The War of Wars (17 page)

This hard domestic line was to last well beyond Pitt’s lifetime and the end of the Napoleonic wars – in fact, for more than four decades all the way to the Great Reform Bill of 1832 – and may in fact have brought Britain to the verge of revolutionary upheaval. It was disastrously misconceived: the tragedy was all the greater for its being implemented by a young idealistic reformer who had worked with his great friend William Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade and pressed for political democracy and Catholic emancipation in Ireland. Men such as Lord Liverpool, Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington have rightly been blamed for the harsh reactionary policies of the first three decades of the nineteenth century: but the creator of these policies was none other than idealistic, enlightened young Pitt himself.

The flame of panic was lit by Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
which, from a man so reformist and wedded to liberty, came as a shock in its ferocious denunciation of the revolutionaries and all their works. This precipitated Thomas Paine’s counterblast,
The Rights of Man,
which secured a phenomenal readership at the time of some 200,000. Pitt’s reaction was to abandon any attempts at parliamentary reform and adopt an uncharacteristic policy of repression.

In May, 1792 a royal proclamation was issued calling on the militia to act against ‘evil-disposed persons acting in concert with persons in foreign parts’. A bill was introduced to prohibit revolutionary propaganda. Prosecutions were brought on trumped up charges of sedition.
A young lawyer and advocate of parliamentary reform, Thomas Muir, was sentenced to fourteen years transportation and a clergyman, Thomas Palmer, to seven years for the same offence.

Senior committees were set up in each house of parliament in 1794 which reported that traitorous conspiracies existed to foment revolution. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended – in the event for a full six years. In 1795 the King was shot at and stoned at the opening of parliament: his coach was destroyed. A Treasonable Practices Bill and a Seditious Meetings Bill were promptly passed which forbade unauthorized meetings of more than fifty people and dispensed with the burden of proof for treason. The country’s multiplicity of ‘popular societies’ were suppressed. Restrictions were imposed upon the freedom of the press.

In December 1792 3,000 daggers were found in a house in Birmingham, and Burke caused a sensation by throwing some of them on the floor of the House of Commons. The cabinet sat until four in the morning to discuss the implications, with Pitt declaring melodramatically: ‘Possibly by this time tomorrow we may not have a head to act or a tongue to utter.’ He told Wilberforce in 1795 that he would be executed in six months were the government to fall and feared that he would be murdered in his carriage. This shrill, panicking representative of the old order lashing out in all directions contrasts sharply with the image of the cool British statesman projected at the time, and is reminiscent of the attitude of some of France’s pre-revolutionary aristocratic fops.

Yet some of his apprehensions seemed justified. In August 1789 there had been bread riots in North Wales. In July 1791 a ‘Bastille Dinner’ in Birmingham had triggered off several days of rioting and resulted in two hangings. Troops were poured into the Midlands, from Warwickshire to Oxford. The following year rioting broke out in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The situation was exacerbated by a sudden economic downturn in the crucial year of 1792 after years of economic expansion, as a result of an inflationary explosion being fuelled by a contraction in the money supply, which put up bread prices. Indeed from around 1789 to 1802 by coincidence there were poor harvests as well, of which the worst
was in 1792. In November of that year there were more than a hundred bankruptcies – double the worst total ever recorded. By the following year there were nearly 2,000 in the year as a whole, double the figure for the previous year.

All of this contributed to a general paranoia on the issue of public security at a time of immense social and economic change. It can be argued that the government was not viciously repressive in the circumstances; but the abandonment of all impetus towards reform – which Pitt had earlier espoused – was taking place against a pressure cooker of economic grievances which were to flare up in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.

Understandably Pitt reflected the temper of the times: his repressive measures were hugely popular and passed by enormous majorities in both houses. There was also a climate of fear that Britain was being subverted by spies and conspirators from France originally masterminded by the Revolution’s last ambassador, the Marquis de Chauvelin, actually a rather inadequate and incompetent personality. Pitt’s fears may have been exaggerated by the one time he had been set upon by a mob during his premiership – outside Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street, when his life may indeed have been endangered (but Fox, the pillar of the club, was not to blame, as was later alleged).

