Read Ebook: History of the English People Volume VIII Modern England 1760-1815 by Green John Richard

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Although therefore the old Europe and its balance of power had passed away, the new Europe which had taken its place presented a balance of power which might be regarded as even more effective; and the peace of Lun?ville was in reality the recognition on both sides of a European settlement on the basis of such a balance. But in the mind of Buonaparte it was far more than this. It was the first step in an entire reversal of the policy which Revolutionary France had pursued in her dealings with the world. It was a return to the older policy of the French monarchy. Under the guidance of the revolutionists France had striven for supremacy among the states of Europe. But for such a supremacy the First Consul cared comparatively little. What he cared for was what Choiseul and the statesmen who followed him cared for, the supremacy of the world. And he saw that with every year of war on the Continent such a supremacy grew more distant than ever. The very victories of France indeed were playing into the hands of England. Amidst all the triumphs of the revolutionary war the growth of the British Empire had been steady and ceaseless. She was more than ever mistress of the sea. The mastery of Holland by the French had only ended in the removal of one of the obstacles to such a mastery by the ruin of the Dutch navy, and the transfer of the rich Dutch colonies to the British crown. The winning of Egypt had but spurred her to crush the only Mussulman power that could avert her rule over southern India. But her growth was more than a merely territorial growth. She was turning her command of the seas to a practical account. Not only was she monopolizing the carrying trade of the European nations, but the sudden uprush of her industries was making her the workshop as well as the market of the world. From the first the mind of Buonaparte had been set on a struggle with this growing world-power. Even amidst his earliest victories he had dreamed of wresting from England her dominion in the East; and if his Egyptian expedition had done nothing for India, it had secured in Egypt itself a stepping-stone for further efforts. But now that France was wholly at his disposal, the First Consul resolved to free his hands from the strife with the Continent, and to enter on that struggle with Britain which was henceforth to be the task of his life.

The significance then of the Peace of Lun?ville lay in this, not only that it was the close of the earlier revolutionary struggle for supremacy in Europe, the abandonment by France of her effort to "liberate the peoples," to force new institutions on the nations about her by sheer dint of arms; but that it marked the concentration of all her energies on a struggle with Britain for the supremacy of the world. For England herself the event which accompanied it, the sudden withdrawal of William Pitt from office which took place in the very month of the treaty, was hardly less significant. To men of our day the later position of William Pitt seems one of almost tragic irony. An economist heaping up millions of debt, a Peace Minister dragged into the costliest of wars, he is the very type of the baffled statesman; and the passionate loyalty with which England clung to him through the revolutionary struggle is one of the least intelligible passages of our history. But if England clung to Pitt through these years of gloom, it was because then more than ever she saw in him her own representative. His strength had lain throughout in his reflection of public opinion: and public opinion saw itself reflected in him still. At the outset of his career the set of opinion had been towards a larger and more popular policy than of old. New facilities of communication, new industrial energy, and a quick accumulation of wealth, as well as the social changes which followed hard on these economical changes, all pointed forward to political progress, to an adaptation of our institutions to the varied conditions of the time. The nation was quivering with a new sense of life; and it faced eagerly questions of religion, of philanthropy, of education, of trade, as one after another they presented themselves before it. Above all it clung to the young minister whose ideas were its own, who, alien as his temper seemed from that of an innovator, came boldly to the front with projects for a new Parliament, a new finance, a new international policy, a new imperial policy, a new humanitarian policy. It was this oneness of Pitt's temper with the temper of the men he ruled that made him sympathize, in spite of the alarm of the court, with the first movements of the revolution in France, and deal fairly, if coldly, with its after-course. It was this that gave him strength to hold out so long against a struggle with it.

But as the alarm deepened, as the nation saw its social, political, and religious traditions alike threatened, the bulk of Englishmen swung round into an attitude of fierce resistance. The craving for self-preservation hushed all other cravings. What men looked for in Pitt now was not the economist or the reformer, but the son of Chatham, the heir of his father's courage, of his father's faith in the greatness of England. And what they looked for they found. Pitt was no born War Minister; he had none of the genius that commands victory, or of the passionate enthusiasm that rouses a nation to great deeds of arms. But he had faith in England. Even when she stood alone against the world he never despaired. Reading him, as we read him now, we see the sickness and the gloom of his inner soul; but no sign betrayed it to the world. As the tempest gathered about them, men looked with trust that deepened into awe on the stately figure that embodied their faith in England's fortunes, and huddled in the darkness round "the pilot that weathered the storm." But there were deeper and less conscious grounds for their trust in him. Pitt reflected far more than the nation's resolve. He reflected the waverings and inconsistencies of its political temper in a way that no other man did. In the general swing round to an attitude of resistance, the impulse of progress had come utterly to an end. Men doubted of the truth of principles that seemed to have brought about the horrors of the Revolution. They listened to Burke as he built up his theory of political immobility on the basis of an absolute perfection in the constitution of things as they were. But even in this moment of reaction they still clung unconsciously to a belief in something better, to a trust that progress would again be possible, and to the man who reflected their trust. Like them, Pitt could understand little of the scene about him, that seething ocean of European change where states vanished like dreams, and the very elements of social life seemed to melt in a mist; his mind, like theirs, was baffled with doubt and darkness, with the seeming suicide of freedom, the seeming triumph of violence and wrong. But, baffled and bewildered as he was, he never ceased to believe in liberty, or to hope that the work of reform which he had begun might yet be carried into effect.

It was as the representative of this temper of the people at large, of its mingled mood of terror at the new developements of freedom and yet of faith in freedom itself, of its dread of progress and yet its hope of a time when a larger national life should again become possible, that Pitt had gathered the nation round him from the opening of the war. Much indeed of the seeming weakness and uncertainty of his statesmanship throughout the struggle sprang from the fidelity with which he reflected this double aspect of national opinion. He has been blamed for fighting the French Revolution at all, as he has been blamed for not entering on an anti-revolutionary crusade. But his temper was that of the nation as a whole. He shrank from the fanaticism of Burke as he shrank from the fanaticism of Tom Paine: his aim was not to crush France or the Revolution, but to bring the struggle with them to such an end as might enable England to return in safety to the work of progress which the struggle had interrupted. And it was this that gave significance to his fall. It was a sign that the time had come when the national union which Pitt embodied must dissolve with the disappearance of the force that created it; when resistance had done its work, and the arrest of all national movement had come to an end with the attitude of mere resistance from which it sprang; when in face of a new France and a new French policy England could again return to her normal political life, and the impulses towards progress which had received so severe a check in 1792 could again flow in their older channels. In such a return Pitt himself took the lead; and his proposal of Catholic emancipation was as significant of a new era of English life as the Peace of Lun?ville was significant of a new settlement of Europe.

