A History of England, Period III. Constitutional Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

That war they declared on the 8th of February, and by thus forestalling what must have been sooner or later the action of the English ministry, saved them from much difficulty. For there was considerable difference of opinion as to what should be the casus belli. England was pledged to neutrality, and was bound to France by a close commercial treaty. The only two grounds on which, technically, war could be declared, were the opening of the Scheldt and the destruction of the balance of power by the appropriation of Savoy. England being under distinct pledge not to interfere with the internal condition of France, neither the massacres of September, the establishment of the Republic, nor the death of the King, could with any justice be alleged as a ground of war. The appropriation of Savoy was an evident fact, but it was very plausibly urged that England, being in a state of professed neutrality, had entirely disregarded the invasion of France by the great Eastern powers, and had allowed to pass, without observation, the second partition of Poland. The opening of the Scheldt was no doubt contrary to treaties with Holland which England had guaranteed, but it was very reasonably urged that England was not called upon to plunge into a war unless Holland requested her to do so, and Holland remained studiously quiet. The guarantee of the treaty had been to save Holland from war; it might well seem a distortion of duty to force Holland into war for the preservation of the treaty. There can be no doubt that the Opposition was right in asserting that the war was declared against opinion; the point in which they were wrong was this, that they did not recognize the fact that opinion grown to a religion, a religion become propagandist in its nature, and that propagandist religion in arms was the greatest social danger which could threaten the world. Pitt and Burke saw this; the whole body of Tories and conservative Whigs dimly felt it. But the trammels of ages of diplomacy were too strong to allow of the fact being openly recognized. It was then with joy that the ministry found themselves released from their difficulties by the French declaration of war.

French successes in the campaign of 1792-3, on the Continent,

When England engaged in the war a campaign had already been fought to the entire disadvantage of the allies. The close of the year 1792 had seen the retirement of the allies from French soil, the battle of Jemmappes, and the occupation of Belgium and Savoy. The accession of England, Spain and Holland to the coalition so far invigorated it that its members believed that a campaign of a few months would complete their work; for dangers surrounded the French Convention on all sides. Dumouriez, a member of the Girondin party, displeased with the conduct of the Jacobin Convention, was meditating defection; the excesses of the governing party in Paris had aroused all the slumbering loyalty of France; La Vendée was in arms for constitutional monarchy and the Catholic religion; and both at Lyons and Toulon the reaction was for the moment triumphant. Dumouriez' treason had an immediate effect. Directly upon the declaration of war he invaded Holland, but seeking rather popularity with his army and the prestige of victory than the success of the plans of Government, he turned aside from Holland, and risked a battle at Neerwinden on the Gheet, in which he suffered a complete defeat from the Prince of Saxe-Coburg; and thus as a defeated general, and without his army, he gave himself up to the Austrians. His defeat and defection allowed the allies to advance along the whole frontier. But their movements were dilatory; instead of marching upon Paris they wasted their time in taking Mayence, Condé, and Valenciennes; they even committed the mistake of binding the captured troops to refrain from war only against themselves; they were therefore available to suppress the insurrection in La Vendée, and the troops hitherto employed there could be sent to the eastern frontier. The same want of energy continually marked the progress of the allies. The Prussians and Austrians were in fact too jealous of each other, and too much bent upon their interests nearer home to act with vigour. Time was again wasted in sieges. While the Austrians sat down before Cambrai, the Duke of York with the English troops besieged Dunkirk. Their communications were kept open by the Dutch at Menin and Hoondschoote. But the French army, under the vigorous management of the Jacobins, and guided by the military genius of Carnot, was no longer to be trifled with; Houchard fell upon the weak position of the Dutch, and York was driven to a disastrous defeat with the loss of all his artillery. The success was indeed only momentary; a panic seized the French troops, and they fell back to Lille, thus affording the allies an opportunity of advancing to the attack of the fortress of Maubeuge, which closed the road to Paris; but Jourdan, who had succeeded Houchard, now put in practice Carnot's principles. Hastily gathering 50,000 men, he fell upon half that number of Austrians, and completely defeated them at Wattigny. Success had also attended the French against the Prussians on the Upper Rhine. There, too, the terrible rigour of the new Government had restored the aspect of affairs. St. Just and Lebas had appeared as conventional commissioners in Alsace, bringing terror with them. The beaten armies were supplied and organized. Two young generals of the revolutionary school, Hoche and Pichegru, were placed in command, and the tide of victory was turned; the Prussians had to fall back, compromising the advanced position of the Austrians, and before the close of the year the French army, which had begun the campaign with a series of disasters, found itself victorious along the whole frontier line.

and against the royalists in France.

The Convention had also been successful in its wars in the interior of France. After six weeks of bombardment, on the 9th of October, Lyons yielded, without conditions, to be given up to the fearful cruelty of Collot d'Herbois; and the victorious troops hurried southwards to besiege Toulon, which had placed itself in the hands of the English, and had admitted the allied fleet to its roadstead. The genius of Bonaparte is said to have secured its capture. He saw that one fort called the Equilette commanded the roadstead, and that its possession would oblige the English, who were the soul of the defence, to withdraw. The capture of the fort answered his expectation; Lord Hood, without making terms for the inhabitants, collected such of the royalists as could crowd on board his ships, and sailed away, having first set fire to all the stores, and to forty ships of war which were in the harbour (Aug. 27, 1793). The insurrection of La Vendée had also been suppressed. Intrusted at first to ignorant men, with no claim to command except the strength of their revolutionary principles, the Convention troops had been everywhere defeated. But when Kleber was put in practical command the course of victory changed. Terribly defeated, and with all their chiefs of importance mortally wounded, the insurgents determined to try the fortune of war upon the other side of the Loire. They marched northwards towards Laval, defeated their pursuers, and had they made common cause with the Bretons might still have been successful. But trusting to help from England, which never came, they undertook a fruitless assault upon Granville in Normandy. Thinking themselves betrayed, and longing for their homes, the ill-organized mass of peasants insisted on being led southwards: even then there was some life in them. They defeated the republican General Rossignol and threw him back upon Rennes; but failing in an attack upon Angers, they marched pointlessly towards Le Mans. They were there received with terrible slaughter by Westermann, Kleber and Marçeau; 18,000 men, women and children were killed, and the rest fled, pursued by the pitiless Westermann. The fugitives reached the Loire, fought one final battle at Savenay near its mouth, where they were all, with the exception of some eight or ten thousand men, either put to death or captured.

