The Age of Elegance Read online

  The Age of Elegance

  Arthur Bryant

  Series: English Saga [3]

  Published: 1975

  Tags: Non Fiction, History

  Non Fictionttt Historyttt

  * * *

  THE AGE OF ELEGANCE

  By the same Author

  KING CHARLES II

  THE ENGLAND OF CHARLES II

  THE YEARS OF ENDURANCE 1793-1801

  YEARS OF VICTORY 1802-1812

  ENGLISH SAGA 1840-1940

  SAMUEL PEPYS:

  THE MAN IN THE MAKING THE YEARS OF PERIL THE SAVIOUR OF THE NAVY ETC., ETC.

  THE AGE OF ELEGANCE

  1812-1822

  ARTHUR BRYANT

  THE REPRINT SOCIETY LONDON

  THIS EDITION PUBLISHED BY THE REPRINT SOCIETY LTD. BY ARRANGEMENT WITH WM. COLLINS, SONS & CO. LTD.

  1954

  To

  FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY Victor of Alamein

  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. & R. CLARK, LTD., EDINBURGH

  CONTENTS

  CHAP. PAGE

  ENGLAND TAKES THE OFFENSIVE I

  SALAMANCA SUMMER 27

  NEPTUNE'S GENERAL 49

  ACROSS THE PYRENEES 68

  TRIUMPHANT ISLAND 100

  Part I: The Court of Prince Florizel Part II: Her Fresh Green Lap

  THE PEACEMAKERS 164

  WATERLOO 215

  PORTRAIT OF THE VICTORS 250

  THE OTHER FACE OF SUCCESS 295

  THE UNDERWORLD 325

  THE YEARS OF DISILLUSION 1 348

  EPILOGUE: THE ENGLISH VISION 399

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN FOOTNOTES 406

  INDEX 419

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 440

  LIST OF MAPS

  BATTLE OF SALAMANCA page 34

  BATTLE OF VITTORIA 64

  BATTLE OF TOULOUSE 96

  BATTLE OF WATERLOO 230

  PREFACE

  IN The Years of Endurance and Years of Victory, I tried to trace the course of our ancestors' long struggle against the French Revolution and Napoleon. The second of these, published in 1944, left the tale unfinished with the capture of Ciudad Rodrigo in January, 1812, and the opening of the offensive which was to carry Wellington's army, first to Madrid and then to the Pyrenees. I have completed my ten years' task by taking the story to its conclusion at Toulouse, the Vienna Conference table, and Waterloo. The war and its termination, so often recorded by Continental writers, has never been presented in its entirety from the British angle by a modern historian, though its different phases have been definitively treated in the great classics of Oman, Fortescue, Holland Rose, Fisher, Corbett, Mahan and Webster.

  Living in a post-war and revolutionary age, I have also tried to describe, in the second and longer part of the book, the impact of the bewildering economic, social and ideological phenomena of the time on victorious Britain. The seven years that followed the Napoleonic Wars were among the most confused in our history; they appear so to the student because they were so to those who lived through them. Britain, without realising what was happening, was undergoing a major revolution, one which had been hastened but concealed by her long struggle and splendid victory. The Industrial Revolution and its aftermath have been presented by a succession of great economic and social historians—Cunningham, Toynbee, Smart, the Webbs and Hammonds, Halevy and, more recently, Clapham, Cole, Fay and Ashton. The political and literary society it both supported and undermined has been brilliantly reconstructed in the work of such distinguished living scholars and critics as Professor Aspinall, Sir Herbert Grierson, Edmund Blunden, Lord David Cecil, Roger Fulford, John Gore, Harold Nicolson, Peter Quennell and Professor Willey. What I have attempted, however inadequately, is to show the synthesis between the two: to depict on a single canvas the nation's wealth and splendour, its tough, racy, independent rustic and sporting life, its underlying poverty and degradation, and the clash between its ancient faith and polity and its newer needs and aspirations. In this I have been immeasurably assisted by Professor Woodward's Age of Reform, and the earlier and monumental work of Elie Halevy.

