George III (1760–1820)

Patriot King (1760–1793)

Unfortunately the hero that Britain had at last brought forth to the admiration of Frederick II was not to the taste of the new king George III. Handsome and blond, a devoted husband to Princess Charlotte Mecklenberg-Strelitz who bore him fifteen children–all but one in Buckingham House, which he purchased as a family home in 1761–the twenty-two-year-old George had his own ideas of heroics. The conspicuous part was to be played by himself. He was enormously influenced by Bolingbroke’s writings on the ideal of the Patriot King, whose every virtue he hoped to embody. The Patriot King had as one of its particular tenets that the king should choose his ministers from the best men of all the parties. Parties led to faction, which destroyed the nation; they should be replaced by the lofty figure of the Patriot King from whom all goodness would spring.

Of a pious nature, with a rather slow and limited intellectual capacity, but with firm opinions once he had formed them, George III had a passionate distrust of the dirty arts of politicians–especially those of the great Pitt. He had complete faith in his own ability to cleanse the Augean stable of Whig patronage which had run the country since 1714. In fact, considering the formidable men ranged against him, George would be remarkably successful over the next twelve years. Blessed with a will of iron and considerable cunning, he clawed back the patronage of the crown from the Whigs and substituted his supporters, known as the King’s Friends, in the Houses of Parliament. For all his youthful ideas he soon became as adept as Walpole at using pensions to create placemen.

But by doing so George put himself on a collision course with his fellow countrymen. To British politicians of the 1760s the idea that the king should control the legislature, that is Parliament, through his Friends, was anathema. It was an article of post-revolutionary faith that there should be checks and balances in the constitution, otherwise there was a real danger of arbitrary power. The first twenty years of George III’s enormously long reign (it lasted for nearly sixty years, though he was incapacitated for his last decade) were therefore disturbed by a new struggle between Parliament and king which was expressed at its most extreme by the radical politician John Wilkes. But those two decades also saw a war to the death between the American colonies and Britain because the king refused to acknowledge America’s own Parliamentary traditions.

The legal rights and liberties of the citizen were the outstanding universal phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the time in George III’s domains was against him. Where he viewed his role as the unifying Patriot King, on both sides of the Atlantic his reign was seen as conflicting with the rights won a century before. The interfering king was destroying liberty, which–like reason–was becoming the buzzword of the age.

George III’s reign coincided with the coming to fruition of ideas emanating from the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement in France, a system of beliefs which spread like wildfire. These ideas were popularized by the French philosophers of the time (for France ever since Louis XIV had been the cultural centre of Europe) in their hugely influential Encyclopédie, first published in 1751. Organized by the philosopher Denis Diderot and containing articles by political theorists such as Montesquieu and philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the Encyclopédie aimed at nothing less than explaining the universe. Its founders’ optimistic notion was that, if the Encyclopédie contained explanations for everything, progress would result as knowledge advanced. Newton’s discovery of the physical laws of the universe, which he began to publish from the 1680s on, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus’ classification of the natural world into species in 1737 and the scientific discoveries which proliferated in the first half of the eighteenth century convinced them that the intellectual laws of the universe could be determined by the application of human intelligence.

The most striking feature of the Enlightenment was its followers’ belief in the benevolent power of man’s reason. If every aspect of human life–institutions, laws, beliefs–were subjected to reason, man would be inspired to improve it. Its next most important aspect was that the laws which the Enlightenment philosophers, not least Jean-Jacques Rousseau, postulated about the universe by and large moved most of them away from conservative forms of government like monarchies towards the concepts of human rights and equality. Many of the political ideas that inspired the Encyclopédistes came from England. John Locke was hailed by them as one of their own, and Montesquieu cited the separation of powers in England as the model for rational government. Tradition was regarded as being almost as bad as superstition, which in the Christian Churches had been responsible for so many deaths the century before. Deism went in tandem with the Enlightenment, the belief that there was a God but that its or his laws were to be known not through established religions like Judaism or Christianity, but by discovering certain common principles. As with a scientific experiment, every belief was to be questioned and, if it was found wanting in the light of reason, abandoned.

For reason, it was believed, led to virtue. The effect that these ideas had on the world are impossible to underestimate. It was only when the French Revolution had run its course and thrown out every piece of irrational human custom in its pursuit of rational virtue that disenchantment with reason and experiment set in. But until 1789 the western world was awash with all kinds of people tearing down the old in the search of the new. The ideas the Encyclopédistes promoted, of political freedom, of social justice, of equality, would prove so powerful that they moved men to fight wars, to pull down palaces, to create a new world.

Nevertheless the compelling, the intoxicating brilliance of the Encyclopédistes’ writing was such that philosophical ideas of reform–and philosophers themselves–became the fashion even among the most conservative monarchies of Europe. If Caroline of Ansbach had corresponded with philosophers twenty years before, in the mid-eighteenth century autocratic monarchs like Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria were so influenced by philosophical ideas that they wanted to put them into practice. They prided themselves on being enlightened, as did people from all walks of life all over the world. From such a standpoint eventually flowed the reform movements in England at the end of the century, which demanded religious toleration, an end to slavery, prison reform, parliamentary reform, trade reform and constitutional reform.

In his own way the young George III represented something of the spirit of the age that was determined to sweep away the old and the outworn. He believed in restoring virtue to the country. Unfortunately, when he was a little boy his autocratic mother, who had been brought up as a princess at the despotic court of a small German state and was horrified by the impudence of the English Parliament, was always saying to him, ‘George, be a king.’ He never forgot her advice. But his interpretation of kingship not only conflicted dramatically with the English political tradition. It also led him into conflict with the Whig leaders of his reign, the Earl of Shelburne and the Marquis of Rockingham.

In the atmosphere of the Enlightenment they prided themselves more than ever on being the keepers of the flame of freedom, as true heirs to the Revolutionary Settlement. And they kept up the Whig reputation for being in contact with advanced thought. Just as Locke had been doctor to the first Whig Lord Shaftesbury, the scientist and dissenter who discovered oxygen Joseph Priestley was Lord Shelburne’s librarian, responsible for much advanced rationalist thought percolating into Whig ruling circles. The stage of George III’s reign was thus set for repeated confrontation.

George III remained under the influence not only of his mother Augusta, Princess of Wales, but also of his former tutor Lord Bute, a tall, vain Scotsman, said to be her lover, who was known for priding himself on his good legs. Bute was loathed by most people, partly because he was Scots (the Scots were still very unpopular) and partly because of his passion for intrigue and secret plots. But he did have the sensible idea of getting the new king off to a good start by emphasizing how English he was compared to his great-grandfather and grandfather, George I and George II. George III made a famous speech from the throne in the perfect English accent derived from a childhood spent at Kew, which began, ‘Born and bred in this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ Nevertheless, though he might be regarded with sentimental enthusiasm after such a start, by the easily moved public, to the political classes (that is, the great Whig network spread so effectively throughout the country) George seemed a dangerous new phenomenon.

Emotional and affectionate, the young George III put his faith in those he loved, chief of whom was the Tory Bute, who had been his tutor ever since his father, Poor Fred, died when George was twelve. The pompous Bute was appointed secretary of state by the king and thrust into Pitt’s administration. George did not appreciate that Pitt should be given free rein, while Pitt himself, as a consummate autocrat–Horace Walpole said that he wanted the crown and sceptre and nothing less–was furious that the Cabinet had to have Bute on board representing the king and putting obstacles in his path. Pitt was insulted when Bute wanted George III in his coronation speech to call the war ‘bloody and expensive’ he insisted that it be changed to ‘just and necessary’. Undermined in his own Cabinet and prevented from declaring pre-emptive war on Spain, France’s ally, Pitt resigned in October 1761. Bute was left to face renewed hostilities with Spain in December (though it brought Britain Hanava and Manila) and to manage the peace which all sides were wearily coming to believe was necessary.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, brought to an end the Seven Years War, but despite Pitt’s entreaties no mention was made by Bute of Britain’s magnificent ally Frederick the Great, who had fought so bravely on her behalf. Bute followed up this ungrateful behaviour by withdrawing without warning the subsidy Frederick had come to depend on. In a sad turnaround the King of Prussia, who had helped to win the war which had left Britain the world’s top trading nation, became her implacable enemy.

Pitt denounced the peace, which he said was ‘as stained as Utrecht’, but just as at Utrecht the gains to Britain from the Seven Years War were immense. Bute’s offensive behaviour certainly left Britain most ominously without a friend in Europe, with Prussia feeling as betrayed as Austria had been, but the British part of North America now extended to the Mississippi. What had become the only French colony in North America, Louisiana, was now worth so little to France that she soon sold it to Spain, in 1762. As a result of giving Havana and Manila back to Spain in return for Florida, the whole of the American eastern seaboard was now in the hands of British colonists, as of course was the vast formerly French settlement of Canada. In addition all the French and Spanish American possessions in the southern part of North America to the east of the Mississippi, with the exception of the town and island of New Orleans, became British too.

Minorca was given back to Britain. In the West Indies Britain kept Grenada and the Grenadines, Tobago, St Vincent and Dominica, but restored Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia to the French. In India all the gains made since 1748 were confirmed. In west Africa the French were handed back Goree, while Britain kept Senegal. In central America Britain obtained the right to cut and trade in Honduras logwood, which would eventually result in protectorate status. Though the French lost Cape Breton by the Peace of Paris, they were still allowed to use the great fisheries round Newfoundland which they had traditionally shared with the British for over a hundred years.

Meanwhile, within Great Britain, the king was starting as he meant to go on. When continuous disagreements with Bute had forced the other pillar of the government, the chief of the great Whig connection the Duke of Newcastle, to resign in May 1762, George III seized the opportunity to dismiss all his followers and dependants. Not only was any Whig who had voted against the treaty in the Houses of Parliament thrown out, so also were Newcastle’s most modest clients such as excisemen. With a quill pen the king personally ran through the name of the Duke of Devonshire on the list of members of the Privy Council, while three of the greatest magnates of the Whig party, Newcastle, Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, were dismissed as lords lieutenant.

This wholesale sacking of the Whigs was known to their sarcastic contemporaries as ‘the massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’. The Whigs were truly amazed by the speed and venom with which the young king had struck. As a result the great Whig connection, or ‘old corps’ Whigs, for the first time in two generations broke up into small rival groups, of which the most important were those headed by Pitt and Rockingham. But, just as the king desired, some Whigs began to desert their party and move towards the idea of becoming King’s Friends.

The elegant Bute soon found the rough and tumble of politics too much for him. He preferred, as he put it, to be ‘a private man at the side of the King’, so he retired while nevertheless continuing to make trouble by advising George informally–or from behind the curtain, as was said at the time. Yet the country still had to be governed. Since George III was only at the beginning of his drive to dispose of the Whigs, he was forced to call upon the competent but unimaginative Whig George Grenville, who headed one of the smaller Whig factions, to lead the government. Grenville, who was Pitt’s brother-in-law (though he had quarrelled with him), had few manners and was constantly rude to the king. He was also immediately faced by trouble. At home, the increasingly outrageous newspaper put out by the daring MP John Wilkes, and its insulting criticisms of the king, had to be suppressed once and for all. In America, when Grenville asked the colonists to help pay for the enormously expensive war by a new levy, the stamp tax, to be imposed on every legal document, his request was met by rioting.

