived to form a coalition with all the discontented parties, Hébertists, Dantonists, Girondists, Royalists, were all ready to combine against the one man whose stoical purity seemed to insult them, and whose cold implacable cruelty gave them no hope if they should offend him. Robespierre was thus hated by the people, and at enmity both with the people and the Committee, but was still influential at the club of the Jacobins, the Convention, and the revolutionary Tribunal. Knowing that an assault would be directed against him, his wisdom would have been to strike first. To this course St. Just urged him, but he seems to have relied upon his influence in the Convention, and was astonished when he found his friends wholly outnumbered and a hearing refused him. On the 27th of July he was arrested with Couthon, St. Just, and his brother. He escaped and fled to the Commune. For a moment it appeared as if an insurrection would have reinstated him. But the richer sections of Paris rallied to the destruction of their tyrant, and on the following day Robespierre, with twenty members of the Commune, was dragged to the scaffold.

[Sidenote: Establishment of the Directory. Oct. 1795.]

The party which had overthrown Robespierre were as cruel and far more depraved than he was. They would gladly have continued the Revolution in its most odious form. But the Terror once destroyed, it was impossible to check a reactionary movement. The revolutionary Committee and Tribunal were modified, the Commune destroyed, the club of the Jacobins dissolved, and the Girondins who had escaped execution recalled. Such measures did not please the mob of Paris, still further excited by the constant continuance of famine. On the 12th Germinal (April 1), and again on the 1st Prairial (May 20), they rose in insurrection, invaded the hall of the Convention, clamouring for bread and the constitution of 1793. For six hours a wild tumult raged within the walls. But soldiers had been collected, and with the aid of the troops of the more reactionary Paris sections order was restored. This was the deathblow of the democratic party. A new constitution was drawn up, the executive power was vested in five directors, and two councils, the one of 500, the other of 250, established. The hopes of the royalists had been raised by the late reactionary movement. Finding themselves thwarted by the new constitution, the richer sections and the partisans of reaction marched on the Tuileries. General Menou proved unequal to his place, and the task of defending the Assembly was given to Barras, who chose as his active lieutenant Bonaparte. With a vigour unchecked by fear of shedding the blood of citizens, this young officer brought up thirty cannon from the camp of Sablons, and received the advancing insurrectionists with such showers of grape, that, though not without a short resistance, they were completely defeated. This was the first step towards military despotism. The new constitution came into effect on the 27th of October 1795.

[Sidenote: Pitt's first negotiations for peace.]

Thus, before it was understood how completely the army had got the upper hand in France, how completely from henceforward its interests would be military, the appearance of something more like a permanent and orderly government in the shape of the Directory seemed for the instant to give hopes of peace. Towards that point Pitt's feelings had been gradually tending. Even as early as December 1795 he had spoken of the possibility of an honourable peace should a more settled government ever be arrived at in France, and since then much had happened to induce him to lower his tone. In spite of all his efforts, he had seen his great coalition disappear at the Congress at Basle. He had seen the complete ruin of his Quiberon expedition. More than that, all his best tendencies had been shocked by the consequences of his own government at home. But the opening of his eyes to the fallacy of his belief in the speedy bankruptcy of France and its rapid conquest, with which in all his difficulties he had hitherto buoyed himself up, came too late. His application for peace through the Swiss minister (March 1796), which the King announced at the close of the session, met with a very cold reception. For the Government of France, having just been re-established on a new and more dangerous basis, would listen to no terms which implied the restoration of the Low Countries to Austria; and as it was impossible for Pitt, after his conduct to that country, to suggest any other terms, the negotiations speedily came to nothing.

[Sidenote: Napoleon's Italian campaign. 1796.]

