A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 17

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 G.o.ds permitted themselves the use of the heroic size and made their immortals and their demi-G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sions 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 grat.i.tude and for admiration.

The most pa.s.sionate 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 Napoleon and the Order of the Legion of Honor, the Simplon Road and the Ca.n.a.l of St. Quentin, the encouragement given to arts, to letters, and to commerce, the reorganization of finance and the reconst.i.tution 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 ign.o.ble, 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 sh.o.r.es.

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 surpa.s.s, but which, however, the sailors of King George the Third were destined to surpa.s.s.

[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 hards.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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-s.h.i.+ps 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 flags.h.i.+p and two frigates to represent the sea power of England, met the difficulty with a s.h.i.+ftiness 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 crus.h.i.+ng victory of Camperdown consoled one of the bravest of the brave for an agony unrivalled in the story of the sea.

[Sidenote: 1758-1805--Nelson]

The British admirals are the heroes of the dying eighteenth century.

"Admirals all, they said their say, the echoes are rising still"--in the words of Henry Newbolt's gallant song. "Admirals all, they went their way to the haven under the hill." Dundonald was called, and finely called, the last of the sea-kings; but they were all true kinsmen of the Vikings, the admirals who were famous figures in Dundonald's fiery youth and famous memories in Dundonald's n.o.ble age.

And as the admirals were, so were the captains, so were the men.

Fearney sticking the surrendered swords in a sheaf under his arm; Walton calmly informing his superior that "we have taken or destroyed all the Spanish s.h.i.+ps on this coast: number as per margin," are typical figures in a tradition of a courage so superlative that Admiral Sir Robert Calder, who fought very gallantly and took two s.h.i.+ps, was tried by court-martial and severely reprimanded for not having destroyed the French fleet. The age of George the Third would be memorable, if it were memorable for nothing else, for the deeds and the glories of the great sea fights and the great sea fighters who saved England from invasion, knocking the tall s.h.i.+ps of France to pieces, taking monstrous odds with alacrity, eager to engage in all weathers and under all conditions, cheerfully converting what seemed an impossible task into not merely a feasible but an easy piece of business. There are some sea battles of that time, fought out in storm and darkness, which read in the tamest statement with the pomp and beauty of the most majestic music. The names of the great admirals must always be dear to English ears, must always sound sweet on English lips. St. Vincent, Collingwood, Howe, Duncan, the n.o.ble list proceeds, each name illuminated with its only splendid story of desperate enterprise and deathless honor, till the proudest name of all is reached, {337} and praise itself seems to falter and fall off before the lonely grandeur of Nelson. Never was a little life filled with greater achievements; never was a little body more compact of the virtues that make great captains and brave men. The life that began in the September of 1758 and that ended in the October of 1805 holds in the compa.s.s of its forty-seven years the epitome of what England meant for Englishmen in the days of its greatest peril and its greatest glory. Magnificent, magniloquent, turbulent, it is starred with glowing phrases as thickly as with glowing deeds. "Fear! I never saw fear: what is it?" "A peerage, or Westminster Abbey;" the immortal signal; the famous saying off Copenhagen: "It is warm work; this day will be the last to many of us, but I would not be elsewhere for thousands;" the pathos of the dying lover: "Let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair;" and the pride of the dying hero: "Thank G.o.d, I have done my duty"--all these things are the splendid ornaments of a splendid career; they gleam on his story as his stars and orders gleamed upon his breast when the "Victory" renewed her name. With the battle of Trafalgar and the destruction of the allied French and Spanish fleets Napoleon's dream of England's conquest came to an end. The result was bought at a great price, the price of Nelson's life. But Nelson had done his work, and done it well. He saved his country; he had deserved well of his countrymen; he summed in himself all the qualities that made the English sailor the idol of his people and the terror of his foes.

While Nelson still lived and conquered, there came a check to the troubled supremacy of Pitt. In 1801--when the memories of the battle of the Nile and the defence of Acre were still fresh in men's thoughts, and Napoleon had been for a year First Consul--Pitt, baffled by circ.u.mstances, surrendered to mediocrity and Addington was Prime Minister in his place. For three disastrous years Addington was permitted to prove his incompetency, till in 1804 Pitt, as the only possible man, came back to power to face a Napoleon more menacing than ever, a Napoleon now, in that same year, crowned and triumphant as {338} Emperor of the French. England was Mistress of the Seas, but Napoleon was Master of Europe. Pitt's health was fading swiftly; he watched with despair the progress of his enemy. Ulm came, and Austerlitz, and Austerlitz struck Pitt at the heart.