Grenville saw no reason why the burden of the colonies’ defence should fall on the English taxpayer alone. And perhaps if they had been asked to consider the request in their assemblies the Americans would have returned a favourable answer. The problem was the peremptory way in which the tax was demanded. The American colonists had a very proud parliamentary tradition of their own in their assemblies. Following the example of their English cousins in the seventeenth century, they held to the belief that they could not be taxed without their consent. Since they were not represented in the British Parliament as they had elected none of its members, the British Parliament had no right to tax them. The passing of the Stamp Act in 1765 in the Parliament at Westminster, but not in their own parliaments and state assemblies, resulted in uproar and riots driven by a slogan which seventeenth-century Englishmen would have understood: ‘No taxation without representation’. Six of the thirteen colonies’ governments made formal protests.

As a patriotic duty Americans refused to accept the stamped paper sent over from England, and boycotted British manufactures. British manufacturers who relied on the vast American trade started to go bankrupt, and amid the chaos, alarmed by such fury, Grenville resigned. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766 by Grenville’s successor, the Marquis of Rockingham. Grenville had been no less thoroughly defeated at home by the antics of the libertarian Wilkes, a member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club.

Ever since the accession of George III, Wilkes’s newspaper the North Briton–so-called in mock-honour of Bute’s antecedents–had specialized in attacking the king’s rule. The removal of the ‘old corps’ Whigs (with secret encouragement from his confrères) had been portrayed as another royal attack on liberty. Wilkes and his paper already had a reputation for scurrility, but in issue No. 45 of April 1763, he went too far when he alleged that the king’s speech to Parliament included a lie. Grenville, who was a lawyer himself, was determined that the recalcitrant Wilkes should feel the full force of the law. He had Wilkes and the printers of the North Briton tried and imprisoned for having had anything to do with the production of the paper, through the unspecific catch-all mechanism known as the general warrant. But Grenville was made to look foolish by an unsympathetic judiciary. On appeal, Chief Justice Charles Pratt released Wilkes by ruling general warrants illegal.

The squinting, licentious Wilkes was already a popular hero among high-spirited and sophisticated Londoners who themselves had long enjoyed a reputation for disliking restraint of all kinds. Wilkes’s imprisonment was worked up into the issue of the right of the citizen to publish the truth and Pratt’s judgement was represented as a blow for liberty. Wilkes sued the government for his arrest and was given damages by the ecstatically partisan London jury. The House of Commons nevertheless expelled him, and because he risked arrest once more for an obscene poem, he was forced to flee for France. But this was only the beginning of his career as the self-appointed gadfly of the state. Often on the run Wilkes had enough of the popular vote behind him to be re-elected to Parliament, to be made an alderman of the City of London and finally to become mayor. He began to campaign for freedom of all kinds, but particularly for press freedom and American rights–a campaign which for the next ten years convulsed the colonies with violence.

For the sake of some governmental stability, George had asked Lord Rockingham to take office as prime minister because he had assumed the leadership of the largest Whig faction, which contained many of the ‘old corps’ Whigs–that is, the old Newcastle or Pelhamite Whig connection. Rockingham (whose secretary, the Irishman Edmund Burke, was to become the supreme thinker of the Whig party) had a great deal more common sense than Grenville. But thanks to the king’s activities behind the scenes, and those of the King’s Friends whom he imposed upon the ministry, the Rockingham government could not last. Though the Duke of Newcastle was a member of the government as lord privy seal, he was too old and unwell to be of much use, while Pitt–who was temperamentally unsuited to playing a supporting role–refused to shore up the ministry. It was thus to Pitt once more and his small band of followers that George III turned to form a government in 1766, in hopes of a smoother time ahead since Pitt himself had now professed contempt for the party system.

In theory Pitt might have ameliorated the continuing poor relations with America. He had persuaded Rockingham to repeal the stamp tax by pointing out how foolish it was to threaten the trade with the American colonies, worth £2 million a year, for the peppercorn rate of stamp duty, which might bring in one-tenth of that revenue. In his view Britain might have a moral right to tax the colonies, but she had no legal right. However, Pitt now fell ill and was obliged to take a prolonged leave of absence, while refusing to resign as prime minister. This left his rash chancellor Charles Townshend to rush into more taxation of the American colonies, since the problem of the unresolved war debts had not gone away. Townshend hoped he had found a way round the dispute by imposing customs duties, which after all were indirect taxes on tea, glass, paper and other essentials, but the Americans saw through this. Their response was more rioting.

Moreover, even before Pitt had what seems to have been some kind of a nervous breakdown, his government was not at all the same as his old ministry. In his pride and grandeur he had accepted the earldom of Chatham. In effect, though, this was the equivalent of being ‘kicked upstairs’. As he now had to sit in the House of Lords, he could no longer employ his formidable powers of rhetoric to control the House of Commons. And since he would not have one party, the Chatham administration was made up of an unworkable ragbag of men of opposing views. Edmund Burke would memorably describe it as ‘such a piece of mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement, patriots and courtiers, king’s friends and republicans, Whigs and Tories, that it was indeed a curious show, but unsafe to touch and unsure to walk on’. Chatham was far too grand to try and wield this mass of warring factions into a workable whole, and it became beset by internal problems when Townshend died unexpectedly. The severity of Chatham’s illness at last compelled him to resign in October 1768.

Then Wilkes returned to London from abroad to make mischief. Despite being imprisoned once more on the outstanding charge of his obscene poetry, he got himself elected MP for Middlesex where his depiction of the corruption in Parliament gained him a willing audience. Chatham’s first lord of the Treasury, the Duke of Grafton, now took over as prime minister, and his government made the House of Commons refuse to accept Wilkes’s election and keep him in prison. Wilkes decried this as further evidence of a conspiracy against liberty, and rioting began outside his prison in Southwark in 1768. The following year he was re-elected and expelled three times. Re-elected one more time, his seat went to his defeated opponent.

By 1770 Grafton had had enough. He had battled against attacks in the House of Lords by a revived Chatham, roused by the imprisonment of Wilkes, which he too saw as an issue of liberty, but he was soon defeated, resigning after two years under the stress of it all. Since all the Whig factions were by now in a profound state of disarray and disagreement with one another, Grafton’s ministry gave way to one consisting entirely of the King’s Friends under Lord North. The son of the Jacobite Earl of Guildford, North was a witty, cherubic and deceptively sleepy-looking man with the sort of emollient skills needed to hold a government together. At last the king had triumphed. Though North was the first Tory to hold office in two generations, the real point about him was that he had risen to power as a King’s Friend. For twelve years Britain got ministerial stability under this affable man, who understood that his hold on power depended on his accepting that the real chief minister was the king.

Unfortunately these years coincided with increasing restiveness in America. English goods were being simultaneously boycotted by all the colonies, while mobs roamed the streets of Massachusetts led by masked men called the Sons of Liberty, who tarred and feathered anyone not in agreement with them. The Massachusetts Parliament debated what form a protest to the British government should take which would deny Britain’s right to make laws for or to tax the colonies. This was a revolt fast developing into revolution.

There were now 10,000 British soldiers in Massachusetts, for Grafton had sent out 2,000 more to Boston, and every day the Boston mob spent hours taunting the troops; tempers were at breaking point. On 2 March 1770, seven British soldiers separated from the rest of their regiment were backed into a corner by an enraged mob advancing down one of Boston’s boulevards, hurling abuse and stones. Fearing for their lives, the soldiers fired into the crowd and killed five men. This was immediately seized on by American agitators as a ‘massacre’ and they demanded nothing less than that all British soldiers should leave the colonies.

George III could not view the colonists’ actions with tolerance; it was not in his nature. They were rebellious subjects whose ideas should not even be listened to, but must be destroyed. Yet the people whose views the king had no patience for were highly sophisticated men and women with their own political traditions who, just as much as their cousins across the Atlantic, had been profoundly influenced by the ideas of John Locke, especially in his sanctioning of rebellion against unjust rulers. In the years since the founding of the American colonies (in the case of Virginia and New England, well over a hundred years before), their own institutions had grown up which were completely independent of and far more real to them than what went on 3,000 miles away at Westminster. Many of the colonists were as practised in debating in their own assemblies as any MP. Well educated at their excellent new universities of Harvard and Yale, they were growing ever more impatient with the mother country. By a strange irony of history, the supreme sacrifice Pitt had demanded of the Americans, the propaganda he had bombarded them with in order to make the colonies see the French as their enemy, had given the thirteen colonies much more of a sense of common destiny than ever before.

But ever since George III had come to the throne and started taking his kingdom in hand there had been other more immediate reasons for friction. The mercantile system, under which the colonies were to import British manufactures but make nothing themselves, infuriated the Americans. They wished to build up their home manufacturing base, but were forbidden to do so by law. Under the old Whigs the colonies had been pretty much left to themselves to run things, but George III had insisted on a much more rigorous observance of the mercantile system. The illegal trade with other parts of Europe and other colonies to which everyone had turned a blind eye was curbed, and customs duties at colonial ports were raised.

At first North tried to be conciliatory to the colonists. He repealed all the taxes except for the one on tea, which was only three pence per pound, and removed the soldiers from Boston. He promised that the British government would not try and raise any more taxes in America, but at the same time, because the king insisted, he weakly said that the tax on tea would nevertheless remain as a matter of principle. The 298 chests of British tea that arrived in Boston Harbour in December 1773 provided too good a symbol of British oppression for an increasingly important circle of American agitators to miss. In what has become known to history as the Boston Tea Party, a group of patriotic young Americans dressed as Mohawk Indians climbed aboard ships in the harbour and emptied all the tea into the water. All patriotic Americans from then on refused to drink tea.

Lord North and George III reacted with intemperate fury. They attempted to punish the Bostonians as if they were children by withdrawing all responsibility from them by means of the Coercive Acts (known to the Americans as the Intolerable Acts). In 1774 the agitators were sent to England for trial, the Massachusetts charter of government was suspended and the colony was henceforth to be ruled directly from Britain. To add insult to injury the port of Boston was closed until compensation had been paid to the tea-merchants. The British government was so ignorant of what effect these draconian measures were going to have on the American colonies that it never considered that the Americans would rather fight than put up with them. The renowned Virginian orator Patrick Henry spoke for all Americans when he said, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’

At Westminster, unlike the rest of Britain which was outraged by the impudence of the Americans, Chatham, his followers and the Rockinghamite Whigs, all opposed the Coercive Acts and called on the government to give in and save the empire. They persuaded North to offer a get-out clause: if the colonies made a grant towards the expense of the war they would not be taxed. But it was to no avail. Events in America were achieving their own rolling momentum. When the British commander General Gage, who had replaced the governor at Boston, tried to carry out his orders to dissolve the Massachusetts Parliament, the Bostonians simply reassembled at Concord, a few miles to the west.

Realizing that the moment had come for real defiance of the mother country, the people of Massachusetts organized their militia into a company called the Minute Men, because they could be called out at one minute’s notice. They also started to pile up guns in their clapboard houses. When Gage sent troops to seize the rebels’ military stores in April 1775, they were attacked at Lexington and 270 British soldiers were killed. The shot fired then has been called one that ‘echoed round the world’, for that was the beginning of the American Wars of Independence.

The Americans then went on the offensive. They drew themselves up on Bunker Hill overlooking Boston Harbour and there at first they kept Gage at bay. All the colonies joined Massachusetts and declared war on Britain, whose legal dependants they had been only a few months before. They appointed George Washington, the hero of the Seven Years War, their commander-in-chief. He was sent up to Massachusetts to co-ordinate the war effort there. In Britain the government grasped that the situation in America was much more serious than had been thought and despatched General Sir William Howe across the Atlantic to Boston to take over from Gage because he was a veteran of the Seven Years War and therefore knew the American terrain well.

