Free Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 by Arthur Bryant Page A

Stanhope, III, 357; Hary-O, 17; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, in; Creevey, I, 8-10; Windham, II, 198-9; Granville, I, 369; Minto, III, 260.
    3 Mr. Addington observed that there were some gentlemen who were in the habit of making exaggerated statements and using language tending to war; others, on the contrary, seemed ready to make any sacrifices for the maintenance of peace. Ministers would not follow the advice of either."—Pellew, 99-100.
    the return of Pitt, and the more moderate section of Pitt's adherents patiently awaiting a lead from their idol. All the genius and eloquence were on the Opposition benches, but the Ministry was sustained by the mutual jealousy of its opponents, the voting power of the Treasury place-holders and the continued goodwill of the King and the stolider country gentry. The poor, who associated Pitt and war with rising prices and taxes, on the whole still supported the humdrum Government which had given them peace. " I am afraid nothing can save us," wrote Windham, "w.e appear to be every day to be more past help." Canning doubted if England would survive the next session of Parliament as an independent country. 1 .
    It was Napoleon who resolved the confusion in the British mind. He had already awoken widespread apprehension. Nelson, a strong Addingtonian, seconding the Address in the Lords on November 23rd, spoke for many when he declared that no considerations of peace and prosperity should be allowed to hazard the traditional faith, honour, generous sympathies and diplomatic influence of England. "I rejoice therefore," he declared, "that his Majesty has signified his intention to pay due regard to the connection between the interests of Europe and the liberties of this country." The Foreign Secretary might take a Member of Parliament to task for speaking slightingly of France, but week by week the confidence of Englishmen in her bona f ides was declining. Events were teaching them that the peace they had so eagerly sought was not to be had. Those chameleons of the future, the young poets who had pleaded for an understanding with France and her great experiment, were among the first now to grasp the impossibility of obtaining it. Coleridge, to whom the name of Pitt was anathema, became an uncompromising opponent of Jacobinism; Southey asked why those who formerly had gazed east to worship liberty failed to turn their faces now that the sun had moved. Wordsworth, back among his native lakes after his abortive visit to France, ominously studied Milton's political poems and mourned Switzerland's lost liberty in an indignant sonnet. More ordinary folk compared the First Consul's pretences to be "pacifying" and "settling" his neighbours with the sordid trickery he used, shook their heads over the decline of British prestige and contrasted Addington's threats with his meagre actions. Men did not want war but they could not remain quiescent in the face of danger; the racial instinct for self-preservation was awakening. An English child, hurrying home with her parents from the Rhine, watched on a November morning the First Consul reviewing his troops on the Place du Carrousel; his stern face,.as he passed and
    1 H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 124; Festing, 92 .
    repassed before the Tuileries' windows with his train of glittering aides and Mamelukes, fascinated her like a rattlesnake. 1
    The great man did not fail to give the English more tangible reasons for their fears. Wherever they had established their tentacles of trade they were confronted by Gallic enmity and intrigue. Their Ambassador at Naples wrote that the French were surveying the Adriatic coast from Ancona to Taranto: "this," he reported, "may be very useful to them and facilitate their progress eastwards, the idea of which they have never abandoned any more than they have forgotten for a moment their views upon Italy." French Colonels travelling on mysterious missions in Algiers and the Ionian Islands were watched by British agents; Lord Keith,