In Pitt's mind the Union which he brought about in 1800 was more than a mere measure for the security of the one island; it was a first step in the regeneration of the other. The legislative connexion of the two countries was only part of the plan which he had conceived for the conciliation of Ireland. With the conclusion of the Union indeed, his projects of free trade between the two countries, projects which had been defeated a few years back by the folly of the Irish Parliament, came quietly into play; and in spite of insufficient capital and social disturbance the growth of the trade, shipping, and manufactures of Ireland has gone on without a check from that time to this. The change which brought Ireland directly under the common Parliament was followed too by a gradual revision of its oppressive laws and an amendment in their administration; while taxation was lightened, and a faint beginning made of public instruction. But in Pitt's mind the great means of conciliation was the concession of religious equality. In proposing to the English Parliament the union of the two countries he pointed out that when thus joined to a Protestant country like England all danger of a Catholic supremacy in Ireland, even should Catholic disabilities be removed, would be practically at an end. In such a case, he suggested that "an effectual and adequate provision for the Catholic clergy" would be a security for their loyalty. His words gave strength to the hopes of "Catholic emancipation," as the removal of what remained of the civil disabilities of Catholics was called, which were held out by his agent, Lord Castlereagh, in Ireland itself as a means of hindering any opposition to the project of Union on the part of the Catholics. It was agreed on all sides that their opposition would have secured its defeat; and the absence of such a Catholic opposition showed the new trust in Pitt which was awakened by the hints of Lord Castlereagh. The trust had good grounds to go on. After the passing of the bill Pitt prepared to lay before his Cabinet a measure which would have raised not only the Irish Catholic but the Irish Dissenter to a perfect equality of civil rights. He proposed to remove all religious tests which limited the exercise of the franchise, or which were required for admission to Parliament, the magistracy, the bar, municipal offices, or posts in the army or the service of the State. An oath of allegiance and of fidelity to the Constitution was substituted for the Sacramental test; while the loyalty of the Catholic and Dissenting clergy was secured by a grant of some provision to both on the part of the State. To win over the Episcopal Church to such an equality measures were added for strengthening its modes of discipline, as well as for increasing the stipends of its poorer ministers, while a commutation of tithes was planned as a means of removing a constant source of quarrel between the Protestant clergy and the Irish people.

But the scheme was too large and statesmanlike to secure the immediate assent of the Cabinet; and before that assent could be won or the plan laid with full ministerial sanction before the king, it was communicated through the treachery of the Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, to George the Third. "I count any man my personal enemy," George broke out angrily to Dundas, "who proposes any such measure." Pitt answered this outburst by submitting his whole plan to the king. "The political circumstances under which the exclusive laws originated," he wrote, "arising either from the conflicting power of hostile and nearly balanced sects, from the apprehension of a Popish queen as successor, a disputed succession and a foreign pretender, a division in Europe between Catholic and Protestant Powers, are no longer applicable to the present state of things." But argument was wasted upon George the Third. In spite of the decision of the lawyers whom he consulted, the king declared himself bound by his Coronation Oath to maintain the tests; and his obstinacy was only strengthened by a knowledge that such a refusal must drive Pitt from office. George was weary of his minister's supremacy. He was longing for servants who would leave him more than a show of power, and he chose his ground for a struggle with all the cunning of his earlier years. It was by his command of public opinion that Pitt had been able to force his measures on the king. But in the question of Catholic Emancipation George knew that opinion was not with his minister, but with himself. On this point his bigotry was at one with the bigotry of the bulk of his subjects, as well as with their political distrust of Catholics and Irishmen. He persisted therefore in his refusal; and it was followed by the event he foresaw. In February 1801, at the moment of the Peace of Lun?ville, William Pitt resigned his office into the hands of the king.

It was with a sense of relief that George found himself freed from the great minister whose temper was so alien from his own. But it was with a yet greater sense of relief that he saw him followed into retirement not only by Lord Grenville, but by nearly all the more liberal section of the ministry, by men like Windham and Lord Spencer, the representatives of the "Old Whigs" who had joined Pitt on the disruption of their party through the French Revolution. Such a union indeed could hardly have lasted much longer. The terror which had so long held these Whigs in their alliance with the Tories who formed the bulk of the administration was now at an end; and we have already seen their pressure for a more liberal policy in the action of Lord Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. But the question of Emancipation finally brought about a restoration of the natural position of parties; and from this moment the old Whigs, who accepted Lord Grenville as their head, fell into alliance with the more revolutionary Whigs who had remained faithful to Fox. The Whig party thus became again a powerful element in English politics, while in face of the reunited Whigs stood the Tories, relieved like themselves from the burthen of an alliance which grew hourly more distasteful. The bulk of the old Ministry returned in a few days to office with Mr. Addington at their head, and his administration received the support of the whole Tory party in Parliament.

Without the walls of Parliament however the nation looked on such a change with dismay. Addington was regarded as a weak and narrow-minded man; and the favour with which the king welcomed him was clue to a consciousness of their common bigotry. Of Lord Hawkesbury, who succeeded Lord Grenville in the conduct of foreign affairs, nothing was known outside the House of Commons. It was with anxiety that England found itself guided by men like these at a time when every hour brought darker news. The scarcity of bread was mounting to a famine. Taxes were raised anew, and yet the loan for the year amounted to five-and-twenty millions. The country stood utterly alone; while the peace of Lun?ville secured France from all hostility on the Continent. And it was soon plain that this peace was only the first step in a new policy on the part of the First Consul. What he had done was to free his hands for a decisive conflict with Britain itself, both as a world-power and as a centre of wealth. England was at once the carrier of European commerce and the workshop of European manufactures. While her mines, her looms, her steam-engines, were giving her almost a monopoly of industrial production, her merchant ships sufficed not only to spread her own products through the world, but to carry to every part of it the products of other countries. Though the war had already told on both these sources of wealth, it was far from having told fatally. It had long closed France indeed to English exports, while the waste of wealth in so wide a strife had lessened the buying power of Europe at large. But in Europe the loss was to some extent made up for the moment by the artificial demand for supplies which war creates; the home market still sufficed to absorb a vast quantity of manufactures; and America, which was fast growing into the most important of English customers, remained unaffected by the struggle. Industry had thus suffered but little loss, while commerce believed itself to have greatly gained. All rivals save one had in fact been swept from the sea; the carrying trade of France and Holland alike had been transferred to the British flag, and the conquest of their wealthier settlements had thrown into British hands the whole colonial trade of the world.

To strike at England's wealth had been among the projects of the Directory: it was now the dream of the First Consul. It was in vain for England to produce, if he shut her out of every market. Her carrying trade must be annihilated if he closed every port against her ships. It was this gigantic project of a "Continental System" that revealed itself as soon as Buonaparte became finally master of France. From France itself and its dependencies in Holland and the Netherlands English trade was already excluded. But Italy also was shut against her after the Peace of Lun?ville, and Spain not only closed her own ports but forced Portugal to break with her English ally. In the Baltic Buonaparte was more active than even in the Mediterranean. In a treaty with America, which was destined to bring this power also in the end into his great attack, he had formally recognized the rights of neutral vessels which England was hourly disputing; and in her disregard of them he not only saw the means of bringing the northern powers into his system of exclusion, but of drawing on their resources for a yet more decisive blow. He was set upon challenging not only England's wealth but her world-empire; and his failure in Egypt had taught him that the first condition of success in such an enterprise was to wrest from her her command of the seas. The only means of doing this lay in a combination of naval powers; and the earlier efforts of France had left but one naval combination for Buonaparte to try. The Directory had been able to assail England at sea by the joint action of the French fleet with those of Holland and of Spain. But the Spanish navy had been crippled by the battle of Cape St. Vincent, and the Dutch fleet destroyed in the victory of Camperdown. The only powers which now possessed naval resources were the powers of the North. The fleets of Denmark, Sweden, and Russia numbered forty sail of the line, and they had been untouched by the strife. Both the Scandinavian states resented the severity with which Britain enforced that right of search which had brought about their armed neutrality at the close of the American war; while Denmark was besides an old ally of France, and her sympathies were still believed to be French. The First Consul therefore had little trouble in enlisting them in a league of neutrals, which was in effect a declaration of war against England, and which Prussia as before showed herself ready to join.

