The turn of affairs in the North at this time, and during the succeeding critical twelvemonth, was powerfully influenced by the presence of a great British fleet in the Baltic and by the extreme discretion of its admiral. Napoleon had compelled Sweden to follow up her exclusion of British ships by a formal declaration of war, which was issued November 17, 1810. The British minister had to leave Stockholm; and, after his departure, the political as well as military direction of affairs on the spot was under the conduct of Sir James Saumarez. That most distinguished and admirable officer had thoroughly appreciated, during his three summers in the Baltic, the feelings of the Swedish rulers and people; and it was chiefly owing to his representations to his own government, and to his steadily conciliatory action, that the formal war never became actual. He resisted with dignity and firmness every attempt on the part of the Swedish authorities to carry out Napoleon's orders to confiscate; but he did not allow himself to be moved, by such occasional yielding on their part, to any act of retaliation. Good feeling between the two nations centred around his attractive personality, and facilitated the essential, but difficult, conciliation between Sweden and Russia. The entire license trade was under the protection of his fleet, which had charge also of the suppression of privateering, of the police of the hostile coasts, and of the interruption of communications between Denmark and Norway. [467] Its presence virtually insured the independence of Sweden against France and Russia, except during the winter months, when compelled to leave the Baltic; and its numbers and character gave the Swedish government a sufficient excuse for not proceeding to the extremities demanded by Napoleon. During the summer of 1811 the flag-ship was the centre of the secret consultations which went on between the two states, to which Russia also, having finally rejected Napoleon's terms, soon became a party; and towards the end of the season the negotiation, practically completed by the admiral, was formally concluded with a British plenipotentiary. It was determined to keep up the appearance of war, but with the understanding that Sweden would join the alliance of Great Britain and Russia. The czar had then no cause to fear that, in the approaching contest with the great conqueror, he should find a hostile Sweden on his flank and rear. [468]
The preparations of Napoleon for the great Russian campaign occupied the year 1811. It was his intention to carry on a vigorous warfare in the Spanish peninsula, while collecting the immense forces of every kind needed in the north of Germany. But the unsatisfactory character of many of the soldiers gathering on the Elbe, among them being tens of thousands of refractory conscripts and foreign nationalities, compelled him to withdraw from Spain in the latter part of 1811 some forty thousand veterans, whose place was to be filled by levies of an inferior character, which, moreover, did not at once appear. The fortune of war in the Peninsula during the year had varied in different quarters. On the east coast General Suchet had brought Tortosa to capitulate on the 1st of January. Thence advancing to the south he reduced Tarragona by siege and assault on the 28th of June,—an exploit which obtained for him his grade of Marshal of France. Still moving forward, according to Napoleon's general plan and instructions to him, the end of the year found him before the city of Valencia, which surrendered on the 9th of January, 1812. But to obtain these later successes, at the time that so many hardened warriors were removed from the Peninsula, it had been necessary to support Suchet with divisions taken from the centre and west, to abandon the hope entertained of combining another great attempt against Lisbon, and also to withdraw Marmont's corps from the valley of the Tagus to a more northern position, around Salamanca and Valladolid. At this time Wellington occupied a line on the frontiers of Portugal, north of the Tagus, resting on the city of Almeida and facing Ciudad Rodrigo. The latter, with Badajoz, on the Guadiana, constituted the two supports to the strong barrier by which the emperor proposed to check any offensive movements of the enemy upon Spain.
The year had been passed by the British general in patient contention with the innumerable difficulties, political and military, of his situation. Masséna had indeed been forced to withdraw from Portugal in April, but since that time Wellington had been balked, in every attempt, by superior numbers and by the strength of the positions opposed to him. His reward was now near at hand. On the 8th of January, 1812, he suddenly appeared before Ciudad Rodrigo, favored in his movements by the pre-occupation of Marmont, who was engaged in the reorganization and arrangements necessitated by the withdrawal of so many troops for the Russian war, and also deceived by the apparent inactivity in the British lines. The siege was pushed with a vigor that disregarded the ordinary rules of war, and the place was successfully stormed on the 19th of January. As rapidly as the nature of the country, the season, and other difficulties would permit, Wellington moved to the south, intending to attack Badajoz. On the 16th of March the place was invested, and though most ably defended by a governor of unusual ability, it was snatched out of the hands of Marshal Soult by the same audacity and disregard of ordinary methods that had bereft Marmont of the sister fortress. Badajoz was stormed on the night of the 6th of April; and the Spanish frontier then lay open to the British, to be crossed as soon as their numbers, or the mistakes of the enemy, should justify the attempt.