Washington was an inspired choice of leader. Not only was he famous in the colonies for his bravery, but having served with British soldiers he understood the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and knew that the British redcoat was vulnerable to the unexpected ambushes and sudden skirmishes in which the colonial militia excelled. But he had a great deal to accomplish before his citizen soldiers were ready to fight. Though the Americans’ outstanding merit was that unlike the British they were fighting for a cause they were prepared to die for, they would be at a disadvantage if they met the redcoats in pitched battle. Enthusiasm and passion would not always carry the day over formal training. Thanks to the passivity of General Howe, who sat at Boston doing nothing all winter, Washington was able to take advantage of those few vital months to drill his troops into disciplined regiments. In 1776 he and his army seized Dorchester Heights, which commanded Boston. Instead of doing battle Howe withdrew to Brooklyn in New York, leaving Washington in possession of one of America’s largest ports.

Once in New York Howe began recruiting as many men as he could find. But since few Americans would fight in the British army he was driven to using the colonists’ enemy, the Indians, and importing 18,000 Hessians to fight against the Americans. These things further alienated the Americans, especially as the German mercenaries’ behaviour was very brutal indeed.

On 4 July 1776, the date which America’s national holiday memorializes, the colonists sitting in Congress in Philadelphia issued the celebrated Declaration of Independence, calling the colonies the ‘free and independent States of America’. Written by Washington’s fellow Virginian planter Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration burned with the spirit of the Enlightenment. Most ringing of all its utterances was the phrase ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. George III was denounced for his ‘history of repeated injuries and usurpations’, and condemned as ‘unfit to be the ruler of a free people’.

Meanwhile to the surprise of the British, a series of military successes for the colonial Americans now ensued. Washington, who marched down from Boston to force the British out of New York, had been defeated, and forced to retreat to Philadelphia. But the British masterplan of an army under General Burgoyne arriving from Canada to join Howe and drive Washington into the south in order to separate New England from the rest of the colonies was humiliatingly defeated. In 1777 at Saratoga on the Hudson river, Burgoyne had to surrender with all his soldiers to the American General Gates.

Saratoga was the turning point for the colonists. Until then the other European powers had not thought it worth their while intervening in the conflict. They had assumed the Americans stood no chance of success against the victor of the Seven Years War. But not only did Saratoga revitalize American morale. More importantly it secured French troops and a French fleet as France officially recognized the colonists’ independence and formed an alliance with America. In 1778 the young Marquis de Lafayette arrived as commander of the French forces which were to fight side by side with the Americans against the British. The end of the war effectively came when the British under General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. They had been defeated by a combined operation: a blockade by Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet from the sea and a land-siege by General Greene.

But Britain was still fighting a new world war, against the Spanish now as well as the French. In 1779 Spain had followed the lead of her Bourbon relation and attacked the British. A year later so did Holland, brought in by Britain’s insulting adherence to the Law of Neutrals, by which Dutch ships carrying (say) French goods were liable to be seized by the British. Further hostility to Britain on similar grounds came from an alliance, the Armed Neutrality of the North, formed by the neutral powers Russia, Denmark and Sweden. They would not allow Britain to stop their ships carrying goods for her enemies. During the war Britain temporarily lost command of the sea: Minorca was seized, Gibraltar was besieged and most of the British West Indies were occupied by the French.

Across the globe Britain’s enemies seized the opportunity offered by the American War to attack her. In India the French attempted to return to their old position of superiority: the Maratha warriors were incited to war against the English and were on the point of overwhelming Bombay, the Sultan of Mysore, Haidar Ali, waged war all over the Karnatic and the French temporarily seized control of the Indian Ocean.

Fortunately for Britain the old hero of the Seven Years War in India, Sir Eyre Coote, was still alive. He completely destroyed the forces of the Sultan of Mysore, while the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, made a name for himself when he showed great presence of mind in sending troops from Bengal to relieve Bombay. Once Yorktown had fallen, the French attempted to seize Jamaica. They were defeated near Dominica by Admiral Rodney, who restored British naval supremacy. In Ireland a gifted barrister turned politician named Henry Grattan raised what was in effect a substantial army of hundreds of thousands of Protestant volunteers, supposedly to defend Ireland. Backed up by the threat these men represented, a convention met in 1782 at Dungannon–copying the Congress of Philadelphia–and unilaterally declared legislative independence from England.

After Saratoga, although the British government finally offered to repeal all the acts passed for the American colonies since 1763, the Americans were no longer prepared to accept any role for British Parliamentary statutes. In early 1782 Britain at last formally accepted that the Americans were not to be subdued by force and recognized American independence. Soon afterwards, peace was made with the rest of Europe. In September 1783 by the Treaty of Versailles Britain retained Gibraltar, though Spain received back Florida once more together with Minorca, and France was given Tobago, Goree and Senegal.

In Britain events had not stood still during the war. With the issue of liberty dominating the arguments of the day, the 1770s saw Granville Sharp begin the anti-slavery movement, launching a campaign that led to a legal judgement of 1772 which forbade slavery in England. Giving reasons for his decision to free James Sommersett, a black slave brought to London by a West Indian plantation-owner, the judge declared that ‘no law of England allowed so high an act of dominion as slavery’. Sharp was helped by a former African slave, Olaudah Equiano, born around 1745, who was sold to a Royal Navy officer. After fighting in Canada and the Mediterranean, Equiano, who was one of about 30,000 black people living in England in the late eighteenth century and who settled in Bristol, wrote an influential first hand description of slavery. He became much in demand to give lecture tours for the growing number of abolition committees.

The poor progress of the war contrasted dramatically with the triumphs achieved during the Seven Years War over the same ground and radicalized the British public’s assessment of the government, adding to the widespread conviction of corruption in high places. The Americans were not alone in believing that they were not properly represented in Parliament. The loss of the American colonies, the failure of the war and the temporary loss to the French of control of the high seas (an American privateer named Paul Jones had created mayhem by attacking British seaside towns) made many more doubt the efficacy of the prevailing political system. Mass meetings were held throughout the country to demand the reforms in Parliamentary representation for which Chatham and Wilkes had been campaigning for the previous decade.

The most striking was the ‘out of doors’ petition movement begun by highly respectable Yorkshiremen. Lawyers, farmers and gentry demanded another hundred country seats to reflect population changes and rid Britain of corruption and the useless placemen round the king who they believed were responsible for the war going so badly. The Great Yorkshire Petition presented in 1780 was copied by twenty-four other counties. In Parliament it was represented by Edmund Burke’s 1780 Civil List Bill which pledged to investigate who was receiving government pensions.

Britain was undergoing tremendous change and dislocation imposed by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Throughout the eighteenth century, new techniques of husbandry using drainage, new grasses, fertilizer and crop rotation invented by among others Jethro Tull and Walpole’s brother-in-law Townshend, and later popularized by Thomas Coke and Arthur Young, had been transforming farming by providing hugely improved yields. George III himself, ‘Farmer George’ as he was nicknamed, was fascinated by his own farm at Windsor and wrote on agricultural topics under a nom de plume. The new farming needed larger farms of 200 acres or more if they were to succeed, and as information about these methods spread, so the rate of enclosure of the common land quickened–a process that reached its peak in the first half of George’s reign as some two million acres were enclosed by countless private acts of Parliament. The English countryside, from being mainly ribbon strips of smallholdings, became a place of extensive fields surrounded by hedgerows.

As improvements in farming practice created regional unemployment during these years, particularly in the midlands, textile manufacturing piecework at home offered another way of earning money. The full industrial revolution did not get under way until the mid-1780s when Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, combined with James Watt’s double-acting steam engine, transformed the British cotton industry almost overnight. From 1764 with James Hargreaves’s invention of the Spinning Jenny, which adapted John Kay’s Flying Shuttle of the 1730s to a multi-spindle system, cotton manufacture was becoming a far more profitable business. Then Richard Arkwright’s invention of the waterframe, which used water to run the spinning machine far more speedily than the hand loom, not only moved work out of the home in the early 1770s into cotton mills, it attracted the new landless labourers north to the Pennines. For centuries the rushing waters of the Pennines had provided natural sites for the water mills of the woollen industry, and it was there that cotton manufacture took off.

The well-to-do could not be wholly disconnected from the anger over enclosures that was often taking the form of riots, nor did many of them want to. For the way the educated thought about the less fortunate was changing, from the anti-slavery movement to the new concern for the treatment of prisoners expressed in 1777 when John Howard wrote his State of the Prisons in England and Wales. But they were not only influenced by the rational thought of the Enlightenment, which in England (propelled by Jeremy Bentham, a barrister and philosopher) was moving towards Utilitarianism–the novel belief that government should be directed towards the greatest happiness of the greatest number. They were also affected by the great religious revival movement begun by the Wesley brothers and the preacher George Whitefield, which from the late 1770s swept the Church of England, creating the Methodist Church.

In the space of thirty years the influential Evangelical movement, as their followers who remained within the Church of England were known, would transform the manners and mores of Britain. The Evangelicals concluded that the people of Britain were very nearly as much in need of missions as those natives in foreign lands who were sent Bibles and clergymen by the growing number of religious societies. The national mood was slowly shifting towards a greater seriousness, the sort of mood that is thought of as Victorian. Piety and hard work were becoming the watchwords of England. They were the values of the inventive middle-class manufacturers, whose factories were poised to make Britain into an industrial giant.

To George III’s anger the loss of the American colonies caused Lord North to resign, and forced the king to bring back the ‘old corps’ Whigs he detested under Lord Rockingham. But it was a short-lived government. The MP John Dunning’s critical motion ‘that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’ was the last gasp of a dying breed. Legislative independence for Ireland was passed by Parliament–the Dublin Parliament was led by Henry Grattan–while Burke’s Civil List Act responding to the out-of-doors agitation removed some of the crown’s sinecures and pensions which the Whigs abhorred and excluded government contractors from becoming MPs. But the political scene was altering. The old-style Whig leaders of aristocratic birth, progressive thought and libertarian morals ranged against the king were out of kilter with the new mood. After France had entered the war, feeling hardened against the Whigs as a group, their support for the Americans now seeming especially unpatriotic. They were epitomized by the swashbuckling Charles James Fox, the most famous Whig of his generation, who had helped revive the party during North’s administration and was now one of Rockingham’s secretaries of state. But it would be Fox’s great rival, Chatham’s son William Pitt the Younger, who caught the respectable tone of the age and became prime minister, while Fox’s unscrupulous behaviour brought the Whigs into further disrepute.

Ideologically Fox had a great deal in common with the young Pitt, who was ten years his junior. They both believed in religious tolerance, the reform of government abuses and parliamentary reform. Pitt, like Fox, was a superb orator, with gifts he had inherited from his father, his first speech in the House of Commons prompting Burke to remark that Pitt was not ‘merely a chip off the old block but the old block himself’. The differences between Fox and Pitt were really temperamental, but Pitt was made for the new age. He was far more circumspect and middle class in his attitudes, controlled where Fox was impulsive, and pragmatic where Fox was courageous but unrestrained.

