dozen times.
Not least, I owe a debt to my predecessors: in particular to the late Professor John Holland Rose and the late Sir Julian Corbett, to Sir Charles Oman for his great History of the Peninsula War and to the late Sir John Fortescue for his History of the British Army —one of the noblest epics of our race and langauge.
Because of the need to save paper I have again omitted a bibliography and appendix of references, and confined myself to a list of abbreviated titles used in the footnotes.
Arthur Bryant.
September, 1944.
CHAPTER ONE
Glimpse of a Grand Nation
"No government has exploited so systematically the national thirst for military glory. None has appealed more successfully to the material passions, or has presumed with such hardihood and success upon the administrative timidity of the French, part inertia, part egotism, which is content to surrender the conduct of affairs in exchange for a quiet life."
H. A. L. Fisher, Bonapartism.
An accursed thing it is to gaze
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye."
Wordsworth.
The s ummer of 1802 saw England relaxing in the sunshine of the Amiens agreement. W earied by nine years of strife, crushing taxation and starvation prices, the masses rejoiced at the return of peace and plenty. A popular cartoonist depicted John Bull making merry with long-absent friends—Old Stout, Best Wheaten Bread, Excellent Fresh Butter, Prime Hops and Jamaica Rum. Lord Grenville, pacing the Olympian lawns of Stowe, might speak of "unnecessary and degrading concessions" and derisive aristocrats compare the Treaty with "the peace that passeth understanding." Such implacables were little regarded. The average man was merely angered or amused by Windham's jeremiads that appeasers had signed England's death warrant and by Canning's demands for the recall of his old leader Pitt to surmount storms winch nobody but he believed existed.
After all their costly blunders and splendid victories the proud islanders were ready to let bygones be bygones. They wanted to turn their backs on an ungrateful Continent and resume their normal pursuits and amusements. Once the fight (in which they had given as good as they took) was called off, they ceased to feel jealousy of the young conqueror of Au stria and Italy and good-humoure dly took him at his own valuation as the man who had saved France and Europe from the Jacobin violence and lawlessness they had themselves so long opposed. They even accepted the incorporation in his dominions of the Austrian Netherlands and his control of the Dutch coast for which they had gone to war. For, imagining that every one else felt as they did, they believed that the world was on the threshold of a new age of international goodwill and expanding commercial opportunity.
It was, perhaps, because of these things that Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, walking home to Grassmere over Kirkstone Pass that spring and seeing the lakeland woods beyond Gorbarrow full of daffodils, felt a more than usual impulse of hope and joy. Even the gloomy Windham, 1 in his regret for the fallen Bourbon cause, could not suppress his pleasure at the sight of the holiday crowds in the Mall: they gave him, he noted in his diary, a pleasant feeling like former times. And all who during the siege years had longed for the delights of foreign travel and could afford it thronged the Dover Road in crested coach and carriage on their way to the Continent. At the Kentish port the York Hotel and its rival, the City of London, were crowded with rank and fashion. " Have you," wrote Charles Lamb wistfully from his London desk to a friend in Paris, "seen a man guillotined: is it as good as a hanging? Are all the women painted and the men all monkeys... . Are you and the First Consul thick?"
Travellers were at first agreeably impressed. The ragged rabble of Calais and Dieppe, who shouted and gesticulated on the quayside and so alarmed returning Emigres, stretched out civil, dirty hands to help the
Not least, I owe a debt to my predecessors: in particular to the late Professor John Holland Rose and the late Sir Julian Corbett, to Sir Charles Oman for his great History of the Peninsula War and to the late Sir John Fortescue for his History of the British Army —one of the noblest epics of our race and langauge.
Because of the need to save paper I have again omitted a bibliography and appendix of references, and confined myself to a list of abbreviated titles used in the footnotes.
Arthur Bryant.
September, 1944.
CHAPTER ONE
Glimpse of a Grand Nation
"No government has exploited so systematically the national thirst for military glory. None has appealed more successfully to the material passions, or has presumed with such hardihood and success upon the administrative timidity of the French, part inertia, part egotism, which is content to surrender the conduct of affairs in exchange for a quiet life."
H. A. L. Fisher, Bonapartism.
An accursed thing it is to gaze
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye."
Wordsworth.
The s ummer of 1802 saw England relaxing in the sunshine of the Amiens agreement. W earied by nine years of strife, crushing taxation and starvation prices, the masses rejoiced at the return of peace and plenty. A popular cartoonist depicted John Bull making merry with long-absent friends—Old Stout, Best Wheaten Bread, Excellent Fresh Butter, Prime Hops and Jamaica Rum. Lord Grenville, pacing the Olympian lawns of Stowe, might speak of "unnecessary and degrading concessions" and derisive aristocrats compare the Treaty with "the peace that passeth understanding." Such implacables were little regarded. The average man was merely angered or amused by Windham's jeremiads that appeasers had signed England's death warrant and by Canning's demands for the recall of his old leader Pitt to surmount storms winch nobody but he believed existed.
After all their costly blunders and splendid victories the proud islanders were ready to let bygones be bygones. They wanted to turn their backs on an ungrateful Continent and resume their normal pursuits and amusements. Once the fight (in which they had given as good as they took) was called off, they ceased to feel jealousy of the young conqueror of Au stria and Italy and good-humoure dly took him at his own valuation as the man who had saved France and Europe from the Jacobin violence and lawlessness they had themselves so long opposed. They even accepted the incorporation in his dominions of the Austrian Netherlands and his control of the Dutch coast for which they had gone to war. For, imagining that every one else felt as they did, they believed that the world was on the threshold of a new age of international goodwill and expanding commercial opportunity.
It was, perhaps, because of these things that Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, walking home to Grassmere over Kirkstone Pass that spring and seeing the lakeland woods beyond Gorbarrow full of daffodils, felt a more than usual impulse of hope and joy. Even the gloomy Windham, 1 in his regret for the fallen Bourbon cause, could not suppress his pleasure at the sight of the holiday crowds in the Mall: they gave him, he noted in his diary, a pleasant feeling like former times. And all who during the siege years had longed for the delights of foreign travel and could afford it thronged the Dover Road in crested coach and carriage on their way to the Continent. At the Kentish port the York Hotel and its rival, the City of London, were crowded with rank and fashion. " Have you," wrote Charles Lamb wistfully from his London desk to a friend in Paris, "seen a man guillotined: is it as good as a hanging? Are all the women painted and the men all monkeys... . Are you and the First Consul thick?"
Travellers were at first agreeably impressed. The ragged rabble of Calais and Dieppe, who shouted and gesticulated on the quayside and so alarmed returning Emigres, stretched out civil, dirty hands to help the
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