History of the English People Volume Viii Part 2

[Sidenote: Pitt and Parliamentary reform.]

It was thus that the ten earlier years of Pitt's rule marked a new point of departure in English statesmanship. He was the first English Minister who really grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a peace Minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between nations; that public economy not only lessened the general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of industry; and that finance might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of political and social improvement. That little was done by Pitt himself to carry these principles into effect was partly owing to the ma.s.s of ignorance and prejudice with which he had to contend, and still more to the sudden break of his plans through the French Revolution. His power rested above all on the trading cla.s.ses, and these were still persuaded that wealth meant gold and silver, and that commerce was best furthered by jealous monopolies. It was only by patience and dexterity that the mob of merchants and country squires who backed him in the House of Commons could be brought to acquiesce in the changes he proposed. How small his power was when it struggled with the prejudices around him was seen in the failure of the first great measure he brought forward. The question of parliamentary reform which had been mooted during the American war had been coming steadily to the front. Chatham had advocated an increase of county members, who were then the most independent part of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond talked of universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual Parliaments.

Wilkes antic.i.p.ated the Reform Bill of a later time by proposing to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, and to give members in their stead to the counties and to the more populous and wealthy towns. William Pitt had made the question his own by bringing forward a motion for reform on his first entry into the House, and one of his earliest measures as Minister was to bring in a bill in 1785 which, while providing for the gradual extinction of all decayed boroughs, disfranchised thirty-six at once, and transferred their members to counties. He brought the king to abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the borough-mongers, as the holders of rotten boroughs were called, by offering to compensate them for the seats they lost at their market-value. But the bulk of his own party joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the bill, while it received no effective support from the general opinion of the people without. The more glaring abuses, indeed, within Parliament itself, the abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action, had in great part disappeared. The bribery of members had ceased. Burke's Bill of Economical Reform had just dealt a fatal blow at the influence which the king exercised by suppressing a host of useless offices, household appointments, judicial and diplomatic charges, which were maintained for the purpose of corruption. But what was probably the most fatal obstacle to any pressure for reform was the triumph of public opinion to which Pitt owed his power. The utter overthrow of the Coalition, the complete victory of public opinion, had done much to diminish the sense of any real danger from the opposition which Parliament had shown till now to the voice of the nation. England, then as now, was indifferent to all but practical grievances; and the nation cared little for anomalies in the form of representation so long as it felt itself represented.

"Terribly disappointed and beat," as Wilberforce tells us Pitt was by the rejection of his measure, the temper of the House and of the people was too plain to be mistaken, and though his opinion remained unaltered, he never brought it forward again.

[Sidenote: Pitt's finance.]

The failure of his const.i.tutional reform was more than compensated by the triumphs of his finance. When he entered office public credit was at its lowest ebb. The debt had been doubled by the American war, yet large sums still remained unfunded, while the revenue was reduced by a vast system of smuggling which turned every coast-town into a nest of robbers. The deficiency in the revenue was met for the moment by new taxes, but the time which was thus gained served to change the whole face of public affairs. The first of Pitt's financial measures--his plan for gradually paying off the debt by a sinking fund--was undoubtedly an error; but it had a happy effect in restoring public confidence. He met the smuggler by a reduction of Custom-duties which made his trade unprofitable. He revived Walpole's plan of an Excise. Meanwhile the public expenses were reduced, and commission after commission was appointed to introduce economy into every department of the public service. The rapid developement of the national industry which we have already noted no doubt aided the success of these measures. Credit was restored. The smuggling trade was greatly reduced. In two years there was a surplus of a million, and though duty after duty was removed the revenue rose steadily with every remission of taxation. Meanwhile Pitt was showing the political value of the new finance in a wider field.

Ireland, then as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous misgovernment under which she had groaned ever since the battle of the Boyne was producing its natural fruit; the miserable land was torn with political faction, religious feuds, and peasant conspiracies; and so threatening had the att.i.tude of the Protestant party which ruled it become during the American war that they had forced the English Parliament to relinquish its control over their Parliament in Dublin.