The great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kerouaille, Charles James Fox was the second son of the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. His father, the wily politician Henry Fox, had made a fortune out of the Seven Years War as paymaster-general in the way that Chatham had disdained. Fox was said to be losing his father’s ill-gotten gains more quickly than they had been made, at all-night gaming, the great vice of the period, which saw hundreds of thousands of pounds staked on a throw at the green-baize gaming tables of clubs like White’s or on the horses. Fox’s irregular life never stopped him making a dazzling speech in the House of Commons after a night without any sleep. To his admirers this was true glamour.

However, Fox’s whole radical style of politics–such as stirring up the London mob to intimidate the House of Commons, which was one of his set pieces–was going out of fashion. Ever since the summer of 1780, when the Gordon Riots against a new relief act for Roman Catholics had ruined half of London in three days of uncontrollable violence, out-of-doors agitation had been deeply discredited. The petitioning of Parliament by the half-mad Protestant fanatic Lord George Gordon, with ‘No Popery’ as its slogan, had made the streets literally run with blood. Catholic chapels were burned, prisons were opened and many killed. Ministers seemed paralysed, and it was George III who saved the day by ordering troops to fire on the rioters. These events had frightened off the middle classes, who preferred to remain unenfranchised–in the event, until 1832–than be associated with mob disorder.

On the unexpected death of Rockingam in July 1782, the intellectually gifted but unpopular Lord Shelburne became prime minister, only for Fox, who had been fighting with Shelburne, to destroy the ministry by resigning (though he was Foreign Secretary) taking the 160 Rockinghamite or ‘old corps’ Whigs with him. Shelburne, left high and dry, was forced to govern with the King’s Friends and his little group of Chathamite Whigs–among whom remained the twenty-three-year-old Pitt, who became chancellor of the Exchequer. Though he had spent the previous twelve years tormenting Prime Minister North over the prosecution of the American War, Fox’s only route to power again was to join forces with the Tories. Together he and North would have enough MPs to form a government. By April 1783, in a cynical power-play that scandalized the electorate, the Fox–North axis forced Shelburne out before he had seen through the treaty to end the war. Under a nominal prime minister, the Duke of Portland, Fox’s and North’s coalition government took office. North, following an apparently amazing conversion, announced that ‘The appearance of power is all that a king in this country can have.’

But, just as before, George III was not to be underestimated. He now loathed the treacherous North only slightly less than Fox, who he believed with considerable justification was leading his son the Prince of Wales into bad ways. One observer watching the burly Fox swagger across the floor at Buckingham House to kiss George’s hand as a sign of taking office, remarked that the king looked like a furious horse who ‘turned back his ears and eyes’ as if he was about to throw the new minister. George not only defeated Fox’s attempt to increase the prince’s allowance but managed to get the whole administration ejected over Fox’s India Bill. This proposed that, instead of a governor-general, India should be ruled by seven commissioners appointed directly by Parliament.

Fox’s reputation for untrustworthiness and his large majority in the House of Commons led to the general assumption that his aim was to secure Indian patronage for himself and his friends. This was greatly resented on the ground that it infringed the East India Company’s chartered rights, while the King’s Friends considered it an attack on the royal prerogative. The king was heard to mutter that if the India Bill passed he would take the crown off his head and put it on Mr Fox’s untidy black locks, while the cartoonists contented themselves with drawings of Carlo (Charles) Khan riding into London on an elephant and taking all before him. The hitherto impassioned belief that the crown’s influence should be limited had passed its high-water mark. What was far more pressing was that Fox and his followers should be restrained.

While the affable, black-browed Fox relaxed after effortlessly piloting the bill through the Commons, George III put his own sly plan of attack into action. He instructed a young peer named Lord Thurlow to take a visiting card to all the members of the House of Lords dining before the vote, on which he had menacingly inscribed in his own handwriting the words: ‘Whoever votes for the India Bill is not only not the King’s friend, but would be considered by the King his enemy.’ The Lords’ role in the eighteenth century was as the king’s advisers and, because George III had been lavish with his creations, they were mainly supporters of his, if not actually King’s Friends. The king’s enmity was something no eighteenth-century peer desired. They defeated the bill.

That same night, 18 December, the king sent for Fox to demand the seals of office. He had a new candidate ready for supreme responsibility, the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt, the youngest prime minister in history. Twice previously the king had secretly approached the virtuous and hardworking Pitt, for all his youth, to see if he would take office at a time when Shelburne could not control the House of Commons and opposition to the American Peace Treaty was threatening its progress. On both occasions Pitt had declined, feeling that he would not himself be able to control the House. The determined king did not give up easily. He kept coming back to Pitt, and eventually by taking soundings persuaded him he should have a go at being prime minister and see whether office did not eventually bring MPs over to him.

To jeers of derision, and the taunt ‘A kingdom entrusted to a schoolboy’s care’, the tall slender young man took over the government. He refused to call an election, relying for his power entirely on the support of the king, and slowly the Tories in the House of Commons began to abandon North for him, not least because he was unsullied by compromise. Pitt was a very different man from Lord Chatham, cool where his father was passionate, happy to be a member of a team where Chatham had to dominate, simple where his father had preferred the grand style. And he was a consummate party politician, where his father had been a statesman and virtuoso war-leader. But it was no longer possible to talk with the same certainty of Whigs and Tories. Many of the old Whig aristocratic families had cut their connection with the party, which was itself continuing to decline in popularity. In the first election Pitt dared call, in March 1784, as many as 160 of Fox’s Whigs lost their seats–Fox’s Martyrs as they were humorously known. The Pitt government, which Fox had contemptuously termed a ‘mince-pie administration’ because he did not believe it could outlast the Christmas season in which it began, endured for seventeen years.

After the election Pitt was in a uniquely powerful position: he had not only the country behind him, but the two Houses of Parliament and, most crucially, the king. He was powerful as no one had been since the days of Walpole. An eminently sensible and worldly man who believed that those with wealth should be involved in politics and have a proper stake in the country, Pitt filled the House of Lords with a new Tory aristocracy which became as powerful as the old Whig revolutionary families. But though he was now at the head of the Tories, he did not forget his liberal origins as a reforming Whig, and put an end once and for all to the dubious methods by which government had been carried out for almost a century, by reforming the audit of public accounts. Like his father, Pitt refused to take the additional income from obscure sinecures, ‘perks’, which so many other politicians in office lived off.

Despite British mastery of the seas, it was rumoured that in peacetime things had got pretty slack with the navy, that there was not a single ship which could set sail and not need to call in for repairs. The dockyards were said to be slow and incompetent at their work. The sensible Admiral Howe, a reformer after Pitt’s own heart, was made first lord of the Admiralty. In five years the fleet was up to speed again, with ninety ships of the line ready to sail to whatever ocean required their presence.

Though Pitt was now head of the Tory party, he continued to be a disciple of the radical economist Adam Smith, who had formed part of Shelburne’s team of advisers. Smith, whom Pitt would continue to consult, had written a seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), that turned on its head the mercantile protectionist orthodoxy to which all European colonial powers of the time subscribed. His argument was that low duties and freer trade between nations would dramatically increase their wealth. Pitt’s attempts to free Irish trade from the restrictions imposed on her by English manufacturers met with shortsighted obstructions thanks to the clout of Lancashire businessmen, but his imaginative treaty with France created the lowest possible duties between the two countries. He hoped trade would encourage peace between the ancient enemies. As a painstaking financier who believed in fiscal probity, Pitt also established a sinking fund to pay off the National Debt, which after two world wars had reached £250 million, and reduced the duty on a large number of items such as tobacco, spirits and tea. It was the resulting cheapness of tea that encouraged the British to become a nation of tea drinkers, and to favour ‘the cups that cheer but not inebriate’, as one of the period’s most characteristic poets, the Evangelical William Cowper, would write.

To some extent Pitt’s zeal was shackled by his dependence on the support of the king and the King’s Friends. He was a consummately practical politician who more than most believed that politics was the art of the possible. Although, true to his origins, he introduced a Reform Bill on coming to power, his motion to purchase some corrupt boroughs and redistribute their seats failed. When he saw how unpopular this measure was in the House of Commons, he simply abandoned it. Likewise, despite his belief in religious toleration, he would not lend his official backing to a series of attempts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts between 1788 and 1791. The importance of the sugar industry to the economy and the lobbying of the powerful West Indian interests also stalled the abolition of the slave trade, but at least progress to that end was being made.

Pitt was fortunate that the beginning of his premiership coincided with that astonishing moment in the industrial revolution when James Watt’s perfected steam engine allowed mass machine production of textiles and iron and steel. Although Britain had developed manufacturing processes throughout the century in tools, textiles and pottery the introduction of Watt’s steam engine in the early 1780s changed the speed of production exponentially. In the space of a few years Britain could produce all kinds of goods from cotton sheets to machine tools ten times more quickly and ten times more cheaply than any other country in the world. For all Pitt’s reforms, without the wealth created by the industrial revolution the country would have been bankrupted by war and by the ten-year boycott by America of English goods.

In only one area did Pitt win less than golden opinions from contemporaries and that was the trial of the former governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, which arose out of Pitt’s 1784 act to regulate Indian affairs. Pitt’s reforms, while not going so far as Fox’s, gave the East India Company a government-run Board of Control, a new department of state. Its president was to be a member of the British Cabinet whose role was to supervise any political decisions of the company with regard to the Indian territories. The British government would also have a veto over the company’s choice of governor-general, though the company’s commercial policy was to remain unrestricted.

In the course of investigating the East India Company’s affairs, poisonous reports from his rivals prompted questions over Hastings’s conduct. Hastings was an extraordinarily able and constructive administrator, but his rooting out of corruption within the East India Company itself had aroused hostility, while his high-handed ways of doing business made him a great many enemies. Eventually he was impeached for extorting money, for corruption and for the murder of a witness against him. Most of the charges turned out to be untrue, and after what was then the longest trial in history, lasting for over seven years, he was acquitted–though he had been utterly ruined in the process. His friends blamed Pitt for not preventing the impeachment, but Pitt felt that the British government could not be seen to condone Hastings’s actions or stand behind a man against whom there were so many adverse rumours. As a result of the trial a much higher code of conduct was demanded of the British Indian civil servant as a caste.

Thanks to Pitt’s ceaseless work, England looked as if she faced the last decade of the century in tolerably good and modern shape in both her internal structures and her external relations. She had also added a new colony to her empire. The continent of Australia was founded in 1788 as a penal colony when the English government established a convict settlement to make up for the loss of America as a home for prisoners whose sentences had been commuted to transportation. The explorer Captain James Cook, who had discovered New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia on his voyages in the 1770s, had reported that Botany Bay would make a favourable place for a settlement. In January 1788, when the settlement of Sydney (named after the then home secretary) was founded, convicts were taken from their temporary prison hulks on the Thames to start a new life a world away. By 1830, over 50,000 convicts had arrived. Soon afterwards the state governments ended the practice, and Australia in the 1850s was instead flooded with gold prospectors and sheep farmers attracted by the wide open spaces. Australia’s neighbour New Zealand was to remain unsettled by the English until 1839, when Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company began colonization.

In foreign relations, as with everything else, Pitt was careful and sensible. He retrieved the alliance with Prussia as well as the age-old one with Holland lost during the American War of Independence. He was the first European statesman to recognize the potential danger the formerly sleeping giant Russia posed, now that she was becoming more involved in European affairs. The sturdy network of alliances ended England’s dangerous isolation which had been hers for far too long after the American War. Those foreign friends would be much needed in the turbulent years to come, as the hidden pressures boiling away under France’s glittering surface were soon to break out like a volcano, showering destruction far beyond its own circumference.