Russia indeed seemed harder to gain. Since Paul's accession she had been the moving spirit in the confederacy which had only been broken up by the victory of Marengo. But the spirit of revolutionary aggression which had nominally roused Paul to action, had, as the Czar believed, been again hushed by the First Consul. Buonaparte had yielded to his remonstrances in preserving the independence of Naples and Sardinia; and with Italian subtlety he now turned the faith in French moderation which these concessions created in the mind of Paul into a dread of the ambition of England and a jealousy of her sovereignty of the seas. But his efforts would have been in vain had they not fallen in with the general current of Russian policy. From the first outbreak of the Revolutionary struggle Russia, as we have seen, had taken advantage of the strife among the Western nations to push forward her own projects in the East. Catharine had aimed at absorbing Poland, and at becoming the mistress of European Turkey. In the first she had been successful, but the second still remained unaccomplished when her empire passed to her son. For a time Paul had been diverted from the task by the turn of affairs in Western Europe, where the victories of the French Republic threatened an utter overthrow of the powers opposed to it, which would have foiled the plans of Russia by bringing about a European union that must have paralysed her advance. The Czar therefore acted strictly in the spirit of Catharine's policy when he stepped in again to feed the strife by raising the combatants to a new equality, and when he withdrew his armies at the very moment that this was done. But successful as his diversion had been, Paul saw that one obstacle remained in the way of his projects upon Turkey. Pitt had never hidden his opposition to the Russian plans. His whole policy at the outbreak of the Revolution had been guided by a desperate hope of binding the powers again together to prevent the ruin of Poland, or of hindering it by a league of England and France alone. Foiled as he had been in these efforts, he was even more resolute to check the advance of Russia on Constantinople. Already her growing empire in India was telling on the European policy of England; and the security of Egypt, of Syria, of Turkey at large, was getting deemed to be essential to the maintenance of her communication with her great dependency. The French descent on Egypt, the attack on Syria, had bound Britain and Turkey together; and Paul saw that an attack on the one would bring him a fresh opponent in the other.

The First Consul's disappointment was keen; but he saw clearly that with this dissolution of the Northern alliance the war came virtually to an end. He no longer had any means of attacking Britain save by the efforts of France itself, and even with the aid of Holland and Spain France was at this moment helpless before the supremacy of England at sea. On the other hand the continuance of the struggle would give triumph after triumph to his foes. One such blow had already fallen. Even in the midst of his immense schemes against Britain at home, Buonaparte had not abandoned the hope of attacking her in India. Egypt was needful to such a scheme; and from the first moment of his power he strained every nerve to retain Egypt in the hands of France. Menou, who commanded there, was ordered to hold the country; an expedition was fitted out in the Spanish ports for its relief; and light vessels were hurried from the Italian coast with arms and supplies. But at the very moment of the attack on Copenhagen, a stroke as effective wrecked his projects in the East. England had not forgotten the danger to her dependency; ever since Buonaparte's expedition her fleet had blockaded Malta, the island fortress whose possession gave France a first stepping-stone in any enterprise against it; and the surrender of Malta left her unquestioned mistress of the Mediterranean. From Malta she now turned to Egypt itself. Triumphant as England had been at sea since the opening of the war, her soldiers had proved no match for the French on land. Two expeditions had been sent against Holland, and each had ended in a disastrous retreat. But at this moment England reappeared as a military power. In March 1801 a force of 15,000 men under General Abercromby anchored in Aboukir Bay. Deserted as they were by Buonaparte, the French had firmly maintained their hold on Egypt. They had suppressed a revolt at Cairo, driven back Turkish invaders in a fresh victory, and by native levies and reinforcements raised the number of their troops to 30,000 men. But their army was foolishly scattered, and Abercromby was able to force a landing five days after his arrival on the coast. The French however rapidly concentrated; and on the 21st of March their general attacked the English army on the ground it had won with a force equal to its own. The battle was a stubborn one, and Abercromby fell mortally wounded ere its close; but after six hours' fighting the French drew off with heavy loss; and their retreat was followed by the investment of Alexandria and Cairo, into which Menou had withdrawn his army. All hope however was over. Five thousand Turks, with a fresh division from England and India, reinforced the besiegers; and at the close of June the capitulation of the 13,000 soldiers who remained closed the French rule over Egypt.

Bitter as was the anger with which the First Consul received the news of this surrender, it only strengthened his resolve to suspend a war of which Britain only could now reap the fruits, and whose continuance might in the present temper of Russia and its Czar disturb that peace of the Continent on which all his plans against England rested. It was to give time for such an organization of France and its resources as might enable him to reopen the struggle with other chances of success that the First Consul opened negotiations for peace at the close of 1801. His offers were at once met by the English Government. In the actual settlement of the Continent indeed England saw only an imperfect balance to the power of France, but it had no means of disputing the settlement, as France had no means of disturbing its supremacy at sea. If Buonaparte wished to husband his resources for a new attack all but the wilder Tories were willing to husband the resources of England for the more favourable opportunity of renewing it which would come with a revival of European energy. With such a temper on both sides the conclusion of peace became easy; and the negotiations which went on through the winter between England and the three allied Powers of France, Spain, and the Dutch, brought about in March 1802 the Peace of Amiens. The terms of the Peace were necessarily simple; for as England had no claim to interfere with the settlement of the Continent, which had been brought about by the treaties of its powers with the French Republic, all that remained for her was to provide that the settlement should be a substantial one by a pledge on the part of France to withdraw its forces from Southern Italy, and to leave to themselves the republics it had set up along its border in Holland, Switzerland, and Piedmont. In exchange for this pledge England recognized the French government, restored all the colonies which they had lost, save Ceylon and Trinidad, to France and its allies, acknowledged the Ionian Islands as a free republic, and engaged to restore Malta within three months to its old masters, the Knights of St. John.

There was a general sense of relief at the close of so long a struggle; and for a moment the bitter hatred which England had cherished against France seemed to give place to more friendly feelings. The new French ambassador was drawn in triumph on his arrival through the streets of London; and thousands of Englishmen crossed the Channel to visit a country which had conquered the world, and to gaze on the young general who after wonderful victories had given a yet more wonderful peace to Europe. But amidst all the glare of success, shrewd observers saw the dangers that lay in the temper of the First Consul. Whatever had been the errors of the French Revolutionists, even their worst attacks on the independence of the nations around them had been veiled by a vague notion of freeing the peoples whom they invaded from the yoke of their rulers. But the aim of Buonaparte was simply that of a vulgar conqueror. He was resolute to be master of the Western world, and no notions of popular freedom or sense of national right interfered with his resolve. The means at his command for carrying out such a design were immense. The political life of the Revolution had been cut short by his military despotism, but the new social vigour which the Revolution had given to France through the abolition of privileges and the creation of a new middle class on the ruins of the clergy and the nobles still lived on; and while the dissensions which tore the country asunder were hushed by the policy of the First Consul, by his restoration of the Church as a religious power, his recall of the exiles, and the economy and wise administration that distinguished his rule, the centralised system of government that had been bequeathed by the Monarchy to the Revolution and by the Revolution to Buonaparte enabled him easily to seize this national vigour for the profit of his own despotism. On the other hand, the exhaustion of the brilliant hopes raised by the Revolution, the craving for public order, the military enthusiasm and the impulse of a new glory given by the wonderful victories France had won, made a Tyranny possible; and in the hands of Buonaparte this tyranny was supported by a secret police, by the suppression of the press and of all freedom of opinion, and above all by the iron will and immense ability of the First Consul himself.