Pitt saw that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland sprang from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly, while culture remained stationary and commerce perished. And of this poverty much was the direct result of unjust law. Ireland was a grazing country, but to protect the interest of English graziers the import of its cattle into England was forbidden. To protect the interests of English clothiers and weavers, its manufactures were loaded with duties. To redress this wrong was the first financial effort of Pitt, and the bill which he introduced in 1785 did away with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he held, would "draw what remained of the shattered empire together," and repair in part the loss of America by creating a loyal and prosperous Ireland; and, struggling almost alone in face of a fierce opposition from the Whigs and the Manchester merchants, he dragged it through the English Parliament, though only to see it flung aside by the Protestant faction under Grattan which then ruled the Parliament of Ireland. But the defeat only spurred him to a greater effort elsewhere. If Ireland was England's difficulty, France had been looked upon as England's natural enemy. We have seen how n.o.bly Pitt rebuked prejudices such as this; but he knew that nothing could so effectively dispel it as increased intercourse between nation and nation. In 1787 therefore he concluded a Treaty of Commerce with France which enabled subjects of both countries to reside and travel in either without licence or pa.s.sport, did away with all prohibition of trade on either side, and reduced every import duty.

[Sidenote: England and Europe.]

The immediate result of this treaty was a great increase of trade between France and England; and brief as its course was fated to be, it at once set Pitt on a higher level than any rival statesman of his time.

But the spirit of humanity which breathed through his policy had to wrestle with difficulties both at home and abroad. No measure secured a warmer support from the young Minister than the bill for the suppression of the slave-trade; but in 1788 it was defeated by the vigorous opposition of the trading cla.s.ses and the prejudice of the people at large. His efforts to sap the enmity of nation against nation by a freer intercourse encountered a foe even more fatal than English prejudice, in the very movement of which his measures formed a part. Across the Channel this movement was growing into a revolution which was to change the face of the world. That such a revolution must one day come, every observer who had compared the state of Europe with that of England had long seen to be inevitable. So far as England was concerned, the Puritan resistance of the seventeenth century had in the end succeeded in checking the general tendency of the time to religious and political despotism. Since the Revolution of 1688 freedom of conscience and the people's right to govern itself through its representatives in Parliament had been practically established. Social equality had begun long before. Every man from the highest to the lowest was subject to, and protected by, the same law. The English aristocracy, though exercising a powerful influence on government, were possessed of few social privileges, and hindered from forming a separate cla.s.s in the nation by the legal and social tradition which counted all save the eldest son of a n.o.ble house as commoners. No impa.s.sable line parted the gentry from the commercial cla.s.ses, and these again possessed no privileges which could part them from the lower cla.s.ses of the community. Public opinion, the general sense of educated Englishmen, had established itself after a short struggle as the dominant element in English government. But in all the other great states of Europe the wars of religion had left only the name of freedom. Government tended to a pure despotism. Privilege was supreme in religion, in politics, in society. Society itself rested on a rigid division of cla.s.ses from one another, which refused to the people at large any equal rights of justice or of industry.

[Sidenote: France.]

We have already seen how alien such a conception of national life was from the ideas which the wide diffusion of intelligence during the eighteenth century was spreading throughout Europe; and in almost every country some enlightened rulers were striving by administrative reforms to satisfy in some sort the sense of wrong which was felt around them.