The closing hours of Pitt's career were as troubled and as gloomy as its dawn had been radiant and serene. It may have cost him little to be reconciled with the pompous mediocrity of Addington, and thereby to placate the King. His nature could afford to be magnanimous to the ungrateful incompetency that was able only in betrayal. It need not have given a pang to that proud and lonely spirit to welcome into the Cabinet the Earl of Buckinghams.h.i.+re, who had wedded the one fair woman whose heart Pitt had won and lost. But the anguish of his soul was wrung into expression by the fall of Dundas. He had loved Dundas, who was now Lord Melville, long and well. Lord Melville's conduct as Treasurer to the Navy provoked from the Opposition a series of condemnatory resolutions. In spite of all that Pitt could do, the resolutions were supported by many of his followers, by many of his friends, by one friend conspicuous among all, by Wilberforce. The division was neck and neck, 216 to 216; the Speaker, "white as a sheet," gave the casting vote against Dundas which stabbed Pitt to the core. Whether it were or no, as Wilberforce maintained, a "false principle of honor" which led the great minister to support Melville, Pitt felt the blow as he had felt nothing before and was to feel but one thing again. Pitt pulled his little c.o.c.ked hat over his forehead to hide his tears. One brutal adversary, Sir Thomas Mostyn, raised the wild yell of triumph that denotes to huntsmen the death of the fox.

Another savage, Colonel Wardle, urged his friends to come and see "how Billy looked after it." But the young Tory gentlemen rallied around their hero. They made a circle of locked arms, and with looks and words that meant swords they kept the aggressors off. In their midst Pitt moved unconsciously out of the House--a broken-hearted man.

[Sidenote: 1806--Death of Pitt]

The heart of Pitt was allowed to feel one pulse of pride {339} and pleasure before it ceased to beat. Pitt shared in the triumph of Trafalgar; he made his best and n.o.blest appearance in public; made his last most splendid speech: "Europe is not to be saved by any single man," he said to those who saluted him at the Guildhall as the savior of Europe. "England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example." A few weeks later, in the December of 1805, Pitt was at Bath, when a courier brought him the news of the battle of Austerlitz. The news practically killed him. He had long been ailing grievously. Sir Walter Farquhar's account of Pitt's health, lately made public by Lord Rosebery, proves that the body which cased that great spirit was indeed a ruined body. Grief and anxiety had stamped lines of care and sorrow upon his face, which gave it what Wilberforce afterwards called "the Austerlitz look." The phrase is famous and admirable, if not exactly accurate as used by Wilberforce, for Lord Stanhope shows that Wilberforce never saw Pitt after the battle of Austerlitz was fought. With the Austerlitz look on his face, Pitt travelled to London, to the villa now known as Bowling Green House at Putney. With the Austerlitz look on his face he surrendered himself to the care of his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who afterwards lived eccentric and died lonely in the East, a kind of desert queen. With the Austerlitz look on his face he bade that niece roll up the map of Europe: "It will not be wanted these ten years." With the Austerlitz look on his face he died on January 23, 1806.

England, that had lost in three months Nelson and Pitt, was to lose a third great man in only eight months more. Pitt's body lay in Westminster; Pitt's Ministry was dissipated into air; Pitt's great opponent was called to the office for the last time, and for a very short time. Fox, as we are told by his biographer, Lord Russell, never felt personal enmity to Pitt. He said, with generous truth, that he never gave a vote with more satisfaction than his vote in support of the motion to pay Pitt's debts and to settle pensions on his nieces.

He could not and did not indorse the proposal to confer honor on the memory of Mr. Pitt {340} as an "excellent statesman." He was ready to take office in the Ministry of All the Talents that Lord Grenville gathered together. He became Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons.

