Without the walls of Parliament however the nation looked on such a change with dismay. Addington was regarded as a weak and narrow-minded man; and the favour with which the king welcomed him was clue to a consciousness of their common bigotry. Of Lord Hawkesbury, who succeeded Lord Grenville in the conduct of foreign affairs, nothing was known outside the House of Commons. It was with anxiety that England found itself guided by men like these at a time when every hour brought darker news. The scarcity of bread was mounting to a famine. Taxes were raised anew, and yet the loan for the year amounted to five-and-twenty millions. The country stood utterly alone; while the peace of Lunéville secured France from all hostility on the Continent. And it was soon plain that this peace was only the first step in a new policy on the part of the First Consul. What he had done was to free his hands for a decisive conflict with Britain itself, both as a world-power and as a centre of wealth. England was at once the carrier of European commerce and the workshop of European manufactures. While her mines, her looms, her steam-engines, were giving her almost a monopoly of industrial production, her merchant ships sufficed not only to spread her own products through the world, but to carry to every part of it the products of other countries. Though the war had already told on both these sources of wealth, it was far from having told fatally. It had long closed France indeed to English exports, while the waste of wealth in so wide a strife had lessened the buying power of Europe at large. But in Europe the loss was to some extent made up for the moment by the artificial demand for supplies which war creates; the home market still sufficed to absorb a vast quantity of manufactures; and America, which was fast growing into the most important of English customers, remained unaffected by the struggle. Industry had thus suffered but little loss, while commerce believed itself to have greatly gained. All rivals save one had in fact been swept from the sea; the carrying trade of France and Holland alike had been transferred to the British flag, and the conquest of their wealthier settlements had thrown into British hands the whole colonial trade of the world.
League of Neutrals.
To strike at England's wealth had been among the projects of the Directory: it was now the dream of the First Consul. It was in vain for England to produce, if he shut her out of every market. Her carrying trade must be annihilated if he closed every port against her ships. It was this gigantic project of a "Continental System" that revealed itself as soon as Buonaparte became finally master of France. From France itself and its dependencies in Holland and the Netherlands English trade was already excluded. But Italy also was shut against her after the Peace of Lunéville, and Spain not only closed her own ports but forced Portugal to break with her English ally. In the Baltic Buonaparte was more active than even in the Mediterranean. In a treaty with America, which was destined to bring this power also in the end into his great attack, he had formally recognized the rights of neutral vessels which England was hourly disputing; and in her disregard of them he not only saw the means of bringing the northern powers into his system of exclusion, but of drawing on their resources for a yet more decisive blow. He was set upon challenging not only England's wealth but her world-empire; and his failure in Egypt had taught him that the first condition of success in such an enterprise was to wrest from her her command of the seas. The only means of doing this lay in a combination of naval powers; and the earlier efforts of France had left but one naval combination for Buonaparte to try. The Directory had been able to assail England at sea by the joint action of the French fleet with those of Holland and of Spain. But the Spanish navy had been crippled by the battle of Cape St. Vincent, and the Dutch fleet destroyed in the victory of Camperdown. The only powers which now possessed naval resources were the powers of the North. The fleets of Denmark, Sweden, and Russia numbered forty sail of the line, and they had been untouched by the strife. Both the Scandinavian states resented the severity with which Britain enforced that right of search which had brought about their armed neutrality at the close of the American war; while Denmark was besides an old ally of France, and her sympathies were still believed to be French. The First Consul therefore had little trouble in enlisting them in a league of neutrals, which was in effect a declaration of war against England, and which Prussia as before showed herself ready to join.
Russia's designs.
Russia indeed seemed harder to gain. Since Paul's accession she had been the moving spirit in the confederacy which had only been broken up by the victory of Marengo. But the spirit of revolutionary aggression which had nominally roused Paul to action, had, as the Czar believed, been again hushed by the First Consul. Buonaparte had yielded to his remonstrances in preserving the independence of Naples and Sardinia; and with Italian subtlety he now turned the faith in French moderation which these concessions created in the mind of Paul into a dread of the ambition of England and a jealousy of her sovereignty of the seas. But his efforts would have been in vain had they not fallen in with the general current of Russian policy. From the first outbreak of the Revolutionary struggle Russia, as we have seen, had taken advantage of the strife among the Western nations to push forward her own projects in the East. Catharine had aimed at absorbing Poland, and at becoming the mistress of European Turkey. In the first she had been successful, but the second still remained unaccomplished when her empire passed to her son. For a time Paul had been diverted from the task by the turn of affairs in Western Europe, where the victories of the French Republic threatened an utter overthrow of the powers opposed to it, which would have foiled the plans of Russia by bringing about a European union that must have paralysed her advance. The Czar therefore acted strictly in the spirit of Catharine's policy when he stepped in again to feed the strife by raising the combatants to a new equality, and when he withdrew his armies at the very moment that this was done. But successful as his diversion had been, Paul saw that one obstacle remained in the way of his projects upon Turkey. Pitt had never hidden his opposition to the Russian plans. His whole policy at the outbreak of the Revolution had been guided by a desperate hope of binding the powers again together to prevent the ruin of Poland, or of hindering it by a league of England and France alone. Foiled as he had been in these efforts, he was even more resolute to check the advance of Russia on Constantinople. Already her growing empire in India was telling on the European policy of England; and the security of Egypt, of Syria, of Turkey at large, was getting deemed to be essential to the maintenance of her communication with her great dependency. The French descent on Egypt, the attack on Syria, had bound Britain and Turkey together; and Paul saw that an attack on the one would bring him a fresh opponent in the other.