But in 1788, as a portent that trouble could erupt out of nowhere, George III suddenly lost his wits and became a violent maniac. He got out of his carriage while driving at Windsor, approached a tree, gripped its lower branches as if shaking it by the hand, and carried on a long conversation with it in the belief that it was the King of Prussia. His agitated wife Queen Charlotte eventually managed to lure him back into the carriage. But the king was so ill and strange on the night of 6 November that the two eldest princes, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, together with his doctors and his equerries, had to spend the night in the room next to his bedroom for fear of what he would do next. All night long he ran up and down the draughty corridors of Windsor Castle, gibbering, unreachable, a hopeless lunatic. The queen was too frightened of him to share a room with him any longer, and the king’s footmen were so exhausted by his behaviour, because he needed so little sleep, that one named Fortnum had to leave for the sake of his health. He started a food emporium in Piccadilly.

It now appears likely that what looked like mental illness was actually a manifestation of a disease called porphyria, nevertheless there was absolute consternation in the higher echelons of government, for the way was open to a regency in the person of the wild and extravagant Prince of Wales, or Prinny as he was known. Campaigned for in Parliament by Fox who at last saw his chance to become prime minister, the post fondly predicted for him since his earliest and very precocious youth, it seemed as if England would be turned over to the irresponsible rule of the twenty-six-year-old heir to the throne. Like his champion Fox, the Prince of Wales was not only a gambler, but he was a declared bankrupt. He had also contracted a secret marriage, to a Roman Catholic no less, a Mrs Fitzherbert, in defiance of George III’s 1772 Royal Marriages Act which still prevents his descendants marrying without the monarch’s permission. While Prinny and his brothers amused their friends and scandalized their acquaintances performing imitations of George III’s nightly doings, in the House of Commons Pitt duelled with Fox to prevent an automatic regency passing immediately to the Prince of Wales.

Pitt insisted that only Parliament could appoint a regent and that Parliament must investigate how to proceed. In a great scene in the House of Commons, Pitt won the debate. Behaving outrageously as usual, Fox announced to his stunned audience that since the king was ‘legally dead’ there was no need of precedents. What mattered was not what a Parliamentary committee thought but that there was in the kingdom a person different from everyone else in the kingdom–an heir apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal power with an automatic right to the throne. At this Pitt was heard to laugh and say, ‘By God, I’ll un Whig that gentleman for the rest of his life.’

Fox had entirely contradicted the great founding principle of the Whig revolution. The Whigs by offering the crown to William III had ended the hereditary succession by Divine Right and changed it into an institution dependent on the will of Parliament, Pitt said. Fox’s argument was destroyed and George III remained king. While Parliament was setting up the regency the king recovered, greatly to the nation’s relief. The fact that he was spending hours of the day trussed up in a straitjacket to stop him damaging himself and others was kept from the country, though there had been alarming and widespread rumours. Hale and hearty once again, though more than a little shaken, the king returned from Kew where he had been kept under the not very tender ministrations of Dr Willis. This episode, when Pitt’s loyalty and quick wits had saved the day, deepened the relationship between prime minister and sovereign. It was another king however, just across the Channel in France, whose fate began to influence Britain’s future when in 1789 the French Revolution began.

The French Revolution was one of the seminal occurrences of the last 200-odd years, and its reverberations continue to make themselves felt. Most of the governments of the world at the outset of the twenty-first century reflect in some form a belief in mass democracy. The French Revolution was the first experiment in that form of government. It began with an attempt by the French king Louis XVI to raise money by calling a meeting of his Parliament, the Estates-General, which had not met since the early seventeenth century. That was the fuse which set off the long-delayed explosion. By 1789 the French state was bankrupt, because of the wars it had waged unceasingly for a hundred years. The only way to tap new resources on the level required, economists realized, was to change the bizarre tax system in France. Almost unreformed since the middle ages, the fiscal structure contained privileged exemptions for the wealthy, the nobility and the Church, who paid almost no taxes at all. The greatest impositions, such as the notorious salt tax, fell on the poorest, as did the main levy, the land tax.

Tax exemptions tied in with other gross inequalities. Unlike the English, who for many centuries had been equal before the law, the French nobility had legal privileges. Their monarch, even so, was an absolute one. His word literally was the law since a letter from the king, the lettre de cachet, was enough to send anyone to jail for the rest of their life without trial or explanation. The French people had no recourse to Parliament to withhold monies from the king to combat this absolute style of monarchy. Though French philosophers had a tremendous effect on the rest of Europe, none of their ideas were practised in their own country. Frenchmen and women now passionately wanted to order their society along more sensible, rational lines.

At long last the first meeting of the Estates-General since 1614 was called at Versailles in order to raise taxes. What the king had not appreciated was how widespread and urgent was the French people’s desire for reform. With the force of a dam breaking, they created a new body called the National Assembly, the French nobility themselves voted to jettison their ancient privileges and together they proclaimed a brand new constitution based on the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man on 26 August 1789. This was influenced by the American Declaration of Independence, with its insistence on liberty, equality and man’s natural rights, which had enthused the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the revolution’s early leaders. But above all it was coloured by that classic Enlightenment document, the Social Contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like Locke, Rousseau held that government was a contract between the people and their rulers, though most crucial to the course of the Revolution was his belief in what he called the General Will of the People.

But who was to identify this was precisely the problem. From the first, the French Revolution was accompanied by mob violence. So strong were English feelings about ending tyranny that the storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, notorious as a symbol of the ancien régime and the lettres de cachet, that Fox spoke for many when he hailed it as the greatest event ‘that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ The young poet William Wordsworth would reflect the feelings of a host of other young Romantics when he exclaimed that it was ‘bliss’ to be alive at such a time in the history of the world. Most English people felt a natural sympathy for the cause of individual freedom; they rejoiced that liberty was flourishing in a land which since the days of Louis XIV had been a byword for repression.

But the Declaration of the Rights of Man was followed by more extreme behaviour when a mob forced the king and queen out of the Palace of Versailles and took them back to Paris and to what was captivity in all but name. Lafayette had to raise a regiment of middle-class national guards to restore order to a Paris where the army had looked on as the mob rampaged. When the new Constituent Assembly made Louis XVI a constitutional monarch, Pitt and the English government remained sympathetic to this curtailment of the tyranny of the absolutist Bourbon dynasty. A French constitutional monarchy would give the two nations facing one another across the Channel more in common. But what began with noble speeches about universal rights soon degenerated into terror and mob rule.

In October 1790 by every boat refugees of the wealthier sort began to flee France with only the clothes they stood up in, warning that there was no making terms with the revolutionaries. They revealed how the furious peasants were paying no heed to what lawyers were doing in Paris–whether it was separating powers or establishing the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Centuries of being treated like beasts had at last provoked them and their Parisian counterparts, the Sansculottes, into behaving like beasts. The starving peasantry had started to go berserk: they were burning the châteaux where their forefathers had worked since time immemorial. They were looting castles, seizing gold, killing their masters indiscriminately, regardless of how well they had been treated.

In Paris the constitutional monarchy with an Assembly became a revolutionary government which was continuously reinventing itself, but which ultimately depended on violence. Though Louis XVI remained king in name, by 1792 he, the queen and their two children had been made prisoners, and their friends feared the worst. As one observer related there soon became ‘reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn each of her children’.

As the Revolution raged on, idealistically attempting to put right centuries of wrongs, disestablishing the Church, then getting rid of God and putting the more logical Cult of the Supreme Being in His place, renaming the months in a more descriptive way, no leader of the Assembly ever lasted for very long. After a few months he was always arrested for undefined crimes against ‘the People’. The real power in Paris was in the radical political association called the Jacobin Club. There the most advanced revolutionary thinkers, such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre, hammered out a Republic of Virtue which aimed to destroy all human traditions which got in the way of logic and their interpretation of the Will of the People. These leaders were fast becoming dictators under the cloak of the great revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.

Of all the English contemporaries the reaction of Edmund Burke, mentor of the Rockingham Whigs, was both the most pessimistic and the most accurate. He who had been such a supporter of liberty in the past turned into a Conservative overnight. His famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France, written only a year after the storming of the Bastille, presciently foretold chaos. Then, he wrote, ‘Some popular general will establish a military dictatorship in place of anarchy.’ The appalled Burke now believed that it was not possible for mankind to tear up the past: human institutions needed to develop slowly. So strong were his views that, to Fox’s anguish, he publicly repudiated his old friend in the House of Commons.

The French revolutionaries’ treatment of the royal family plunged Europe into war. Queen Marie Antoinette was the aunt of the Habsburg emperor and when the news got abroad that the king and queen were prisoners Austrian and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick were moved across the frontier to save them. But the mob responded to this threat to the Revolution with the September Massacres, a mindless slaughter of prisoners. In three days the people of Paris killed 6,000 royalist prisoners, bursting into the jails and murdering them where they stood. The heads of ordinary criminals joined those of friends of the royal family on pikes, to be paraded through the streets. All that autumn of 1792 the sound of the tocsin called the city and the citizens to arms. To shouts of ‘À la lanterne!’, which meant string them up on the streetlamps, the citizens of Paris complied.

And then, to the horror of Europe, when the revolutionary committees summoned every French citizen to join the army in a levée en masse, this revolutionary army managed to defeat the Prussians. This news had an effect similar to the British defeat at Saratoga. It had never been imagined that raw recruits, untrained and untried in battle, though 50,000 strong and burning with desire to protect their homeland, would defeat the renowned Prussian troops at the Battle of Valmy. But they had, and they had driven them back across the French frontier.

In response to the foreigners’ invasion, the revolutionaries announced that the monarchy no longer existed. In its place a republic was declared. Then, in October, the Revolution which Mirabeau and Robespierre had vowed would not be exported, crossed the frontier. Fighting battle after battle the levée en masse streamed across the continent, seizing several German towns, then Basel in Switzerland where they proclaimed another republic. Finally, having inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Austrians at the Battle of Jemappes, the French took Brussels and Antwerp. If the ragged masses who died in droves for their country were alarming–when one lay down another twenty patriots sprang up behind him–still more frightening to the governments of Europe were the Decrees of November 1792, which announced that the French armies would help all people wanting to recover their liberty. The thirty-one-year-old Madame Roland, the wife of one of the Assembly’s deputies, executed for no apparent reason, summed up the bewilderment of her contemporaries at what was happening to them with the words she uttered on the scaffold: ‘Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’

Only a year before, Pitt had cut taxes and reduced British expenditure on arms because he was optimistic about the new constitutional French monarchy. He still thought Europe had never had more reason to expect peace. But events now followed one another so rapidly that even he was unprepared. In January 1793 the French king had received a hasty trial by committee, which bore no relation to a proper legal process. He was executed by that perfect eighteenth-century invention, the logical and efficient guillotine, which made executions faster and more humane.

News of Louis XVI’s execution was greeted with widespread revulsion in Britain. The British government’s reaction was immediate. To their surprise, the suave French ambassador Chauvelin and the special envoy, the elegant Bishop Talleyrand, the future prince, were told in no uncertain terms to leave the country within the week. In the House of Commons Pitt publicly deplored the fate of the king as an outrage against religion, justice and humanity. Unlike Britain, he said, where no man was too rich or too grand to be above the reach of the laws, and no man was so poor or unimportant as to escape their protection, the death of Louis XVI showed that in France neither applied.