  It remains to thank those who have helped me so generously: my constant guide and critic, Milton Waldman, and my patient amanuenses, my wife and secretaries: Colonel Alfred Burne who, as before, has helped me with the maps and military history; Commander John Owen, H. J. Massingham, Ludovic Kennedy, Bernard Knowles, General Sir Bernard Paget and Colonel Sir James Neville, who have all read the book in part or in whole and have made invaluable suggestions for its improvement. I am particularly indebted to Henry Newnham and Herbert van Thai who again have read my proofs, to Professor L. B. Namier who, in the midst of his own work, has placed at my disposal his immense historical knowledge and wisdom, and to Professor A. Aspinall who has given me the benefit of his unrivalled knowledge of the period and helped to eliminate many errors. I must also record my gratitude to Lord Hamilton of Dalzell, for allowing me the use of his ancestor's manuscript, referred to in these pages as the Hamilton of Dalzell MS., to Lady Gurney of Walsingham Abbey for so kindly sending for my inspection Robert Blake's MS. diary, to Brigadier C. E. Hudson, V.C., and General Sir Henry Jackson for the use of unpublished Waterloo letters, and to the Duke of Wellington for generous permission to use extracts from Mrs. Arbuthnot's Journal which he and my kind friend, Francis Bamford, have edited and which Messrs. Macmillan are publishing this autumn.

  ARTHUR BRYANT

  SMEDMORE, July, 1950

  CHAPTER ONE

  England Takes the Offensive

  "And what are noble deeds but noble truths realised?"

  Coleridge

  I

  N the spring of 1812 every road across Germany was thronged with horses, guns and wagons bound for Poland. The ditches were strewn with dead horses, farms were stripped of livestock, villages requisitioned and looted. A British prisoner in a fortress on the frontiers of France watched for weeks the interminable train of men, horses and supplies, until the refrain of his jubilant jailors grew intolerable: "The Emperor will soon subdue England."1 More than half a million troops were marching east. Their aim was to drive back Russia into her Asian steppes and open a way to world empire.

  The Grande Armee was the most concentrated instrument of power yet seen on earth. It surpassed the armies of Alexander and Caesar, of Darius, Attila and Tamerlane. The restless energy of the Revolution, superimposed on the martial tradition of France, had been forged by the organising genius of Napoleon into an irresistible weapon. The names of Lodi, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland and Wagram were inscribed on its banners; in fourteen years it had entered every Continental capital except St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Constantinople.

  Yet there remained one force it had been unable to subdue. The sea, and the floating batteries of England that barred the sea's channels, had set bounds to its conquests. And neither threats nor guile could induce the island rulers to make peace. True to the beaconlight of their dead leader, Pitt, they had refused to accept the universal hegemony which was Napoleon's prescription for human government. The will and genius of the crowned Jacobin was matched by the stubborn refusal of British aristocrats, squires, traders and lawyers to accept his dictatorship. And for all the strains and injustices of British social life, that refusal—so far as they had any say in the matter—was endorsed by the common people of Britain. The rude

  1 Stewart, 57.

  Wapping boatmen who sailed with Nelson and Collingwood, the hungry North Country weavers who enlisted for liquor to drown the memory of their ill-usage and cares, the Irish peasants who fought so valiantly by their side, had stood, for a generation, between Napoleon's armies and the domination of the world. As the spring of 1812 crept northwards over a cowed Europe, they sto
od there still.

  It was England's mysterious art of commanding the waves that now impelled those armies eastwards. Westwards they could not go: four great sea-battles fought during the past fifteen years off Europe's shores had made that plain, even to Napoleon. On their own element the English were invincible. Nor was their power confined to the Atlantic. Southwards, too, in Europe's inland sea, their invisible ring extended. Twice Napoleon had tried to break it: once when, taking advantage of their Fleet's absence from the Mediterranean, he had seized Malta and landed in Egypt; again when he had treacherously invaded the territories of his ally, Spain, with the intention of closing the Straits of Gibraltar. In each case the logic of sea-power and its stranglehold on military communications had thwarted him. Striking back from the sea, at the point where his own lunge was overextended, a handful of stiff, red-coated British soldiers had landed from their ships and called on the conquered to rise. Ten years before, Napoleon had wheedled them out of Egypt by a truce. Yet when, in an attempt to renew his drive on Asia and Africa, he had broken that peace, their fleets had closed round him again. And since their landing in Portugal, all his Marshals' attempts to expel them from that seabound extremity of Europe had been in vain. After four years they were still there and, because of their presence, his brother's Spanish subjects were in a state of permanent eruption.

