The History of Napoleon Buonaparte

by J. G. Lockhart

On the eastern side of the Peninsula, Blake, advancing with the view of recovering Zaragossa, was met on the 19th of June by Marshal Suchet, Duke of Albufera, and totally routed. The central Spanish army, under Ariezaga, attempted, with equal ill-fortune, to relieve Madrid. King Joseph, accompanied by Soult, Victor, and Mortier, met them at Ocaña on the 19th November, and broke them utterly. In December Girona surrendered to Augereau; and the intrusive King appeared to be in possession of far the greater part of Spain. But his command extended no further than the actual presence of his brother's legions. Wherever they were posted, all was submission; beyond their lines the country remained as hostile as ever. The soldiery of the defeated armies dispersed themselves in small bands, watching every opportunity to surprise detachments and cut off supplies; and, in spite of all their victories, the situation of the invaders became every hour more embarrassing. In Portugal, meanwhile, the English general (created Lord Wellington after the battle of Talaveyra) was gradually organising a native force not unworthy of acting under his banners; and on that side it was obvious that, unless Napoleon made some extraordinary exertions, the French cause was wholly undone.

Portugal was safe; and the character of the British army had been raised by another splendid victory in Spain; but these were trivial advantages compared with what Lord Wellington might have achieved, had his government placed him, as they could easily have done, at the head of an army of 80,000 or 100,000 men, while Napoleon was occupied with the campaign of Essling and Wagram. Instead of strengthening Wellington's hands in an efficient manner, the English cabinet sent 40,000 troops, under the command of the Earl of Chatham, an indolent or incompetent general, to seize the isle of Walcheren, and destroy the shipping and works at the mouth of the Scheld; nor was this ill-judged expedition despatched from Britain until the first of August, three weeks after the decisive battle of Wagram had been fought and won. Lord Chatham took Flushing, and fixed his headquarters at Middleburg; but Bernadotte (Prince of Ponte Corvo) put Antwerp into such a state of defence that the plan of besieging that city was, ere long, abandoned. A pestilence, meantime, raged among the marches of Walcheren; the English soldiers were dying by thousands. The news of the armistice of Znaim arrived; and Lord Chatham abandoned his conquests. A mere skeleton of his army returned to their own country, from the most disastrous expedition which England had undertaken since that of Carthagena, seventy years before.

The announcement of the armistice with Austria put an end, in effect, to all hostile demonstrations on the continent, the Peninsula alone excepted. The brave Schill (as has already been said) was happy enough to fall in the field: his followers, being at last compelled to surrender at Stralsund, were treated as rebels, and died with the constancy of patriots. The Duke of Brunswick, who had by this time obtained considerable successes in Franconia, found himself abandoned, in like manner, to the undivided strength of Napoleon. At the head of a few regiments, whose black uniform announced their devotion to the one purpose of avenging their former sovereign, the Duke succeeded in cutting his way to the Baltic, where some English vessels received him. Germany, in apparent tranquillity, awaited the result of the negotiations of Vienna.

Napoleon, a few days after he returned from Moravia to Schoenbrunn, escaped narrowly the dagger of a young man, who rushed upon him in the midst of all his staff, at a grand review of the Imperial Guard. Berthier and Rapp threw themselves upon him, and disarmed him at the moment when his knife was about to enter the Emperor's body. Napoleon demanded what motive had actuated the assassin. "What injury," said he, "have I done to you?" "To me, personally, none," answered the youth, "but you are the oppressor of my country, the tyrant of the world; and to have put you to death would have been the highest glory of a man of honour." This enthusiastic youth, by name Stabbs, son of a clergyman of Erfurt, was, justly—no doubt—condemned to death, and he suffered with the calmness of a martyr.

Buonaparte led at Schoenbrunn nearly the same course of life to which he was accustomed at the Tuileries; seldom appearing in public; occupied incessantly with his ministers and generals. The length to which the negotiations with Austria were protracted excited much wonder; but he had other business on hand besides his treaty with the Emperor Francis, and that treaty had taken a very unexpected shape.