Pitt still refused to go to war immediately, as Burke urged him to. He could not see it as part of the British government’s job to launch a moral crusade purely on the ground that the French were ‘the enemies of God and man’, even though he felt it to be true. But he gave the French a stern warning. If France wanted to remain at peace with England, he told the Commons, she must show that she had renounced aggression and was going to stay within her borders, ‘without insulting other governments, without disturbing their tranquillity, without violating their rights. And unless she consent to these terms, whatever may be our wishes for peace, the final issue must be war.’ Unlike his father Chatham, Pitt the Younger believed in peace. But it had to be a peace that was real and solid, consistent with the interests of Britain and the general security of Europe.

It had been growing fairly inevitable that Britain would go to war. The Revolution’s foreign policy threatened monarchies all over Europe by its mere existence. However, it was only after the revolutionaries had declared that ‘the Laws of Nature’ meant the important Scheldt estuary was open to all shipping that Britain was forced into the conflict. France had threatened the neutrality of Holland, which Britain was bound by treaty to defend. There was nothing for it. Reluctantly Pitt steeled himself to put an end to the peace and progress that he had pursued for ten years.

But Pitt was pre-empted. The same day that he was speaking in the House of Commons, the men battling for power within France agreed to declare war on England and Holland. It was a war that would engulf Europe for the next twenty-three years and would not end until the Battle of Waterloo.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815)

During the next two decades of almost continuous war with France, the tolerant political climate of Great Britain underwent a dramatic change. Pitt had originally declared that this was not to be a war against ‘armed opinions’. It was to protect British commerce, which was threatened by French ships on the Scheldt. However, it soon became clear that fighting ‘armed opinions’ had to be its objective, since the French government had vowed to help all nations which rose against their rulers. Just as ‘Jacobite’ had been a catch-all phrase in England denoting an enemy of the state for half the eighteenth century, so the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ was to be in that century’s last decade and the first decades of the nineteenth.

Only a few years after celebrating the Glorious Revolution’s hundredth anniversary, for the English the word ‘revolution’ had taken on the most fearful connotations. Apart from a short-lived ministry of 1806–7 during which they abolished slavery, the Whigs and their ideas were as firmly out of office and out of fashion as the Tories had been for two generations. Political conservatism was in vogue, and more to the point was in office. In the face of war and the threat to British institutions posed by sympathizers with the French Revolution, the rational liberal convictions of Pitt and of most of the political classes vanished so absolutely that it was hard to recognize the former friend of reform in the young prime minister.

Even before the war Pitt had become alarmed by support for the Revolution. When a pamphlet entitled The Rights of Man, written by the radical Tom Paine and proposing an English republic, sold 200,000 copies in 1792, all further ‘seditious writing’ was forbidden by law. Paine was prosecuted and had to flee to France, escaping arrest by an hour thanks to a warning from the poet William Blake, who had had a prophetic dream about him. He was later elected to the French Convention. Once war commenced, a regime of complete repression was instituted. Pitt closed down the enthusiastic Corresponding Societies which had sprung up all over the country since the Revolution as a means of obtaining information about the great political experiment in France. In the new mood of suspicion most political clubs were considered nests of revolutionaries. If they would not abolish themselves, their members were imprisoned.

To make the authorities’ work easier, in May 1794, habeas corpus, the foundation stone of English liberties, was suspended. This measure, which allowed the government to hold citizens in prison indefinitely while they were investigated for unspecified crimes, was opposed by only thirty-nine votes in the House of Commons. Moreover, contact with France was forbidden as a treasonable act punishable by death. Had it not been for the example set by Fox’s continuing brave outspokenness, in which he was followed by his nephew Lord Holland, the playwright Richard Sheridan and the young nobleman Charles Grey, it might not have been opposed at all. Many Whigs were becoming increasingly uneasy about their leaders’ opposition to the war. By July 1794 a large number of them, headed by the Duke of Portland and Edmund Burke, had crossed the floor to join Pitt’s Tory party.

The war against Revolutionary France opened with Britain as a partner in the First Coalition, formed as a result of Pitt’s efforts in 1793 and including Holland, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Portugal and Sardinia. Britain’s allotted role was to concentrate on what she did best, which meant exploiting her large fleet. She was the only European country not to have conscription–indeed her army’s very existence had to be approved by Parliament every year. The fleet, on the other hand, was that of a powerful maritime nation, and was successfully used to preserve the sea routes and seize enemy colonies. The route to India was saved when in 1795 the British captured the Cape of Good Hope from Dutch settlers. In India itself at Seringapatam prompt action by the governor, Marquis Wellesley, brother of the future Duke of Wellington, prevented Tipoo Sahib endangering the colony by stirring up trouble on behalf of the French. But the effect of concentrating on the colonies was that Britain’s interventions by her army in Europe were too limited to be successful. Attempts to bring aid to the pockets of French royalist resistance in the Vendée in the west and to Toulon in the south were failures, while an army to the Austrian Netherlands under the Duke of York was run out of the country.

What Britain could do, however, thanks to the trade surpluses now mounting in the Treasury, was to pay for the armies on the continent after the fashion of Pitt the Elder. She had reached this position thanks to the application of Watt’s steam engine, which propelled British industrial development into a different league from other European countries. The strength of the British fleet meant that British manufacturing exports and imports of raw materials from the colonies were almost unaffected by the war, while British manufactures were stimulated by the demand for materials from uniforms to tents to cannon balls. In an already reactive and practical industrial culture, a shortage of labour drove the ironmasters and factory owners, who were daily pushing invention forward in their factories, to greater heights of mechanization.

Since the Austrian armies alone consisted of perhaps 300,000 highly professional soldiers, Britain and her allies believed that the combination of so many countries against a rabble would prove irresistible, that France would soon be defeated and forced to retreat behind her old frontiers. But the French Revolutionary Wars showed that the world had reached a new stage. Fighting a war was no longer just a question of military science. Beliefs too could provide a secret weapon. Wherever France’s Armies of the Republic marched, their call for ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ found an emotional response from those living under more repressive regimes, and they were welcomed as liberators. Nor did the amateur leadership in the French military matter at all. The armies under the ex-lawyer Lazare Carnot were honed into a magnificent new fighting machine. Where they were not magnificent, their enormous numbers as ‘the nation in arms’ made up for their defects, and they swept all before them. In 1794 the French humiliatingly drove out the Austrians from the Netherlands and severed the Habsburgs’ 300-year link with that country for ever.

And the efficiency of the coalition armies on the continent was undermined by the fact that Britain’s main allies, Austria and Prussia, were far more interested in carving up the weakened kingdom of Poland with Russia than in eradicating the threat the French armies posed to the world order. After two years of war Prussia made peace with France, abandoning the coalition in order to finish off the partition of Poland (Russia, Austria and Prussia vowing to extinguish the name of Poland), while a mere two alarming encounters with the French armies had been enough to persuade Spain to ally with France. In addition, Holland had become a French puppet-state, the Batavian Republic. But Pitt had high hopes of the Austrian army, which still held Italy, for it was the largest in the world. Pitt also had information that after four years of war not only were the French armies suffering from exhaustion and lack of supplies, but the inexperienced government in Paris was running out of money. A peace might be arranged. But these were not conventional times. By October 1797, in an astonishing, almost miraculous campaign in Italy under a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French had expelled the Austrian army from Italy and changed the shape of the war.

The British had first encountered Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the war in 1793 when the masterly tactics of the twenty-three-year-old had defeated the British fleet’s attempt to help the royalist resistance in the south of France by seizing Toulon. Napoleon was a small, thin, sallow-skinned, shabbily dressed artillery officer affectionately known to his men as the Little Corporal. After the Italian campaign he captured the world’s imagination as one of history’s greatest generals. Bonaparte began to be compared to Caesar and Alexander the Great rolled into one; and he certainly shared their dreams of conquest. During the Italian campaign he had thrown the Austrian defences into chaos by the swiftness of his forays, winning a series of victories that enabled him to overrun the entire peninsula. The portrait of a long-haired, windswept Napoleon holding a standard at the Battle of Arcola as he turns to urge his men on is perhaps the best-known image of him as a young man.

By the end of the Italian campaign his men would do anything for the leader who could apparently pluck victories from the air. Wellington, Napoleon’s great opponent, would say in his memoirs that he had always believed that Napoleon’s presence on the battlefield was the equivalent of 40,000 men, and military historians have agreed. The reason why Napoleon succeeded when everything was against him was because his personality caused the men to march and fight harder than any could have dreamed possible.

The peace party at Paris with whom Pitt had been negotiating for the previous two years were cast aside in favour of a war party headed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had no intention of allowing his conquests to stop at Italy. By October 1797 Italy had become a series of republics set up by Napoleon. Alarmed by the threat the French Grand Army posed to Vienna, and to preserve the Veneto for themselves, the Austrians too made peace with France. With the Treaty of Campo Formio they were out of the war. Of the theoretically invincible First Coalition, Britain was left to face Revolutionary France on her own. Italy, whose indented coast had provided harbours for the British navy, was now out of bounds, her waters swarming with French and Spanish ships. French armies were established up to the left bank of the Rhine and the Alps, on what the French government decreed to be France’s ‘natural frontiers’.

For Pitt and the British, the years of Napoleon’s most startling triumphs, which inspired Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, were very bad years indeed. Not only did the French seem unstoppable, but since Spain’s desertion Britain’s independence had been seriously threatened by three fleets. The combined forces of the Spanish and the French and the Dutch had the potential to seize control of the Channel and launch invasions of both Ireland and England. In 1796 French soldiers landed at Fishguard in south Wales and there were abortive attempts at invading Britain via Ireland. Only bad weather at Christmas that year stopped French soldiers being received at Bantry Bay by an Irish independence movement. But there was still the constant danger that the inherent anti-British feeling in Ireland would always make it a landing spot for the vanguard of French invaders. There Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of the United Irishmen–an increasingly republican progressive reform movement, which included both Catholics and Protestants–was only waiting for propitious conditions and French soldiers to throw off British rule.

The personal bravery of Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in February 1797 prevented the Spanish fleet from seizing control of the Channel. Nevertheless for much of the ensuing year Britain continued to be threatened by three navies, a predicament made much more grave by a series of mutinies (against bad conditions) in her own fleet which left the Channel quite unguarded. Only the quick wits of Admiral Duncan saved Britain from invasion by the Dutch when the mutinies were at their height. Duncan was out at sea watching the Dutch fleet in the Texel, quite alone and without a fleet apart from two little frigates. He sent the frigates up to where they could be seen by the Dutch from the Texel estuary; for the next few weeks the frigates signalled to an imaginary fleet out of the Dutch line of vision, and the invasion plan was abandoned. Then in October Duncan destroyed the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Camperdown.

There was danger of a different kind that same year. No one had appreciated quite how expensive the war would be. Thanks to the war’s monumental costs and the gold disbursed to the allied armies, and despite the trade surpluses, the Treasury was empty. The Bank of England was about to suspend payment. There was a danger of real civil disorder, as poor harvests had brought severe social distress. Fortunately Pitt persuaded the king to put his authority behind a Parliamentary bill which allowed Bank of England notes to be issued as legal tender throughout the country instead of gold. The armed forces continued to be paid in gold, but the rest of the country used banknotes until 1819. This in turn brought its own troubles: prices rose but wages followed far more slowly. With so many labourers living just above subsistence level, local authorities throughout the country started to supplement their wages out of the rates, copying what was called the Speenhamland system of poor relief begun in Berkshire in 1795. As a result farmers saw no reason to put up their labourers’ wages, which thus remained static for twenty years.