The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia and Joseph the Second in Austria and the Netherlands were rivalled by the efforts of statesmen such as Turgot in France. It was in France indeed that the contrast between the actual state of society and the new ideas of public right was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of the Crown been more complete. The aristocracy had been robbed of all share in public affairs; it enjoyed social privileges and exemption from any contribution to the public burdens without that sense of public duty which a governing cla.s.s to some degree always possesses. Guilds and monopolies fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, and cut them off from the working cla.s.ses, as the value attached to n.o.ble blood cut off both from the aristocracy. If its political position indeed were compared with that of most of the countries round it, France stood high. Its government was less oppressive, its general wealth was larger and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration of justice, and greater security for public order. Poor as its peasantry seemed to English eyes, they were far above the peasants of Germany or Spain. Its middle cla.s.s was the quickest and most intelligent in Europe. Under Lewis the Fifteenth opinion was practically free, and a literary cla.s.s had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brilliancy and activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political justice which it learned from English writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and Voltaire from personal contact with English life. The moral conceptions of the time, its love of mankind, its sense of human brotherhood, its hatred of oppression, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its longing after a higher and n.o.bler standard of life and action, were expressed by a crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with a fire and eloquence which carried them to the heart of the people. But this new force of intelligence only jostled roughly with the social forms with which it found itself in contact. The philosopher denounced the tyranny of the priesthood. The peasant grumbled at the lord's right to judge him in his courts and to exact feudal services from him. The merchant was galled by the trading restrictions and the heavy taxation. The country gentry rebelled against their exclusion from public life and from the government of the country. Its powerlessness to bring about any change at home turned all this new energy into sympathy with a struggle against tyranny abroad. Public opinion forced France to ally itself with America in its contest for liberty, and French volunteers under the Marquis de Lafayette joined Washington's army. But while the American war spread more widely throughout the nation the craving for freedom, it brought on the Government financial embarra.s.sments from which it could only free itself by an appeal to the country at large. Lewis the Sixteenth resolved to summon the States-General, which had not met since the time of Richelieu, and to appeal to the n.o.bles to waive their immunity from taxation. His resolve at once stirred into vigorous life every impulse and desire which had been seething in the minds of the people; and the States-General no sooner met at Versailles in May 1789 than the fabric of despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in Paris destroyed the Bastille, and the capture of this fortress was taken for the dawn of a new era of const.i.tutional freedom in France and through Europe. Even in England men thrilled with a strange joy at the tidings of its fall.

"How much is this the greatest event that ever happened in the world,"

Fox cried with a burst of enthusiasm, "and how much the best!"

[Sidenote: Pitt and Russia.]

Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of liberty which had long been familiar to England with greater coolness, but with no distrust. For the moment indeed his attention was distracted by an attack of madness which visited George the Third in 1788, and by the claim of a right to the Regency which was at once advanced by the Prince of Wales. The Prince belonged to the Whig party; and Fox, who was travelling in Italy, hurried home to support his claim in full belief that the Prince's Regency would be followed by his own return to power.

Pitt successfully resisted the claim on the const.i.tutional ground that in such a case the right to choose a temporary Regent, under what limitations it would, lay with Parliament; and a bill which conferred the Regency on the Prince, in accordance with this view, was already pa.s.sing the Houses when the recovery of the king put an end to the long dispute. Foreign difficulties, too, absorbed Pitt's attention. Russia had risen into greatness under Catharine the Second; and Catharine had resolved from the first on the annexation of Poland, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and the setting up of a Russian throne at Constantinople. In her first aim she was baffled for the moment by Frederick the Great. She had already made herself virtually mistress of the whole of Poland, her armies occupied the kingdom, and she had seated a nominee of her own on its throne, when Frederick in union with the Emperor Joseph the Second forced her to admit Germany to a share of the spoil. If the Polish part.i.tion of 1773 brought the Russian frontier westward to the upper waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it gave Galicia to Maria Theresa, and West Prussia to Frederick himself. Foiled in her first aim, she waited for the realization of her second till the alliance between the two German powers was at an end through the resistance of Prussia to Joseph's schemes for the annexation of Bavaria, and till the death of Frederick removed her most watchful foe. Then in 1788 Joseph and the Empress joined hands for a part.i.tion of the Turkish Empire. But Prussia was still watchful, and England was no longer fettered as in 1773 by troubles with America. The friendship established by Chatham between the two countries, which had been suspended by Bute's treachery and all but destroyed during the Northern League of Neutral Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co-operation with the successor of Frederick the Great in the restoration of the Dutch Stadtholderate. Its political weight was now seen in an alliance of England, Prussia, and Holland, in 1789, for the preservation of the Turkish Empire. A great European struggle seemed at hand. In such a struggle the sympathy and aid of France were of the highest importance; and it was only as weakening her in face of such a crisis that Pitt looked on the Revolution with any fear. But with the treaty the danger pa.s.sed away. In the spring of 1790 Joseph died broken-hearted at the failure of his plans and the revolt of the Netherlands against his innovations; Austria practically withdrew from the war with the Turks; and the young Minister could give free expression to the sympathy with which the French movement inspired him.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution.]