Once chosen Consul for life, he felt himself secure at home, and turned restlessly to the work of outer aggression. The pledges given at Amiens were set aside. The republics established on the borders of France were brought into mere dependence on his will. Piedmont and Parma were actually annexed to France; and a French army occupied Switzerland. The temperate protests of the English Government were answered by demands for the expulsion of the French exiles who had been living in England ever since the Revolution, and for its surrender of Malta, which was retained till some security could be devised against a fresh seizure of the island by the French fleet. Meanwhile huge armaments were preparing in the French ports; and a new activity was seen in those of Spain. Not for a moment indeed had Buonaparte relinquished his design of attacking Britain. He had made peace because peace would serve his purpose, both in strengthening the tranquillity of the Continent, which was essential to his success in any campaign across the Channel, and in giving him time to replace by a new combination the maritime schemes which had broken down. Beaten as it had been, the Spanish fleet was still powerful; and a union with the French fleet which the First Consul was forming might still enable it to dispute the command of the sea. All that he wished for was time; and time was what the Peace gave him. But delay was as dangerous to England, now that it discerned his plans, as it was profitable to France; and in May 1803 the British Government anticipated his attack by a declaration of war.

The breach only quickened Buonaparte's resolve to attack his enemy at home. The difficulties in his way he set contemptuously aside; "Fifteen millions of people," he said, in allusion to the disproportion between the population of England and France, "must give way to forty millions"; and the invasion was planned on a gigantic scale. A camp of one hundred thousand men was formed at Boulogne, and a host of flat-bottomed boats gathered for their conveyance across the Channel. The peril of the nation forced Addington from office and recalled Pitt to power. His health was broken, and as the days went by his appearance became so haggard and depressed that it was plain death was drawing near. But dying as he really was, the nation clung to him with all its old faith. He was still the representative of national union; and he proposed to include Fox and the leading Whigs in his new ministry, but he was foiled by the bigotry of the king; and the refusal of Lord Grenville and of Windham to take office without Fox, as well as the loss of his post at a later time by his ablest supporter, Dundas, left him almost alone. But lonely as he was, he faced difficulty and danger with the same courage as of old. The invasion seemed imminent when Buonaparte, who now assumed the title of the Emperor Napoleon, appeared in the camp at Boulogne. A slight experience however showed him the futility of his scheme for crossing the Channel in open boats in the teeth of English men-of-war; and he turned to fresh plans of securing its passage. "Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours," he is reported to have said, "and we are masters of the world." A skilfully-combined plan, by which the British fleet would have been divided while the whole French navy was concentrated in the Channel, was delayed by the death of the admiral destined to execute it. But the alliance with Spain placed the Spanish fleet at Napoleon's disposal, and in 1805 he planned its union with that of France, the crushing of the squadron which blocked the ports of the Channel before the English ships which were watching the Spanish armament could come to its support, and a crossing of the vast armament thus protected to the English shore.

Though three hundred thousand volunteers mustered in England to meet the coming attack, such a force would have offered but small hindrance to the veterans of the Grand Army, had they once crossed the Channel. But Pitt had already found them work elsewhere. It was not merely the danger of Britain, and the sense that without this counterpoise they would be helpless before the new French Empire, that roused the alarm of the Continental powers. They had been scared by Napoleon's course of aggression since the settlement at Lun?ville, and his annexation of Genoa brought their alarm to a head. Pitt's offer of subsidies removed the last obstacle in the way of a league; and Russia, Austria, and Sweden joined in an alliance to wrest Italy and the Low Countries from the grasp of the French Emperor. Napoleon meanwhile swept the sea in vain for a glimpse of the great armament whose assembly in the Channel he had so skilfully planned. Admiral Villeneuve, uniting the Spanish ships with his own squadron from Toulon, drew Nelson in pursuit to the West Indies, and then suddenly returning to Cadiz, hastened to form a junction with the French squadron at Brest and to crush the English fleet in the Channel. But a headlong pursuit brought Nelson up with him ere the manoeuvre was complete, and the two fleets met on the 21st of October 1805 off Cape Trafalgar. "England" ran Nelson's famous signal, "expects every man to do his duty"; and though he fell himself in the hour of victory, twenty French sail had struck their flag ere the day was done. The French and Spanish navies were in fact annihilated. From this hour the supremacy of England at sea remained unquestioned; and the danger of any invasion of England rolled away like a dream.

Her allies were less fortunate. "England has saved herself by her courage," Pitt said in what were destined to be his last public words: "she will save Europe by her example!" But even before the victory of Trafalgar Napoleon had abandoned the dream of invading England to meet the coalition in his rear; and swinging round his forces on the Danube, he forced an Austrian army to capitulation in Ulm three days before his naval defeat. From Ulm he marched on Vienna, and at the close of November he crushed the combined armies of Austria and Russia in the battle of Austerlitz. "Austerlitz," Wilberforce wrote in his diary, "killed Pitt." Though he was still but forty-seven, the hollow voice and wasted frame of the great Minister had long told that death was near; and the blow to his hopes proved fatal. "Roll up that map," he said, pointing to a map of Europe which hung upon the wall; "it will not be wanted these ten years!" Once only he rallied from stupor; and those who bent over him caught a faint murmur of "My country! How I leave my country!" On the twenty-third of January 1806 he breathed his last; and was laid in Westminster Abbey in the grave of Chatham. "What grave," exclaimed Lord Wellesley, "contains such a father and such a son! What sepulchre embosoms the remains of so much human excellence and glory!" So great was felt to be the loss that nothing but the union of parties, which Pitt had in vain desired during his lifetime, could fill up the gap left by his death. In the new ministry Fox, with the small body of popular Whigs who were bent on peace and internal reform, united with the aristocratic Whigs under Lord Grenville and with the Tories under Lord Sidmouth. All home questions, in fact, were subordinated to the need of saving Europe from the ambition of France, and in the resolve to save Europe Fox was as resolute as Pitt himself. His hopes of peace indeed were stronger; but they were foiled by the evasive answer which Napoleon gave to his overtures, and by a new war which he undertook against Prussia, the one power which seemed able to resist his arms. On the 14th of October 1806 a decisive victory at Jena laid North Germany at the Emperor's feet. From Berlin Napoleon marched into the heart of Poland to bring to terms the last opponent now left him on the Continent; and though checked in the winter by the stubborn defence of the Russian forces on the field of Eylau, in the summer of 1807 a decisive victory at Friedland brought the Czar to consent to the Peace of Tilsit.