Fox, in office as out of office, had three great questions closely at heart: the treatment of Catholics, peace with France, and the Slave Trade. But Fox in office was obliged to face and recognize the difficulties, the solution of these questions. He admitted, reluctantly, the inadvisability of pressing the Catholic claims at a time when such pressure would prove destructive alike to the claims and to the Ministry that maintained them. He admitted, reluctantly, that the prospect of peace with France was very far from hopeful. He still dreamed of a speedy abolition of the Slave Trade, and to this end he attended Parliament too persistently in defiance of the warnings of his failing health. He was tapped for dropsy; his condition grew worse; in the evening of September 13, 1806, he died. He was the greatest liberal of his age; the greatest friend of liberty. The Irish poet bade the Irish banshee wail for him on whose burning tongue, truth, peace, and freedom hung.

Fox was not long dead when the Ministry of All the Talents found itself in direct collision with its royal master. It had ventured to suggest that it should be permitted to Catholics and to Dissenters to serve the King and the country in the Army and Navy. This small concession was too vast for the bigotry of George. He would have none of it, and the obsequious Ministry consented to abandon the measure. This was not enough for George. He wanted to extract from the Ministry a formal promise in writing that it would never submit to the sovereign any measure that involved, or was in any way connected with, concessions to the Catholics. The Ministry was not obsequious to that ign.o.ble degree.

It refused to bind itself by any such degrading pledge; and, in consequence, it was turned out of office, and the Duke of Portland and Mr. Perceval reigned in its stead. The Ministry of All the Talents had lived neither a long nor a useful life.

{341}

Spencer Perceval was an able lawyer, a dexterous debater, a skilful Parliamentarian. He was privately an excellent man, with an excellence that the irony of Sydney Smith has made immortal. He was not quite the man to sit in the Siege Perilous that had been occupied in turn by Pitt and Fox. He held his office under difficult conditions. In 1810 the King, whose ailing mind was unhinged by the death of his daughter Amelia, lost his reason irreparably. Perceval had to fight the question of the Regency with a brilliant Opposition and a bitterly hostile Prince of Wales. He succeeded, in the January of 1811, in carrying his Regency Bill on the lines of the measure proposed in 1788.

In May, 1811, he was shot dead, in the Lobby of the House of Commons, by a madman named John Bellingham, who had some crazy grievance against the Government.

The years from the January of 1811 to the January of 1820 are technically the last nine years of the reign of George the Third; they are practically the first nine years of the reign of George the Fourth.

The nine years of the Regency were momentous years in the history of England. The mighty figure of Napoleon, whose shadow, creeping over the map of Europe, had darkened and shortened the life of Pitt, was still an abiding menace to England when the Prince of Wales became Regent. But England, that had lost so much in her struggle with the Corsican conqueror, who had now no Nelson to oppose to him on the high seas, and no Pitt to oppose to him in the council chamber, found herself armed against his triumphs in the person of a great soldier.

[Sidenote: 1769-1852--Arthur Wellesley]

In the same year that saw the birth of Napoleon, and on a date as little certain as that of the conqueror of Europe, a child was born to Garret Wellesley, first Earl of Mornington, in Dublin. The child was a son, the third that Anne Hill, Lord Dungannon's eldest daughter, had borne to her music-loving husband; the child was christened Arthur.

Dates as various as May 1, May 6, and April 29, 1769, are given by different authorities in that very year, and the place of birth is as unsettled as the date, Dangan Castle in Meath, and Mornington House, Merrion Street, {342} Dublin, being the alternatives offered. Very little is known about the childhood and early youth of Arthur Wellesley. His mother seems to have considered him stupid, and to have disliked him for his stupidity. He went from school to school--first at Chelsea, then at Eton, then at Brussels--without showing any special gifts, except a taste for music, inherited no doubt from the father, whose musical tastes had earned him the affection of George the Third.

An unamiable mother decided that he was "food for powder and nothing more;" and when he was sixteen years old he was sent to the French Academy at Angers, where he was able to learn all the engineering that he wanted, at the very same time that the young Napoleon Bonaparte was being trained for a soldier in the military college at Brienne. Of the little that can be known of the first seventeen years of Arthur Wellesley's life the clearest facts are that his childhood was not happy, that he was believed by many to be a dull and backward boy, and that he himself thought that if circ.u.mstances had not made him a soldier he would probably have become distinguished in public life as a financier.