In France indeed things were moving fast. By breaking down the division between its separate orders the States-General became a National a.s.sembly, which abolished the privileges of the provincial parliaments, of the n.o.bles, and the Church. In October 1789 the mob of Paris marched on Versailles and forced both King and a.s.sembly to return with them to the capital; and a Const.i.tution hastily put together was accepted by Lewis the Sixteenth in the stead of his old despotic power. To Pitt the tumult and disorder with which these great changes were wrought seemed transient matters. In January 1790 he still believed that "the present convulsions in France must sooner or later culminate in general harmony and regular order," and that when her own freedom was established, "France would stand forth as one of the most brilliant powers of Europe." But the coolness and goodwill with which Pitt looked on the Revolution were far from being universal in the nation at large. The cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen, their love of order and law, their distaste for violent changes and for abstract theories, as well as their reverence for the past, were rousing throughout the country a dislike of the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on across the Channel; and both the political sense and the political prejudice of the nation were being fired by the warnings of Edmund Burke. The fall of the Bastille, though it kindled enthusiasm in Fox, roused in Burke only distrust. "Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice," he wrote a few weeks later, "neither is safe." The night of the fourth of August, when the privileges of every cla.s.s were abolished, filled him with horror. He saw, and rightly saw, in it the critical moment which revealed the character of the Revolution, and his part was taken at once. "The French," he cried in January, while Pitt was foretelling a glorious future for the new Const.i.tution, "the French have shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In a short s.p.a.ce of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts and their manufactures."

[Sidenote: Pitt and France.]

But in Parliament Burke stood alone. The Whigs, though distrustfully, followed Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The Tories, yet more distrustfully, followed Pitt; and Pitt warmly expressed his sympathy with the const.i.tutional government which was ruling France. At this moment indeed the more revolutionary party in that country gave a signal proof of its friendship for England. Irritated by an English settlement at Nootka Sound in California, Spain appealed to France for aid in accordance with the Family Compact; and the French Ministry, with a party at its back which believed things had gone far enough, resolved on a war as the best means of checking the progress of the Revolution and restoring the power of the Crown. The revolutionary party naturally opposed this design; and after a bitter struggle the right of declaring war, save with the sanction of the a.s.sembly, was taken from the king.

With this vote all danger of hostilities pa.s.sed away. "The French Government," Pitt a.s.serted, "was bent on cultivating the most unbounded friendship for Great Britain," and he saw no reason in its revolutionary changes why Britain should not return the friendship of France. What told even more on his temper towards that country was a conviction that nothing but the joint action of France and England would in the end arrest the troubles of Eastern Europe. His intervention foiled for the moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob Poland of Dantzig and Thorn. But though Russia was still pressing Turkey hard, a Russian war was so unpopular in England that a hostile vote in Parliament forced Pitt to discontinue his armaments; and a fresh union of Austria and Prussia, which promised at this juncture to bring about a close of the Turkish struggle, promised also a fresh attack on the independence of Poland. To prevent a new part.i.tion without the co-operation of France was impossible; and in the existing state of things Pitt saw nothing to hinder the continuance of a friendship which would make such a co-operation inevitable.

[Sidenote: Burke and the Revolution.]