But it was almost impossible to enforce such a system. It was foiled by the rise of a widespread contraband trade, by the reluctance of Holland to aid in its own ruin, by the connivance of officials along the Prussian and Russian shores, and by the pressure of facts. It was impossible even for Napoleon himself to do without the goods he pretended to exclude; an immense system of licences soon neutralized his decree; and the French army which marched to Eylau was clad in greatcoats made at Leeds, and shod with shoes made at Northampton. Vexatious therefore as the system might be at once to England and to Europe, it told on British industry mainly by heightening the price of its products, and so far by restricting the market for them. But it told far more fatally on British commerce. Trade at once began to move from English vessels, which were subject to instant confiscation, and to shelter itself under neutral flags, where goods had at least to be proved to be British before they could be seized. America profited most by this transfer. She was now entering on that commercial career which was to make her England's chief trading rival; and she rapidly availed herself of the Berlin decree to widen her carrying trade. But the British Government at once felt the pressure of the merchant class. As yet this class had profited above all others by the war and by the monopoly which war placed in its hands; and now that not only its monopoly but its very existence was threatened, it called on the Government to protect it. It was to this appeal that the administration of Lord Grenville replied, in January 1807, by an Order in Council which declared all the ports of the coast of France and her allies under blockade, and any neutral vessels trading between them to be good prize.

Such a step however, though it arbitrarily shut neutral vessels out from the coasting trade of most of Europe, was far from satisfying the British merchants, for it left the whole trade between Europe and other countries, which virtually included the colonial trade, untouched; and this passed as of old into American bottoms. But their appeal was no longer to Lord Grenville. The work which his ministry had set itself to do was to continue the double work of Pitt, his resolute maintenance of English greatness, and his endeavour to carry on even amidst the stress of the fight that course of philanthropic and political progress which was struggling back into renewed vigour after its long arrest through the French Revolution. But the forces of ignorance and bigotry which had been too strong for Pitt were too strong for the Grenville ministry, weakened as it was by the death of Fox at the close of the previous year. Its greatest work, the abolition of the slave-trade, in February 1807, was done in the teeth of a vigorous opposition from the Tories and the merchants of Liverpool; and in March the first indication of its desire to open the question of religious equality by allowing Catholic officers to serve in the army was met on the part of the king by the demand of a pledge not to meddle with the question. On the refusal of this pledge the Ministry was dismissed. Its fall was the final close of that union of parties in face of the war with France which had brought about the junction of the bulk of the Whig party with the Tories, and which had been to some extent renewed after the temporary breach in Pitt's last ministry by the junction of Lord Sidmouth and a large body of the Tories with the Whigs. The union had been based on the actual peril to England's existence, and on the suspension of all home questions in face of the peril. But with the break-up of the camp at Boulogne and the victory of Trafalgar the peril of invasion had disappeared. England again broke into the party that called for progress and the party that resisted it.

The policy of Napoleon was at any rate a consistent one in these measures; for his sole aim was to annihilate the industry as well as the commerce of Britain; and he had little to fear from the indignation of America. But the aim of Britain was to find outlets for her manufactures; and of these outlets America was now far the most important. She took in fact ten millions of our exports every year, not only for her own consumption, but for the illicit trade which she managed to carry on with the Continent. To close such an outlet as this was to play into Napoleon's hands. And yet the first result of Canning's policy was to close it. In the long strife between France and England, America had already borne much from both combatants, but above all from Britain. Not only had the English Government exercised its right of search, but it asserted a right of seizing English seamen found in American vessels; and as there were few means of discriminating between English seamen and American, the sailor of Maine or Massachusetts was often impressed to serve in the British fleet. Galled however as was America by outrages such as these, she was hindered from resenting them by her strong disinclination to war, as well as by the profit which she drew from the maintenance of her neutral position; and she believed in the words of Jefferson, that "it will ever be in our power to keep so even a stand between France and England, as to inspire a wish in neither to throw us into the scale of his adversary." But the Orders in Council and the Milan Decree forced her into action, and she at once answered them by an embargo of trade with Europe.

Such a step was a menace of further action, for it was plain that America could not long remain in utter isolation, and that if she left it she must join one combatant or the other. But she had as yet shown no military power outside her own bounds, either by land or sea; and England looked with scorn on the threats of a state which possessed neither army nor fleet. "America," Lord Sidmouth wrote at this time, "is a bugbear: there is no terror in her threats!" Canning indeed saw in the embargo only a carrying out of his policy by the very machinery of the American Government. The commerce of America ceased to exist. Her seamen were driven to seek employment under the British flag; and Britain again absorbed the carrying-trade of the world. But what he really looked forward to was something far beyond this. He saw that the embargo was but a temporary expedient: and he believed that its failure would force the United States into union with England in her war with France. Nothing shows the world-wide nature of the struggle more than such a policy as this; but for a while it seemed justified by its results. After a year's trial America found it impossible to maintain the embargo: and at the opening of 1809 she exchanged it for an Act of Non-Intercourse with France and England alone. But this Act was as ineffective as the embargo. The American Government was utterly without means of enforcing it on its land frontier; and it had small means of enforcing it at sea. Throughout 1809 indeed vessels sailed daily for British ports. The Act was thus effective against France alone, and part of Canning's end was gained. At last the very protest which it embodied was given up, and in May 1810 the Non-Intercourse Act was repealed altogether. All that America persisted in maintaining was an offer that if either Power would repeal its edicts, it would prohibit American commerce with the other.

What the results of this offer were to be we shall see hereafter. But at the moment the attitude of America was one of utter submission; and the effect of the Continental system on Britain had thus been to drive it to a policy of aggression upon neutral states, which seemed to be as successful as it was aggressive. The effect of his system on Napoleon himself was precisely the same. It was to maintain this material union of Europe against Britain that he was driven to aggression after aggression in North Germany, and to demands upon Russia which threatened the league that had been formed at Tilsit. Above all, it was the hope of more effectually crushing the world-power of Britain that drove him, at the very moment when Canning was attacking America, to his worst aggression, the aggression upon Spain. Spain was already his subservient ally; but her alliance became every hour less useful. The country was ruined by misgovernment: its treasury was empty: its fleet rotted in its harbours. To seize the whole Spanish Peninsula, to develope its resources by an active administration, to have at his command not only a regenerated Spain and Portugal, but their mighty dominions in Southern and Central America, to renew with these fresh forces the struggle with Britain for her empire of the seas, these were the designs by which Napoleon was driven to the most ruthless of his enterprises. He acted with his usual subtlety. In October 1807 France and Spain agreed to divide Portugal between them; and on the advance of their forces the reigning House of Braganza fled helplessly from Lisbon to a refuge in Brazil. But the seizure of Portugal was only a prelude to the seizure of Spain. Charles the Fourth, whom a riot in his capital drove at this moment to abdication, and his son and successor, Ferdinand the Seventh, were alike drawn to Bayonne in May 1808, and forced to resign their claims to the Spanish crown; while a French army entered Madrid, and proclaimed Joseph Buonaparte as King of Spain.

