A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 15

Abuse and invective were not confined to Burke nor to the side which Burke represented. Warren Hastings, or those who acted for Warren Hastings, employed every means in their power to blacken the characters of their opponents and to hold them up to public ridicule and to public detestation. The times were not gentle times for men engaged in political warfare, and the companions of Hastings employed all the arts that the times placed at their disposal. Burke and Sheridan, and those who acted with Burke and Sheridan, were savage enough in the tribune, but they did not employ the extra-tribunal methods by which their enemy retaliated upon them.

Hastings is scarcely to be blamed, considering duly the temper of his age, for doing everything that party warfare permitted against his opponents. He was fighting as for his life; he was fighting for what was far dearer to him than life--for life, indeed, he had ever shown a most soldierly disregard; he was fighting for an honorable name, for the reward of a lifetime devoted to the interests of his country, as he understood those interests; he was fighting for fame as against infamy, and he fought hard and he {288} fought after the fas.h.i.+on of the time in which he lived. The newspaper, the pamphlet, the lampoon, the caricature, the acidulated satire, the envenomed epigram, all were used, and used with success, against the promoters of the impeachment.

The caricatures were not all on one side, but the most numerous and the most effective were in favor of the impeached statesman. If the adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a cla.s.sical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of Cicero and Verres, the friends of Verres replied by the pencil of Gillray, representing Hastings as the savior of India defending himself heroically against a.s.sa.s.sins with the faces of Burke and of Fox. As the interest in the trial flagged the caricatures grew fewer and fewer, to revive a little at the close of the case. The popular view of the trial was then represented fairly enough by a large print called "The Last Scene of the Manager's Farce," in which Hastings was represented as rising in glory from the clouds of calumny, while Burke and Fox are represented witnessing with despair the failure of their protracted farce, and the crafty face of Philip Francis peeped from behind a scene where he was supposed to be playing the part of the prompter--"no character in the farce, but very useful behind the scenes," a description which sums up smartly enough the part that Philip Francis played in the whole transaction from first to last.

[Sidenote: 1818--Death of Hastings]

The eve of Hastings's life was as peaceful as its noon and day had been stormy. The proconsul became a country squire; the ruler of an empire, the autocrat of kings, soothed his old age very much after the fas.h.i.+on of Diocletian and of Candide, in the planting of cabbages. For three-and-twenty years he dwelt at Daylesford, happy in his wife, happy in his friends, happy in his health, in his rustic tastes, in his simple pleasures, in his tranquil occupation. He and his wife often visited London, but Hastings seems to have been always happiest in the country, and he gradually declined into extreme old age with all the grace and dignity of a Roman gentleman, loved by his {289} friends, dearly loved by those who were young. Once in those long quiet years, after the death of Pitt, Hastings, to please his wife, pleaded for public reparation of the wrong which he believed had been done him.

Grenville professed every willingness to grant him a peerage, but refused to entertain the idea of inducing the Commons to reverse their former judgment. On those terms Hastings declined the peerage. The nearest approach to anything like public consolation for his sorrows came to him in 1813, when, at the age of eighty, he came once more to the Bar of the House of Commons, this time to give evidence on the question of renewing the Charter of the East India Company. By both Houses, Commons and Lords alike, the old man was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, saluted with rapturous applause on his arrival, with reverential salutations on his departure. In 1818 the health which he had preserved so well till then broke, and he died after some severe suffering on August 22 in that year, and was laid in the earth that he had always loved so well.

One of the latest acts of his life was to appeal to the Court of Directors to make some provision for his wife, by extending to her the annuity that had been accorded to him. They gave, says his most devoted biographer, no more heed to his dying entreaties than they would have given to the whine of a self-convicted beggar. Yet surely Hastings had deserved well of the East India Company. His faults had been committed in their service and had given them, not himself, wealth and power. But England is not always grateful to her servants. It is not wonderful, says Sir Alfred Lyall, that Hastings's application failed entirely, "remembering that even Lord Nelson's last testamentary appeal on behalf of a woman--'the only favor I ask of my King and my country at the moment when I am going to fight their battle'--had been rejected and utterly disregarded." Mrs. Hastings survived her husband for some years, and was over ninety years of age when she died.

