A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

{331}

CHAPTER LXII.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

[Sidenote: 1793-1815—The genius of the great Bonaparte]

Nothing in the history of the world is quite as wonderful as the history of the first Napoleon. No other man ever rose from so little to so much, ever played a greater part in the eyes of the civilized world, was more monstrous in his triumphs or more tragic in his fall. Everything connected with his strange career was distorted, exaggerated, seemingly out of all proportion to the familiarities, the conventionalities, and even the possibilities of existence. As the ancient Greeks, in their sculpture, for the delineation of their gods permitted themselves the use of the heroic size and made their immortals and their demi-gods more than common tall, and more than common comely, so might the modern historian seem privileged in the use of a superlative style in dealing with a life so phenomenal, so unbounded by the average horizon, so ungoverned by the ordinary laws. And yet no more is needed than the cold statement of the stages in that great story, of the steps which conducted to the summit of the pyramid only to be descended on the other side. Such a statement is itself the sermon on an earthly glory that was almost unearthly in the vastness of its aims and of its gains, and on a humiliation that restored humanity to reason and reaffirmed the inexorable lesson. As the mere names of battles on the commemorative arch appeal to the memories, the ambitions, and the passions of a military race with a monumental emphasis that is not to be rivalled by the painter or writer, so a few simple words serve to contrast with a simplicity that is in itself a pomp the crowns and the catastrophes of that amazing visitation. "Corsica," "St. Helena," "Brumaire," "Moscow," "Toulon," {332} "Waterloo." The chronicle of the great conqueror is written in little in the names of two islands, two battles, and two towns.

[Sidenote: 1803-15—England's fear of Napoleon]

To Frenchmen, even to the Frenchmen who are most opposed to him, Napoleon must always be an object for gratitude and for admiration. The most passionate champion of the Bourbon lilies and the doctrine of the divine right of kings cannot refuse to recognize that Napoleon Bonaparte gave to France a greater military glory than she had ever known or ever dreamed of before. The most devout disciple of the principles of '89, the fieriest apostle of the Revolution that went down into the dust before the cunning of Barras and the cannon of the Corsican adventurer, is obliged to admit the splendid services that Napoleon Bonaparte rendered to his adopted country. The one antagonist confesses that the Napoleonic eagles flew with the length of flight and the strength of wing of the Roman eagles. The other antagonist sees with approval the Code Napoléon and the Order of the Legion of Honor, the Simplon Road and the Canal of St. Quentin, the encouragement given to arts, to letters, and to commerce, the reorganization of finance and the reconstitution of the army. But to the average Englishman of that time, and for long afterwards, Napoleon was first and last and always the implacable enemy of Great Britain. From the day of Toulon to the day of Waterloo, Bonaparte was the Big Bogey of England; always either fighting against her openly or plotting against her secretly, always guided by one purpose, always haunted by one hope—the conquest of a country that had learned to look upon herself as unconquerable. Pitt, who hated war, was destined to play the uncongenial part of a War Minister, with one short interval, for the rest of his life, and to devote his genius and his energy to a life-and-death struggle with the soldier of fortune who was yesterday the hero of Italy, to-day First Consul, to-morrow to be Emperor of the French. The story of Pitt's life, for the rest of Pitt's life, is the story of a struggle against Napoleon, a struggle maintained under difficulties and disadvantages that might well have {333} broken a strong man's heart, and that seemed to end in disaster when the strong man's heart was broken.