Touchingly Pitt displayed one further sign of his old reformist spirit. After being shown the conditions under which the working classes lived and worked in the small town of Halstead in Essex by his secretary, Joseph Smith, and remarking that he had no idea such awful conditions existed in England, he issued a bill of some 130 clauses setting up schools of charity in each parish to provide work for the destitute to be run by justices, who could build warehouses, buy materials and buy bread. Friendly societies were to be set up, child allowances were to be provided, and each person was to be allowed a loan to purchase a cow. In this remarkable version of a primordial welfare state, Pitt showed where his heart lay; but the bill was considered too progressive by some and not enough by the radicals, and was allowed to lapse. Thus one of the French Revolution’s first casualties was the cause of moderate reform in Britain.

The British Foreign Office had perhaps unrivalled powers of analysis and intelligence at the time – its detached view of the European theatre was the best anywhere on the continent. The trouble was that this calculated objectivity was always designed to lead to a single conclusion: to take any action short of war. This suited Pitt’s own preoccupations with domestic affairs, and in ordinary times was probably the right policy. However, the French Revolution had entirely reshaped the map of Europe to a much greater extent than anyone was aware of at the time.

The Foreign Office analysis, shared by Grenville although his suspicion of the French was much more pronounced than that of his subordinates, was more or less as follows: continental Europe was a patchwork, and an extraordinarily complex one at that, of a kind enormously satisfying to the largely classically educated minds running the Foreign Office. What was needed was to preserve the balance of power through an alliance here, a subsidy there, a nudge somewhere else. The British empire offered scope for bold and imaginative ventures. By contrast Europe was a mass of moving diplomatic pieces and a chessboard on which there were multiple players. Before, and all the more so immediately after, the French Revolution, complacency simply oozed from the diplomatic mandarins: the Revolution had brought low Britain’s greatest rival, a belated revenge for the French support of America in the War of Independence. This, in brief, was their view of the continental quilt.

Towards France, Britain’s oldest antagonist and rival, there was a
scarcely disguised contempt. The country had been virtually bankrupted by the Seven Years’ War and then the American War: the events of 1789 appeared to have removed it as a player from the European stage. This was immensely agreeable to the British. Then there was another traditional enemy, Spain. This was in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline. Both of these maritime rivals were on the wane.

The real threats to European stability were at arms’ length: Russia, which was growing steadily more assertive under the initially anti-British court of Catherine the Great; and the newly emergent Prussia which, however, challenged the power of an old British enemy, Austria. Austria had long vied with Britain for control of the Low Countries and traditionally tended to side with France. Finally, Poland and Sweden were two smaller but at the same time somewhat assertive powers in their own right, while the Low Countries, the German states of central Europe, the Italian states and the Balkans were prizes to be argued over. The Ottoman empire in the east was also in decline.

The trouble with this complacent traditional analysis is that it took no account of two sea-changes now occurring: the first was the French Revolution itself; the second was the modernization of the rest of Europe. For Britain and France were not alone in being affected by the new political ideas after the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Liberalism and reaction were almost at war in Spain and Portugal; the Swedes, Prussians and Poles regarded themselves as newly modernizing societies. Catherine the Great and her ministers considered that they were at the forefront of an enlightened autocracy. Joseph II of Austria had just introduced sweeping reforms across his huge Habsburg possessions.

With commerce and trade spreading exponentially across the continent, all Europe was convulsed – as indeed France had been through the centralizing reforms of the French monarchy and the hostility they had aroused among the nobility. The British believed all they had to do was ensure freedom of commerce for British goods and for navigation; the rest could more or less look after itself. To understand how England blundered its recalcitrant and belated way into war in 1793, a quick look is necessary at the rather modest crisis which preceded it, before
returning to continental Europe in which revolutionary France sprang up like a lion in a herd of gazelles.

