“It is with the most particular satisfaction, sir, that I make known to you this determination of the Emperor. His Majesty loves the Americans. Their prosperity and their commerce are within the scope of his policy. The independence of America is one of the principal titles of glory to France. Since that epoch the Emperor is pleased in aggrandizing the United States; and under all circumstances that which can contribute to the independence, to the prosperity, and to the liberty of the Americans the Emperor will consider as conformable with the interests of his Empire.”
One might doubt whether Napoleon or Canning were the more deficient in good taste; but Americans whose nerves were irritated to fury by the irony of Canning, found these expressions of Napoleon’s love rather absurd than insulting. So little had the mere fact of violence to do with the temper of politics, compared with the sentiments which surrounded it, that Napoleon could seize without notice ten million dollars’ worth of American property, imprisoning the American crews of two or three hundred vessels in his dungeons, while at the same instant he told the Americans that he loved them, that their commerce was within the scope of his policy, and as a climax avowed a scheme to mislead the United States government, hardly troubling himself to use forms likely to conceal his object; yet the vast majority of Americans never greatly resented acts which seemed to them like the exploits of an Italian brigand on the stage. Beyond doubt, Napoleon regarded his professions of love and interest not as irony or extravagance, but as adapted to deceive. A few weeks earlier he sent a message to the Czar of Russia, who asked him to disavow the intention of restoring the kingdom of Poland. “If I should ever sign,” replied Napoleon,[207] “a declaration that the kingdom of Poland shall never be restored, it would be for the reason that I intended to restore it,—a trap I should set for Russia;” and in signing a declaration to the President that his decrees were repealed, he set a trap for the United States, which he baited with professions of love that to a more refined taste would have seemed fatal to his object.
This mixture of feline qualities,—energy, astuteness, secrecy, and rapidity,—combined with ignorance of other natures than his own, was shown in the act with which he concluded his arrangements of Aug. 5, 1810. About a fortnight before, by a secret decree dated July 22, 1810,[208] he had ordered the proceeds of the American cargoes seized at Antwerp and in Dutch and Spanish ports, valued by him at six million dollars, to be turned into the Treasury as a part of his customs revenue devoted to the service of 1809–10. In French ports he held still some fifty ships in sequestration. Cadore’s letter of August 5 mentioned these ships as sequestered,—a phrase implying that they would be held subject to future negotiation and decision, liable to be returned to their owners; yet on the same day Napoleon signed another secret decree[209] which condemned without hearing or judgment all the ships and cargoes declared to be still in sequestration by the letter that could hardly have yet been sent from Cadore’s office. Every vessel which had arrived in French ports between May 20, 1809, and May 1, 1810, suffered confiscation by this decree, which further ordered that the American crews should be released from the dungeons where they were held as prisoners of war, and that from August 5 to November 1, 1810, American ships should be allowed to enter French ports, but should not discharge their cargoes without a license.
The Decree of August 5 was never made public. Armstrong indeed employed the last hours of his stay in Paris in asking whether the French government meant to admit further negotiation about these seizures,[210] and Cadore replied that the law of reprisals was final;[211] but when Albert Gallatin, as minister at Paris some ten years afterward, happened to obtain a copy of the document, he expressed his anger at its secrecy in language such as he used in regard to no other transaction of his public life. “No one can suppose,” he wrote,[212] “that if it had been communicated or published at the same time, the United States would with respect to the promised revocation of the Berlin and Milan Decrees have taken that ground which ultimately led to the war with Great Britain. It is indeed unnecessary to comment on such a glaring act of combined injustice, bad faith, and meanness as the enacting and concealment of that decree exhibits.” These epithets would not have disturbed Napoleon. Politics were to him a campaign, and if his opponents had not the sense to divine his movements and motives, the disgrace and disaster were none of his.