The League broken up.
It was to check the action of Britain in the East that the Czar now turned to the French Consul, and seconded his efforts for the formation of a naval confederacy in the North, while his minister, Rostopchin, planned a division of the Turkish Empire in Europe between Russia and her allies. Austria was to be satisfied with the western provinces of the Balkan peninsula; Russia gained Moldavia, Bulgaria, and Roumelia as far as Constantinople; while Greece fell to the lot of France, whose troops were already on the Italian shores, at a day's sail from the Illyrian coast. A squabble over Malta, which had been blockaded since its capture by Buonaparte, and which surrendered at last to a British fleet, but whose possession the Czar claimed as his own on the ground of an alleged election as Grand Master of the Order of St. John, served as a pretext for a quarrel with England; and at the close of 1800 Paul openly prepared for hostilities. In October he announced an armed neutrality; in December he seized three hundred English vessels in his ports, and sequestrated all English goods found in his Empire. The Danes, who throughout the year had been struggling to evade the British right of search, at once joined this neutral league, and were followed by Sweden in their course. It was plain that, as soon as the spring of 1801 opened the Baltic, the fleets of the three Powers would act in practical union with those of France and Spain. But the command of the seas which such a union threatened was a matter for England of life and death, for at this very moment the Peace of Lunéville left Buonaparte without a foe on the Continent, and able to deal as he would with the whole military resources of France. Once master of the Channel he could throw a force on the southern coast of England which she had no means of meeting in the field. But dexterous as the combination was, it was shattered at a blow. On the first of April 1801 a British fleet of eighteen men-of-war forced the passage of the Belt, appeared before Copenhagen, and at once attacked the city and its fleet. In spite of a brave resistance from the Danish batteries and gunboats six Danish ships were taken, and the Crown Prince was forced to conclude an armistice which enabled the English ships to enter the Baltic, where the Russian fleet was still detained by the ice. But their work was really over. The seizure of English goods and the declaration of war had bitterly irritated the Russian nobles, whose sole outlet for the sale of the produce of their vast estates was thus closed to them; and on the twenty-fourth of March, nine days before the battle of Copenhagen, Paul fell in a midnight attack by conspirators in his own palace. With Paul fell the Confederacy of the North. The policy of his successor, the Czar Alexander, was far more in unison with the general feeling of his subjects; in June a Convention between England and Russia settled the vexed questions of the right of search and contraband of war, and this Convention was accepted by Sweden and Denmark.
French lose Egypt.
The First Consul's disappointment was keen; but he saw clearly that with this dissolution of the Northern alliance the war came virtually to an end. He no longer had any means of attacking Britain save by the efforts of France itself, and even with the aid of Holland and Spain France was at this moment helpless before the supremacy of England at sea. On the other hand the continuance of the struggle would give triumph after triumph to his foes. One such blow had already fallen. Even in the midst of his immense schemes against Britain at home, Buonaparte had not abandoned the hope of attacking her in India. Egypt was needful to such a scheme; and from the first moment of his power he strained every nerve to retain Egypt in the hands of France. Menou, who commanded there, was ordered to hold the country; an expedition was fitted out in the Spanish ports for its relief; and light vessels were hurried from the Italian coast with arms and supplies. But at the very moment of the attack on Copenhagen, a stroke as effective wrecked his projects in the East. England had not forgotten the danger to her dependency; ever since Buonaparte's expedition her fleet had blockaded Malta, the island fortress whose possession gave France a first stepping-stone in any enterprise against it; and the surrender of Malta left her unquestioned mistress of the Mediterranean. From Malta she now turned to Egypt itself. Triumphant as England had been at sea since the opening of the war, her soldiers had proved no match for the French on land. Two expeditions had been sent against Holland, and each had ended in a disastrous retreat. But at this moment England reappeared as a military power. In March 1801 a force of 15,000 men under General Abercromby anchored in Aboukir Bay. Deserted as they were by Buonaparte, the French had firmly maintained their hold on Egypt. They had suppressed a revolt at Cairo, driven back Turkish invaders in a fresh victory, and by native levies and reinforcements raised the number of their troops to 30,000 men. But their army was foolishly scattered, and Abercromby was able to force a landing five days after his arrival on the coast. The French however rapidly concentrated; and on the 21st of March their general attacked the English army on the ground it had won with a force equal to its own. The battle was a stubborn one, and Abercromby fell mortally wounded ere its close; but after six hours' fighting the French drew off with heavy loss; and their retreat was followed by the investment of Alexandria and Cairo, into which Menou had withdrawn his army. All hope however was over. Five thousand Turks, with a fresh division from England and India, reinforced the besiegers; and at the close of June the capitulation of the 13,000 soldiers who remained closed the French rule over Egypt.
