History of the English People, Volume VIII / Modern England, 1760-1815

by John Richard Green

Such a policy gave France all that she needed to recover from the shock of her past disasters: it gave her time. Whatever were the crimes and tyranny of her leaders, the country felt in spite of them the value of the Revolution, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. The strength of the revolt in La Vendée was broken. The insurrection in the south was drowned in blood. The Spanish invaders were held at bay at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese were driven from Nice and Savoy. At the close of the year a fresh blow fell upon the struggling country in the revolt of Toulon, the naval station of its Mediterranean fleet. The town called for foreign aid against the government at Paris; and Lord Hood entered the port with an English squadron, while a force of 11,000 men, gathered hastily from every quarter, was despatched under General O'Hara as a garrison. But the successes against Spain and Savoy freed the hands of France at this critical moment: the town was at once invested, and the seizure of a promontory which commanded the harbour, a step counselled by a young artillery officer, Napoleon Buonaparte, brought about the withdrawal of the garrison and the surrender of Toulon. The success was a prelude of what was to come. At the opening of 1794 a victory at Fleurus, which again made the French masters of the Netherlands, showed that the tide had turned. France was united within by the cessation of the Terror and of the tyranny of the Jacobins, while on every border victory followed the gigantic efforts with which she met the coalition against her. The coalition indeed was fast breaking up. Spain sued for peace. Prussia, more intent on her gains in the east than on any battle with the revolution on the west, prepared to follow Spain's example by the withdrawal of her armies from the Rhine. It was only by English subsidies that Austria and Sardinia were still kept in the field; and the Rhine provinces were wrested from the first, while the forces of Sardinia were driven back from the Riviera and the Maritime Alps into the plain of Piedmont. Before the year ended Holland was lost. Pichegru crossed the Waal in midwinter with an overwhelming force, and the wretched remnant of ten thousand men who had followed the Duke of York to the Netherlands, thinned by disease and by the hardships of retreat, re-embarked for England.

Howe's victory.

In one quarter only had the fortune of war gone against the French republic. The victories of Rodney at the close of the strife with America had concentrated English interest on the fleet. Even during the peace, while the army was sacrificed to financial distress, great efforts were made to preserve the efficiency of the navy; and the recent alarms of war with Russia and Spain had ended in raising it to a strength which it had never reached before. But France was as eager as England herself to dispute the sovereignty of the seas, and almost equal attention had been bestowed on the navy which crowded the great harbours of Toulon and Brest. In force as in number of ships it was equal in effective strength to that of England; and both nations looked with hope to the issue of a contest at sea. No battle marked the first year of the war; but, as it ended, the revolt of Toulon gave a fatal wound to the naval strength of France in the almost total destruction of her Mediterranean fleet. That of the Channel however remained unhurt; and it was this which Lord Howe at last encountered, off Brest in 1794, in the battle which is known by the name of the day on which it was fought—The "First of June." The number of ships on either side was nearly the same, and the battle was one of sheer hard fighting, unmarked by any display of naval skill. But the result was a decisive victory for England, and the French admiral, weakened by a loss of seven vessels and three thousand men, again took refuge in Brest.

Break-up of the Coalition.

The success of Lord Howe did somewhat to counteract the discouragement which sprang from the general aspect of the war. At the opening of 1795 the coalition finally gave way. Holland had been detached from it by Pichegru's conquest, and the Batavian republic which he set up there was now an ally of France. In the spring Prussia bought peace at Basle by the cession of her possessions west of the Rhine. Peace with Spain followed in the summer, while Sweden and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland recognized the republic. These terrible blows were hardly met by the success of the Austrian army in relieving Maintz, or by the colonial acquisitions of England. The latter indeed were far from being inconsiderable. Most of the West-Indian Islands which had been held by France now fell into British hands; and the alliance of Holland with the French threw open to English attack the far more valuable settlements of the Dutch. The surrender of Cape Town in September gave England the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the nucleus of what has since grown into a vast southern settlement which is destined to play a great part in the history of Africa. At the close of the year the Island of Ceylon was added to our Indian dependencies. Both of these acquisitions were destined to remain permanently attached to England, though at the moment their value was eclipsed by the conquest of the Dutch colonies in the Pacific, the more famous Spice Islands of the Malaccas and Java. But, important as these gains were in their after issues, they had no immediate influence on the war. The French armies prepared for the invasion of Italy; while in France itself discord came well-nigh to an end. A descent by a force of French emigrants on the coast of Brittany ended in their massacre at Quiberon and in the final cessation of the war in La Vendée; while the royalist party in Paris was crushed as soon as it rose against the Convention by the genius of Napoleon Buonaparte.

Pitt's effort for peace.

But the fresh severities against the ultra-republicans which followed on the establishment of a Directory after this success indicated the moderate character of the new government, and Pitt seized on this change in the temper of the French Government as giving an opening for peace. The dread of a Jacobin propagandism was now all but at an end. In spite of an outbreak of the London mob, whose cries meant chiefly impatience of dear bread, but which brought about a fresh suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the introduction of a Bill "for the prosecution of seditious meetings," the fear of any social disturbance or of the spread of "French principles" in England was fast passing away from men's minds. The new constitution which France accepted in 1795 showed that the tendencies of the French themselves were now rather to order than to freedom. The old grounds for the struggle therefore had ceased to exist; while the pressure of it grew hourly more intolerable. Pitt himself was sick of the strife. The war indeed had hardly begun when he found himself without the means of carrying it on. The English navy was in a high state of efficiency; but the financial distress which followed the American war had brought with it a neglect of the army. The army was not only small, but without proper equipment; and the want of military experience among its soldiers was only equalled by the incapacity of their leaders. "We have no general," Lord Grenville wrote bitterly, "but some old woman in a red riband." Wretched, too, as had been the conduct of the war, its cost was already terrible; for if England was without soldiers she had wealth, and in default of nobler means of combating the revolution Pitt had been forced to use wealth as an engine of war. He became the paymaster of the coalition, and his subsidies kept the allied armies in the field. But the immense loans which these called for, and the quick growth of expenditure, undid all the financial reforms on which the young minister prided himself. Taxation, which had reached its lowest point at the outbreak of the contest, mounted ere a few years were past to a height undreamed of before. The debt rose by leaps and bounds. In three years nearly eighty millions had been added to it, a sum greater than that piled up by the whole war with America, and in the opening of 1796 votes were taken for loans which amounted to twenty-five millions more.

The dogged temper of England.

Nor was this wreck of his financial hopes Pitt's only ground for desiring a close of the war. From the first, as we have seen, he had been keenly sensitive to the European dangers which the contest involved; nor had he shown, even in his moment of social panic, the fanatical blindness of men like Burke to the evils which had produced the revolution, or to the good which it had wrought. But he could only listen in silence while the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord Shelburne of earlier days and the successor of Chatham as the advocate of a more liberal policy, met the rhetoric of Burke by a cool demonstration of the benefit which the recent change had brought to the mass of the French people, and by pointing to the profit which Russia was drawing from the struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs, in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone. Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war with America at the blow which France had dealt England in that hour of her weakness, and a disgust which only slowly grew fainter at her overthrow of every social and political institution that Englishmen held dear. On the dogged temper of the nation at large the failure of the coalition produced little effect. It had no fear of fighting France single-handed, nor could it understand Pitt's suggestion that a time had come for opening negotiations with a view to peace. Public opinion indeed went hotly with Burke in his denunciation of all purpose of relaxing England's hostility against the revolution, a denunciation which was embodied in his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," the last outcry of that fanaticism which had done so much to plunge the world in blood.

The Irish danger.