Thus opened the fatal year 1812. The clouds breaking away, though scarce yet perceptibly, for Great Britain, were gathering in threatening masses on the horizon of Napoleon. A painful picture is drawn by his eulogist, M. Thiers, of the internal state of the empire at this time. An excessively dry season had caused very short crops throughout Europe, and want had produced bread riots in England, as well as in France and elsewhere. But such demonstrations of popular fury were far more dangerous and significant, in a country where all expression of opinion had been so rigorously controlled as in the empire, and in a capital which concentrates and leads, as only Paris does, the feelings of a nation. The discontent was heightened and deepened by the miseries of the conscription, which ate ever deeper and deeper, wringing the heart of every family, and becoming more and more extreme as each succeeding enterprise became vaster than those before it, and as the excessive demands, by reducing the quality of the individual victims, required ever growing numbers. Six hundred thousand men had been poured into Spain, three hundred thousand of whom had died there. [469] Besides the immense masses carried forward to the confines of Poland, and those destined for the Peninsula, there was to be a powerful reserve between the Elbe and the Rhine, another behind the Rhine in France itself, and to these Napoleon now proposed to add yet a third, of one hundred and twenty thousand so-called national guards, taken from the conscription of the four last years and legally not liable to the call. Throughout the great cities there was growing irritation, rising frequently to mutiny, with loud popular outcries, and again the number of refractory conscripts, of whom forty thousand had been arrested the year before, rose to fifty thousand; again flying columns pursued them through all the departments. Caught, shut up in the islands off the coasts, whence they could not escape, and, when drilled, marched under strong guard to the ends of Europe, they none the less contrived often to desert; and everywhere the people, hating the emperor, received them with open arms and passed them back, from hand to hand, to their homes. Thus amid starvation, misery, weeping, and violence, the time drew near for Napoleon to complete his great military undertaking of conquering the sea by the land.
In the North the situation had finally developed according to the wishes of Great Britain. The secret understanding of 1811 had resulted in January, 1812, in another commercial ukase, allowing many British manufactures to be introduced into Russia. On the 5th of April a secret treaty was concluded with Sweden, ceding Finland to Russia, but assuring to the former power Norway, of which Denmark was to be deprived. Relieved now on her northern flank, Russia soon after made peace with Turkey under the mediation of Great Britain. Thus with both hands freed she awaited the oncoming of Napoleon.
On the 9th of May, 1812, the emperor left Paris to take command of his forces in Poland; and on the 24th of June the imperial army, to the number of four hundred thousand men, crossed the Niemen and entered Russia. Two hundred thousand more followed close behind. The preceding day, June 23, the British Orders in Council of 1807 and 1809 were revoked, as to the United States of America. It was too late. War had been declared by Congress, and the declaration approved by the President, five days before, on the 18th of June, 1812.
In narrating the extraordinary, and indeed unparalleled, series of events which reach their climax in the Berlin and Milan Decrees and the Orders in Council, the aim has been to compress the story within the closest limits consistent with clearness, and at the same time to indicate the mutual connection of the links in the chain; how one step led to another; and how throughout the whole, amid apparent inconsistencies, there is an identity of characteristics, not impossible to trace, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the downfall of Napoleon. To do this it has been thought expedient to suppress a mass of details, much of a very interesting character, bearing upon the working of the two opposing systems. The influence of the military element of Sea Power, the function of the British navy, after Trafalgar, has also been passed over in silence. When that great disaster wrecked Napoleon's naval hopes, and convinced him that not for many years could he possibly gather the ships and train the seamen necessary to meet his enemy in battle upon the ocean, he seized with his usual sagacity the one only remaining means of ruining her, and upon that concentrated his great energies. The history of Europe and of the civilized world, after 1805, turned upon this determination to destroy Great Britain through her commerce; and the decision was forced upon the mighty emperor by the power of the British navy, and the wise resolve of the government not to expose her land forces to his blows, until peculiarly favorable circumstances should justify so doing. The opportunity came with the Spanish uprising; and, by one of those coincidences not uncommon in history, with the hour came the man. The situation was indeed of the most favorable for Great Britain. The theatre of war, surrounded on three sides by water, was for the French a salient thrust far out into the enemy's domain on the sea, while its interior features and the political character of the people, incapable of cohesion and organized effort, made the struggle one eminently alien to the emperor's genius; for it gave no opportunity for those brilliant combinations and lightning-like blows in which he delighted. To the British the Peninsula offered the advantage that the whole coast line was a base of operations; while every friendly port was a bridge-head by which to penetrate, or upon which, in case of reverse, to retire, with a sure retreat in the sea beyond.
The course pursued by each of the two governments, in this great enterprise of commerce-destroying, may be looked at from the two points of view, of policy and of rightfulness.