18

PROPOSAL OF PEACE.

[BOOK I. Pope, France was released from the control of the Holy See in spiritual matters. Parties were repressed, and their leaders were made subservient to the new ruler. Office and influence were freely thrown open to merit; and the institution of the Legion of Honor invited civic desert from every rank and condition of life. The people were rid of the race of despotic and incapable Bourbon sovereigns; and in their joy at having secured a ruler who was capable, and who professed popular objects, they were not too careful to inquire whether he might not prove a despot in another way.

On the 25th of December, 1799, Napoleon addressed the folProposal of lowing letter to the King of Great Britain.1 "Called peace. by the wishes of the French nation to occupy the first magistracy of the Republic, I think it proper, on entering into office, to make a direct communication of it to your Majesty. The war which, for eight years, has ravaged the four quarters of the world must it be eternal? Are there no means of coming to an understanding? How can the two most enlightened nations of Europe, powerful and strong beyond what their independence requires, sacrifice to ideas of vain greatness the benefits of commerce, internal prosperity, and the happiness of families? How is it that they do not feel that peace is of the first necessity, as well as the truest glory? These sentiments cannot be foreign to the heart of your Majesty, who reigns over a free nation, and with the sole view of making it happy. — Your Majesty will see in this overture only my sincere desire to contribute efficaciously, for the second time, to a general pacification by a step, speedy, entirely of confidence, and disengaged from those forms which, however necessary to disguise the dependence of weak states, prove, in the case of strong ones, only a mutual desire to deceive. France and England, by the abuse of their strength, may still, to the injury of all nations, long retard the period of their own exhaustion: but I will venture to say that the fate of all civilized nations depends on the termination of a war which involves the whole world."

But one

Such was the invitation to England to be at peace. of the conditions under which the European powers had entered into an alliance, and carried on war against France since the deposition of her princes, was that no one of them should make a separate peace. The answer from England was not, therefore, a matter of choice; and this Napoleon could not but have known. The greater his victories, and the more eminent his civic authority, the more necessary was it to the balance of power, and the security of the European nations, that all other countries should band themselves together against France, till unquestionable 1 Annual Register, 1800, p. 73.

CHAP. I.]

NEGOTIATION DECLINED.

19

guaranties should be obtained that France would be quiet, and keep at home. The King of England, therefore, de- Declined. clined negotiation. In his reply, he said more than

1

any statesman would now approve to enforce the restoration of the Bourbons; but he declared distinctly that this should not be made an essential condition, as no foreign power could claim to dictate to any nation its mode of government. The essential condition would be, (whenever the time should arrive,) that France should give such evidences of stability at home and harmlessness abroad as might justify her neighbors in laying down their arms. The sovereign of Great Britain had the highest right to use a lofty tone with the new ruler of France, as the naval power of England had proved the only counterpoise to the military preeminence of France. While Napoleon had become lord of the Continent, England remained mistress of the seas. By various successes in the earlier years of the war, by the victory off Cape St. Vincent in February, 1797, and especially by the battle of the Nile, France had been kept in check, and more had been done for the maintenance of the common cause against her than by the action of all other European powers together. The battle of the Nile, fought on the 1st of August, 1798, yielded the greatest victory then known in naval warfare. To destroy the French fleet in the Mediterranean had long been the first wish of Nelson's heart. He did it now. Only a single frigate of the whole armament returned to France; and Napoleon was left in Egypt, shut out from all communication with home. It was while the remembrance of this great defeat, in the midst of so many successes, was fresh in his mind, that Napoleon addressed to George III. his invitation to peace and it was while England was yet cheered with her victory, and making much of her great hero, that George III. sent his haughty reply.

The war, as has been said, had lasted eight years. In 1792, the French Assembly had declared war against Austria, on the ground of her harboring French rebels, contrary to the faith of treaties. The poor king, Louis XVI., was then still living; and one of the bitter things he had to endure was appearing to sanction a declaration of war against the friends who were at work for his rescue. Prussia and the King of Sardinia presently joined Austria; but Great Britain preserved a position of neutrality for yet a few months longer. After the execution of Louis in January, 1793, no further terms were to be kept with France, and in February, England and Holland were her proclaimed enemies. The successes of Napoleon justified his coming forward to propose peace, as soon as the government of France appeared to be settled in his person: but his making the proposition to England 1 Annual Register, 1800. State Papers, 204.

20

Napoleon's

successes.

PEACE ENFORCED ABROAD.

[BOOK I. alone shows that he could hardly have been sincere; for no one of the great powers could make a separate peace. Yet he declared to the legislative body, at the close of their session, in March, 1800, that the French people desired peace, and their government also, and even more earnestly; but that the English government rejected it. A new army of reserve was immediately formed; and forth went the great soldier to conquer again. By the middle of June in this last year of the century, he had gained the battle of Marengo, taking from the Austrians in one day all that they had regained in Italy since his former warfare there. His forces under Moreau in Germany were driving back the Austrians at every point; and by the middle of July, the Emperor was helpless, many of his strongholds in the hands of the French, and the road to Vienna open to them. He would have made peace, but could not do it without the consent of the other powers; and Great Britain objected to some of the terms imposed by France. Before the end of the year, however, the successes of Moreau in Germany, and of the French wherever they appeared, were such as to precipitate peacemaking wherever it could be had. On Christmas Day, 1800, the Emperor signed an armistice, by which he bound himself to agree to a separate peace, his allies giving their compassionate It was clear that other powers must follow the same Enforced course; and on the last day of the century, it was peace abroad. understood by British statesmen that England would presently be the only power standing out against this terrific France and her astonishing ruler. It is now that we begin to find in the records of the time, and in the correspondence of our fathers, those scattered assertions that such a man could not be long-lived, which show how vast was his power over the imagination in the early years of his conquests. Our fathers were taken by surprise by the manifestation of the resources of France. By changing the natural course of her life, and calling forth all her strength of every kind for the maintenance of her new position against the assaults of the world, her ruler had made her appear able to confront the united opposition of the world and even to drive back the world, and occupy the homes of nations wherever she pleased-except only in regard to England. France was now about to gain territory as far as the left bank of the Rhine from Austria; and Parma, Tuscany, and Etruria from Spain; and alliance against the English from poor helpless Naples; and peace on his own terms with Russia, Bavaria, and Portugal. While seeing the new century rise on this wonderful adventurer, now the foremost man of all the world, men discerned no hope but in the probable shortness of his life. Such energy as his, they said, always wore out the frame: he exposed himself in so