Indeed, the French Republic had this year reached a pitch of glory unequalled in the palmiest times of the monarchy. Carnot, who was again in power as one of the Directory, had conceived a plan for a campaign of this year upon a gigantic scale. Three armies were to push out from France and strike all of them by the three different roads, of the Maine, the Danube, and the Po, at Vienna. Three young generals were intrusted with the task. Jourdan was given the army of the Sambre and Meuse, Moreau the army of the Rhine and Moselle, Bonaparte succeeded Schérer in the command of the army of Italy. The preceding year the battle of Loano had secured to the French the Riviera as far as Savona, but the troops were destitute of every necessary. Napoleon aroused their enthusiasm by promises, and in a fortnight had separated the Austrians and Piedmontese, defeated the former at Montenotte and Dégo, and thrown them back into Lombardy, the latter at Millesimo, and again at Mondovi, as he pursued them towards Turin, and finally wrung from them a treaty which left him at liberty to pursue the Austrians. Another fortnight was hardly over before he had turned the Austrian position on the Ticino by the passage of the Po at Placenza, driven them from the Adda by the victories of Fombio and Lodi, and having chased them behind the Mincio, secured the whole of Lombardy to the French. Bonaparte completed the first act of the campaign by securing the line of the Adige and forming the siege of Mantua. He employed some weeks in conquering Italy as far south as Naples, but from this work he was recalled by the approach of an Austrian army to raise the siege of Mantua. Wurmser came down the Adige on one side of the Lake of Garda, Quasdanowich down the Chiesa on the other. Bonaparte, giving up every other object for the moment, placed himself between the armies, defeated Quasdanowich, at Lonato on the one hand, and Wurmser at Castiglioni on the other, and thus driving them into the Tyrol, resumed the siege of Mantua. Wurmser made one more effort to raise the siege; again he advanced with two armies, hoping to enclose the French. Davidowich descended the Adige, Wurmser the valley of the Brenta. The battle of Roveredo destroyed the former, while Bonaparte, turning rapidly into the valley of the Brenta in pursuit of Wurmser, came up with and defeated him at Bassano. Thus cut off from Germany, the Austrian general had no resource but to take refuge in Mantua (Sept. 12). The Austrians could not leave their army thus shut up in Mantua, and a fresh effort was made to save it. It was again a double attack, but after three days' fight, Alvinzi, coming from the east, was beaten at Arcola, and the attempt failed. Six weeks later he made one more desperate effort, but was defeated again on the plateau of Rivoli. Alvinzi's attack had been rendered the more dangerous, because upon the Maine and Rhine Jourdan and Moreau had been unsuccessful. There the Archduke Charles had in a certain degree followed the same plans as Bonaparte, and directing his whole force against Jourdan, had compelled the retreat of Moreau also. It was to this victorious general that the Austrians looked to continue their defence. But Bonaparte, in the beginning of the following year, repeatedly drove him backwards, defeated him on the Tagliamento, drove him into the mountains, and defeated him at Neumarck, and finally, having secured the pass of the Semmering, and being within eighty miles of Vienna, he obliged the Archduke to demand a suspension of arms, and opened negotiations known as the Preliminaries of Léoben (April 13), which were completed under the title of Campo Formio on the 17th of October 1797.

[Sidenote: Pitt's second negotiations for peace.]

On the Rhine and the Maine the two other divisions of the general plan had not met with the same success as had attended the arms of Bonaparte. Great and astonishing as his progress had been, it did not therefore seem as yet to have closed all hope of peace, for which in fact it had only rendered Pitt more anxious; and as the establishment of the Directory seemed to promise that permanence to the Government which Pitt had declared to be the indispensable condition of any hopeful negotiations, it was determined in the autumn of this year (1796) to make a fresh effort, this time direct, to negotiate with the Directory. For this purpose Lord Malmesbury was despatched to Paris. The English believed that they had something they could offer in exchange for any restorations France might make. The Cape of Good Hope had been captured in the preceding year, and in the spring of the present year Moore and Abercrombie had done good service in the West Indies. Many of the islands there had been taken, Guadaloupe almost alone remained in French hands. These conquests they offered to restore. But if the French had been unwilling to treat in the preceding year, their successes in Italy had not rendered them more moderate; they were at this very time arranging, at the instigation of the malcontents in Ireland, represented by Wolfe Tone, a plan for the conquest of Ireland under the command of General Hoche, and probably a still greater plan for the invasion of England itself. In fact, there was still the same irremediable objection--the English still felt bound in honour not to resign the Netherlands to France. "On this point," writes Grenville in his instructions to Malmesbury, "your Lordship must not give the smallest hope that his Majesty will be induced to relax." There was also another point in the French diplomacy which rendered the negotiations difficult. They could not understand the position of a plenipotentiary who had not absolutely full powers to act without reference to his own Court, and taking umbrage at the repeated couriers who went to and fro from Paris, declared their belief that the effort at peace was not honest on the part of England, and that Malmesbury had not full powers at all; and finally, De la Croix, a somewhat stiff man of the red tape school, who had from the first behaved with considerable rudeness, wrote suddenly to Malmesbury bidding him leave Paris within eighteen hours. Thus closed the second effort on the part of Pitt to make peace, chiefly important because it clears him from the charge of inveterate determination to continue the war, because it throws the blame of that continuance completely on the French, and because it shows the effect which the lengthened efforts of England, especially the pressure on the finances, were having upon the naturally peaceful and economical mind of the minister.