More mysterious than the conduct of Napoleon was that of Armstrong. Contenting himself with whatever the Emperor ordered, he refrained in his despatches from saying more than was necessary for the record. He protected himself from Napoleon’s personal attack by sending to the Duc de Cadore an undated letter,[213] referring to the archives of Cadore’s department for proof that every public measure of the United States had been promptly and officially communicated to the French government; but he wrote home no report of any conference with Cadore, he expressed no opinion as to the faith of the Emperor’s promise, made no further protest against the actual reprisals, and required no indemnity for past spoliations. In fact, no action was asked from him; but he lent himself readily to the silence that was needed. Cadore reported[214] to the Emperor that Armstrong “before his departure wishes to open (engager) none of those difficult questions which he foresees must rise between the two governments, in order to arrive in America without having seen the fading of the glory he attaches to having obtained the Note of August 5.” Too happy in the good fortune that threw an apparent triumph into his hands at the moment when he was ending his diplomatic career in disgust, he felt anxious only to escape before another turn of the wheel should destroy his success. He remained in Paris more than a month after receiving Cadore’s letter of August 5, but reserved for a personal interview whatever information he had to give the President; and his letters, like his despatches, expressed no inconvenient opinions. Sept. 12, 1810, his long and extremely interesting mission ended, and he quitted Paris on his homeward journey, leaving the Legation in charge of Jonathan Russell of Rhode Island. Armstrong’s last official act was to write from Bordeaux a letter to Pinkney at London, declaring that the conditions imposed by Napoleon on the repeal of his decrees were “not precedent, as has been supposed, but subsequent.”[215]
CHAPTER XIII.
While Napoleon labored to reconstruct his system mutilated by American legislation, the Government of Great Britain sank lower and lower toward disappearance, while the star of Spencer Perceval shone alone with dull lustre on the British horizon. When the Portland ministry went to pieces in September, 1809, Perceval became of necessity master of the empire. Canning had quarrelled with him, and refused office except as prime minister. Castlereagh had been so lately disgraced that he could bring only weakness to the Government if he rejoined it. Both Castlereagh and Sidmouth refused to serve with Canning on any terms. The Whigs, represented by Lord Grenville and Lord Grey, were excluded by the King’s prejudices, by their own pledges to the Irish Catholics, and by the great preponderance of Tory opinion in the country. The Duke of Portland was dying; King George himself was on the verge of insanity, and every one supposed that the Prince of Wales, if he became regent, would at once appoint a ministry from among his Whig friends. This stalemate, where every piece on the chessboard stood in the way of its neighbor, and none could move while the King and Spencer Perceval remained, seemed likely to end in the destruction of the British empire. An economist wiser and better educated than Napoleon might easily have inferred, as he did, that with time England must succumb.
Perceval and his remaining friends—Liverpool, Bathurst, Eldon—looked about them for allies. They would not, indeed they could not, surrender the government to others, for no one offered to take it. In the House of Lords they were strong, but in the Commons they had no speaker except Perceval, while the opposition was strengthened by Canning, and Castlereagh could not be safely reckoned as more than neutral. They sought for allies both old and young in the Commons, but their search was almost fruitless. They could find only young Viscount Palmerston, about five-and-twenty years of age, who took the subordinate place of Secretary at War.
Nothing remained but to carry on the government by the Peers, with Perceval as its only important representative in the Commons. The Lord Hawkesbury of 1802, who had become Lord Liverpool at his father’s death, and was actually head of the Home Office, succeeded Castlereagh as head of the War Department. Spencer Perceval took the Duke of Portland’s place as first Lord of the Treasury, retaining his old functions as Chancellor of the Exchequer. These changes brought no new strength into the Cabinet; but Canning’s place at the Foreign Office remained to be filled, and common consent fixed upon one person as alone competent to bring with him to the position a weight of character that could overbalance the losses the Cabinet had suffered.
This person, hitherto unmentioned, was Richard Colley Wesley, or Wellesley, born in Ireland in 1760, eldest son of the first Earl of Mornington, whose younger son Arthur was born in 1769. Another brother, Henry, born in 1773, rose to high rank in diplomacy under the later title of Lord Cowley. In 1809 these three brothers were all actively employed in the public service; but the foremost of the three was the eldest, the Marquess Wellesley, whose reputation still overshadowed that of Arthur, then just called to the peerage Sept. 4, 1809, as Viscount Wellington of Talavera, in reward of his recent battle with Marshal Victor.