CHAPTER XXXVIII.
ENGLAND AND BONAPARTE.
1802-1815.
When the treaty of Amiens had been signed, the English people firmly believed that the great war was ended, that the period of stress and anxiety, of heavy taxation and huge armaments, of threatened invasions and domestic strife, was finally closed. Bonaparte, who needed an interval of peace for the working out of his domestic policy, had affected a frank, liberal, and conciliatory spirit in dealing with our diplomatists, and had produced on them the impression that a reasonable as well as strong man was now at the helm at Paris. The France with which we had come to terms was no longer the wild and militant republic of the old Jacobin days, but a well-ordered and strongly centralized monarchy, though its ruler did not yet bear the title of king. If Bonaparte had really intended to accept the situation, and dwell in peace beside us as a loyal neighbour, the treaty of Amiens would have needed no defence. But Addington and his fellows had not gauged the First Consul's true character or the peculiarities of his position. He had risen to power by war; his power depended on his military prestige, and a permanent peace would have ruined his control over his army, which he had gorged with plunder and glory, and turned into a greedy and arrogant military caste. But it was hard to expect English statesmen to see through the character and designs of a man whom the French themselves had not yet learnt to know. And when an honourable peace was proffered, it would have been wrong to refuse it: the internal condition of England called for rest and retrenchment.
Schemes of Bonaparte.
But the First Consul's real objects in concluding the peace of Amiens were purely personal and selfish. He wished to recover the lost French colonies, and to rebuild the ruined French navy. He needed peace to reorganize the control of France over her vassal states in Holland, Italy, and Switzerland, which she had bound to her chariot-wheels during the late wars. Most of all he required a space of leisure to prepare for that assumption of monarchical power which he had been plotting ever since his return from Egypt.
His conduct towards England.
While England was thinking only of peace, and while thousands of English were embarking on the continental travel which had been denied them for nine years, Bonaparte was already beginning to show the cloven hoof. In the autumn of 1802 he annexed to France the continental half of the dominions of our old ally the King of Sardinia, and the Duchy of Parma. He sent 30,000 men into Switzerland to occupy the chief passes of the Alps. He ordered the vassal republics in Holland and North Italy to place prohibitive duties on English merchandise. These actions, though irritating, were not actual breaches of the peace, but things grew more serious when he made the impudent request that we should expel from our shores the exiled princes of the old royal house of France, and that our government should suppress certain newspapers which criticized his rule in France too sharply. These demands were of course refused; the First Consul then began to harp on the question of the evacuation of Malta. That island was still garrisoned by English troops, as its old masters, the Knights of St. John, were not yet in a position to resume their dominion there. When England refused to evacuate Malta at once, and ventured to remonstrate about the annexation of Piedmont and Parma, Bonaparte assumed a most offensive attitude. He summoned Lord Whitworth, our ambassador at Paris, into his presence, and in the midst of a large assembly at the Tuileries delivered an angry harangue to him, declaring that the English cabinet had no respect for honour or treaties, and was wishing to drive him to a new war. He did not wish to fight, he said, but if he once drew the sword, it should never be sheathed till England was crushed.
War declared.—Seizure of English subjects in France.
This insulting message roused even the feeble Addington to anger. With extreme reluctance and dismay, the cabinet began to contemplate the possibility of a renewed war with France. A royal message was laid before Parliament asking for increased votes for the army and navy, which had just been cut down on account of the peace. Bonaparte, on the other hand, began to move masses of troops towards the shores of the English Channel, and to order the building of many ships of war. Addington attempted further negotiations for staving off a collision, but met no response from the First Consul, who refused to listen to any offers till we should have evacuated Malta, and recognized the legality of his annexations in Italy and Switzerland. Nothing could be done to bring him to reason, and on May 12, 1803, our ambassador left Paris, and war was declared, only thirteen months after the signing of the peace of Amiens. Bonaparte had, perhaps, been intent on bullying the English cabinet, and had fancied that they would yield to his hectoring. He showed intense irritation when war was declared, and committed a flagrant breach of international law by seizing all the English tourists and travellers who were passing through France on business or pleasure, and imprisoning them as if they were prisoners of war. They were about 10,000 in number, and Bonaparte had the cruelty to keep them confined during the whole of the war. Another sign of his malice was that he kept accusing the English government of instigating assassins to murder him—there was, indeed, hardly a crime which he did not lay to the account of his enemies.
The second act of the great drama of the French war had now begun: the first had lasted nine years, this was to endure for eleven—from May, 1803, to March, 1814. The whole war is indeed one, if we regard it as the last struggle for commercial and maritime supremacy between England and her old rival, and compare it with the Seven Years' War and the war of American Independence.