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CHAPTER LX.

THE CHANGE OF THINGS.

[Sidenote: 1789--The political condition of France]

The establishment of the American republic meant something more for England than the loss of her fairest colonies, and meant much more for Europe than the establishment of a new form of government in the New World. While the United States were acclaiming Was.h.i.+ngton as their first President and rejoicing over the excellence of their carefully framed Const.i.tution, the principles which had elected the one and had created the other were working elsewhere to unexpected and mighty issues. French gentlemen of rank and fortune, fired by a philosophic admiration for liberty, had fought and fought well for the American colonists. When the revolt had become a revolution, and the revolution a triumph, the French gentlemen went back to France with their hearts full of love and their lips loud in praise for the young republic and its simple, splendid citizens. The doctrines of liberty and equality, which had been so dear to the Philosophers and the Encyclopaedists, were now being practically applied across the Atlantic, and the growth of their success was watched by the eager eyes of the wisest and the unwisest thinkers in France.

Within five years from the time when the American army was disbanded French political philosophy found itself making astonis.h.i.+ng strides towards the realization of its cherished ideals. It had long felt the need of some change in the system of government that had prevailed in France, but its desires had seemed dim as dreams until the success of a handful of rebellious colonists in a distant country had made the spirit of democracy an immediate force in the life and the thought of the world.

Undoubtedly the condition of France was bad. {291} The feudal system, or what was left of the feudal system, worn out, degraded, and corrupt, was rapidly reducing France to financial, physical, and political ruin. It is no part of the business of this history to dwell upon the conditions prevailing in France towards the close of the eighteenth century, conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with the sovereign for its apex, with the n.o.bility, a remnant of antique feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the unprivileged ma.s.ses who were the people of France. In the hands of the few who had the happiness to be "born," or who otherwise belonged to the privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comte. Such a system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes.

The conditions under which the vast ma.s.s of the French people lived, struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292} for the benefit of a n.o.bility whose corruption was only rivalled by its worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the Mount and the way to Calvary.

But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech were beginning, very gradually, to a.s.sert themselves and to make their influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers; successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the seasoned const.i.tution of monarchical England to the as yet green const.i.tution of republican America.

[Sidenote: 1789--Revival of the States-General in France]

Those Englishmen whose tastes and sympathies induced them to keep in touch with political opinion in France, and to watch with interest the spread of ideas which they themselves held dear, noted with approval many remarkable {293} signs of activity across the Channel. While the strain upon the false financial system of France had become so great that the attempt to stop the hole in the money chest broke the spirit of finance minister after finance minister, a feeling in favor of some change in the system that made such catastrophes possible seemed to be on the increase in educated and even in aristocratic circles. Many Englishmen of that day knew France, or at least Paris, fairly well. If Pitt had paid the French capital but a single visit, Fox was intimately acquainted with it, and Walpole was almost as familiar with a superficial Paris as he was with a superficial London. Dr. Johnson, not very long before the time of which we write, had visited Paris with his friends the Thrales, and had made the acquaintance of a brewer named Santerre. Arthur Young travelled in France as he travelled in England and in Ireland. On the other hand, Frenchmen who were soon to be conspicuous advocates of change were not unknown on the English side of the Channel. Mirabeau was known in London--not too favorably--and the cousin of the French King, the Duke de Chartres, afterwards Duke of Orleans, had moved in London society and was to move there again. So when educated Englishmen heard that Lafayette had demanded the revival of the States-General, unused and almost forgotten these two centuries, they knew that the friend of Was.h.i.+ngton was not likely to ask for impossibilities. When the Duke of Orleans set himself openly in opposition to the King, his cousin, they recognized a significance in the act, and when Mirabeau a.s.serted himself as the champion of a growing agitation in favor of an oppressed and unrepresented people they remembered the big, vehement man who had pa.s.sed so much of his life in prisons and had played the spy upon the Prussian Court. Gradually prepared for some change in the administrative system of France, they were not prepared for the rapid succession of changes that followed upon the formal convocation of the States-General in the spring of 1789.

The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public opinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or essential to its convocation had pa.s.sed out of living memory, and had to be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent.