  Everything the Emperor had done to destroy the English had failed. Since Trafalgar he had turned Antwerp into a naval arsenal, and filled it, as well as the dockyards of Venice, Toulon, Brest, Rochefort and Cherbourg, with the hulls of new battleships. But as the British kept watch outside and their cruisers prevented all coastal trade, his ships could neither get out nor obtain stores. Ceaselessly contained by more than a hundred British battleships, Napoleon's Navy, which by 1812 numbered seventy capital ships with fifty more building, was a fleet in embryo but never one in being. His intricate plans for transporting 200,000 men into an England denuded of troops by the Spanish War remained a fairy tale: one so insubstantial that English mothers could no longer frighten their children with it.

  Because England drew her strength from trade, Napoleon sought to destroy her by ruining trade. Since his conquest of Germany in 1806, he had shut Europe's ports to everything she made or carried, which meant everything from the outer world. Yet, though he made bankrupt thousands of her traders and manufacturers by extending his power—and Decrees—south to Seville and north to Stockholm, he had failed to break her stranglehold. While he closed old markets to her with one hand, he opened new ones with the other. The more he conquered in Europe, the more England conquered beyond the seas. As her remaining colonial and trading rivals became satrapies of France, she seized the bulk of the trade of Asia, America and Africa. And, as the exigencies of war forced her Government, in the teeth of its own economic convictions, to create abundant loan-credit to buy and maintain the flow of arms and equipment from her new machines and factories, she was able to supply on an ever-growing scale, not only her own fleets and armies, but all the discontented forces which, first in one part of Europe and then in another, sought to challenge Napoleon's new imperium.

  For, by denying to the peoples he had conquered the colonial and manufactured wares, the coffee, spices, tea, sugar and cloths, to which they were accustomed, and so depriving their traders of their livelihood, Napoleon's Decrees against England robbed the Continent of the very unity he was trying to impose. The bonfires on the quaysides burning British colonial imports became beacons that heralded a Continental crusade, not against England but against himself. Bereft of commercial intercourse, his Empire remained in a state of constant ferment. More than a hundred thousand douaniers were permanently engaged in trying to stop its middle and upper classes from obtaining the things they wanted. The will of one man, however dynamic and lucid, proved incapable of controlling the diverse purposes and activities of man. It was the virtue of England—the historic nursery of freedom—that, while she resisted the regimented march of mankind to the theoretical liberty of the aggregate, she continued to be the champion of the real liberties of the individual.

  Napoleon, and the brave and intelligent French people who followed him so blindly, failed to see this. To them England, in opposing the Revolutionary will and the rnihtary power that enforced it, was prolonging the old, corrupt institutions and discriminatory laws that everywhere repressed human energies and preserved inequalities. She alone stood out against the reforming Emperor and the great natural force he embodied. Yet, in doing so, while her terrifying adversary came increasingly to regard all opposition as treason to be crushed without mercy, England, old-fashioned, aristocratic, and conservative, became the rallying-point for all who resented injustice and oppression. And as in her sea-power England enjoyed a weapon which, though useless for enforcing uniformity on others, was perfectly adapted for preventing anyone else from doing so, she turned the Continent Napoleon had conquered into a cage.

  To break out of it and complete his unification of mankind, Napoleon, therefore, prepared to strike at Russia. There was no other way. Five years before, when his victories had convinced the Russians of his overwhelming might and of England's impotence, the Czar had signed with him a treaty of peace and mutual friendship. Together, the two rulers had agreed, they would advance across southern Asia and divide the empire of the world. But neither trusted the other. Alexander, like every Russian ruler, coveted Constantinople and all Poland, an outlet to the Mediterranean, and the hegemony of Asia. Napoleon wanted the whole earth. There was, thus, from the start a rift in their friendship.