It was during his residence at Schoenbrunn that a quarrel, of no short standing, with the Pope reached its crisis. The very language of the Consular Concordat sufficiently indicated the reluctance and pain with which the head of the Romish church acquiesced in the arrangements devised by Buonaparte, for the ecclesiastical settlement of France; and the subsequent course of events, but especially in Italy and in Spain, could hardly fail to aggravate those unpleasant feelings. In Spain and in Portugal, the resistance to French treachery and violence was mainly conducted by the priesthood; and the Pope could not contemplate their exertions without sympathy and favour. In Italy, meantime, the French Emperor had made himself master of Naples, and of all the territories lying to the north of the papal states; in a word, the whole of the peninsula was his, excepting only that, narrow central stripe which still acknowledged the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff. This state of things was necessarily followed by incessant efforts on the part of Napoleon to procure from the Pope a hearty acquiescence in the system of the Berlin and Milan decrees; and thus far he at length prevailed. But when he went on to demand that his holiness should take an active part in the war against England, he was met by a steady refusal. Irritated by this opposition, and, perhaps, still more by his suspicion that the patriots of the Spanish Peninsula received secret support from the Vatican, Buonaparte did not hesitate to issue a decree in the following words: "Whereas the temporal sovereign of Rome has refused to make war against England, and the interests of the two kingdoms of Italy and Naples ought not to be intercepted by a hostile power; and whereas the donation of Charlemagne, our illustrious predecessor, of the countries which form the Holy See, was for the good of Christianity, and not for that of the enemies of our holy religion, we, therefore, decree that the duchies of Urbino, Ancona, Macerata, and Camarino, be for ever united to the kingdom of Italy."

The seaports of the papal territory were forthwith occupied by French troops, but Pius remained for some time in undisturbed possession of Rome itself. On his return from Spain, however, Napoleon determined to complete his work in Italy, ere he should begin the inevitable campaign with Austria. General Miollis, therefore, took military possession of Rome in February, 1809; the Pope, however, still remaining in the Vatican, and attended there as usual by his own guards.

On the 17th of May, Napoleon issued, from Vienna, his final decree declaring the temporal sovereignty of the Pope to be wholly at an end, incorporating Rome with the French empire, and declaring it to be his second city; settling a pension on the holy father in his spiritual capacity—and appointing a committee of administration for the civil government of Rome. The Pope, on receiving the Parisian senatus-consultum, ratifying this imperial rescript, instantly fulminated a bull of excommunication against Napoleon. Shortly after some unauthentic news from Germany inspired new hopes into the adherents of the Pontiff; and, disturbances breaking out, Miollis, on pretence that a life sacred in the eyes of all Christians might be endangered, arrested Pius in his palace at midnight, and forthwith despatched him under a strong escort to Savona.

The intelligence of this decisive step reached Napoleon soon after the battle of Wagram, and he was inclined to disapprove of the conduct of Miollis as too precipitate. It was now, however, impossible to recede; the Pope was ordered to be conveyed across the Alps to Grenoble. But his reception there was more reverential than Napoleon had anticipated, and he was soon reconducted to Savona.

This business would, in any other period, have been sufficient to set all Catholic Europe in a flame; and even now Buonaparte well knew that his conduct could not fail to nourish and support the feelings arrayed against him openly in Spain and in Southern Germany, and suppressed, not extinguished, in the breasts of a great party of the French clergy at home. He made, therefore, many efforts to procure from the Pope some formal relinquishment of his temporal claims—but Pius VII. remained unshaken; and the negotiation at length terminated in the removal of His Holiness to Fontainebleau, where he continued a prisoner, though treated personally with respect, and even magnificence, during more than three years:—until, in the general darkening of his own fortunes, the imperial jailer was compelled to adopt another line of conduct.