Pitt's difficulty in keeping up the coalition.

Thus revolutionary France had proved itself no contemptible enemy to the united troops of Europe, and established its rule unquestioned in France. It was plain that all hope of an easy subjugation of France was over, and it was with the greatest difficulty that Pitt was able to keep the coalition together; the eyes of Prussia were eagerly bent upon Poland, an easier prey than France. Of increase of territory England had no hope; the war had been forced on her, and was honestly a war of opinion. But any cessation of her efforts would have placed her in a worse position than when the war began, and Pitt and the upper classes of England were not blind to the fact that the occupation of the continental nations in the great war afforded England immense advantages both at sea and in the colonies; it was worth making great efforts to gain the undisputed mastery of the sea both in commerce and in arms. Nor did the large sums of money, raised chiefly by way of loan, appear so ruinous as they really were. The effect of large loans is to increase the wealth of the capitalist at the expense of the working man; nor, as the chief weight of the accumulating taxation falls on posterity, does it become immediately evident. Thus supplied with almost unlimited means, Pitt succeeded in keeping up the coalition, taking into English pay, it is almost true to say, the whole of the Prussian army, and doing nearly as much for the Austrians.

Continued success of the French in 1794.

Pitt's energy was equalled by that of France, and the Convention had the additional advantage of being free from constitutional rules. Vast conscriptions filled their armies, forced requisitions supplied them with arms and equipments. It was with the army of the North, 160,000 strong, under Pichegru, that the English had most to do. On each side the armies were divided into three divisions, and the duty of marching with 100,000 men on Paris was intrusted to Coburg. Defeated in the centre, the French had met with unexpected success on the left, Clairfait, the Austrian general, having been twice beaten at Moucron and at Courtray. Upon this, Pichegru almost destroyed his centre to strengthen his wings, and the threefold manœuvres became twofold. The key of the campaign was the possession of the Sambre; the Austrians lay in an advancing angle with their left upon that river from Mons to Charleroi. If the French could cross the Sambre they would be virtually in the rear of the Austrians. To this point, therefore, the Commissioners of the Convention, St. Just and Lebas, repaired, and attempted to inspire the troops with something of their own enthusiasm. Again and again the French were driven back. But Carnot's plan of massing troops was at length employed; the greater part of the army, which under Jourdan had been facing the Prussians on the Moselle, was turned northward, and Jourdan took command of 100,000, well known as the army of the Sambre and Meuse, just as the Commissioners had been driven back for the fifth time behind the river. After a sixth failure, the Commissioners insisting upon a seventh effort, the river was successfully crossed, and on the heights of Fleurus a battle was fought in which, though it was not completed, the Austrians were practically defeated. Step by step the English and the Austrians retired, the one towards Holland, the other towards the Rhine. By July the English were behind Breda, the Austrians beyond the Meuse. Want of supplies checked the French advance for a few weeks, but by October the English were driven into the corner between the Yssel and the Rhine, and the army of the Sambre and Meuse had captured Cologne and Coblenz. The occupation of Belgium by the French compelled the Prussians further south also to fall behind the Rhine, the left bank of which was thus in possession of the French army from Basle to the sea. Even south of that point successes had been won. The Sardinian position of Saorgio had been turned, and the passes of the Alps were opened to the French, who were thus in a position to invade Italy on the one hand and Holland on the other. The lateness of the season, and the wretched state of the equipment and commissariat, might have induced the French to be satisfied with these conquests, and few armies would have thought of facing an unusually severe winter shoeless and in rags, for to such a plight had the bad management of the Revolutionary Government brought them. But to this army of enthusiasts the winter was but a useful ally for the conquest of Holland, where a strong feeling in their favour already existed among that large section of the people, who had seen with anger their attempted Revolution of 1787 suppressed by the arms of Prussia, and to whom the Government of the Stadtholder was very distasteful. The failure of the preceding campaign had obliged Pitt to insist upon the recall of the Duke of York, much to the King's displeasure, and Pichegru now found himself opposed to General Walmoden, the Hanoverian commander. But of opposition there was really none. The lines of the three great rivers, the Meuse, the Waal and the Lech, were abandoned without a fight, and crossed by the French, either upon the ice or by means of pontoons; and finally Walmoden left Holland to its fate, and retreated across the Yssel and the Ems to embark his army safely in Bremen. The The French capture Amsterdam and the Dutch fleet. 1795. Stadtholder had already fled from the Hague and taken refuge in England. Amsterdam was occupied by the French without difficulty, the ragged regiments waiting patiently in the bitter snow in the streets of the rich city till their quarters were arranged for them without the least attempt at disorder. A striking finish was put to the campaign by the capture of the Dutch fleet in the Texel. The ships were ice-bound, and fell into the hands of a regiment of cavalry, who galloped across the ice to secure them. Holland was at once erected into a republic upon the French model.

Indirect advantages gained by England.