[Sidenote: Preparations to resist the threatened French invasion.]

The preparations for invasion from abroad could not be kept secret, and fresh and constant efforts had been made to meet them. Fresh levies were made both for the navy and for the army; supplementary bodies of militia were raised; plans suggested for the establishment of large bodies of irregular cavalry, and the enrolment as irregular infantry of all those who paid a gun license. More than this, in spite of the pressure on the finances, under which the funds had fallen as low as £53, a new loan of £18,000,000 was raised upon terms which, though we should now think very high, were not then considered remunerative. The loan, which bore a nominal interest of 5 per cent., was issued at £112, 10s.; that is, every £112, 10s. advanced was to represent £100, thus practically reducing the interest to less than 4½ per cent. Pitt found it necessary to make a distinct appeal to the loyalty of the people to raise the loan on these terms; but the temper of the wealthy classes and the amount of riches still existing in England were shown by the extraordinary rapidity with which the subscription list was filled. £1,000,000 was subscribed by the Bank in their corporate capacity, £400,000 by the directors individually; before the close of the first day £5,000,000 was subscribed by different merchants. At ten o'clock on the Monday the doors were opened, and by twenty minutes past eleven the subscription was declared to be full; hundreds were reluctantly obliged to go away. By the post innumerable orders came from the country, scarcely one of which could be accepted, and long after the subscription was closed persons continued coming, and were obliged to depart disappointed.[13] The Duke of Bridgewater sent a draft on sight of £100,000, a similar sum was even given by the Duke of Bedford, one of the staunchest opponents of the war. The Ministry subscribed £10,000 a piece.

[Sidenote: French expeditions to Bantry Bay and Bristol.]

Such an outburst of loyalty might have opened the eyes of the French as to the difference between the revolutionary temper of England and of their own country, but their ignorance of the temper both of England and Ireland was extreme; General Clark (subsequently Napoleon's War Minister) was at this very time asking Wolfe Tone whether he thought it probable that in case of a landing in Ireland the Irish Lord Chancellor would join the rebels. On the 15th of December the great expedition for Ireland set sail from Brest. Like so many invasions of England, it was thwarted by the uncertainties of the sea. After a stormy passage a few ships assembled in Bantry Bay; but the general had been driven in another direction; there were no signs of the eager Jacobin uprising which the French had expected, the commanders were afraid to proceed without orders from Hoche, and the expedition straggled back again to Brest, with the loss of four line of battle-ships and eight frigates. A similar untimely fate met a more desperate assault intended for the shores of England. Some 1500 men, two-thirds of whom were liberated galley-slaves, and from their character known as the "Légion noire," were sent under Colonel Tate with the intention of burning Bristol. They landed on the shores of Pembrokeshire, and it needed but the appearance of a few militia and yeomanry under Lord Cawdor (and it is frequently said of a few old Welsh women in their red cloaks and hats) to induce the crew of miscreants to take to flight. The expedition was probably only intended as a sort of forlorn hope to discover in what state of preparation England was, for the negotiations having entirely ceased, the French were thinking of a great attack on England itself.

[Sidenote: Critical condition of England.]