High-handed as such an act was, it was in harmony with the general system which Napoleon was pursuing elsewhere, and which had as yet stirred no national resistance. Holland had been changed into a monarchy by a simple decree of the French Emperor, and its crown bestowed on his brother Louis. For another brother, Jerome, a kingdom of Westphalia had been built up out of the Electorates of Hesse Cassel and Hanover. Joseph himself had been set as king over Naples before his transfer to Spain. But the spell of submission was now suddenly broken, and the new king had hardly entered Madrid when Spain rose as one man against the stranger. Desperate as the effort of its people seemed, the news of the rising was welcomed throughout England with a burst of enthusiastic joy. "Hitherto," cried Sheridan, a leader of the Whig opposition, "Buonaparte has contended with princes without dignity, numbers without ardour, or peoples without patriotism. He has yet to learn what it is to combat a people who are animated by one spirit against him." Tory and Whig alike held that "never had so happy an opportunity existed for Britain to strike a bold stroke for the rescue of the world"; and Canning at once resolved to change the system of desultory descents on colonies and sugar islands for a vigorous warfare in the Peninsula. Supplies were sent to the Spanish insurgents with reckless profusion, and two small armies placed under the command of Sir John Moore and Sir Arthur Wellesley for service in the Peninsula. In July 1808 the surrender at Baylen of a French force which had invaded Andalusia gave the first shock to the power of Napoleon, and the blow was followed by one almost as severe. Landing at the Mondego with fifteen thousand men, Sir Arthur Wellesley drove the French army of Portugal from the field of Vimiera, and forced it to surrender in the Convention of Cintra on the 30th of August. But the tide of success was soon roughly turned. Napoleon appeared in Spain with an army of two hundred thousand men; and Moore, who had advanced from Lisbon to Salamanca to support the Spanish armies, found them crushed on the Ebro, and was driven to fall hastily back on the coast. His force saved its honour in a battle before Corunna on the 16th of January 1809, which enabled it to embark in safety; but elsewhere all seemed lost. The whole of northern and central Spain was held by the French armies; and even Zaragoza, which had once heroically repulsed them, submitted after a second equally desperate resistance.

The landing of the wreck of Moore's army and the news of the Spanish defeats turned the temper of England from the wildest hope to the deepest despair; but Canning remained unmoved. On the day of the evacuation of Corunna he signed a treaty of alliance with the Junta which governed Spain in the absence of its king; and the English force at Lisbon, which had already prepared to leave Portugal, was reinforced with thirteen thousand fresh troops and placed under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley. "Portugal," Wellesley wrote coolly, "may be defended against any force which the French can bring against it." At this critical moment the best of the French troops with the Emperor himself were drawn from the Peninsula to the Danube; for the Spanish rising had roused Austria as well as England to a renewal of the struggle. When Marshal Soult therefore threatened Lisbon from the north, Wellesley marched boldly against him, drove him from Oporto in a disastrous retreat, and suddenly changing his line of operations, pushed with twenty thousand men by Abrantes on Madrid. He was joined on the march by a Spanish force of thirty thousand men; and a bloody action with a French army of equal force at Talavera in July 1809 restored the renown of English arms. The losses on both sides were enormous, and the French fell back at the close of the struggle; but the fruits of the victory were lost by a sudden appearance of Soult on the English line of advance. Wellesley was forced to retreat hastily on Badajoz, and his failure was embittered by heavier disasters elsewhere; for Austria was driven to sue for peace by a decisive victory of Napoleon at Wagram, while a force of forty thousand English soldiers which had been despatched against Antwerp in July returned home baffled after losing half its numbers in the marshes of Walcheren.

The failure at Walcheren brought about the fall of the Portland ministry. Canning attributed this disaster to the incompetence of Lord Castlereagh, heir to an Irish peerage, who after taking the chief part in bringing about the union between England and Ireland had been raised by the Duke of Portland to the post of Secretary at War; and the quarrel between the two Ministers ended in a duel and in their resignation of their offices in September 1809. The Duke of Portland retired with Canning; and a new ministry was formed out of the more Tory members of the late administration under the guidance of Spencer Perceval, an industrious mediocrity of the narrowest type; while the Marquis of Wellesley, a brother of the English general in Spain, succeeded Canning as Foreign Secretary. But if Perceval and his colleagues possessed few of the higher qualities of statesmanship, they had one characteristic which in the actual position of English affairs was beyond all price. They were resolute to continue the war. In the nation at large the fit of enthusiasm had been followed by a fit of despair; and the City of London even petitioned for a withdrawal of the English forces from the Peninsula, Napoleon seemed irresistible, and now that Austria was crushed and England stood alone in opposition to him, the Emperor determined to put an end to the strife by a vigorous prosecution of the war in Spain. Andalusia, the one province which remained independent, was invaded in the opening of 1810, and with the exception of Cadiz reduced to submission; while Marshal Massena with a fine army of eighty thousand men marched upon Lisbon. Even Perceval abandoned all hope of preserving a hold on the Peninsula in face of these new efforts, and threw on Wellesley, who had been raised to the peerage as Lord Wellington after Talavera, the responsibility of resolving to remain there.

While England thus failed to rescue Spain from the aggression of Napoleon, she was suddenly brought face to face with the result of her own aggression in America. The repeal of the Non-Intercourse Act in 1810 had in effect been a triumph for Britain: but the triumph forced Napoleon's hand. As yet all he had done by his attack on neutral rights had been to drive the United States practically to join England against him. To revenge himself by war with them would only play England's game yet more; and with characteristic rapidity Napoleon passed from hostility to friendship. He seized on the offer with which America had closed her efforts against the two combatants, and after promising to revoke his Berlin and Milan Decrees he called on America to redeem her pledge. In February 1811, therefore, the United States announced that all intercourse with Great Britain and her dependencies was at an end. The effect of this step was seen in a reduction of English exports during this year by a third of their whole amount. It was in vain that Britain pleaded that the Emperor's promises remained unfulfilled, that neither of the decrees was withdrawn, that Napoleon had failed to return the American merchandise seized under them, and that the enforcement of non-intercourse with England was thus an unjust act, and an act of hostility. The pressure of the American policy, as well as news of the warlike temper which had at last grown up in the United States, made submission inevitable; for the industrial state of England was now so critical that to expose it to fresh shocks was to court the very ruin which Napoleon had planned.

During the earlier years of the war indeed the increase of wealth had been enormous. England was sole mistress of the seas. The war gave her possession of the colonies of Spain, of Holland, and of France; and if her trade was checked for a time by the Berlin Decree, the efforts of Napoleon were soon rendered fruitless by the smuggling system which sprang up along the southern coasts and the coast of North Germany. English exports indeed had nearly doubled since the opening of the century. Manufactures were profiting by the discoveries of Watt and Arkwright; and the consumption of raw cotton in the mills of Lancashire rose during the same period from fifty to a hundred million of pounds. The vast accumulation of capital, as well as the vast increase of the population at this time, told upon the land, and forced agriculture into a feverish and unhealthy prosperity. Wheat rose to famine prices, and the value of land rose in proportion with the price of wheat. Inclosures went on with prodigious rapidity; the income of every landowner was doubled, while the farmers were able to introduce improvements into the processes of agriculture which changed the whole face of the country. But if the increase of wealth was enormous, its distribution was partial. During the fifteen years which preceded Waterloo, the number of the population rose from ten to thirteen millions, and this rapid increase kept down the rate of wages, which would naturally have advanced in a corresponding degree with the increase in the national wealth. Even manufactures, though destined in the long run to benefit the labouring classes, seemed at first rather to depress them; for one of the earliest results of the introduction of machinery was the ruin of a number of small trades which were carried on at home and the pauperization of families who relied on them for support. In the winter of 1811 the terrible pressure of this transition from handicraft to machinery was seen in the Luddite, or machine-breaking, riots which broke out over the northern and midland counties; and which were only suppressed by military force. While labour was thus thrown out of its older grooves, and the rate of wages kept down at an artificially low figure by the rapid increase of population, the rise in the price of wheat, which brought wealth to the landowner and the farmer, brought famine and death to the poor, for England was cut off by the war from the vast corn-fields of the Continent or of America, which nowadays redress from their abundance the results of a bad harvest. Scarcity was followed by a terrible pauperization of the labouring classes. The amount of the poor-rate rose fifty per cent; and with the increase of poverty followed its inevitable result, the increase of crime.

