The Years of Endurance Read online

  The submerged tenth of Paris bore little resemblance to that shining and virtuous Humanity acclaimed by the Philosophers. It was obscene, destructive and, once it had tasted blood, sadistically cruel. But there was no mistaking the terrible authenticity of its voice. Before it the easy-going, good-natured King surrendered. He rode humbly into Paris and made his peace with the illegally constituted Municipality. On the balcony of the Hotel de Ville he donned the revolutionary tricolour.

  " Sire," cried an onlooker, with that cockade and the Third Estate, you will conquer Europe."

  A confused period of fear and popular tumult followed. The anchor of the ancien regime had gone. In the provinces reactionary noblemen were chased by mobs down sunlit streets or fled across the frontiers while behind them the funeral pyre of their chateaux and muniment rooms, stuffed with ancient servile charters, lit up the August sky. All one delirious night in the National Assembly an excited handful of nobles and churchmen who had thrown in their lot with the Third Estate rose amid cheering and weeping to propose the surrender $f one after another of their venerable privileges. In the colder light of dawn a new France of social and political equality was born. The feudal system had been abolished overnight.

  France in those autumn months of 1789 seemed like a giant awakening from sleep. Her people were gripped by a strange fanatic fervour. " The public highways were crowded with enthusiasts, some shouting the watchwords of the Revolution, others disputing on the most abstract principles of the universal constitution which they fully believed that all the nations of the earth were shortly to adopt: the most ignorant among them confident of his fitness for the highest duties of a legislator and all prepared to shed their blood in the defence of the inalienable sovereignty of the self-governed people." 1 Nothing like it had been seen on earth since the day when the English Fifth Monarchists had hailed the imminent advent of Christ. " We desire," cried one deputy, " to make a Declaration for all men, for all times, for every country, that will be an example to the whole world." The first of the human species outside France to acclaim the Rights of Man were the negro slaves of Santo Domingo, who under its influence rose and massacred their French masters.

  For from the start the Revolution was dogged by an evil fatality. It arose from an inherent conflict between the ideal the revolutionary theorists pursued and the human reality in which their lot was cast. The men who orated so splendidly at Versailles or debated in the Paris democratic clubs on how to make a new France were not statesmen carefully navigating the ship of state through the shifting political and economic facts of the hour. They were dreamers who had seen a vision, sleepwalkers without eyes for the obstacles at their feet. They thought that men were just and rational instead of violent, unreasoning and passionate creatures; that they were swayed solely by love of the commonwealth instead of by greed and self-interest. But the ignorance of the multitude and harsh economic reality did not disappear merely because the representatives of the People had abolished a few irrational laws.

  During the summer and autumn of 1789 Paris, its population

  swollen by political excitement, became ever shorter of bread. The

  forestallers of wheat, aided by the weakening of the executive power, drove the price up to new and dangerous levels. On October 5th an armed mob, incited by the orators of the Palais Royal, set out to cover the thirteen miles to Versailles. It was partly composed of women, many of them showing masculine legs striding beneath their petticoats. The King returning from hunting in the forest found his Palace surrounded. While the Court debated the pros and cons of flight, the Guard was relieved by the half-trained Citizen Army which under the liberal Marquis de Lafayette had followed the crowd out from the capital. In the early hours of the 6th a mob broke into the Queen's bedchamber: hurried flight down a secret passage alone averted tragedy. Presently an unappeasable

  1 S, T. Coleridge, The Friend, Section I, Essay III. In the light of later experience this early adherent of the Revolution gave it as his opinion that a " constitution equally suited to China and America or to Russia and Great Britain must be equally unfit for both."

  clamour arose demanding the seizure of the Royal Family—the " baker " and the " baker's wife." A little before two, the King's coach, surrounded by drunken fishwives and mysteriously followed by laden grain waggons, set out for the capital. For seven hours the bacchanalian rout continued amid obscene jests and threats of " A la lanterne" until the sweating captives were deposited at the Hotel de Ville. Thence they were consigned by the city fathers to the palace of the Tuileries.

  These events caused much astonishment in England. The meeting of the States General had at first been greeted with general sympathy. France, it was felt, was following the British example. Whig magnates and parliamentary lawyers imagined they were witnessing a repetition of the "glorious" Revolution of 1688: Dissenters and Protestants hailed an end of Popish superstition and wooden shoes. The age of reason which William III had established in England seemed to be dawning across the Channel: henceforward the two great nations of the West would lead the world hand in hand. A treaty of commerce with France concluded a few years before by the young Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, which had been much criticised by the Whigs—a party traditionally hostile to Bourbon and military France—was now universally acclaimed as a far-sighted act of statesmanship. Pitt assured the new French Ambassador " that France and England had the same principles, namely, not to aggrandise themselves and to oppose aggrandisement in others."