In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the realm--the Church, the n.o.bility, and the People--met with much ceremony at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that.

The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the Church and the n.o.bility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and declared themselves a National a.s.sembly. The people of Paris, profoundly agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent National a.s.sembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander, De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a pike.

[Sidenote: 1789--The French Revolution]

If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success.

But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates, his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revolution. After ages of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace, slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English amba.s.sador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote, with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen, recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians, catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France free and ill.u.s.trious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to convey to a confident, const.i.tution-making National a.s.sembly the {296} a.s.surance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed and moved in unison with their desires.

[Sidenote: 1790--Burke and the French Revolution]

Such a.s.surances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others.

At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke made himself conspicuous by the vehemence and the vigor of his opposition to a movement which commanded the admiration of his most intimate friends and closest political allies. While the Revolution was still almost in its infancy, while Sheridan and Fox vied with each other in the warmth of their applause, Burke set himself to preach a crusade against the Revolution with all the unrestrained ardor of his uncompromising nature.

No words of Fox or of Sheridan, no resolution of clubs, no delegated enthusiasm had anything like the same effect in aiding, that Burke's famous pamphlet had in injuring the French Revolution, in the eyes not merely of the ma.s.s of the English people, but in the eyes of a very great number of people in the countries of Europe. People whose business it was to be king, to use the famous phrase of a then reigning prince, readily welcomed Burke's "Reflexions on the French Revolution," which was soon disseminated all over the Continent in a French translation.

Naturally enough it appealed to the Emperor of Germany, to the Empress Catherine of Russia, to the French princes sheltering in Coblentz and boasting of the revenge they would take on the Revolution when the King should enjoy his own again. Naturally enough it appealed to George the Third as a book which every gentleman ought to read. Kings and princes everywhere, who felt that at any moment their own thrones might begin to rock unsteadily beneath them, inevitably applauded the unexpected a.s.sistance of the greatest orator and thinker of his age.

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Such applause alone would not have made Burke's pamphlet the formidable weapon that it proved to be in the hands of reaction, or have brought about the grave results that may be directly attributed to Burke's pen.

The words of Burke created, the breath of Burke fanned, a public opinion in England and abroad that was in direct antagonism to everything that was meant by those who formed and who guided or were driven by the Revolution. It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the influence thus exerted by a single man against so great a force. All the conservatism of Burke's nature--the conservatism that led him to regard the English Parliamentary system of his day as well-nigh ideally perfect, and that prompted him to resist so steadily and so successfully Pitt's proposals of Parliamentary reform--concentrated itself against what he believed to be the spirit of anarchy newly arisen in France. The Revolution was but a year old, and was as yet unstained by the worst excesses of the Terror, when Burke launched his bolt, shouted his battle-cry, and animated Europe to arms. It must be admitted that many of the evils which Burke prophesied in his review of the nascent revolution were the stigmas of its prime. From the premises he beheld he drew clear and definite conclusions, which were only too unhappily verified as the tide of revolution flowed. But it must also be remembered that Burke was himself in no small measure the cause of the realization of his own dark and tragic prognostications. Burke's arguments, Burke's eloquence, Burke's splendid ability were among the most potent factors in animating the hopes of the refugee princes, of inspiriting their allies, and of forming that ill-advised and disastrous coalition of the Powers against France which Danton answered with the head of a king. It was the genius of Burke that stemmed the sympathy between England and a nation struggling to be free; it was the genius of Burke that fostered the spirit of animosity to France which began with the march upon Paris, and which ended after the disastrous defeats of the invaders, the deaths of the King and Queen, and all the agonies of the Terror, in {298} creating for England, in common with Europe at large, the most formidable enemy that she had ever known.

In spite of Burke and Burke's melancholy vaticinations the course of the Revolution in France seemed at first to most liberal-minded Englishmen to move along reasonable lines and to confine itself within the bounds of moderation. The excesses and outrages that followed immediately upon the first upheaval, the murders of Foulon and Berthier in Paris, the peasant war upon the castles, were regarded as the unavoidable, deplorable ebullitions of a long dormant force which, under the guidance of capable and honorable men, would be directed henceforward solely to the establishment of a stable and popular system of government. The men who were, or who seemed to be, at the head of affairs in France had names that for the most part commended themselves to such Englishmen as had anything more than a superficial knowledge of the country. The fame of Lafayette, the hero of the American war, seemed to answer for the conduct of the army. In Bailly, the astronomer whom unhappy chance had made Mayor of Paris, const.i.tutionalism recognized a man after its own heart.