It looked for long enough as if nothing could withstand the military genius or sate the ambition of Napoleon. On his sword sat laurel victory, and smooth success was strewn before his feet. He overran Egypt, and dreamed of rivalling the Eastern conquests of Alexander. The Kingdoms of Europe crumpled up before him. On land he seemed to be little less than invincible. England was only safe from him because England held the supremacy of the sea. When the war with France began England was blessed with an effective navy, and England's fleet was England's fortune in the days when the conqueror of a continent was the nightmare of an island. A monstrous regiment of caricaturists were painting themselves into fame by fantastic and ferocious presentations of the man who was so fiercely hated because he was so greatly dreaded. Some of these caricatures are pitifully ignoble, some in their kind are masterpieces; all are animated by a great fury that is partly the outcome of a great fear. For years that fear was always present; for years it was always well within the bounds of possibility that the fear might be realized in a great national catastrophe. In every coast town of England men volunteered and drilled and manned defences, and scanned with anxious eyes the horizon for the sails that were to fulfil a menace more terrible than the menace of the Armada. England's military fame had dwindled on the battle-fields of Europe; England's strength at home was as nothing compared to the strength that France could employ against her if once France could obtain a landing on her shores. Napoleon had declared scornfully that the country with the few millions of men must give way to the country with many millions of men. All that he needed to reduce England, as he had reduced so many other of the kingdoms of the earth, was to place his armed majority where it could act with overwhelming force against an armed minority. Only one thing lay between him and his purpose, but that one thing was the navy of England. Napoleon knew that if he had but {334} command of the Channel for a very few hours the landing of which he had dreamed, and for which he had schemed so long, would be a reality, and a march on London as easy as a march on Vienna. But he never got those few hours' command of the sea. Perhaps no greater monument of human vanity exists than the medal which Napoleon, madly prophesying, caused to be struck in commemoration of the conquest of England. Perhaps no pages of all the pages of history are more splendid than those which record the triumphs and the glories of the English fleet in the mortal struggle with France. When the great war began it was well for England that her navy was in effective condition; it was perhaps better still that the traditions of her navy were rich with heroic deeds, examples splendid to emulate, hard to surpass, but which, however, the sailors of King George the Third were destined to surpass.

[Sidenote: 1797—Mutinies in the British Navy]

Yet the conditions of life under which the English sailor lived were scarcely of a kind to foster the serene, austere virtues of patriotism and heroism. The English sailor was often snared into the active service of his country sorely against his will by means of the odious instrument for recruiting known as the press-gang. His existence on board the mighty and beautiful men-of-war was a life that at its best was a life of the severest hardship, and that at its worst was hard indeed to endure. He and his fellows were herded together under conditions of indescribable filth, squalor, and discomfort, often foolishly ill-fed, often cruelly ill-treated, often the victims of intolerable tyranny from brutal superiors. It is sometimes little short of marvellous that the sailors on whose faith the safety of England depended should have proved so faithful, so cheerful, so desperately brave. There was, indeed, a moment when the faith of some of them failed, and when the safety of England was in greater jeopardy than it had been in since the crescent of the Armada was reported off Plymouth or the Dutch ships lay in the Medway. While the war with France was still in its gloomy dawn the unwisdom of treating British sailors worse than beasts of burden came near to wrecking the kingdom. In 1797 the crews {335} of very many of the King's ships were exasperated by ill-treatments and injustices of many kinds, exasperated most of all by the fatal folly of long arrears of pay—a folly which in France, but eight years earlier, had been one of the most powerful factors in aiding the spread of the Revolution. There came a point when the sense of injury seemed too hard to bear, and England was startled by the news of a mutiny at Spithead. But the mutiny, if alarming, was kept within moderate bounds and under control by the mutineers; it was temperately met and temperately dealt with by Lord Howe, and it soon came to an end. It was immediately followed by a far more alarming mutiny which broke out among the ships at the Nore. This mutiny, headed by a seaman named Parker, who proved himself a bold and daring spirit, swelled swiftly to serious proportions. Londoners saw the mouth of their river blockaded by the war-ships of England, saw their capital city fortified against the menaces of the men they relied upon as their saviors. Admiral Duncan, busily engaged in keeping a Dutch fleet cooped up in the river Texel, suddenly beheld almost the whole of his squadron desert him and sail away to join Parker and his fellow-mutineers at the Nore. It was one of the gravest crises in English history, one of the greatest perils that England had to face during the whole of the French war. But the danger was weathered, the peril overcome. The Government faced the dangers of mutiny as firmly as they had faced the dangers of the war. Whatever the provocation, mutiny at such a moment was a national crime. It flickered out as tamely as it blazed up fiercely. Parker and some of his fellow-conspirators were hanged, strong men dying unhappily, and once again England had only her foreign foes to reckon with. Over away by the Texel stout-hearted Duncan, with only his flagship and two frigates to represent the sea power of England, met the difficulty with a shiftiness worthy of Ulysses. Through all his long hours of loneliness he kept on gallantly signalling away to an imaginary fleet, and the Dutchmen in the Texel little dreamed that they were held in check by a deserted admiral {336} upon a desolate sea. When at last they emerged, Duncan's danger was over; his faithless vessels had returned to their faith, and the crushing victory of Camperdown consoled one of the bravest of the brave for an agony unrivalled in the story of the sea.