  Some went further. The leader of the Opposition, Charles James Fox, in his generous enthusiasm described the fall of the Bastille as the greatest and best event that had ever happened. And all who felt that the libertarian tradition of England was not yet liberal enough—Dissenters who wanted the last religious disabilities repealed, parliamentary reformers who wished to see Manchester and Birmingham enfranchised, freethinkers and Unitarians who hated the Church monopoly of education—applauded the lofty sentiments of French orators who in the course of a few weeks seemed to have advanced further on the democratic road than slow-moving England in a century. Most enthusiastic of all were the young: those who like Wordsworth " approached the shield of human nature from the golden side" and sensed the love of humanity that was coursing like an intoxication through the veins of a great people waking from sleep:

  " France standing on the top of golden hours And human nature seeming born again."

  Many, unwisely as it afterwards turned out, crossed the Channel and imbibed at the source new and generous sympathies.

  But, when the Paris mob threatened the life of the Queen and insulted the King, sober Britons began to have their doubts. The King of England was no genius. But his people were genuinely fond of him and looked on a decent respect for the throne as a sign of good citizenship. Old Nobbs, as they called him, had been reigning for nearly thirty years, and, though he had had his full and often deserved share of unpopularity and troubles, his natural friendliness and good humour and the personal integrity of his life had finally turned him into a national institution. Since the end of the American War and the revival of prosperity under the brilliant young Minister whom he had so boldly placed in office, George III's popularity had risen by leaps and bounds. Not even the extravagance and indiscretions of his eldest son were able to detract from it: indeed by contrast they enhanced it. When in the autumn of 1788 the King's natural " rapid and rambling volubility " degenerated under the strain of insomnia into insanity, there was widespread grief and alarm.

  He recovered suddenly at a time when hope had been almost abandoned. While the States General was meeting at Versailles, England was giving itself up to a round of thanksgiving services,, illuminations and roasted oxen. That summer the royal holiday pilgrimage to Weymouth became a triumph, his Majesty driving through flower-strewn villages and grassy forest rides lined with cheering multitudes: the country folk turning out with artless loyalty in their broadcloth, loose white frocks and neckcloths, while chariots, chaises, land
aus, carts, waggons, gigs and phaetons, drawn up in democratic disarray under the trees, shimmered with fluttering handkerchiefs. At Lyndhurst the King on an evening walk was accompanied by the entire village repeatedly singing the National Anthem.

  This loyalty of the rustic English to the Crown afforded a curious contrast to the uneasy splendours of the French monarchy. At the time of the storming of the Bastille, Britain's sovereign was peacefully taking the sea waters under the delighted eyes of a proprietary multitude, a band concealed in a bathing machine striking up " God save great George our King " as the " Royal one entered the water." 1 Wherever he went the same spontaneous acclamations attended him: " the greatest conqueror," wrote Fanny Burney, " could never pass through his dominions with fuller acclamations of joy from his devoted subjects than George III experienced, simply from having won their love by the even tenor of an unspotted life." It was a loyalty founded on nature by a people who gave him their hearts, not because he was their sovereign but because, being what they wanted their sovereign to be, he deserved them.

  For he was as natural as they. In his familiar Windsor uniform— the broadskirted blue frockcoat with its scarlet collar and cuffs—and round hat he looked what he was, an English country gentleman. He liked farming, the routine of his duties, but most of all the human beings about him. He talked incessantly, to every one, pouring out good-humoured comments and questions, such as how the apple got into the dumpling, and answering them mostly himself with a volley of hoarse "Tut! Tuts!" and "What! Whats! " which somehow removed all sense of ceremony and superiority.

  Like his " cousin " of France, King George was a family man, but, unlike Louis, happy in being so since this was what the English, with their strong sense of the realities of life, wanted their sovereign to be. The Queen might be an over-frugal hausfrau, but Royal George was a faithful husband and a devoted father, and in his feckless eldest son an injured one, and his subjects loved him for it. They knew that he had a good heart. Nothing so won their affection as his manifest delight in children. When middle-class Dorothy Wordsworth accompanied her uncle and his family to one of the familiar summer evening parades on the terrace at Windsor, the old King stopped in front of little Christopher and Mary Wordsworth and allowed them to play with his stick. And when a day or two later Mary was wearing a new hat, the old man was quick to

  1 D'Arblay, II, 316.

  notice it. " Ah, Mary," says he, " that's a pretty hat! that's a pretty hat!"

  Because of these things and because, despite black spots in the national existence, most Englishmen were tolerably satisfied with their lot, King George's subjects echoed Parson Woodforde's prayer:

  " And may so good a King long live to reign over us—and pray God that his amiable and beloved Queen Charlotte may now enjoy again every happiness this world can afford with so good a man, and may it long, very long continue with them both here and eternal happiness hereafter."

  They could not follow events across the Channel without their viewpoint being affected by such personal considerations: and when the French people rose in their majesty and established liberty by flinging drunken insults at their sovereign and butchering his retainers, they refused to approve such goings-on. Liberty was one thing: " anarchy and confusion " another. Even John Wilkes, that tried champion of the populace's right to do as it pleased, observed that the new France was not a democracy but a mobocracy.