[Sidenote--1786-97--Wellesley's military training]

Circ.u.mstance made him a soldier. Through the patronage of his eldest brother, who became Earl of Mornington on his father's death, in 1781, the young Arthur Wellesley entered the Army as an ensign in the Seventy-third Foot. The same influence that had got him into the army aided him to rise in it. When he was little more than of age he was captain of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons, aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and member of the Irish Parliament for his brother's borough of Trim. In the Irish Parliament he supported Pitt's measure to enfranchise Roman Catholics. It was characteristic of the young man that, when once a career had been chosen for him, he devoted himself to it with a cold, persistent zeal that accomplished as much for him as the most pa.s.sionate enthusiasm would have done for another.

He set before himself the principle that having undertaken a profession he had better try to understand it, and understand it he did with a determined thoroughness {343} that was rare indeed, if not unknown, among the young officers of his day. We are told that soon after he got his first commission he had one of the privates of the Seventy-third weighed, first in his ordinary military clothes, and then in heavy marching order, in order to ascertain what was expected of a soldier on service. This kind of thoroughness, at once comprehensive and minute, distinguished the conduct of his whole career. One of the maxims that regulated his life was always to do the day's business in the day. Long years later he and a friend were driving together along a coaching road, and amusing themselves by guessing what kind of country lay behind each hill they approached. When the friend commented upon the surprising accuracy of his companion's guesses the man who had been Arthur Wellesley answered: "Why, all my life I have been trying to guess what lay on the other side of the hill;" a stimulating piece of wisdom, to which he himself supplied the no less stimulating comment: "All the business of war, and, indeed, all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know from what you do." The youth who took soldiering in this iron spirit must have been more than a puzzle to many of his contemporaries, whose simple military creed it was that when an officer was not actually fighting he might best employ his time in drinking and gambling. Young Wellesley fell in love with Catherine Pakenham, Lord Longford's daughter, and she with him; but the means of neither permitted marriage then, and they did not marry until long years later. When the war with France was forced upon a reluctant minister, Wellesley went to the Continent under Lord Moira and saw some fighting. But his serious career began when he was sent to India with the Thirty-third Regiment in 1797.

It was in India that the young soldier was to learn those lessons in the art of war which were afterwards to prove so priceless to England, and to gain a fame which might well have seemed great enough to satisfy any ambition less exacting than his. But he had the generous greed of the great soldier, the restless, high-reaching spirit, to which {344} the success of yesterday is as nothing save as an experience that may serve for the success of to-morrow. No better field than India could have been found for a young and ambitious soldier who had devoted himself to his career almost by chance, but who was resolved to approve his choice by giving to the career of arms a zeal, a stubborn pertinacity, a very pa.s.sion of patience, rare, indeed, at the time, and who was resolved to regard nothing as too great to attempt, or too trivial to notice, in the execution of his duty.

After a career of military honor and experience in India, Arthur Wellesley began his struggle with Napoleon on the battle-fields of the Spanish Peninsula, and ended it upon the battle-field of Waterloo. His was the hand that gave the final blow to the falling, failing Emperor.

The career of so much glory and of so much gloom, of Corsican lieutenants.h.i.+p and Empire, of Brumaire and Bourbon Restoration, of Egyptian pyramids and Russian snows, of Tilsit and of Elba, and of the Hundred Days, ended in the Island of St. Helena. There exists among the doc.u.ments that are preserved from Napoleon's youth a geographical list made out in his own boyish hand of names and places, with explanatory comments. The name of St. Helena is on the list, and the only words written opposite to it are "Little Island." The Preacher on Vanities never had a better text for a sermon. The "little island"

that had then seemed so unimportant became in the end more momentous than the Eastern Empire of his dreams. The man who had made and unmade kingdoms, who had flung down the crowns of Europe for soldiers of fortune to scramble for as boys unto a muss, was now the unhonored captive of ungenerous opponents, the unhonored victim of the petty tyrannies of Sir Hudson Lowe.

