History of the English People Volume Viii Part 5

Napoleon was able to find a pretext for his new attack in England's own action. By a violent stretch of her rights as a combatant she had declared the whole coast occupied by France and its allies, from Dantzig to Trieste, to be in a state of blockade. It was impossible to enforce such an order as this, even with the immense force at her disposal; but it was ostensibly to meet this "paper blockade" that Napoleon issued from Berlin, on the twenty-first of November 1806, a decree which--without a single s.h.i.+p to carry it out--placed the British Islands in a state of blockade. All commerce or communication with them was prohibited; all English goods or manufactures found in the territory of France or its allies were declared liable to confiscation; and their harbours were closed, not only against vessels coming from Britain, but against all who had touched at her ports. An army of inspectors spread along the coasts to carry out this decree.

[Sidenote: Its results.]

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 sh.o.r.es, 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 cla.s.s. As yet this cla.s.s 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.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Grenville Ministry.]

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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Sidenote: The Portland Ministry.]

The last was still the stronger: for in the ma.s.s of the nation progress was still confounded with the destruction of inst.i.tutions, the pa.s.sion for war absorbed public attention, and the Tories showed themselves most in earnest in the prosecution of the war. From this time therefore to the end of the war England was wholly governed by the Tories. The nominal head of the ministry which succeeded that of Lord Grenville was the Duke of Portland; its guiding spirit was the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, a young and devoted adherent of Pitt, whose brilliant rhetoric gave him power over the House of Commons, while the vigour and breadth of his mind gave a new energy and colour to the war. At no time had opposition to Napoleon seemed so hopeless as at the moment of his entry into power. From foes the two Emperors of Western and Eastern Europe had become friends, and the hope of French aid in the conquest of Turkey drew Alexander to a close alliance with Napoleon. Russia not only enforced the Berlin decrees against British commerce, but forced Sweden, the one ally that England still retained on the Continent, to renounce her alliance. The Russian and Swedish fleets were thus placed at the service of France; and the two Emperors counted on securing in addition the fleet of Denmark, and again threatening by this union the maritime supremacy which formed England's real defence. The hope was foiled by the decision of the new ministers. In July 1807 an expedition was promptly and secretly equipped by Canning, with a demand for the surrender of the Danish fleet into the hands of England, on pledge of its return at the close of the war. On the refusal of the Danes the demand was enforced by a bombardment of Copenhagen; and the whole Danish fleet, with a vast ma.s.s of naval stores, was carried into British ports. It was in the same spirit of almost reckless decision that Canning turned to meet Napoleon's Continental System. The cry of the British merchant fell upon willing ears. Of trade or the laws of trade Canning was utterly ignorant; nor could he see that the interests of the country were not necessarily the interests of a cla.s.s; but he was resolute at any cost to hinder the transfer of commerce to neutral flags; and he saw in the crisis a means of forcing the one great neutral power, America, to join Britain in her strife with France. In November 1807, therefore, he issued fresh Orders in Council. By these France, and every Continental state from which the British flag was excluded, were put in a state of blockade, and all vessels bound for their harbours were held subject to seizure unless they had touched at a British port.

The orders were at once met by another decree of Napoleon issued at Milan in December, which declared every vessel, of whatever nation, coming from or bound to Britain or any British colony, to have forfeited its character as a neutral, and to be liable to seizure.

[Sidenote: The American Embargo.]

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 a.s.serted 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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.

[Sidenote: Napoleon and Spain.]

What the results of this offer were to be we shall see hereafter. But at the moment the att.i.tude 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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.

[Sidenote: The Rising 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 Ca.s.sel 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.

[Sidenote: Wellesley in Portugal.]

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

[Sidenote: The Perceval Ministry.]

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 statesmans.h.i.+p, 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 pet.i.tioned 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 Ma.s.sena 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.

[Sidenote: Torres Vedras.]