But while Pitt was pleading for friendship between the two countries, Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible. In Parliament, as we have seen, he stood alone. He had long ceased, in fact, to have any hold over the House of Commons. The eloquence which had vied with that of Chatham during the discussions on the Stamp Act had become distasteful to the bulk of its members. The length of his speeches, the profound and philosophical character of his argument, the splendour and often the extravagance of his ill.u.s.trations, his pa.s.sionate earnestness, his want of temper and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and merchants about him. He was known nowadays as "the dinner-bell of the House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising. For a time his energies found scope in the impeachment of Hastings; and the grandeur of his appeals to the justice of England hushed detraction. But with the close of the impeachment his repute had again fallen; and the approach of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel retirement from an a.s.sembly where he stood unpopular and alone. But age and disappointment and loneliness were forgotten as Burke saw rising across the Channel the embodiment of all that he hated--a Revolution founded on scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric which the past had reared; the ordered structure of cla.s.ses and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality; a State rudely demolished and reconst.i.tuted; a Church and a n.o.bility swept away in a night. Against the enthusiasm of what he rightly saw to be a new political religion he resolved to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He was at once a great orator and a great writer; and now that the House was deaf to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. The "Reflections on the French Revolution" which he published in October 1790 not only denounced the acts of rashness and violence which sullied the great change that France had wrought, but the very principles from which the change had sprung. Burke's deep sense of the need of social order, of the value of that continuity in human affairs "without which men would become like flies in a summer," blinded him to all but the faith in mere rebellion and the yet sillier faith in mere novelty which disguised a real n.o.bleness of aim and temper even in the most ardent of the revolutionists. He would see no abuses in the past, now that it had fallen, or anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached a crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of religion and civilization, and called on the armies of Europe to put down a Revolution whose principles threatened every state with destruction.

[Sidenote: His failure in Parliament.]

The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt: and one of the grandest outbursts of the "Reflections" closed with a bitter taunt at the Minister. "The age of chivalry," Burke cried, "is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever." But neither taunt nor invective moved Pitt from his course. At the moment when the "Reflections" appeared he gave a fresh a.s.surance to France of his resolve to have nothing to do with any crusade against the Revolution. "This country," he wrote, "means to persevere in the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed with respect to the internal dissensions of France; and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispensable as an act of self-defence." So far indeed was he from sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading around him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what was libellous in any publication from the judge to the jury, completed the freedom of the press; and himself pa.s.sed in 1791 a bill which, though little noticed among the storms of the time, was one of the n.o.blest of his achievements. He boldly put aside the dread which had been roused by the American war, that the gift of self-government to our colonies would serve only as a step towards their secession from the mother country, and established a House of a.s.sembly and a Council in the two Canadas. "I am convinced," said Fox, who gave the measure his hearty support, "that the only method of retaining distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern themselves"; and the policy of the one statesman as well as the foresight of the other has been justified by the later history of our dependencies. Nor had Burke better success with his own party. Fox remained an ardent lover of the Revolution, and answered a fresh attack of Burke upon it with more than usual warmth. Till now a close affection had bound the two men together; but no sooner had this defence been uttered than the fanaticism of Burke declared their union to be over. "There is no loss of friendship," Fox exclaimed, with a sudden burst of tears. "There is!"

Burke repeated. "I know the price of my conduct. Our friendship is at an end."

[Sidenote: His success with the country.]

Within the walls of Parliament however Burke as yet stood utterly alone.

His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to detach a follower from Fox; while Pitt coldly counselled him rather to praise the English Const.i.tution than to rail at the French. "I have made many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, "by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in other races hindered men from seeing that every element of this content, of this order, of this peaceful and harmonious progress, of this reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting abroad. The sympathy which the first outbreak of the Revolution had roused among Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people in Europe. Every incident in the struggle between the French people and their king widened the breach of feeling. The anarchy of the country, the want of political sense in its a.s.sembly, the paltry declamation of its clubs, the exaggerated sentiment, the universal suspicion, the suspension of every security for personal freedom, the arrests, the murders, the overthrow of the Church, the ruin of the Crown, were watched with an ever-growing severity by a nation whose chief instinct was one of order, whose bent was to practical politics, whose temper was sober and trustful, whose pa.s.sionate love of personal liberty was only equalled by its pa.s.sionate abhorrence of bloodshed in civil strife, and whose ecclesiastical and political inst.i.tutions were newly endeared to it by a fresh revival of religious feeling, and by the const.i.tutional att.i.tude of its Government for a hundred years.

[Sidenote: The coalition against France.]