  Not that Britons wished to interfere with their neighbour's concerns. The best of them continued to believe that good would come out of evil and that the licence which despotism had begotten would be succeeded by ordered freedom. For they knew that the French—that effervescent people—must be given time to learn the sober lessons which their own sane land had only mastered in the course of many centuries.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Failure of Appeasement 1790-3

  " This Country and Holland ought to remain quiet as long as it is possible to do so."

  Lord Grenville, November, 1792.

  FOR a time it looked as though the first nation in Europe—formerly the terror of her neighbours—might prefer the road of peaceful evolution to that of revolutionary violence. The clamour of the angry fishwives on the march from Versailles was followed by a reaction: the upper middle-class and the more liberal of the nobility assumed a kind of loose control. A business government of rich men dedicated to the proposition of liberty for the talents irrespective of birth temporarily took the place of the old aristocratic muddle and inertia of Versailles. The King to all appearance accepted his new situation as the first clerk of the nation. A man of genius with one foot in both camps, Mirabeau—a rebel who understood the necessity of order and an aristocrat who was also a demagogue—kept liaison between King and Assembly. So long as he lived there was reasonable hope that the French Revolution would take the steady and decent course that every British lover of freedom wanted to see it take.

  No one was more convinced that it would than the Prime Minister. A reformer and a lover of peace, William Pitt at 30, after six years as the youngest Premier in English history, was a living example of the triumph of reason. He had apparently no passions, no prejudices and, save for a liking for port, scarcely any weaknesses. By his industry, sound judgment and financial acumen he had raised his country in a few years from the despairing aftermath of a ruinous war to a prosperity unrivalled in the world. He had restored her finances, liberalised her commercial system and begun to rationalise her laws and parliamentary system. Without humiliating his sovereign, he had reduced the undue influence of the Crown and simultaneously ended the long political monopoly of the great Whig families. Instead he had set up a liberal" Tory " government representing the smaller squires and the commercial classes and legislating not for an hereditary clique but for the nation as a whole. He had done, in fact, or begun to do all those practical things about which the French theoretical philosophers and politicians never tired of talking.

  The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with them: unlike his father, Chatham, he loathed the very thought of war. In the King's Speeches of 1789 and 1790 Pitt scrupulously refrained from stressing the disorders across the Channel. " The present convulsions in France," he told the House, " must sooner or later culminate in general harmony and regular order, and thus circumstanced France will stand forth as one of the most brilliant Powers of Europe. She will enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate."

  But one of his auditors, at least, did not share his optimism. After a quarter of a century in Parliament, Edmund Burke, though slightly discounted at home by a certain Hibernian vehemence of speech,1 had established a great international reputation as a political philosopher and the enemy of every kind of oppression. During the war with the Colonies he had boldly stood out against the popular view and denounced in language which is part of human literature the senseless tyranny that had alienated British America from Britain. More recently he had taken the lead in the impeachment of the great Indian proconsul, Warren Hastings.

  In November, 1790, Burke took a momentous step. For some time he had been corresponding with a young Parisian who had begged for his reflections on the happenings in his country. Irritated by the extravagant praise lavished on these by a handful of British cranks, he published his Reflections on the Revolution. With splendid eloquence he analysed the divergence between French rhetoric and practice. Irish in his passion and excessive emphasis, Burke was never more English than when he applied to every principle of the revolutionary philosophers the evidence carefully collected from France of what had actually happened when it had been put into effect.

  1 Wilkes unkindly said of him that, just as the Venus of Appelles suggested milk and honey, so Burke's oratory was reminiscent of whisky and potatoes. —Sir Charles Petrie, When Britain Saved Europe, 88.

  Yet it was Burke's Irish logic that enabled him to see more clearly than any Englishman the unreality of the childlike discussions which were going on in the National Assembly about theoretical systems and constitut
ions. An Englishman would not have troubled about them at all until their practical effects had begun to touch him directly. Burke knew that those effects would be a universal conflagration. He saw at once the flaw in the reformers' philosophy: that it could not be applied to the world about them without disaster. It was all very well to talk about the divinity of reason and the General Will, but how was the reason of any man, let alone of a concourse or mob, to be distinguished from his baser passions and selfish desires ? For these just as much as intellect were an inherent part of human nature. To assume that the votes of an assembly or the acclamations of a crowd must be synonymous with the will of God was merely to condone despotism which was as evil when practised by a mob as by a king. Burke always insisted on testing the pretence of liberty by the reality. Before he could approve high-sounding generalisations he wanted to know how they accorded with stable government and justice, with the subordination of the military arm to the civil, with prosperous commerce and agriculture, with peace and order, with the security of property and private rights, with morality and religion, with learning and the arts, with social manners, in a word with civilisation. " All these in their way are good things, too," he wrote, " and without them liberty is not a benefit while it lasts and is not likely to continue long."