By 1798 Pitt was forced to introduce a rising scale of income tax to help pay for the war. It was based on the simple principle that taxing the rich at a higher rate would raise more money; it proved extremely unpopular with them, especially because the war showed no sign of ending. Pitt’s attempts to bring the French government to the peace table, by returning France’s captured West Indian colonies with a £400,000 bribe, had been rejected. The French had no need of money after Bonaparte’s looting of Italy: all her treasures whether in gold or Old Masters were being dragged on baggage trains into France. And the French had no intention of moving out of the Netherlands, which was Britain’s precondition for peace. Elated by Bonaparte’s victories the French government was happily contemplating other campaigns–invading Egypt and Syria, perhaps Turkey and India, to make a new empire in the east.

But it was in that year, 1798, that the balance of the French Revolutionary Wars began to tip in Britain’s favour. Nelson was in the grip of a deep conviction that the continental alliances on which Pitt had spent so much energy generally turned out to be useless. He believed that only British sea-power could save Europe from French domination. Thanks to him it did. When he heard that Napoleon with a flotilla of ships had managed to slip out of Toulon and capture Malta, one of the best harbours in the eastern Mediterranean, he became intuitively convinced that the Corsican must be heading for Egypt and possibly India. In this he was quite right, though it was a closely guarded secret even from the French ships’ captains themselves. As the weather changed to the luxuriant warmth of the Middle East, Nelson followed grimly behind on what he was sure was Napoleon’s trail. Without permission from his commanding officer he continued to sail east, severely hampered by the loss of his frigates during a storm–because in the days before radio these scouting ships, known as ‘the eyes of the sea’, would have been miles ahead searching for information. For the rest of the voyage Nelson was completely blind as far as long-distance scouting was concerned.

Extraordinarily enough, Nelson and the English fleet actually overtook the French ships during the night of 22–23 June. But because he had no frigates he never realized what had happened; the French fleet seemed simply to have vanished. While Nelson sailed fruitlessly round the eastern Mediterranean, the French war plan went like clockwork. By the end of July the loss of India loomed as Napoleon led his army south across the desert, defeated the rulers of Egypt, the Mamelukes, in the Battle of the Pyramids and captured Cairo. At last Nelson stumbled on a clue to where the French fleet had hidden itself. French ships were seen off Crete steering south-east, and on the morning of 1 August Nelson was back at Alexandria once more, to find his first instinct had been right all along. The French fleet was anchored in the crucially important Aboukir Bay, five miles east of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile river.

Without pausing for even a moment, even though it was dusk, Nelson sailed straight in and attacked the enemy. The French, who had first sighted the English fleet in the far distance at two o’clock in the afternoon, were astonished that Nelson had made no preliminary skirmishes and by his lack of orthodoxy in choosing to give battle at six in the evening, since night-fighting was notoriously difficult. Theoretically the French fleet under Admiral Brueys was in a very good position at Aboukir Bay because Brueys had mounted batteries on the shore, but their range turned out to be too short. Brueys’ second big mistake–but he was ignorant of Nelson’s talent for spotting a vulnerable point which to others seemed nothing of the kind–was to have ordered his ships to be anchored far enough apart to give his ships room to swing round. Nelson suddenly realized that, if there was room for an enemy ship to swing, there was room enough for British ships and their uniquely skilled sailors to anchor alongside.

After a long night illuminated by a massive explosion and by burning ships, Nelson had captured or killed 9,000 men. But he had not only destroyed French naval power in the Mediterranean. Horatio Nelson’s outstanding and unexpected victory against the French navy at the Battle of the Nile literally changed the course of the war. French plans were checked for the first time in five years. The British gained control of the eastern Mediterranean while the French army, with the best general it possessed, was left stranded in Egypt, having never received the reinforcements it was relying on, the soldiers on board ship in Aboukir Bay. But above all the Battle of the Nile gave heart to Britain’s former allies, such as Austria. Up to now they had all accepted defeat. Now they tore up their peace treaties, enabling Pitt to form the Second Coalition of Britain, Austria, Russia, Naples and Turkey, and renew the war by land. Egypt became France’s firm enemy as a result of her treatment by Napoleon and Britain’s firm friend, while any ideas Napoleon had of starting a war in India had become pipe dreams. He was now in the middle of extremely hostile enemy territory surrounded by angry Turks and Egyptians. Nelson summed it all up when he said laconically, ‘Their army is in a scrape and will not get out of it.’

When the news of the destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay reached England two months later on 2 October the country went wild with joy. After five years of inexorable French military success the British could scarcely believe that at last they had dealt a serious blow to the enemy. Nelson was the hero of the hour, inspiring public prints and cartoons as adoring as Napoleon’s in France. Lively, immensely charming and very patriotic, Nelson displayed genius and daring in a string of triumphs at sea between 1797 and 1805 which established the British maritime supremacy that would last for a hundred years. He had been in the navy since he was twelve and had often been wounded–he had only one arm (the other had been amputated) and one good eye (the other could only distinguish between light and dark). A small man, his clothes always looked too big for him–the future King William IV said that he was ‘the merest boy of a Captain that I ever saw’–he was adored by his men.

Typically Bonaparte refused to admit that the Battle of the Nile was a defeat. The Army of Egypt was told in one of his most grandiloquent speeches that it must go on and accomplish great new things. But for once he had taken on more than he bargained for. The Sultan of Turkey, refusing to lie down under the French invasion, despatched two armies against Napoleon, and on 22 August 1799 the Little Corporal saw that the time was ripe for him to return to Paris before the disastrous Egypt campaign became known. Effectively deserting his troops, he sailed secretly from Alexandria on a small frigate to mount the coup which overturned the French government, the Directory, and enabled him that November to become France’s principal ruling consul, a virtual dictator. A year later, when Sir Ralph Abercromby landed in Egypt and defeated the French at the Battle of Alexandria, the last wraiths of their hoped-for eastern empire melted away.

The Austrians now drove the French out of Germany. The Russians under the leadership of the remarkable Russian General Suvorov began to force the French to retire up the Italian peninsula, back the way they had come. The French were also attacked in Switzerland and Holland. But after a good start the Second Coalition did not realize its early promise. Led by poor commanders the English were pushed out of Holland and Pitt’s attention was distracted by a rebellion that blew up in Ireland at the end of 1798. In Switzerland the French defeated the Russians at Zurich before Suvorov could get there.

The rebellion in Ireland was a revival of the one that had failed the year before for lack of French and Dutch troops. Revolutionary ideas had increased the already strongly anti-British tendencies in Ireland. The Irish anyway had little regard for a British king, and when they saw the French throwing off their monarch they were encouraged to do the same. Their excuse was Pitt’s Catholic Relief measures, which were felt not to have gone far enough. In 1792 and 1793 Pitt had agreed that as a concession to the large number of Irish Roman Catholics, in Ireland Catholics should be allowed to sit on juries and vote in elections even if they could not stand for Parliament themselves. But eventually the hot-headed Wolfe Tone abandoned hopes of internal reform and concluded that revolution was the only answer. The British navy guarded the Channel and Irish Sea so efficiently, however, that what had been intended to be an Irish uprising backed by French military support turned into a civil war. Members of the newly formed extreme Presbyterian Orange Lodges in Ulster, named in remembrance of William of Orange, fought bitterly against the United Irishmen and their largely Catholic following. Despite strong support in Wexford the revolt failed, so that by the time French troops had managed to sneak across to Ireland’s west coast they were too late.

The need for a proper solution to the Irish problem had become acute, particularly now that Napoleon had escaped from Egypt and was directing French military operations. To Lord Cornwallis, the former general of the English army in America sent over to keep peace between the warring factions as lord lieutenant, the Irish appeared congenitally incapable of seeing one another’s point of view. He told Pitt that Ireland could be ruled only by a neutral government which had none of the Irish prejudices and hatreds. Rule from Westminster was the only way of escaping the implacable antagonisms of Irish internal politics.

But short of main force how could Pitt get the Dublin Parliament to vote for its own destruction? Not only was its existence a matter of national pride, but it was such a nest of entrenched interests. Pitt’s solution was what he viewed as an extremely generous offer: Ireland should have one hundred seats in the Parliament at Westminster, and would thus play a part in decision-making way above her power and importance in the world. Free trade was to be established between Ireland and England. But it was the carefully designed package of bribes for the greedy and unpatriotic Dublin borough-mongers which got them to abolish the Dublin Parliament and their independence for the sum of £7,500 per seat. As for national acceptance of the Union, Pitt understood that the only way to win over the Irish and make them loyal to England was by courting the Catholics. The Act of Union between Britain and Ireland was predicated on its being accompanied by Catholic Emancipation for the Irish. Roman Catholics were to be admitted to Parliament and have their disabilities removed.

What Pitt had left out of the equation was the ailing king. George III took his coronation oath very seriously. As a Protestant monarch, he believed that it would be dereliction of his sacred royal duty if he allowed the remedial measures for the Catholics to go before Parliament. Despite all the arguments put to him, he held to his idea that allowing Catholic Emancipation would violate his promise to uphold the Protestant religion. ‘None of your Scotch metaphysics,’ he said to Pitt’s friend the Scots politician Henry Dundas, when the latter tried to persuade him otherwise.

The Act of Union of 1800 thoroughly tied Ireland to Great Britain, temporarily at least. The first United Parliament sat in February 1801 and contained within it one hundred Irish members of Parliament, twenty-eight Irish peers and four Irish bishops. But it had a dramatic consequence: it caused Pitt’s resignation. Pitt felt he could not stay in office as the failure to introduce Emancipation made it look as if he had deceived the Irish Catholics to get their support. Since any mention of the Catholics wound the king’s nerves up to an alarming pitch, it was better if his prime minister resigned. Addington, the inconspicuous Speaker of the House of Commons, took his place.

Throughout the year 1800 the Second Coalition was on the retreat. Russia and her huge armies had already pulled out of the alliance; the new tsar Paul wished to be the chief arbiter in making peace with Britain and thereby gain Napoleon’s gratitude. Tsar Paul, exploiting resentment of British naval policy on enemy goods, began to create an armed Northern League of former neutral countries, whose Danish navy posed a real danger to British defences. Then, in a typical feat of daring, Napoleon took his army straight over the Alps through the snow to attack the Austrians, crossing the Great St Bernard Pass to fall on the Austrians’ rear where they were besieging Genoa. By December the Austrians had been driven back down the Danube. Terrified that Vienna would be Bonaparte’s next target, in February 1801 they signed the peace treaty of Lunéville and withdrew from the coalition. Once more the British were left to face the French alone, and they had to do so under Addington, who had little executive sense.

Nevertheless by 1801 the tsar’s plans to create a dangerous Northern League had been thwarted by Nelson. The slaughter at the Battle of Copenhagen in April when the British sank the Danish fleet was so terrible and the two navies so evenly matched that Admiral Parker started signalling to Nelson to ‘leave off action’. But Nelson believing, accurately as it turned out, that he could bring the Danes to their knees, put his telescope to his blinded eye so that he could not see his commander’s signal. He continued fighting until the Danes accepted his offer of a truce. The Northern League’s most fearsome weapon, the Danish navy, was now out of the picture, and the League was soon broken up by the assassination of Tsar Paul.