  It was one which the Continental Decrees widened. At first the young Czar, seeing the British as usurers who relied on their sea-barriers to avoid martial sacrifices for their allies, joined in the great blockade. But, though Russia was a land of peasants, her ruling class depended on sea-borne trade for their luxuries and standard of living. As commerce languished, the Czar changed his policy. At the end of 1810, chafing at Napoleon's annexations in northern Germany, he re-admitted colonial produce under neutral flag into his dominions. Sooner than see his blockade broken, the French Emperor thereupon threatened war.

  The Czar did not want another war with Napoleon. But there was in his nature, as in that of his race, a fund of fatalism; driven beyond a certain point, he was prepared to fight without counting the cost. He continued to protest his desire for friendly relations with France, but persisted in his policy. Like everyone else in Europe, he was impressed by the success of Wellington's Fabian retreat in Portugal; he had been heartened, too, by the resistance of the Spanish guerrillas. He therefore increased his army, called out the Cossacks and began to build entrenchments on the road to St. Petersburg.

  At the time, however, it needed a Slav set in impenetrable space, or an Englishman with the cloak of ocean about him, to suppose Napoleon resistible. The rulers of central and southern Europe had felt his lash too often. When at the beginning of 1812 he ordered them to arm against Russia, they obeyed. The Prussian King, though it meant ruin to his people, promised free passage and forage to the Grande Armee and sent the remnants of his own to join it. The Austrian Emperor, who as Napoleon's father-in-law enjoyed a special position of servile favour in his entourage of puppets, offered to guard his southern flank. The lesser Sovereigns of Germany raised 150,000 troops, Italy 40,000, the Duchy of Warsaw nearly 100,000. Frenchmen, Poles, Germans, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Danes, Croats, Swiss, Illyrians, all marched under the new Caesar's banner. The only Continental State which stood out was Sweden, which, given the choice between the ruin of her commerce and the invasion of her trans-Baltic province, tacitly chose the latter.

  In order to free a quarter of a million French veterans for a campaign which was to start a thousand miles from Paris, Napoleon called up 120,000 more conscripts. No Frenchman was exempt; a bevy of young exquisites whom he encountered at a hunting party were sent to the colours next day. On May 9th, ignoring the Czar's final plea for a settlement, he set out to join his army. At Dresden, t
he home of the puppet King of Saxony, an emperor and seven kings waited in his ante-chamber and thirty reigning princes paid him homage. Europe, he announced, was an old prostitute who must do his pleasure; an unwieldy, medieval realm of barbarous serfs and wandering Asian tribes could not hope to resist him. Britain would inevitably fall when he had destroyed her influence at St. Petersburg. The Continent would become a single state and Paris its capital.

  Napoleon was the embodiment of the dreams of a hundred years. He was the child of nature, the personification of reason and energy, the irresistible Figaro who, always triumphing, proved the force of natural genius. This stern, plump, iron-faced little Italian, with his aquiline nose and eagle eye, his sword, sash and laurel-wreath, had shattered the pretensions of mankind's "legitimate" rulers. Strong as tempest, swift as lightning, he had only to will and strike.

  Yet, just because Napoleon shared this view of himself, he was doomed. Having risen by observing natural law, he had come to suppose himself above it. He acknowledged no morality but his own appetite and will. He cheated, lied, bullied, and exploited until in the end no one who had had dealings with him trusted him. Viewing treachery as inherent in human nature, he betrayed and was betrayed. He even denied arithmetic. Believing from repeated success that he could do anything, that the word impossible existed only in the dictionary of fools and that he alone was exempt from folly, he essayed that summer what he himself had declared the greatest of military follies: a campaign against a desert. No one was better able to assess the arithmetical impossibility of supporting half a million men and their horse-borne transport in the Russian wastes. But with all the intensity of his passionate nature he was resolved to make the diversionist crawl, and when the Czar Alexander, sooner than do so, called on his Gods and the valour of his people, Napoleon turned his back on the Europe he had conquered and strode to destruction.