The majority of the members of the National a.s.sembly seemed to be gloriously occupied in evolving out of the chaos of the old order a new and entirely admirable framework of laws modelled boldly after the English pattern. Most English observers thought, in opposition to Burke, what the majority of the members of the National a.s.sembly themselves thought, that the Revolution was an accomplished fact, a concluded page of history, brought about not indeed bloodlessly, but still, on the whole, with comparatively slight shedding of blood, considering the difficulty and the greatness of the accomplished thing. The practical imprisonment of the King and Queen within the walls of Paris, within the walls of the Tuileries, seemed no great hards.h.i.+p in the eyes of the Englishmen who sympathized with the aims of those of the French revolutionaries with whom they were acquainted. The French King himself seemed to be reconciled to his lot, to have joined himself frankly and {299} freely enough to the party of progress within his dominions, and to be as loyally eager to accept the new const.i.tution which the National a.s.sembly was busy framing as the most ardent patriot among its members.

Even the flight of the Royal Family, the attempted flight that began with such laborious pomp at Paris to end in such pitiful disaster at Varennes, the flight that condemned the King and Queen to a restraint far more rigorous than before, did not greatly disturb British equanimity.

[Sidenote: 1791--Burke and the coalition against France]

To the mind of Burke, however, his prophecies were already justifying themselves. He could see nothing in the Revolution but its errors, and he hailed the coalition of Europe against France as a league of light against the powers of darkness. He broke away furiously from his friends and allies of so many great political battles. He could not understand, he could not bear to realize that men who had struggled with him to champion the rights of the American colonists, and to punish the offences of Warren Hastings, should now be either avowed sympathizers with or indifferent spectators of the events that were pa.s.sing in France. He had loved Charles Fox greatly ever since Fox had shaken off the traditions of Toryism and become the most conspicuous champion of liberal ideas in England. But he could not and would not forgive him for his att.i.tude towards the French Revolution and the French Revolutionists. Burke saw nothing but evil in, thought nothing but evil could come of, what was happening in France, and he feared disasters for his own country if it became impregnated with the poison of the revolutionary doctrine. That Fox should in any way advocate that doctrine made him in Burke's eyes an enemy of England, and not merely of England but of the whole human race.

There was no middle way with Burke. Those who were not with him were against him, not merely as a politician, but as a man. To the day of his death, in 1797, he hated the Revolution and denied his friends.h.i.+p to those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the results of that intervention. Burke was to see all the horrors he had so eloquently antic.i.p.ated realized as the direct consequence of the invasion of France by the allied armies. The French people in the very hour in which they believed their cherished revolution to be an accomplished fact saw it menaced by the formidable league which proposed to bring the King's brothers back in triumph from Coblentz, and which threatened, in the extraordinary language to which Brunswick put his name, to blot Paris from the map of Europe if any injury were done to the King, who had already formally accepted the const.i.tution that the Revolution had created. Paris went mad with fear and rage. The September ma.s.sacres, the attacks upon the Tuileries, the proclaimed republicanism of the Convention, the rise of the men of the Mountain, Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, the execution first of the King and then of the Queen, the dominion of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, were the direct results of a coalition whose only excuse would have been its complete success. The coalition proved to be an absolute failure. To the cry that the country was in danger ragged legions of desperate men rushed to the frontiers, and, to the astonishment of the world, proved more than a match for the armies that were sent against them.

[Sidenote: 1789-92--Pitt and the French Revolution]

Pitt was not himself eager to see England dragged into the European quarrel with France. But it was not easy for a minister who loved popularity, and who very sincerely believed his presence at the head of affairs to be essential to the welfare of the State, to avoid being involved in the controversy. The result of the unsuccessful coalition had been to increase the crimes that marked the course of the French Revolution, and seemingly to justify the fierce indignation of Burke.

