A bank’d-up fire that flashes out again
From century to century, and at last
May lead them on to victory.”
“The Cup.”—Tennyson.
It is very difficult for us now to go back in imagination to the time, between eighty and ninety years ago, when the whole of Europe was in danger of being crushed under the tyranny and rapacious cruelty of Napoleon Buonaparte.
This miraculous man, with his insatiable ambition, his almost more than human power and less than human unscrupulousness, had raised himself from a comparatively humble station, not only to be Emperor of France, but to be the conqueror of Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Germany. He dreamed that in his person was to be revived the ancient empire of Charlemagne, and that all the nations of Christendom were to be subject to his universal dominion. He crowned himself in the presence of the Pope, in Paris, in 1804, and the year following he had the iron crown of the kings of Lombardy placed on his head at Milan. Not content with the title of Emperor of France, he styled himself Emperor of the West, conceding for a time to the Czar of Russia the title of Emperor of the East.
No combination of the other Powers seemed capable of withstanding his wonderful military genius. Most of all his foes, he hated England; because, to the eternal honour of our country, be it remembered, England took the lead in rousing the other nations of Europe to resist him. England was the banker of almost every coalition that was formed against him. She supplied men, armies, and armed ships, where she could, and she supplied money to carry on war against Napoleon everywhere. Our great minister, William Pitt, threw himself and all the wealth and power of England into this great struggle against Napoleon. Again and again he revived the spirit of resistance among the other Powers. The rulers and representatives of other countries allowed themselves to be flattered and bribed and threatened into lending themselves to the objects of Napoleon’s inordinate ambition. The Czar consented to meet him on intimate and friendly terms; the Emperor of Austria, notwithstanding the cruel humiliations he had suffered, consented to give his daughter to take the place of the unjustly divorced wife of the Corsican upstart; the less important German princes cringed before him. The hostility of England alone was implacable and unceasing, and what made her even more hated, successful.
There is little doubt that Napoleon fully recognised that England was the main obstacle in the way of the fulfilment of his dream of universal dominion. His most darling project was to crush the power of England, and in 1804-5 he made preparations for the invasion of our country, assembling a vast army at Boulogne for that purpose. So fast did his ambition outrun the bounds of fact and common sense, that he actually had a medal struck to commemorate the conquest of England. On one side was his own head crowned with the laurel wreath of victory; on the other, was a representation of Hercules strangling a giant, with the lying inscription, “Struck in London, 1804.” He wrote to the admiral of the French fleet, which was destined about two months later to be completely destroyed by our great Nelson at Trafalgar: “Set out, lose not a moment, bring our united squadron into the Channel and England is ours.” It was at this moment of supreme suspense and danger that Wordsworth wrote that stirring sonnet to the men of Kent, the words of which vibrated through the nation like a trumpet call.
Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that doth advance