Napoleon now began to widen his plans. According to the scheme of September 29th, three expeditions were now to set out; the first was to assure the safety of the French West Indies; the second was to recover the Dutch colonies in those seas and reinforce the French troops still holding out in part of St. Domingo; while the third had as its objective West Africa and St. Helena. The Emperor evidently hoped to daze us by simultaneous attacks in Africa, America, and also in Asiatic waters. After these fleets had set sail in October and November, 1804, Ireland was to be attacked by the Brest fleet now commanded by Gantheaume. Slipping away from the grip of Cornwallis, he was to pass out of sight of land and disembark his troops in Lough Swilly. These troops, 18,000 strong, were under that redoubtable fighter, Augereau; and had they been landed, the history of the world might have been different. Leaving them to revolutionize Ireland, Gantheaume was to make for the English Channel, touch at Cherbourg for further orders, and proceed to Boulogne to convoy the flotilla across: or, if the weather prevented this, as was probable in January, he was to pass on to the Texel, rally the seven Dutch battleships and the transports with their 25,000 troops, beat back down the English Channel and return to Ireland. Napoleon counted on the complete success of one or other of Gantheaume's moves: "Whether I have 30,000 or 40,000 men in Ireland, or whether I am both in England and Ireland, the war is ours."[326]
The objections to the September combination are fairly obvious. It was exceedingly improbable that the three fleets could escape at the time and in the order which Napoleon desired, or that crews enervated by long captivity in port would succeed in difficult operations when thrust out into the wintry gales of the Atlantic and the Channel. Besides, success could only be won after a serious dispersion of French naval resources; and the West Indian expeditions must be regarded as prompted quite as much by a colonial policy as by a determination to overrun England or Ireland.[327]
At any rate, if the Emperor's aim was merely to distract us by widely diverging attacks, that could surely have been accomplished without sending twenty-six sail of the line into American and African waters, and leaving to Gantheaume so disproportionate an amount of work and danger. This September combination may therefore be judged distinctly inferior to that of July, which, with no scattering of the French forces, promised to decoy Nelson away to the Morea and Egypt, while the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons proceeded to Boulogne.
The September schemes hopelessly miscarried. Gantheaume did not elude Cornwallis, and remained shut up in Brest. Missiessy escaped from Rochefort, sailed to the West Indies, where he did some damage and then sailed home again. "He had taken a pawn and returned to his own square."[328] Villeneuve slipped out from Toulon (January 19th, 1805), while Nelson was sheltering from westerly gales under the lee of Sardinia; but the storm which promised to renew his reputation for good luck speedily revealed the weakness of his ships and crews.
"My fleet looked well at Toulon," he wrote to Decrès, Minister of Marine, "but when the storm came on, things changed at once. The sailors were not used to storms: they were lost among the mass of soldiers: these from sea-sickness lay in heaps about the decks: it was impossible to work the ships: hence yard-arms were broken and sails were carried away: our losses resulted as much from clumsiness and inexperience as from defects in the materials delivered by the arsenals."[329]
Inexperience and sea-sickness were factors that found no place in
Napoleon's calculations; but they compelled Villeneuve to return to
Toulon to refit; and there Nelson closed on him once more.
Meanwhile events were transpiring which seemed to add to Napoleon's naval strength and to the difficulties of his foes. On January 4th, 1805, he concluded with Spain a treaty which added her naval resources to those of France, Holland, and Northern Italy. The causes that led to an open rupture between England and Spain were these. Spain had been called upon by Napoleon secretly to pay him the stipulated sum of 72,000,000 francs a year (see p. 437), and she reluctantly consented. This was, of course, a covert act of hostility against England; and the Spanish Government was warned at the close of 1803 that, if this subsidy continued to be paid to France, it would constitute "at any future period, when circumstances may render it necessary, a just cause of war" between England and Spain. Far from complying with this reasonable remonstrance, the Spanish Court yielded to Napoleon's imperious order to repair five French warships that had taken refuge in Ferrol from our cruisers, and in July, 1804, allowed French seamen to travel thither overland to complete the crews of these vessels. Thus for some months our warships had to observe Ferrol, as if it were a hostile port.
Clearly, this state of things could not continue; and when the protests of our ambassador at Madrid were persistently evaded or ignored, he was ordered, in the month of September, to leave that capital unless he received satisfactory assurances. He did not leave until November 10th, and before that time a sinister event had taken place. The British Ministry determined that Spanish treasure-ships from South America should not be allowed to land at Cadiz the sinews of war for France, and sent orders to our squadrons to stop those ships. Four frigates were told off for that purpose. On the 5th of October they sighted the four rather smaller Spanish frigates that bore the ingots of Peru, and summoned them to surrender, thereafter to be held in pledge. The Spaniards, nobly resolving to yield only to overwhelming force, refused; and in the ensuing fight one of their ships blew up, whereupon the others hauled down their flags and were taken to England. Resenting this action, Spain declared war on December 12th, 1804.
Stripped of all the rodomontade with which French historians have enveloped this incident, the essential facts are as follows. Napoleon compelled Spain by the threat of invasion to pay him a large subsidy: England declared this payment, and accompanying acts, to be acts of war; Spain shuffled uneasily between the two belligerents but continued to supply funds to Napoleon and to shelter and repair his warships; thereupon England resolved to cut off her American subsidies, but sent a force too small to preclude the possibility of a sea-fight; the fight took place, with a lamentable result, which changed the covert hostility of Spain into active hostility.
Public opinion and popular narratives are, however, fashioned by sentiment rather than founded on evidence; accordingly, Britain's prestige suffered from this event. The facts, as currently reported, seemed to convict her of an act of piracy; and few persons on the Continent or among the Whig coteries of Westminster troubled to find out whether Spain had not been guilty of acts of hostility and whether the French Emperor was not the author of the new war. Undoubtedly it was his threatening pressure on Spain that had compelled her to her recent action: but that pressure had been for the most part veiled by diplomacy, while Britain's retort was patent and notorious. Consequently, every version of this incident that was based merely on newspaper reports condemned her conduct as brutally piratical; and only those who have delved into archives have discovered the real facts of the case.[330] Napoleon's letter to the King of Spain quoted on p. 437 shows that even before the war he was seeking to drag him into hostilities with England, and he continued to exert a remorseless pressure on the Court of Madrid; it left two alternatives open to England, either to see Napoleon close his grip on Spain and wield her naval resources when she was fully prepared for war, or to precipitate the rupture. It was the alternative, mutatis mutandis, presented to George III. and the elder Pitt in 1761, when the King was for delay and his Minister was for war at once. That instance had proved the father's foresight; and now at the close of 1804 the younger Pitt might flatter himself that open war was better than a treacherous peace.