The country that had {301} been profoundly impressed by Burke's eloquence was profoundly shocked by the horrors that lost nothing of their magnitude in the reports that crossed the Channel. The country was flooded with fugitives from France, emigrants who presented in themselves moving pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To him, whose business above all things it had been to be king, the prospect was unlovely and alarming. The fear that he felt for his office was shared in varying degree by all those who felt that they would have much to lose if the example set by France came to be followed in England. The Church and the aristocracy, with all wealthy and vested interests, were naturally ranked to resist by all means the spread of the new doctrines.

There were a few n.o.blemen who, like Lord Stanhope and Lord Lauderdale, professed themselves to be champions of the French Revolution; there were some statesmen among the Opposition who were either sympathizers with the Revolution or a.s.serters of the doctrine that it was no part of England's duty to interfere with the way in which another nation chose to govern herself. But the strength of public opinion was against these, as it was against the minister who was as eager as any Englishman living to remain on good terms with France.

Pitt from the first had looked with a favorable eye upon the changes that were taking place across the Channel. To maintain a friends.h.i.+p with France was a radical part of his policy. Friends.h.i.+p with France was essential in his mind in order to combat the aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia, and friends.h.i.+p with France seemed more possible under an enlightened const.i.tution than under a despotic king. While Burke, who could only make the House of Commons smile and sneer by his denunciations {302} of Jacobin intrigues and his display of Jacobin daggers, was playing on the heart-strings of England and reviving all the old hostility to France, Pitt pursued as long as he was allowed to pursue it a policy of absolute neutrality. But he was not long allowed to pursue that policy, although he reaped some reward for it in a proof that the French Government appreciated his intentions and shared his desire for friends.h.i.+p. An English settlement at Nootka Sound, in Vancouver Island, had been interfered with by Spain. England was ready to a.s.sert her rights in arms. Spain appealed to France for her aid by the terms of the Family Compact. The French King and the French Ministers were willing enough to engage in a war with England, in the hope of diverting the course and weakening the power of the Revolution. But the National a.s.sembly, after a long and angry struggle, took away from the King the old right to declare war, save with the consent of the National a.s.sembly, which consent the National a.s.sembly, in that particular crisis, was decided not to give. Pitt was delighted at this proof of the friendly spirit of the French people and the advantage of his principle of neutrality. But he was not able to act upon that principle. The forces brought against him were too many and too potent for him to resist. From the King on the throne to the mob in the streets, who sacked the houses of citizens known to be in sympathy with the Revolution, the English people as a whole were against him. The people who sympathized with the Revolution, who made speeches for it in Westminster and formed Const.i.tutional Clubs which framed addresses of friends.h.i.+p to France, were but a handful in the House of Commons, were but a handful in the whole country. Their existence dazzled and deluded the French Revolutionists into the belief that the heart of England was with them at a time when every feeling of self-interest and of sentiment in England was against them. Pitt clung desperately to peace. He thought, what the Opposition thought then and for long years later, that it was wisest to leave France to settle her internal affairs and her form of government in her own way.

When England {303} no longer had an amba.s.sador at the French capital Pitt adhered doggedly, tenaciously, to a peace policy; persisted in preserving the neutrality of Holland; was ready, were it only possible, only permitted to him, to recognize the new Republic. But even if the execution of Louis the Sixteenth had not roused irresistible indignation in England the action of the new Republic made the prolongation of peace an impossibility. When, in the winter of 1792, the Convention made the famous offer of its aid in arms to all peoples eager to be free, it must have been plain to Pitt that, with France in that temper and England tempest-tossed between hatred of the Revolution and fear lest its theories were being insidiously fostered in her own confines, the preservation of peace was a dream. The dream was finally dissipated when France made ready to attack Holland and, rejecting all possible negotiations, declared war in the early days of 1793.