Sympathy in fact was soon limited to a few groups of reformers who gathered in "Const.i.tutional Clubs," and whose reckless language quickened the national reaction. But in spite of Burke's appeals and the cries of the n.o.bles who had fled from France and longed only to march against their country, Europe held back from any attack on the Revolution, and Pitt preserved his att.i.tude of neutrality, though with a greater appearance of reserve. So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East make him for the restoration of tranquillity in France, that he foiled a plan which its emigrant n.o.bles had formed for a descent on the French coast, and declared formally at Vienna that England would remain absolutely neutral should hostilities arise between France and the Emperor. But the Emperor was as anxious to avoid a French war as Pitt himself. Though Catharine, now her strife with Turkey was over, wished to plunge the two German powers into a struggle with the Revolution which would leave her free to annex Poland single-handed, neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie their hands by such a contest. The flight of Lewis the Sixteenth from Paris in June 1791 brought Europe for a moment to the verge of war; but he was intercepted and brought back: and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revolutionists in France to greater moderation. Lewis too not only accepted the Const.i.tution, but pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed intervention as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference at Pillnitz therefore, in August, Leopold and the king of Prussia contented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in France, availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all military aid to the French princes, and dealt simply with the affairs of Poland. But the peace they desired soon became impossible. The Const.i.tutional Royalists in France availed themselves of the irritation caused by the Declaration of Pillnitz to revive the cry for a war which, as they hoped, would give strength to the throne. The more violent revolutionists, or Jacobins, on the other hand, abandoned their advocacy of peace. Under the influence of the "Girondists," the deputies from the south of France, whose aim was a republic, and who saw in a great national struggle a means of overthrowing the monarchy, they decided, in spite of the opposition of their leader, Robespierre, on a contest with the Emperor. Both parties united to demand the breaking up of an army which the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine; and though Leopold before his death a.s.sented to this demand, France declared war against his successor, Francis, in April 1792.

CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

1792-1801

[Sidenote: England and the Revolutionists.]

That the war with Germany would widen into a vast European struggle, a struggle in which the peoples would rise against their oppressors, and the freedom which France had won diffuse itself over the world, no French revolutionist doubted for an hour. Nor did they doubt that in this struggle England would join them. It was from England that they had drawn those principles of political and social liberty which they believed themselves to be putting into practice. It was to England that they looked above all for approbation and sympathy, and on the aid of England that they confidently counted in their struggle with a despotic and priest-ridden Europe. Absorbed in the mighty events about them, and utterly ignorant of the real set of English feeling or the real meaning of Pitt's policy, they were astonished and indignant at his firm refusal of their alliance and his resolve to stand apart from the struggle. It was in vain that Pitt strove to allay this irritation by demanding only that Holland should remain untouched, and promising neutrality even though Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he strengthened these pledges by a reduction of military forces, and by bringing forward in 1792 a peace-budget which rested on a large remission of taxation. To the revolutionists at Paris the att.i.tude of England remained unintelligible and irritating. Instead of the aid they had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly across the Channel, a reserve pa.s.sing into disapproval. The pen of Burke was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles on which English liberty rested. The priests and n.o.bles who had fled from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English sh.o.r.es. And now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its peoples from their kings, England stood coldly apart. To men frenzied with a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm, and frenzied yet more with a sudden terror at the dangers they were encountering, such an att.i.tude of neutrality in such a quarter seemed like a stab in the back.

[Sidenote: Their efforts in England.]

But that this att.i.tude was that of the English people as a whole was incredible to the French enthusiasts. Conscious as no Englishman could be conscious of the great evils they had overthrown, of the great benefits they had won for their country, they saw in the att.i.tude of England only the sympathy of an aristocracy with the aristocracy they had struck down. The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the hope of England's aid in the emanc.i.p.ation of Europe from despotism and superst.i.tion, but they came now to believe that England must itself be emanc.i.p.ated before such an aid could be given. Their first work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic government which held it down. But this was far from being all the work they looked to accomplishing. The aristocracy which oppressed the people at home oppressed, as they believed, great peoples beyond the bounds of England itself. It was subjecting to its sway nation after nation in India. Its rule over Ireland was a masterpiece of tyranny. To rouse India, to rouse Ireland to a struggle which should shake off the English yoke, became necessary steps to the establishment of freedom in England itself. From the moment therefore that the opposition between the two countries declared itself, French agents were busy "sowing the revolution" in each quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication with the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts of the native princes, and above all at the court of Mysore. Meanwhile in England itself they strove through a number of a.s.sociations, which had formed themselves under the name of Const.i.tutional Clubs, to rouse the same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy, Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this correspondence as seditious.