[Sidenote: 1812-15--The War of 1812]

As the most disastrous event of the reign of George the Third prior to the Regency was a war with America, so the most disastrous event of the Regency was a war with America. Napoleon's fantastic decrees of commercial blockade levelled against England, and known as the Continental system, had embroiled the young republic and England, and differences inflamed by the unwisdom of {345} Perceval were not to be healed by the belated wisdom of Castlereagh. Two keen causes of quarrel were afforded by England's persistent a.s.sertion of the right to stop and search American vessels on the high seas for British subjects and England's no less persistent refusal to recognize that naturalization as an American citizen in any way affected the allegiance of a British subject to the British crown. Wise statesmans.h.i.+p might have averted war, but wise statesmans.h.i.+p was wanting. The death of Spencer Perceval caused the elevation to the premiers.h.i.+p of a man as incapable as his predecessor of dealing skilfully with the American difficulty. Robert Banks Jenkinson, who had been Lord Hawkesbury and who was now Lord Liverpool, was a curiously narrow-minded, hidebound politician who had never recovered from the shock of the French Revolution, and who was chiefly conspicuous for his dogged opposition to every species of reform. He was five years old when the fight at Concord began the struggle that ended with American Independence, but the great event which overshadowed his childhood had no apparent effect upon his later judgment. This belated survival of the tradition of Hillsborough thought and said that America ought to look to England "as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization, but for her very existence."

Folly such as this could only end in disaster. America, believing herself to be deeply wronged, declared war on Great Britain in the June of 1812. The war lasted more than two years with varying fortunes.

Once again the scarlet coats of English soldiers were familiar, if detested, objects to many of the men who had made the Republic, and over b.l.o.o.d.y battle-fields fluttered that English flag which most of those who now opposed it had only seen as a trophy of their fathers'

victories. Both sides fought under heavy disadvantages. If England was weakened by her struggle with Napoleon, America was hampered by internal dissensions, by a disorganized army and by a navy so small that it might almost have been regarded as not in existence. Yet it was this very navy which did most for {346} America in the struggle, and dealt England the most staggering blows inflicted upon her supremacy of the sea. The most shameful episode of the whole unhappy campaign was when the English General Ross captured Was.h.i.+ngton, and, in obedience to infamous orders from home, burned the Capitol and other public buildings. No more disgraceful act stains the history of the time. It proved as impossible for England to defend as for America to forget. The war ended at last, after the commerce of both countries had been gravely injured, in a grotesque treaty of peace, signed at Ghent, in which the princ.i.p.al cause of the war, the impressment of American sailors by English s.h.i.+ps, was not even alluded to. But as the impressment was abandoned by England, the war had not been waged wholly in vain.

In the year that followed upon the Battle of Waterloo, Sheridan died.

He had outlived by ten years his great contemporaries Pitt and Fox, by nearly twenty years his greatest contemporary Burke, and by more than thirty years his great contemporary Johnson. The pompous funeral that carried his remains to Westminster Abbey was the funeral not merely of a man but of an age. He was almost the last of the great heroic figures that made the eighteenth century famous. He had long outlived all the friends, heroes, rivals of his glorious prime: he could talk to the children of the dawning century of Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds; of Burke, and Pitt, and Fox; of poets and painters, players, and politicians, who seemed to his listeners to belong to a departed Age of Gold. Two years later, in the November of 1818, England, and indeed the whole civilized world, received a sudden and painful shock by the death, under conditions peculiarly harrowing, of Sir Samuel Romilly, the great lawyer, social reformer, and philanthropist. Romilly had been deeply attached to his wife, and on her death in October of that year, it would seem that he must have lost his reason, for, in the following month, he committed suicide. Romilly was a man of the highest principles, and the most austere conscience, and although the loss of his much-loved wife must have made the world but a mere {347} ruin to him, it is not believed that, if his mind had not suddenly given away, he would have done himself to death with his own hand. To Napoleon, then fretting in exile in St. Helena, the deed appeared to be one curiously characteristic of the English people.