[Sidenote: 1793--France declares war against Holland]

At first the war went ill with France, and if the German Powers had co-operated earnestly and honestly with England it is at least within the limits of possibility that Paris might have been occupied and the Revolution for the time r.e.t.a.r.ded. France seemed to be circled by foes; her enemies abroad were aided by civil war at home. La Vendee was in Royalist revolt; Ma.r.s.eilles and Lyons rose against the tyranny of Paris; Toulon, turning against the Republic, welcomed an English fleet. For a moment the arms of England and the aims of the Allies seemed to have triumphed. But the pa.s.sionate determination of the French popular leaders and the ma.s.s of the French people to save the Revolution seemed to inspire them with a heroism that grew in proportion to the threatened danger. Her armies were swollen with enthusiastic recruits. Her internal revolts were coped with and crushed with savage severity. Loyal La Vendee was beaten. The rebellious towns of Lyons and Ma.r.s.eilles almost ceased to exist under the merciless repression of their conquerors. Many of the allied armies were defeated, while those of the two German Powers for their own selfish ends played the game of revolutionary France by abstaining from any serious effort to {304} advance into the country. Germany and Austria were confident that they could whenever they pleased crush revolutionary France, and they preferred to postpone the process, in order to occupy themselves in a new part.i.tion of Poland, which they could scarcely have carried out if the French monarchy had been restored. If there was nothing to justify the conduct of the two German Powers, there was much to warrant their confidence in their own strength when they judged that the time had come for them to exert it. They counted upon the known when they measured their forces with those of revolutionary France; they could not count upon the unknown quant.i.ty which was to disturb all their calculations.

The unknown quant.i.ty a.s.serted itself just at the moment when France, in spite of some successes, seemed to be deeply wounded by the loss of Toulon.

With the great port of Toulon in their hands the adversaries of France might well believe that a serious blow had been struck at her strength, and that the spirit which so long had defied them might yet be broken.

But the success which had seemed to menace France so gravely proved to be but the point of departure for a new era of French glory. The occupation of Toulon is forever memorable, because it gave an opportunity to a young lieutenant of artillery in the French service, quite obscure in that service and wholly unknown outside of it. The quick intelligence of this young soldier perceived that the seizure of a certain promontory left unguarded by the invaders would place Toulon and those who had held it at the mercy of the French cannon. The suggestion was acted upon; was entirely successful; the English admiral was obliged to retire with all his fleet, and Toulon was once again a French citadel garrisoned by French soldiers. But the importance of the event, for France and the world lay not in the capture but in the captor. Though Barras, confident in his dominion over the Directory, might sneer at the young adventurer from Corsica and minimize his share in a success that had suddenly made him conspicuous, the name of Bonaparte then for the first time took its {305} place in the history of Europe. The youth whose military genius had enabled him to see and to seize upon the fatal weakness in a well-defended city was destined to prove the greatest soldier France had ever known, the greatest as well as the most implacable enemy England had ever to reckon with, and one of the greatest conquerors that ever followed the star of conquest across the war-convulsed earth.

[Sidenote: 1793--Napoleon Bonaparte]

This is the story of England, not the story of France, and Napoleon was at his best and worst rather an influence upon than an integral part of English history. It must be enough to say here that he is a.s.sumed to have been born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in 1769; that when he was ten years old he tried to become French rather than Italian--a feat which he never successfully accomplished--by entering the military school of Brienne; that he served Louis the Sixteenth with indifference and the Revolution with an ambition that was often baffled, and that he struck the first of his many strokes at England when he won Toulon for France.

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CHAPTER LXI.

"NINETY-EIGHT."

[Sidenote: 1798--Irish Catholic disabilities]

England was not concerned merely with the successes of France upon the Continent, with the French power of resisting invasion and preserving its capital and its const.i.tution. The time was at hand when England was to take the French Republic into consideration as a more active enemy, whose enmity might take effect and be a very serious menace at her own doors. The breath of the French Revolution was to Great Britain like that of a sudden storm which sweeps round some stately mansion and finds out all its weak places and shatters some of its outlying buildings, although it cannot unroof its firmest towers or disturb its foundations. The weakest spot in Great Britain, and indeed we might almost say in the whole British Empire, was the kingdom of Ireland. Ireland had for long been in a state of what might almost be called chronic rebellion against the rule of England. England's enemies had always been regarded as Ireland's friends by the Irishmen who claimed especially to represent the national aspirations of their country. This is a fact which cannot be made too clear to the minds of Englishmen even at the present day, for the simple reason that no one who is capable of forming a rational idea on the subject can doubt that where a government is persistently hated that government must have done much to deserve the hate.