consent.

CHAP. I.]

no successor.

ALARM IN ENGLAND.

21

many battle-fields, that he would be taken off that way: he had also been nearly murdered, in the last month of the century, by a conspiracy in Paris; and between the discontented and the mad, he would never be safe. And then, such a man leaves He was himself the greatness and the power of France; for he had tranquillized her. She would easily be conquered when his day was over. Such were the consolations of the more hopeful. As for the timid, they had no hope, beyond that of keeping quiet in their own island, letting destruction rage abroad. When, presently, it appeared doubtful whether they would be allowed to remain quiet in their own island, the consternation was such as Englishmen and their families had little dreamed of ever experiencing in so late an age of the world. In their school-days they had imagined what it must be to the people to see the approach of the Danes, or of the Normans, and to have their beloved country overrun by the foe; but it had never occurred to them that such a thing could happen to themselves. When, however, this Bonaparte had reduced to peace on his own terms all his foes abroad, it was thought and whispered that he would turn his face our way, and try the power of his presence in England, as in the countries which he had laid low. He had used his influence abroad to injure Great Britain by embroiling her with the northern powers, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. He wrought upon the Emperor Paul's ambition to possess Malta, and on the jealousy and fears of the three Powers about the commercial and naval supremacy of England, till he succeeded in making a rupture, most alarming to the government and people of Great Britain at such a juncture. During the last months of the century, the three great Baltic Powers were bound in a confederacy against England: the Danes were evading naval search, and supplying arms and stores to French vessels; Paul was burning British vessels in Russian ports, and sending the crews into the interior as prisoners; and it was clear that a northern war was impending at the same moment that England was left alone in her resistance to France. We shall have to see what was thought and said and done by the brave and by the timid, by the wise and by the incapable, in this extraordinary exigence. Meantime, we must glance at the operation of these exterior relations on the interior condition of Great Britain, at the close of the century.

Amidst the convulsions which broke up the Balancing System on the Continent, the British nation seemed exempted Condition of from dangers common to all other peoples secured England. by its free constitution. It was an edifying sight, just before the French Revolution, to see the Prime Minister William Pitt. of England, Mr. Pitt, bringing forward the subject of

22

PITT'S OPPRESSIVE POLICY.

[BOOK I. parliamentary reform, proposing to transfer the franchise from decayed boroughs to London, and to counties which had become populous; and to provide for the future disfranchisement of boroughs, as they should sink in the scale of proportion, to growing manufacturing towns. Thus liberal and popular were the ideas of the great statesman up to 1785. But he took alarm at the French Revolution; and, like other directors of public affairs in Europe, looked upon states as units, and turned away from the interests of the aggregate peoples. He became one of the despots of Europe in point of despotism, one of the foremost. His policy. He might have been justified for entering into the continental war, diverse as were the opinions of the time as to the necessity of doing so. He might have been forgiven the bad conduct of the war, by which England was drained of money that went to subsidize the weaker continental powers. Terrible as were the burdens of taxation and the derangements of commercial affairs at the time, and fearful as is the load of debt which he deposited in the future by a method of warfare which brought no glory and did no effectual service, he might have been forgiven; for the times were such as wellnigh to set men's judgments at defiance. But that for which he cannot be forgiven is his overruling of the civil liberties of Englishmen. All who doubted the wisdom of the war were regarded by Mr. Pitt's government as seditious persons; and imputed sedition was hunted down with a ferocity to the last degree unwise in such times. Clergymen and other educated men in Scotland were doomed to transportation for speeches and acts of political license, such as always grows under persecution; and attempts were made to bring others to the gibbet in England for constructive treason : attempts which, if not baffled by the sense and courage of the juries, would have been ground enough, in such a crisis, for such a revolution in England as would secure to men their constitutional rights. There was a suspension of the Habeas Corpus, a stringent Alien Bill; and finally, in 1796, the Seditious Meetings' Bill, which was so oppressive and unconstitutional that Mr. Fox and the leaders of the Opposition seceded from the House of Commons when the Bill was committed. The fiercer the severity on the part of the government, the stronger grew the resentment of the people; and "the spread of revolutionary principles " the thing dreaded was stimulated by tyranny at home far more than it could ever have been by mere example from abroad; example which a little time was sure to convert into warning. In Financial the midst of all this turmoil, the Bank found her difficulty. resources exhausted. By 1797, the country was so drained of specie that the Bank could not go on, unless saved by some immediate intervention of government. So the Restriction

Sedition.