"The English character is superior to ours. Conceive Romilly, one of the leaders of a great party, committing suicide at fifty because he had lost his wife. They are in everything more practical than we are; they emigrate, they marry, they kill themselves with less indecision than we display in going to the opera." Napoleon was wrong in his estimate of Romilly's age. Romilly was sixty-one when he died. He was one of the greatest legal and social reformers of his age. His father was a Huguenot watchmaker who had settled in London, and the young Samuel Romilly had only an imperfect education to begin with. By intense study he became possessed of wide and varied culture. He studied for the bar, became distinguished in Chancery practice, made his way in public life, sat in the House of Commons for several years, and finally represented Westminster. During successive visits to France he had made the acquaintance of Diderot and D'Alembert, and became the friend of Mirabeau. He won a n.o.ble fame by his persistent endeavors to mitigate the cruelties of the criminal laws, to introduce the principles of a free country into political prosecutions, to abolish the odious spy system, and to put an end to slavery at home and abroad. His name will be remembered forever in the history of political and social reform.

The Houses of Death and of Birth were busy for the royal family in the closing scenes of the King's tragedy. There had been very little happiness for George the Third in his long reign and his longer life.

His childhood had been darkened by the shadow of a family feud that seemed traditional in his line. His marriage, indeed, fortunate if unromantic, the sequel of more than one unfortunate romance, gave him a companion whose tastes were as simple, and whose purposes were as upright as his own. But his private domesticity was not destined to be less troubled than his public fortunes. The grim tradition a.s.serted {348} itself again for him whose childhood and manhood had been only too devoted to the influence of his mother. Few of his children were a cause of joy to him; some were a source of very poignant sorrow. He might have known content in a private station under conditions better fitted to strengthen his virtues and to lessen the force of his defects. If Farmer George had really been but Farmer George, his existence might tranquilly have followed the courses of the seasons through a prosperous manhood to a peaceable old age. But the curse of kings.h.i.+p was upon him very heavily, and his later years are very pitiful in their loneliness and their pain. Of the course of events about him he, in the awful visitation of his infirmities, had long been unconscious. Blind and deaf and mad, he seems to have been haunted by the ghastly fancy that he was already dead. "I must have a suit of black," he is reported to have said, "in memory of George the Third, for whom I know there is a general mourning." George the Third was dead in life, and about him those he loved were dying fast. On November 6, 1817, the Princess Charlotte died, the only child of the Prince Regent. She was very popular, was in the direct succession to the throne; she hoped to be queen, and many shared her hope. The prisoner of St. Helena believed that in her lay his best chance of liberation. She married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg on May 2, 1816, and died after giving birth to a still-born child in the following year. She was not quite twenty-two years old. The news of her death greatly affected the old queen, her grandmother. Her health, that had long been weak, grew weaker, and she died on November 17, 1818. She had lived her simple, honest, narrow, upright life for seventy-four years. On May 24, 1819, a daughter was born to the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, the wife of Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George the Third.

On January 23, 1820, the Duke of Kent died. Six days later the King ceased to exist. He was in the eighty-second year of his age and the sixtieth year of his reign. The most devoted loyalist could not have wished for the unhappy King another hour of life. "Vex not his ghost O! Let {349} him pa.s.s; he hates him that would upon the rack of this rough world stretch him out longer."

[Sidenote: 1760-1820--Progress under George the Third]

The reign that had ended was certainly the longest and perhaps the most remarkable then known to English history. The King's granddaughter, the Princess Victoria, born so short a time before his death, was destined to a reign at once longer and more remarkable than the reign of George the Third. The England of 1820 was not nearly so far removed from the England of 1760 as the England of the last year of the nineteenth century was removed from 1837. But the changes that took place in England in the sixty years of the reign of the third George were changes of vast moment and vast importance. If England's political fortunes fell and rose in startling contrast, the progress of civilization was steady and significant. The social England of 1820 was widely different from the social England of 1760. The advance of population, the growth of great towns, the increase of means of intercourse between one part of the country and another by highways and waterways, the engineering triumphs that bridged rivers and cut ca.n.a.ls, the marvels of industrial invention that facilitated labor, the patient pains of science on the edge of great discoveries, the slowly increasing spirit of toleration, pity, and humanity, the gradual spread of education, the widening realms of knowledge, the increasing appreciation of the decencies and amenities of life--all these things make the reign of George the Third the hopeful preface to the reign of greater length, greater glory, greater promise and greater fulfilment that was to dawn when two more sovereigns of the House of Hanover had ceased to reign over England. If George the Third had been a wiser man his reign would have been happier for the country he ruled; but the country at least was happy in this, that he was, as kings went, and according to his lights, a good man.

END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.