With social and political troubles thus awaking anew to life about them, even Tory statesmen were not willing to face the terrible consequences of a ruin of English industry such as might follow from the junction of America with Napoleon. They were in fact preparing to withdraw the Orders in Council, when their plans were arrested by the dissolution of the Perceval ministry. Its position had from the first been a weak one. A return of the king's madness made it necessary in the beginning of 1811 to confer the Regency on the Prince of Wales; and the Whig sympathies of the Prince threatened for a while the Cabinet with dismissal. Though this difficulty was surmounted their hold of power remained insecure, and the insecurity of the ministry told on the conduct of the war; for the apparent inactivity of Wellington during 1811 was really due to the hesitation and timidity of the Cabinet at home. But in May 1812 the assassination of Perceval by a madman named Bellingham brought about the dissolution of his ministry; and fresh efforts were made by the Regent to install the Whigs in office. Mutual distrust however again foiled his attempts; and the old ministry returned to office under the headship of Lord Liverpool, a man of no great abilities, but temperate, well informed, and endowed with a remarkable skill in holding discordant colleagues together. The most important of these colleagues was Lord Castlereagh, who became Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Time has long ago rendered justice to the political ability of Castlereagh, disguised as it was to men of his own day by a curious infelicity of expression; and the instinctive good sense of Englishmen never showed itself more remarkably than in their preference at this crisis of his cool judgement, his high courage, his discernment, and his will to the more showy brilliancy of Canning. His first work indeed as a minister was to meet the danger in which Canning had involved the country by his Orders in Council. On the 23rd of June, only twelve days after the ministry had been formed, these Orders were repealed. But, quick as was Castlereagh's action, events had moved even more quickly. At the opening of the year America, in despair of redress, had resolved on war; Congress had voted an increase of both army and navy; and laid in April an embargo on all vessels in American harbours. Actual hostilities might still have been averted by the repeal of the Orders, on which the English Cabinet was resolved; but in the confusion which followed the murder of Perceval, and the strife of parties for office through the month that followed, the opportunity was lost. When the news of the repeal reached America, it came six weeks too late. On the 18th of June an Act of Congress had declared America at war with Great Britain.

Had Napoleon been able to reap the fruits of the strife which his policy had thus forced on the two English peoples, it is hard to say how Britain could have coped with him. Cut off from her markets alike in east and west, her industries checked and disorganized, a financial crisis added to her social embarrassment, it may be doubted whether she must not have bowed in the end before the pressure of the Continental System. But if that system had thrust her into aggression and ruin, it was as inevitably thrusting the same aggression and ruin on her rival. The moment when America entered into the great struggle was a critical moment in the history of mankind. Six days after President Madison issued his declaration of war, Napoleon crossed the Niemen on his march to Moscow. Successful as his policy had been in stirring up war between England and America, it had been no less successful in breaking the alliance which he had made with the Czar at Tilsit and in forcing on a contest with Russia. On the one hand, Napoleon was irritated by the refusal of Russia to enforce strictly the suspension of all trade with England, though such a suspension would have ruined the Russian landowners. On the other, Alexander saw with growing anxiety the advance of the French Empire which sprang from Napoleon's resolve to enforce his system by a seizure of the northern coasts. In 1811 Holland, the Hanseatic towns, part of Westphalia, and the Duchy of Oldenburg were successively annexed, and the Duchy of Mecklenburg threatened with seizure. A peremptory demand on the part of France for the entire cessation of intercourse with England brought the quarrel to a head; and preparations were made on both sides for a gigantic struggle.

Even before it opened, this new enterprise gave fresh vigour to Napoleon's foes. The best of the French soldiers were drawn from Spain to the frontier of Poland; and Wellington, whose army had been raised to a force of forty thousand Englishmen and twenty thousand Portuguese, profited by the withdrawal to throw off his system of defence and to assume an attitude of attack. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz were taken by storm during the spring of 1812; and at the close of June, three days before Napoleon crossed the Niemen, in his march on Moscow, Wellington crossed the Agueda in a march on Salamanca. After a series of masterly movements on both sides, Marmont with the French army of the North attacked the English on the hills in the neighbourhood of that town on the twenty-second of July. While he was marching round the right of the English position his left wing remained isolated; and with a sudden exclamation of "Marmont is lost!" Wellington flung on it the bulk of his force, crushed it, and drove the whole army from the field. The loss on either side was nearly equal, but failure had demoralized the French army; and its retreat forced Joseph to leave Madrid, and Soult to evacuate Andalusia and to concentrate the southern army on the eastern coast. While Napoleon was still pushing slowly over the vast plains of Poland, Wellington made his entry into Madrid in August, and began the siege of Burgos. The town however held out gallantly for a month, till the advance of the two French armies, now concentrated in the north and south of Spain, forced Wellington, in October, to a hasty retreat on the Portuguese frontier.

If Wellington had shaken the rule of the French in Spain in this campaign, his ultimate failure showed how firm a military hold they still possessed there. But the disappointment was forgotten in the news which followed it. At the moment when the English troops fell back from Burgos began the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow. Victorious in a battle at Borodino, Napoleon had entered the older capital of Russia in triumph, and waited impatiently to receive proposals of peace from the Czar. But a fire kindled by its own inhabitants reduced the city to ashes; Alexander still remained silent; and the gathering cold bent even the stubborn will of Napoleon to own the need of retreat. The French were forced to fall back amidst the horrors of a Russian winter; and of the four hundred thousand combatants who formed the Grand Army at its first outset, only a few thousands recrossed the Niemen in December. In spite of the gigantic efforts which Napoleon made to repair his losses, the spell which he had cast over Europe was broken. Prussia rose against him as the Russians crossed the Niemen in the spring of 1813; and the forces which held it were at once thrown back on the Elbe. In this emergency the military genius of the French Emperor rose to its height. With a fresh army of two hundred thousand men whom he had gathered at Mainz he marched on the allied armies of Russia and Prussia in May, cleared Saxony by a victory over them at Lutzen, and threw them back on the Oder by a fresh victory at Bautzen. Disheartened by defeat, and by the neutral attitude which Austria still preserved, the two powers consented in June to an armistice, and negotiated for peace. But Austria, though unwilling to utterly ruin France to the profit of her great rival in the East, was as resolute as either of the allies to wrest from Napoleon his supremacy over Europe; and at the moment when it became clear that Napoleon was only bent on playing with her proposals, she was stirred to action by news that his army was at last driven from Spain. Wellington had left Portugal in May with an army which had now risen to ninety thousand men; and overtaking the French forces in retreat at Vitoria on the twenty-first of June he inflicted on them a defeat which drove them in utter rout across the Pyrenees. Madrid was at once evacuated; and Clausel fell back from Zaragoza into France. The victory not only freed Spain from its invaders; it restored the spirit of the Allies. The close of the armistice was followed by a union of Austria with the forces of Prussia and the Czar; and in October a final overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig forced the French army to fall back in rout across the Rhine.