But the cool judgement and firm temper which distinguished Wellington enabled him to face a responsibility from which weaker men would have shrunk. "I conceive," he answered, "that the honour and interest of our country require that we should hold our ground here as long as possible; and, please G.o.d, I will maintain it as long as I can." By the addition of Portuguese troops who had been trained under British officers, his army was now raised to fifty thousand men; and though his inferiority in force compelled him to look on while Ma.s.sena reduced the frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, he inflicted on him a heavy check at the heights of Busaco, and finally fell back in October 1810 on three lines of defence which he had secretly constructed at Torres Vedras, along a chain of mountain, heights crowned with redoubts and bristling with cannon. The position was impregnable: and able and stubborn as Ma.s.sena was he found himself forced after a month's fruitless efforts to fall back in a masterly retreat; but so terrible were the privations of the French army in pa.s.sing again through the wasted country that it was only with forty thousand men that he reached Ciudad Rodrigo in the spring of 1811. Reinforced by fresh troops, Ma.s.sena turned fiercely to the relief of Almeida, which Wellington had besieged. Two days' b.l.o.o.d.y and obstinate fighting however, in May 1811, failed to drive the English army from its position at Fuentes d'Onore, and the Marshal fell back on Salamanca and relinquished his effort to drive Wellington from Portugal. But great as was the effect of Torres Vedras in restoring the spirit of the English people, and in reviving throughout Europe the hope of resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, its immediate result was little save the deliverance of Portugal. If Ma.s.sena had failed, his colleagues had succeeded in their enterprises; the French were now masters of all Spain save Cadiz and the eastern provinces, and even the east coast was reduced in 1811 by the vigour of General Suchet.

[Sidenote: The Quarrel with America.]

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 pa.s.sed from hostility to friends.h.i.+p. 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.

[Sidenote: State of England.]

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 Lancas.h.i.+re rose during the same period from fifty to a hundred million of pounds.

The vast acc.u.mulation 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses. The amount of the poor-rate rose fifty per cent; and with the increase of poverty followed its inevitable result, the increase of crime.

[Sidenote: Political Progress.]

The natural relation of trade and commerce to the general wealth of the people at large was thus disturbed by the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the time. The war enriched the landowner, the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer; but it impoverished the poor. It is indeed from these fatal years that we must date that war of cla.s.ses, that social severance between employers and employed, which still forms the main difficulty of English politics. But it is from these too that we must date the renewal of that progressive movement in politics which had been suspended since the opening of the war. The publication of the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802 by a knot of young lawyers at Edinburgh marked a revival of the policy of const.i.tutional and administrative progress which had been reluctantly abandoned by William Pitt. Jeremy Bentham gave a new vigour to political speculation by his advocacy of the doctrine of Utility, and his definition of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" as the aim of political action. In 1809 Sir Francis Burdett revived the question of Parliamentary Reform. Only fifteen members supported his motion; and a reference to the House of Commons in a pamphlet which he subsequently published, as "a part of our fellow-subjects collected together by means which it is not necessary to describe," was met by his committal to the Tower, where he remained till the prorogation of the Parliament. A far greater effect was produced by the perseverance with which Canning pressed year by year the question of Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation. So long as Perceval lived both efforts at Reform were equally vain; but the advancing strength of a more liberal sentiment in the nation was felt by the policy of "moderate concession"

which was adopted by his successors. Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation became an open question in the Cabinet itself, and was adopted in 1812 by a triumphant majority in the House of Commons, though it was still rejected by the Lords.

[Sidenote: War with America.]

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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 heads.h.i.+p 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.

[Sidenote: Napoleon and Russia.]

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 embarra.s.sment, 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.

[Sidenote: Salamanca.]

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 a.s.sume an att.i.tude 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.

[Sidenote: Ruin of Napoleon.]

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 att.i.tude 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.

[Sidenote: His Abdication.]

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 Bida.s.soa, 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 pa.s.sed, 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.

[Sidenote: The American War.]

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 ma.s.s of half-drilled and half-armed recruits; while the States themselves were divided on the question of the war, and Connecticut with Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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."

[Sidenote: Peace in America.]

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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.

[Sidenote: Return of Napoleon.]

The close of the war with the United States freed England's hands at a moment when the reappearance of Napoleon at Paris called her to a new and final struggle with France. By treaty with the Allied Powers Napoleon had been suffered to retain a fragment of his former empire--the island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany; and from Elba he looked on at the quarrels which sprang up between his conquerors as soon as they gathered at Vienna to complete the settlement of Europe. The most formidable of these quarrels arose from a claim of Prussia to annex Saxony and that of Russia to annex Poland; but their union for this purpose was met by a counter-league of England and Austria with their old enemy, France, whose amba.s.sador, Talleyrand, laboured vigorously to bring the question to an issue by force of arms. At the moment, however, when a war between the two leagues seemed close at hand, Napoleon landed on the coast near Cannes, and, followed only by a thousand of his guards, marched over the mountains of Dauphine upon Gren.o.ble and Lyons.