The Revolution was not a fight between British and Americans, as we and they are apt to think it now, but a British civil war that divided people in Britain as well as in America. In both countries there were two parties, the Government and Opposition, each against the other; the only difference, though a very great one, being that while the Opposition in America took up arms the Opposition in Britain did not. Both countries were then parts of the same British Empire; and so this war was really the link between the other two great civil wars that have divided the English-speaking peoples. Thus there were three civil wars in three successive centuries: the British Civil War in the seventeenth, between Roundhead and Cavalier in England; the British-American Civil War in the eighteenth, between the King's Party Government and the Opposition on both sides of the Atlantic; and the American Civil War in the nineteenth, between the North and South of the United States.
The American Opposition had no chance of winning their Independence, however much they might proclaim it, so long as the Royal Navy held the sea against them. Washington knew this perfectly well; and his written words are there to prove it. The Revolutionists fought well on land. They invaded Canada and took the whole country except the walls of Quebec. They also fought well at sea; and Paul Jones, a Scotsman born, raided the coasts of Great Britain till nurses hushed children by the mere sound of his name.
But no fleet and army based on the New World could possibly keep up a war without help from the Old; because, as we have seen all through Pitt's Imperial War, the Old World was the only place in which enough men, ships, arms, and warlike stores could be found. Stop enough supplies from crossing the Atlantic, and the side whose supplies were stopped would certainly lose. And more than that: whichever side commanded the sea would soon command the land as well. Quebec held out under Carleton till relieved by a fleet in the spring. But, even if Quebec had fallen, the American invaders would have been driven out again by the mere arrival of the fleet. For whichever side lost the use of the St. Lawrence lost the only means of moving, feeding, arming, and reinforcing an army in Canada well enough to stand the strain.
The turn of the tide of fortune came, and only could come, when all the foreign navies in the world took sides against the King's party in this British civil war. France, Spain, and Holland were thirsting for revenge. So when they saw a vile creature like Lord George Germain bungling through a war Pitt never would have made; when they saw British generals half-hearted because belonging to the party that opposed the King's; when they saw how steadfastly Washington fought; and, most of all, when they saw how much the Royal Navy was weakened by the Opposition in Parliament, who stopped a great deal of money from being voted for the Army and Navy lest the King should be too strong against the Americans; when foreigners whose own navies had been beaten by the British saw such a chance, they came in with navies which they had meanwhile been strengthening on purpose to get their revenge.
France, Spain, and Holland all fought on the side of the Revolution, their big navies joining the little one formed by Paul Jones; while Russia, Sweden, Denmark (which then included Norway), Prussia, and the Hansa Towns, all formed the Armed Neutrality of the North against the weakened British Navy. The King's Party Government thus had nine navies against it—four in arms and five in armed neutrality; and this checked the British command of the Atlantic just long enough to make Independence safe for the American Revolutionists.
It did, not, however, stop the Navy from saving the rest of the Empire; for Pitt and the Opposition in the Mother Country, who would not strengthen the Navy against the Americans, were eager to strengthen it against foreign attack. In 1782 Rodney beat the French in the Atlantic, and Hughes beat them in the Indian Ocean; while Gibraltar was held triumphantly against all that France and Spain could do by land and sea together.
CHAPTER XVIII
NELSON
(1798-1805)
Nelson and Napoleon never met; and Wellington the soldier beat Napoleon ten years after Nelson was killed at Trafalgar. Yet it was Nelson's victories that made Napoleon's null and void, thus stopping the third attempt in modern times to win the overlordship of the world. As Drake stopped Philip of Spain by defeating the Armada, as Russell stopped Louis XIV by the battle of La Hogue, as Jellicoe in our own day stopped the Kaiser off the Jutland Bank, so Nelson stopped Napoleon by making British sea-power quite supreme. Century by century the four mightiest warlords of the land have carried all before them until their towering empires reached the sea. But there, where they were strangers, they all met the same Royal Navy, manned by sailors of the only race whose home has always been the sea, and, meeting it, they fell.