[Sidenote: The Coalition attacks France.]

Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox, that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists,"

he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France, though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless; her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August; and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the a.s.sembly, was suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne, bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies,"

cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms the opening of the Scheldt.

[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]

To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the ma.s.sacres of September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke.

But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and pa.s.sionless before the growth of national pa.s.sion, and refused to bow to the gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September ma.s.sacres could only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic.

At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching part.i.tion of Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's execution showed the growing ardour for the contest. The rejection of his last offers indeed made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from diplomatic communications, and in February 1793 France issued her Declaration of War.

[Sidenote: The Panic.]

From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the country broke out in a fit of pa.s.sion and panic which rivalled the pa.s.sion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was going on across the Channel. But in the ma.s.s of Englishmen the dread of these revolutionists pa.s.sed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk of the Whig party believed property and the const.i.tution to be in peril, and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head, followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself, though little touched by the political reaction which was to const.i.tute the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pitt.i.tes," was shaken by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a pa.s.sage from the _Rights of Man_, in which that author had vindicated the principles of the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the progress of "French principles" in England itself.

The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill against seditious a.s.semblies restricted the liberty of public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into disuse. But the panic soon pa.s.sed away for sheer want of material to feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the ma.s.sacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason, their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which lay before it. But though the public terror pa.s.sed, it left a terrible legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which threatened change to an existing inst.i.tution, beneficial though the change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so n.o.bly characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of revolution.

Easy however as Pitt found it to deal with "French principles" at home, he found it less easy to deal with French armies abroad. The very excellences of his character indeed unfitted him for the conduct of a war. He was at heart a Peace Minister; he was forced into war by a panic and enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree; and he was utterly dest.i.tute of his father's gift of entering instinctively into the sympathies and pa.s.sions around him, and of rousing pa.s.sions and sympathies in return. At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France.

When the campaign of 1793 opened she was girt in along her whole frontier by a ring of foes. The forces of the House of Austria, of the Empire, and of the King of Prussia, pressed her to the north and the east; those of Spain and Sardinia attacked her in the south; and the accession of England to this league threatened to close the sea against her. The efforts of these foreign foes were seconded too by civil war.

The peasants of Poitou and Brittany, estranged from the revolution by its attack on the clergy, rose in revolt against the government at Paris; while Ma.r.s.eilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the violent leaders who now seized on power in the capital. The campaign opened therefore with a series of terrible reverses. In spite of the efforts of General Dumouriez the French were foiled in their attack on Holland and driven, after a disastrous defeat at Neerwinden, from the Netherlands. At the moment when the Duke of York with ten thousand English troops joined the Austrian army on the northern border of France, a march upon Paris would have crushed the revolution. But the chance was lost. At this moment indeed the two German powers were far from wishing honestly for the suppression of the Republic and the re-establishment of a strong monarchy in France. Such a restoration would have foiled their projects of aggrandizement in Eastern Europe.

The strife on the Rhine had set Russia free, as Pitt had foreseen, to carry out her schemes of aggression; and Austria and Prussia saw themselves forced, in the interest of a balance of power, to share in her annexations at the cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland would have become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration of its monarchy to take up again its natural position in Europe, and to accept the alliance which Pitt would in such a case have offered her.

The policy of the German courts therefore was to prolong an anarchy which left them free for the moment to crush Poland, and which they counted on crushing in its turn at a more convenient time; and the allied armies which might have marched upon Paris were purposely frittered away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine.

[Sidenote: The revival of France.]