Pre-revolutionary France, although always treated with a wary eye, was not seen as much of a threat to European peace immediately before the Revolution. By contrast, Russia and Prussia were the new troublemakers, and each was to play a part in the subsequent crisis. As Rosebery pithily wrote of the former:

If there is one point on which history repeats itself, it is this: that at certain fixed intervals the Russian Empire feels a need of expansion; that that necessity is usually gratified at the expense of the Turk; that the other Powers, or some of them, take alarm, and attempt measures for curtailing the operation, with much the same result that the process of pruning produces on a healthy young tree. One of these periods had occurred in 1791.

More than that was happening in Catherine the Great’s Russia. On 6 December 1788 her chief minister, Prince Potemkin, as part of a concerted strategy of Russian advances to the south, had won the greatest victory of his life in securing the huge fortress of Ochakov which controlled the mouths of the strategically crucial Dnieper and Bug rivers. With around 15,000 men, he had attacked in the early morning and slain some 10,000 Turks. As Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote of this strategic triumph:

The Turks were killed in such numbers and in such density that they fell in piles, over which the Comte De Damas [A French adventurer and cousin of Talleyrand who commanded one of Potemkin’s armies] and his men trampled, their legs sinking into bleeding bodies. ‘We found ourselves covered in gore and shattered brains’ – but inside the town. The bodies were so closely packed that Damas had to advance by stepping from body to body until his left foot slipped into a heap of gore, three of four corpses deep, and straight into the mouth of a wounded Turk underneath. The jaws clamped so hard on his heel that they tore away a piece of his boot.

There was so much plunder that soldiers captured handfuls of diamonds, pearls and gold that could be bought round the camp the next day for almost nothing. No one even bothered to steal silver. Potemkin saved an emerald the size of an egg for his Empress. ‘Turkish blood flowed like rivers,’ Russian soldiers sang as they marched into the next century. ‘And the Pasha fell to his knees before Potemkin.’

Massacres are easy to make and hard to clear up. There were so many Turkish bodies that they could not all be buried, even if the ground had been soft enough to do so. The cadavers were piled in carts and taken out to the Liman where they were dumped on the ice. Still moist with gore, they froze there into macabre blood-blackened pyramids. The Russian ladies took their sledges out on to the ice to admire them.

Over the following eleven months Potemkin captured most of the lower Danube and soon there was only the Turkish stronghold of Ismail in his way. This was assailed by 60,000 ‘ursomaniacs’ as the Prussians described the Russians. Ismail assumed the incarnadine horror of a Dantean hell. As the:

‘ursomaniacs’ screamed ‘Hurrah’ and ‘Catherine II’, and the Turks fell back, they were overtaken again by the lust for havoc, a fever of blood madness to kill everything they could find. ‘The most horrible carnage followed,’ Damas recalled, ‘the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood. Even women and children fell victims to the rage.’

These spectacular victories were not about to be abandoned by either Catherine or Potemkin easily. However, in later 1790, Pitt, flushed by a minor diplomatic success over a British ship seized by the Spanish, decided to rein in the Russian bear: this was urged upon him by Britain’s unstable treaty ally, Prussia, which was deeply concerned by Russian expansion. The usually cautious Pitt took on Catherine’s Russia, which had proved unco-operative over a settlement in central Germany as well as over trade. Angry at Britain’s alliance with Prussia,
Catherine had established relations with the leader of the British opposition, Charles James Fox. The Russians may even have instigated Spain’s seizure of the ship.

Deploying a large fleet of thirty-six big ships to the Baltic, Pitt blatantly threatened Russia, saying that unless Ochakov was restored to the Turks Britain would attack with the aid of 80,000 Prussians, as well as Turks and Poles, with which Russia was already at war. It was an extraordinary threat and one for which the British public was wholly unprepared. Virtually no one had ever heard of Ochakov and most people preferred the Russians to the heathen Turks. A huge outcry against war exploded around the country, and Fox made a withering speech denouncing the whole enterprise. Although Pitt won parliamentary majorities, they were by smaller and smaller margins: his aide Grenville was implacably opposed to the whole misconceived idea. Finally Pitt was forced to revoke the Anglo-Prussian ultimatum – not knowing that Potemkin was trying to persuade Catherine to give way. According to Sebag Montefiore: