BATTLE OF MARENGO.
In April Moreau defeated Kray in a series of engagements and forced him to retire to Ulm. Bonaparte, who had formed "an army of reserve" at Dijon, crossed the Great St. Bernard in May with 41,000 men, reached Aosta on the 22nd, and entered Milan on June 2. On the 4th Masséna capitulated, and led his half-starved force out of Genoa with the honours of war. It had done its work by keeping the Austrians before the city. The successes of Moreau secured Switzerland and enabled Bonaparte to summon other French divisions, partly composed of detachments from Moreau's army, to enter Italy by the passes of the Simplon and the St. Gothard. Their appearance upset the plans which Melas was making for defence. He met Bonaparte at Marengo on the 14th, and after a hard-fought battle was totally defeated. On the 16th he signed a convention at Alessandria, which left the French masters of the country as far as the Oglio. Hostilities in Germany were suspended on July 9. Bonaparte returned to Paris in triumph after an absence of less than two months. On June 20, before the news of Marengo reached Vienna, Minto signed a convention with Austria which guaranteed the loan to the emperor, and stipulated that neither power should make peace without the consent of the other. Pitt's hopes were defeated; for the time Austria was completely paralysed. The opposition reproached the government with the failure of its plans. The country, it was urged, desired peace; another defeat would reduce Austria to impotence, and France, disengaged from all continental war, would direct her whole strength against England. Parliament remained steadfast in its support of the government.
Bonaparte, anxious to detach Austria from her alliance with England, offered peace to the emperor, who sent an envoy to Paris to find out what terms he proposed. It was a dangerous move, for the English ministers might have interpreted the mission as a negotiation for a separate peace, contrary to the convention of June 20; and Thugut feared that England might take offence and leave Austria to Bonaparte's mercy. The emperor's envoy was in fact persuaded by Talleyrand to sign articles of peace, generally on the basis of the treaty of Campo Formio. The emperor disavowed his unauthorised action. Austria's interests would be best served by a general peace, arranged at a European congress, at which Great Britain should be represented. This was in accordance with the views of the British government, and on August 9 Minto informed the emperor that his court desired to take part in negotiations for a general peace. The emperor proposed a congress at Lunéville in which England should be invited to take part. Bonaparte's design of disuniting Austria from England and treating separately with the emperor was foiled; he could not reject the emperor's proposal, for France was eager for peace. Pitt and Grenville believed that negotiations were certain, and Thomas Grenville was chosen to attend the congress.
But Bonaparte's diplomatic resources were not exhausted. He declared that if the continental armistice with Austria was to be prolonged, it must be supplemented by a naval armistice with Great Britain, and in September he employed an agent named Otto to negotiate this armistice and to propose a separate peace between France and England. Bonaparte's project would have enabled France to revictual Malta and to send supplies and reinforcements to her army in Egypt, and would thus have robbed England of the most powerful means of enforcing her demands in the proposed congress. The king was for rejecting the project absolutely. The cabinet was divided: Dundas and some others were for making a separate peace; Pitt and Grenville were determined to maintain the alliance with Austria, to insist that all negotiations should be for a general peace, and to refuse to throw away the advantages which England derived from her naval supremacy, but, as a speedy termination of the armistice would have been fatal to Austria, they hoped to modify Bonaparte's demands. Pitt, of course, had his way, and the government, after sending Bonaparte a counter-project which he refused, finally rejected his proposal. Bonaparte was enraged and stormed against England's usurpation of the lordship of the sea. Determined to isolate her, he pressed the emperor's ministers to negotiate separately. They foresaw that they might be forced to yield, but so long as they were not assured of advantageous terms, decided to remain united to England; for they were unwilling to stand alone, to lose the money of England, or to risk a possible alliance between England and Prussia.
AUSTRIAN POWER CRUSHED.
While the proposed naval armistice was still in debate, the blockade of Valetta came to an end. England's supremacy in the Mediterranean prevented France from relieving the garrison. The only two ships which remained to France of the fleet defeated in Abukir bay were captured, one of them by Nelson himself. The blockade was kept up until September 15, when the place was surrendered after a siege of two years, and Malta passed into the possession of Great Britain. About the same time the Dutch island of Curaçao put itself under the king's protection. Earlier in the year Goree was surrendered to a British squadron. Elsewhere British ships were less profitably employed. Some attacks on the Breton coast did little damage to the enemy, and brought no material advantage to England. The government employed the troops which should have been sent in the spring to the support of the Austrians in desultory expeditions. In August a considerable force under Sir James Pulteney was sent against Ferrol. After landing his men Pulteney found that the place was too strong to be taken by a coup-de-main, and abandoned the enterprise. An equally abortive attempt was made on Cadiz in October by a force of 22,000 men under Abercromby, then commanding at Minorca, and by the Mediterranean fleet under Keith. The plague was raging in the town, and Keith could not guarantee that, if the troops were landed, the weather might not cut them off from communication with the fleet, and possibly hinder re-embarkation. Abercromby therefore refused to land his troops, and decided to sail off to Gibraltar. He received orders to attack the French in Egypt in co-operation with the grand-vizier. The troops landed in Abukir bay on February 8 and 9, 1801, with results which must be deferred to our next volume.
The armistice in Germany ended on November 28. A strong Austrian army under the archduke John, a general of no experience, held the line of the Inn. The archduke adopted the offensive, crossed the river, attacked the French under Moreau at Hohenlinden on December 3, and was totally defeated, losing ninety-seven guns and 15,000 men, or more, killed, wounded, or prisoners. The Austrians were utterly crushed; the French crossed the Inn and the Salzach without meeting serious opposition. The archduke Charles again took command of the defeated army, and on the 25th signed an armistice at Steyer. Meanwhile Cobenzl, the imperial ambassador, was haggling over terms of peace with Joseph Bonaparte at Lunéville; he refused to negotiate officially without the participation of England, and at last proposed that if a treaty was made, it should not be announced until after March 10 when the Anglo-Austrian alliance would lapse. The battle of Hohenlinden brought the alliance to a premature end. The emperor informed the British court that he was no longer able to maintain the alliance, and gave Cobenzl authority to sign preliminaries independently of Great Britain. The splendid achievement of Macdonald, who led the "second army of reserve" from the Grisons across the Splügen, and the subsequent success of the French under Brune, who forced the passage of the Mincio and crossed the Adige, enabled Bonaparte to dictate his own terms to Austria. By the treaty of Lunéville, signed on February 9, 1801, Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine were ceded to France, and the line of the Adige was made the Austrian boundary in Italy; the grand-duchy of Tuscany was to be transferred to the house of Parma, and Modena annexed to the Cisalpine republic, and the independence of the Batavian, Helvetian, Cisalpine, and Ligurian republics was acknowledged by Austria; they remained practically under French domination.
In addition to the loss of her ally, new dangers threatened England in the later part of the year. They arose from the animosity of the tsar. He was angered by England's alliance with Austria, and by the certainty that his hostile attitude would prevent her from handing over Malta to him; for though the government would have ceded the island to him as grand-master of the knights, if he had continued to co-operate with England, it was not bound to do so by treaty, and would not cede it to a sovereign who was fast becoming an open enemy. Paul was greatly enraged, and on February 1, 1800, wrote to Vorontsov, his minister in England, desiring that Whitworth (created Lord Whitworth in March) should be recalled, as he did not want "liars as ministers at his court".[308] He refused a passport to Whitworth's messenger in March, and behaved, Whitworth wrote, in the way which showed that he was "literally not in his senses".[309] At last, apparently on April 1, he demanded Whitworth's recall.[310] After long delay Whitworth obtained a passport and returned to England, leaving the embassy to a chargé d'affaires, who was peremptorily dismissed by Paul, and left Russia with the embassy in June. Bonaparte was quick to take advantage of Paul's anger against England. After some overtures to him, begun as early as March,[311] he proposed in July to restore to him 6,000, and, later, a larger number of Russian prisoners taken in Holland and Switzerland, and suggested ceding to him Malta, which was then hard pressed by the British fleet. Paul was delighted, and made arrangements for garrisoning Valetta; but the place was surrendered to Great Britain, and the British government would not part with it.
THE ARMED NEUTRALITY.
Paul had already laid his hand on the weapon forged by his mother Catherine in 1780, an armed neutrality of the Baltic powers. The war put many difficulties in the way of neutral commerce. England's maritime supremacy gave the trade of Europe into her hands. For her own purposes she encouraged neutral trade with herself to the great profit of those who engaged in it, but she placed rigorous restrictions on the trade of neutrals with her enemy. France, in a more lawless fashion, had attempted to destroy neutral trade with England, but had only succeeded in driving the ships of neutral states from her own ports.[312] England could enforce her system in every sea. She refused to allow that an enemy's goods were covered by a neutral flag, and insisted that naval stores were contraband of war, and that no trade should be carried on with a port of which she declared a blockade. In 1798 Sweden and Denmark adopted the plan of sending their merchant ships under convoy to exempt them from search. Paul saw his opportunity in the annoyance which the British system caused to neutral states, and in May and June, 1800, invited Sweden and Denmark to resist it. In July a Danish frigate, the Freya, with a convoy was stopped by British ships in the Channel; her captain refused to allow the ships under his convoy to be searched, and after a short resistance the Freya was captured and taken into the Downs. The government despatched Whitworth to Copenhagen to remonstrate on this act of war on the part of Denmark, and enforced his representations by sending a squadron into the Sound.