The war now hurried to its close. Though held at bay for a while by the sieges of San Sebastian and Pampeluna, as well as by an obstinate defence of the Pyrenees, Wellington succeeded in the very month of the triumph at Leipzig in winning a victory on the Bidassoa, which enabled him to enter France. He was soon followed by the Allies. On the last day of 1813 their forces crossed the Rhine; and a third of France passed, without opposition, into their hands. For two months more Napoleon maintained a wonderful struggle with a handful of raw conscripts against their overwhelming numbers; while in the south, Soult, forced from his entrenched camp near Bayonne and defeated at Orthez, fell back before Wellington on Toulouse. Here their two armies met in April in a stubborn and indecisive engagement. But though neither leader knew it, the war was even then at an end. The struggle of Napoleon himself had ended at the close of March with the surrender of Paris; and the submission of the capital was at once followed by the abdication of the Emperor and the return of the Bourbons.

England's triumph over its enemy was dashed by the more doubtful fortunes of the struggle across the Atlantic. The declaration of war by America seemed an act of sheer madness; for its navy consisted of a few frigates and sloops; its army was a mass of half-drilled and half-armed recruits; while the States themselves were divided on the question of the war, and Connecticut with Massachusetts refused to send either money or men. Three attempts to penetrate into Canada during the summer and autumn were repulsed with heavy loss. But these failures were more than redeemed by unexpected successes at sea, where in two successive engagements between English and American frigates, the former were forced to strike their flag. The effect of these victories was out of all proportion to their real importance; for they were the first heavy blows which had been dealt at England's supremacy over the seas. In 1813 America followed up its naval triumphs by more vigorous efforts on land. Its forces cleared Lake Ontario, captured Toronto, destroyed the British flotilla on Lake Erie, and made themselves masters of Upper Canada. An attack on Lower Canada, however, was successfully beaten back; and a fresh advance of the British and Canadian forces in the heart of the winter again recovered the Upper Province. The reverse gave fresh strength to the party in the United States which had throughout been opposed to the war, and whose opposition to it had been embittered by the terrible distress brought about by the blockade and the ruin of American commerce. Cries of secession began to be heard, and Massachusetts took the bold step of appointing delegates to confer with delegates from the other New England States "on the subject of their grievances and common concerns."

In 1814, however, the war was renewed with more vigour than ever; and Upper Canada was again invaded. But the American army, after inflicting a severe defeat on the British forces in the battle of Chippewa in July, was itself defeated a few weeks after in an equally stubborn engagement, and thrown back on its own frontier; while the fall of Napoleon enabled the English Government to devote its whole strength to the struggle with an enemy which it had ceased to despise. General Ross, with a force of four thousand men, appeared in the Potomac, captured Washington, and before evacuating the city burnt its public buildings to the ground. Few more shameful acts are recorded in our history; and it was the more shameful in that it was done under strict orders from the Government at home. But the raid upon Washington was intended simply to strike terror into the American people; and the real stress of the war was thrown on two expeditions whose business was to penetrate into the States from the north and from the south. Both proved utter failures. A force of nine thousand Peninsular veterans which marched in September to the attack of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain was forced to fall back by the defeat of the English flotilla which accompanied it. A second force under General Packenham appeared in December at the mouth of the Mississippi and attacked New Orleans, but was repulsed by General Jackson with the loss of half its numbers. Peace, however, had already been concluded. The close of the French war, if it left untouched the grounds of the struggle, made the United States sensible of the danger of pushing it further; Britain herself was anxious for peace; and the warring claims, both of England and America, were set aside in silence in the treaty of 1814.

About five thousand men had fallen on either side in this fierce engagement: but, heavy as was Wellington's loss, the firmness of the English army had already done much to foil Napoleon's effort at breaking through the line of the Allies. Bl?cher's retreat however left the English flank uncovered; and on the following day, while the Prussians were falling back on Wavre, Wellington, with nearly seventy thousand men--for his army was now well in hand--withdrew in good order, followed by the mass of the French forces under the Emperor himself. Napoleon had detached thirty thousand men under Grouchy to hang upon the rear of the beaten Prussians, while with a force of eighty thousand he resolved to bring Wellington to battle. On the morning of the 18th of June the two armies faced one another on the field of Waterloo in front of the Forest of Soignies, on the high road to Brussels. Napoleon's one fear had been that of a continued retreat. "I have them!" he cried, as he saw the English line drawn up on a low rise of ground which stretched across the high-road from the ch?teau of Hougomont on its right to the farm and straggling village of La Haye Sainte on its left. He had some grounds for his confidence of success. On either side the forces numbered between seventy and eighty thousand men: but the French were superior in guns and cavalry, and a large part of Wellington's force consisted of Belgian levies who broke and fled at the outset of the fight. A fierce attack upon Hougomont opened the battle at eleven; but it was not till midday that the corps of D'Erlon advanced upon the centre near La Haye Sainte, which from that time bore the main brunt of the struggle. Never has greater courage, whether of attack or endurance, been shown on any field than was shown by both combatants at Waterloo. The columns of D'Erlon, repulsed by the English foot, were hurled back in disorder by a charge of the Scots Greys; but the victorious horsemen were crushed in their turn by the French cuirassiers, and the mass of the French cavalry, twelve thousand strong, flung itself in charge after charge on the English front, carrying the English guns and sweeping with desperate bravery round the unbroken squares whose fire thinned their ranks. With almost equal bravery the French columns of the centre again advanced, wrested at last the farm of La Haye Sainte from their opponents, and pushed on vigorously though in vain under Ney against the troops in its rear.

But meanwhile every hour was telling against Napoleon. To win the battle he must crush the English army before Bl?cher joined it; and the English army was still uncrushed. Terrible as was his loss, and many of his regiments were reduced to a mere handful of men, Wellington stubbornly held his ground while the Prussians, advancing from Wavre through deep and miry forest roads, were slowly gathering to his support, disregarding the attack on their rear by which Grouchy strove to hold them back from the field. At half-past four their advanced guard deployed at last from the woods; but the main body was far behind, and Napoleon was still able to hold his ground against them till their increasing masses forced him to stake all on a desperate effort against the English front. The Imperial Guard--his only reserve, and which had as yet taken no part in the battle--was drawn up at seven in two huge columns of attack. The first, with Ney himself at its head, swept all before it as it mounted the rise beside La Haye Sainte, on which the thin English line still held its ground, and all but touched the English front when its mass, torn by the terrible fire of musketry with which it was received, gave way before a charge. The second, three thousand strong, advanced with the same courage over the slope near Hougomont, only to be repulsed and shattered in its turn. At the moment when these masses fell slowly and doggedly back down the fatal rise, the Prussians pushed forward on Napoleon's right, their guns swept the road to Charleroi, and Wellington seized the moment for a general advance. From that hour all was lost. Only the Guard stood firm in the wreck of the French army; and though darkness and exhaustion checked the English in their pursuit of the broken troops as they hurried from the field, the Prussian horse continued the chase through the night. Only forty thousand Frenchmen with some thirty guns recrossed the Sambre while Napoleon himself fled hurriedly to Paris. His second abdication was followed by a triumphant entry of the English and Prussian armies into the French capital; and the long war ended with his exile to St. Helena, and the return of Lewis the Eighteenth to the throne of the Bourbons.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Reference to the Index has been removed from the Table of Contents.

The word manoeuvre uses an oe ligature in the original.

Variations in spelling have been left as in the original.

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