The voyage to Gothenburg was long and stormy, and it became advisable to select a point nearer Hamburg. Husum in Holstein was admirably situated for the purpose; and throughout 1805 and the early months of 1806 the mails were sent thither. There does not appear to have been any insuperable difficulty in forwarding them from Husum to Hamburg. There was still a British agent in the latter city, and the Danish Government which controlled the former was as yet neutral, if not friendly to England.
It was by no means in accordance with Napoleon’s purposes, however, that the Hamburg gates should remain ajar to English commerce and correspondence. Closely occupied as he was throughout the year 1805, he found time to advance his great design for striking at England through her commercial supremacy. “Go to Hamburg,” he said to Bourrienne in March, “it is there I will give a mortal blow at England.”
And so the power of France grew steadily in Hamburg, while the ancient Syndic of the city saw its independence gradually sapped. Already violent outrages were committed by the French agents upon messengers carrying English letters. A courier on his way from Vienna to England was seized in a forest, robbed of his despatches, and left bound to a tree, where he would certainly have perished, had he not been released by a woman who was accidentally passing through the forest. Such were the risks confronted by the English messengers; but despite all such dangers the Postal Service was maintained, irregularly indeed, and with delays and interruptions which caused wide-spreading losses. The wonder is not that the Service was imperfect, but that it was maintained at all.
The difficulties grew as the months went by. The decrees of March, 1806, which Prussia was forced to issue, excluding British ships from all the ports of Prussia and Hanover, added little to the difficulties of the Post-Office, for neither Denmark nor Hamburg was concerned in it. But a darker cloud was rising fast. The French began to menace actively the independence of Hamburg. In October it was notified by the Hamburg Post-Office that the situation of affairs no longer admitted of the receipt of mails for Prussia, Russia, or Germany, and for many days after the receipt of this gloomy notification no news whatever reached London from the Elbe.
Late in November a few bags of letters filtered through, giving a more hopeful account of the situation, but even while these letters were being read, the French had entered Hamburg, and the revenues of the Post-Office, the ancient property of the House of Tour and Taxis, had been appropriated by the agent of Murat.
Quickly on the heels of the messengers who carried this intelligence followed others bringing the notorious Berlin decrees, of which the paragraph affecting the Post-Office was short and simple. “All trade and correspondence with the British Islands are prohibited. In consequence, all letters and packets addressed to England, or to an Englishman, or written in English, shall not be transmitted by the Post-Office, but shall be seized....” Napoleon had struck his “mortal blow,” and the clang of the Custom-House doors closing against British goods along the whole coast of Europe, north, west, and south simultaneously, save only in Portugal and Denmark, sounded in his eager ears the knell of England’s power.
Thus was created the most serious situation which had ever confronted the General Post-Office, the most serious, one might say, if it is ever safe to forecast the complications of international affairs, with which it can possibly have to deal. The public looked to the Postmaster General to carry their correspondence, commercial and private; the Government called on them for the safe delivery of despatches. My Lords took down the map of Europe and found that from the Elbe to Dalmatia their Packets could land in Portugal alone, a country whence mails must be forwarded not only through a hostile territory, but across lofty mountain passes, and through provinces so wild and unsettled that it appeared hopeless to think of organizing mail routes from Lisbon for Germany or Austria.
The chances of smuggling letters into Hamburg was the only one worth consideration, and the thoughts of the officials in Lombard Street remained fixed on Northern Europe.
When the French entered Hamburg, Mr. Thornton, the British Consul, retired to Husum. He saw no prospect whatever of forwarding the mails which arrived from England, and being somewhat uncertain how long his position in Holstein might be secure, he thought it well to send the bags back to London. This was in November; and in the following July those mails were lying still at the General Post-Office, waiting for some chance of conveyance to their destination. It needs but a small effort of the imagination to realize what widespread mischief might result from the detention of a mail for seven months. Such a fact, more than pages of description, brings home to our minds how hard and heavy was the burden which our grandfathers bore in the days of the great war.
The scope of the present work, concerned as it is solely with the difficulties and successes of Postal administration, does not demand any relation of the various measures and counter-measures taken by one or the other of the parties in the struggle for supremacy. It is enough to observe that the great system proved scarcely more successful than any other attempt to fetter the natural impulses of nations by any artificial restriction. Licenses to import English goods were granted in great numbers by Napoleon himself, as a source of revenue. His officers in many places, seeing that the chief burden of the system fell on the German merchants not on the English, evaded their instructions. “I received orders,” says Count Rapp, “to commit all articles of English merchandise to the flames. This measure would have been most disastrous. I evaded it ... and Dantzig lost no more than what amounted to 200 francs, and Koenigsberg still less.” A gigantic system of smuggling grew up, and on this contraband trade Count Rapp also looked benevolently. “I frankly confess,” he writes, “that I did not watch the coast of the Baltic with the vigilance that was prescribed to me.” And thus it happened that what with licenses, a convenient blindness of the executive, and a bold and daring trade by smuggling, the great barrier erected against England proved to be rather a trellis than a barricade, and was penetrable at many different points.