The Austrian capital now lay exposed to the march of three victorious armies; and the Emperor was at last compelled to release himself from his English obligations, and negotiate in sincerity for a separate peace. Mr. Pitt himself considered the prosecution of the continental war as for the time hopeless. On reading the bulletin of Marengo, he said, "Fold up that map" (the map of Europe); "it will not be wanted for these twenty years."
A definitive treaty was signed at Luneville on the 9th February, 1801; by which the Emperor, not only as the head of the Austrian monarchy, but also in his quality of Chief of the German empire, guaranteed to France the boundary to the Rhine; thereby sacrificing certain possessions of Prussia and other subordinate princes of the empire, as well as his own. Another article, extremely distasteful to Austria, yielded Tuscany; which Napoleon resolved to transfer to a prince of the House of Parma, in requital of the good offices of Spain during the war. The Emperor recognised the union of the Batavian Republic with the French;—and acknowledged the Cisalpine and Ligurian Commonwealths; both virtually provinces of the great empire, over which the authority of the First Consul seemed now to be permanently established.
CHAPTER XVI
Affairs of Naples and of the Pope—The Emperor Paul of Russia—Northern confederacy against England—Battle of Copenhagen—Nelson's Victory—Death of Paul—Expedition to Egypt under Sir Ralph Abercrombie—Battle of Alexandria—Conquest of Egypt—The Flotilla of Boulogne—Negotiations with England—Peace of Amiens.
England alone remained steadfast in her hostility; and, as we shall presently see, the Chief Consul was even able to secure for himself the alliance against her of some of the principal powers in Europe; but before we proceed to the eventful year of 1801, there are some incidents of a minor order which must be briefly mentioned.
It has been already said that the half-crazy Emperor of Russia had taken up a violent personal admiration for Buonaparte, and, under the influence of that feeling, virtually abandoned Austria before the campaign of Marengo. Napoleon took every means to flatter the Autocrat and secure him in his interests. Paul had been pleased to appoint himself Grand Master of the ruined Order of the Knights of St. John. It was his not idle ambition to obtain, in this character, possession of the Island of Malta; and Buonaparte represented the refusal of the English government to give up that stronghold as a personal insult to Paul. Some 10,000 Russian prisoners of war were not only sent back in safety, but new clothed and equipped at the expense of France; and the Autocrat was led to contrast this favourably with some alleged neglect of these troops on the part of Austria, when arranging the treaty of Luneville. Lastly, the Queen of Naples, sister to the German Emperor, being satisfied that, after the battle of Marengo, nothing could save her husband's Italian dominions from falling back into the hands of France (out of which they had been rescued, during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, by the English, under Lord Nelson), took up the resolution of travelling in person to St. Petersburg in the heart of the winter, and soliciting the intercession of Paul. The Czar, egregiously flattered with being invoked in this fashion, did not hesitate to apply in the Queen's behalf to Buonaparte; and the Chief Consul, well calculating the gain and the loss, consented to spare Naples for the present, thereby completing the blind attachment of that weak-minded despot.
At the same time when Nelson delivered Naples from the French, a party of English seamen, under Commodore Trowbridge, had landed at the mouth of the Tiber, marched to Rome, and restored the Pope. The French army, after the great victory which gave them back Lombardy and Piedmont, doubted not that the re-establishment of "the Roman Republic" would be one of its next consequences. But Buonaparte, who had in the interim re-opened the churches of France, was now disposed to consider the affairs of the Pope with very different eyes. In a word, he had already resolved to make use of the Holy Father in the consolidation of his own power as a monarch; and, as the first step to this object, the government of the Pope was now suffered to continue—not a little to the astonishment of the French soldiery, and to the confusion, it may be added, and regret, of various powers of Europe.
The First Consul, meanwhile, proceeded to turn the friendship of the Russian Emperor to solid account. It has never, in truth, been difficult to excite angry and jealous feelings, among the minor maritime powers, with regard to the naval sovereignty of England. The claim of the right of searching neutral ships, and her doctrine on the subject of blockades, had indeed been recognised in many treaties by Russia, and by every maritime government in Europe. Nevertheless, the old grudge remained; and Buonaparte now artfully employed every engine of diplomacy to awaken a spirit of hostility against England, first, in the well-prepared mind of the Czar, and then in the cabinets of Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. The result was, in effect, a coalition of these powers against the mistress of the seas; and, at the opening of the nineteenth century, England had to contemplate the necessity of encountering single-handed the colossal military force of France, and the combined fleets of Europe. To deepen the shadows of her prospects at that great crisis of her history, the people suffered severely under a scarcity of food, in consequence of bad harvests; and the efforts which England made, under such an accumulation of adverse circumstances, must ever be treasured among the proudest of her national recollections.