Thus by 1802 Great Britain and France were level pegging, and a peace between the two nations was successfully negotiated: Great Britain could not hurt France by land, and France could not hurt Britain by sea. Both nations were utterly weary of war and in March that year the Treaty of Amiens was signed, which accepted the stalemate between the two countries. Britain agreed to recognize the French Republic and to give back all the colonies she had taken from France, apart from Trinidad and Ceylon. Malta was to be returned to the Knights of St John, who were to be under the protection of the tsar.

But the Peace of Amiens was not a peace so much as a truce, which Napoleon made use of to regroup his forces. He illegally annexed Piedmont and Elba to France, moved troops into Switzerland and was still occupying Holland. When in response the British refused to surrender Malta to a Russian protectorate, because of the growing rapprochement between France and Russia, hostilities resumed. But the nature of the conflict had changed. Not only are the wars which raged once more from 1803 to 1815 called the Napoleonic Wars, but the spirit of them was different.

The French revolutionary armies had invaded monarchist countries as an act of self-defence to prevent their enemies crushing the Revolution and restoring the royal family. But, though Napoleon’s armies still claimed that they were recovering the liberty of the people from medieval laws, the Napoleonic Wars were old-fashioned wars of conquest. Bonaparte had drawn the Revolution in France firmly to a close. Not content to merely be military dictator as the first consul for life, in 1804 Napoleon crowned himself emperor in the presence of the pope, and six months later made himself King of Italy.

Britain was the most substantial threat to France’s new ruler. Just as she had resisted the French revolutionary armies, Britain steadfastly resisted the extension of the Napoleonic Empire. Bonaparte or ‘Boney’ was contemptuously regarded as a new embodiment of the French tyranny and absolutism the British were used to combating. In the coming war Britain would not only be Napoleon’s chief opponent, but often his only opponent. For his part Napoleon had become obsessed with the idea of humbling the British. During the peace his consular agents had been involved in unobtrusive espionage, taking country walks whose subsidiary intention was to spy out good landing places.

But now the gloves were off. Much of the original attraction of the French Revolution for radical thinkers in this country had died out when Bonaparte had abandoned its republican forms and made a Concordat with the pope. But even if some, like Fox, continued to be attracted by the great ideals of the Revolution, all arguments were irrelevant from June 1803. For Napoleon had begun massing an enormous army of 150,000 soldiers to invade England. While he stirred up revolts simultaneously in Ireland and India (the latter being put down by a superior young officer named Sir Arthur Wellesley) the camp at Boulogne on the north-east coast of France had already accumulated 90,000 Frenchmen and the flat-bottomed boats required for the operation. The emperor was waiting for the moment when the tides and winds would converge to carry what was known as the Army of England over the Channel to conquer the recalcitrant islanders. Napoleon had even had a medal made bearing the legend ‘Struck in England 1804’.

When news of this build-up of troops across the Channel, with soldiers practising disembarkation techniques, reached England, the people became seriously alarmed. An invasion might only be days away, for even in the early nineteenth century the Channel took just hours to cross. At this crisis the British longed for the return of Pitt’s safe pair of hands, or as the politician George Canning called him in a piece of light verse, ‘the Pilot that weathered the storm’. Not only was the new prime minister Addington a complete nonentity but he had a poor grasp of foreign affairs and had even begun reducing the navy to save money. As another of Canning’s jingles put it:

By May 1804 not even George III could keep Addington in power. Pitt returned having promised never again to mention Catholic Emancipation to the king for fear that it would bring on his madness. Once more it was up to Pitt to plan the new war against Napoleon and hope that somehow he could persuade another coalition to materialize. Unlike Addington, during the peace Pitt had not been won over by Napoleon’s protestations of friendship. Convinced that war would recur soon, he had thrown himself into organizing the drilling on the south coast of the enthusiastic volunteer movement which was to provide 300,000 soldiers for the British army. He also supervised the building of those huge, round, windowless Martello towers you can still see today that were to serve as coastal defences. But after a year of the Grand Army sitting on the coast waiting for the best moment to cross the Channel, Napoleon realized that he might be waiting until Doomsday. The Channel was too well guarded by the British fleet. It would have to be overwhelmed by superior force. Napoleon therefore forced Charles IV of Spain to enlarge his fleet and join with the French to overcome the British once and for all. When British secret service agents reported this, Pitt declared war on Spain in December 1804.

Despite the overwhelming numbers against them, the British had one advantage on their side. The French navy after the Revolution was never up to the standard of the pre-revolutionary service; in a technical profession lack of technique counted badly against it. This also meant that Nelson could take risks he might not necessarily have got away with under the French ancien régime, for one of his characteristics was his ability to react to situations without scouring the rule book. But he also had extraordinary captains. Unlike the British army, where until the late nineteenth century officers could buy their rank, the king’s ships were considered far too valuable to be trusted to amateurs. Learning how to sail a ship to the exacting standards of the Royal Navy took a long time. Commanders at sea could not be anything other than excellent seamen, and there was a very strict order of training. Officers started as a midshipman, as Nelson did aged twelve on a battleship, and worked their way up.

Napoleon’s plan depended on the French navy joining up with the Spanish in a union of the fleets. But for the first half of 1805 the French naval ports of Toulon on the Mediterranean and Brest on the Atlantic were so closely barricaded in by British ships that the French fleets could not get out. But then in the summer the French had a bit of luck. A storm allowed Admiral Villeneuve and the Mediterranean fleet to escape from Toulon where Nelson was blockading him and join up with the Spanish fleet at Cadiz. The first part of the union of the fleets had been accomplished. The French and Spanish navies raced for the safety of the West Indies with Nelson in hot pursuit. But, to Nelson’s frustration, the minute that Villeneuve heard of his arrival in American waters, he rushed back to Europe hoping to free the French navy at Brest.

On 22 July the combined fleets of France and Spain arrived off Cape Finisterre at the north-west corner of Spain. It was the watching brief of Sir Robert Calder, who was patrolling the harbour of Ferrol. Calder had only fifteen ships of the line, while the French and Spanish had twenty-five. Nevertheless, knowing what the enemy vessels portended, the daring Calder attacked the combined fleet and captured two of their ships. But the overall consequence was better than that. For Villeneuve was so unnerved by the English ferocity that he whisked the Spanish ships out of Ferrol, made south for the safety of Cadiz, and ruined Napoleon’s plans. If the combined fleets had instead sailed north they might have seized control of the Channel there and then, and overseen the safe crossing to England of the immense French army. But they did not, and England was safe for the time being.

Pitt had meanwhile managed to conjure up a new alliance against Napoleon, the Third Coalition, consisting of Austria, Russia and Sweden, which had become more wary of the Little Corporal’s intentions. After Villeneuve’s failure Napoleon had decided to cut his losses. The troops from the Channel ports were hurried to south Germany to fight Austria before she could get ready. But Napoleon’s plan to control the Channel had not gone away. It could easily be resurrected. In the late summer of 1805 Pitt believed that destroying the combined enemy fleet sheltering down at Cadiz remained the most crucial task of the war. The situation was desperate, and it required desperate solutions. Admiral St Vincent had written after the Battle of Copenhagen, ‘All agree there is but one Nelson.’ It was Nelson that Pitt called in to see him at Downing Street to entrust him with an extraordinarily important task.

For this courageous man held the fate of Britain and the free world in his hand. On land in 1805 Napoleon was unbeatable; if the threatening allied fleet were not destroyed, he might be unbeatable on sea as well. Then the invasion of England would be assured. This was Britain’s very last chance to continue to survive against Napoleon. As Nelson left Portsmouth on 14 September on board the Victory people knelt on the shore and prayed.

Although Nelson reached Cadiz at the end of the month, it took three weeks to lure Admiral Villeneuve out to give battle at Cape Trafalgar. On 21 October Nelson went up on to the Victory’s poop having visited every deck to boost morale. He was wearing the dress uniform of a vice-admiral of the White Squadron of the Fleet, to which he had been appointed in 1804. In the view of his friend and flag-captain Thomas Hardy this made him too conspicuous, but Nelson felt that it was important that his men should be able to see him. Looking out over the dark sea, which was a mass of fluttering white sails, he said, ‘I’ll amuse the fleet with a signal,’ and asked for the message ‘England confides [meaning ‘trusts’] that every man will do his duty’ to be run up. But since a flag for ‘confides’ did not exist, the word ‘expects’ was used instead. Then the battle began.

Nelson had twenty-seven ships to Villeneuve’s thirty-three. His plan was to use his three biggest ships, the Victory, Neptune and Temeraire, ‘like a spear to break the enemy line’, the great Nelsonian innovation. He and Vice-Admiral Collingwood were leading two lines of fourteen and thirteen ships spaced about a mile apart. They would bear down at right angles on the two enemy lines and cut them in three, to create maximum confusion. This they proceeded to do at considerable cost to themselves.

Two hours after the battle began, a French sniper perched in the rigging of the Redoubtable picked Nelson off from about forty feet away. As he fell to the deck bleeding fatally all over his white uniform, Nelson cried, ‘They have done for me at last, Hardy. My backbone is shot through.’ Hardy carried the greatest seaman of the age, perhaps of any age, down to the surgeon’s cabin, while Nelson concealed his face with a handkerchief so the men would not see the agony he was in. For four hours the admiral lay dying amid the din and smoke of battle. But by 4.30 in the afternoon his strategy had worked and the battle had been won. Of the thirty-three enemy ships, only eleven returned to Cadiz. As his ship’s log reported, when the victory had been reported to Lord Nelson, ‘He then died of his wound.’ His last words, as a weeping Hardy held the little body in his arms, were ‘Kiss me, Hardy. Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done my duty.’

At one o’clock in the morning of 6 November 1805 the Admiralty received the news of Trafalgar, and by two in the morning Pitt knew. That restrained man was so stirred up that he, who could always put his head on the pillow and sleep, for once could not do so. Throughout Britain, people wept when they heard the news of Nelson’s death. Even the London mob, who usually celebrated victories with fires along the Thames and frenzied toasts, were silent from grief.

And the British could not have been in direr need of victory, especially one that secured control of the seas. Only three days before, Napoleon, moving faster than had been thought possible, with a Grand Army of 190,000 men, had forced the Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. Three days after the news of Trafalgar had roused the nation from gloom, Pitt attended the annual banquet at the Guildhall. His popularity in the country was such, after the great victory against Boney, that his carriage was unhitched from its horses and drawn to the dinner by cheering crowds. At the end of the evening the lord mayor proposed the health of ‘the Saviour of Europe’. Pitt responded with one of his most quoted and briefest speeches: ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ The young soldier who had done so well in the fight against the powerful Maratha chiefs in India was present. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, said of Pitt’s speech, ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’

But though Pitt was in good form that night, in reality his health was breaking under the strain of overwork and the increasingly depressing news from the continent. Little more than a month later, amid the snow of Austerlitz, on 2 December Napoleon utterly routed the Austrians and Russians. The resulting Peace of Pressburg gave France back control over Italy and most of Germany. So many of the hereditary Habsburg lands were redistributed to the smaller German principalities that the Holy Roman Empire became an archaic concept and the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis abdicated on 6 August 1806. The new German states were organized into the Confederation of the Rhine, headed by Napoleon himself. Not only was he formally recognized as King of Italy, but he made all his brothers kings. The Bourbons were evicted from Naples in favour of Joseph Bonaparte, Louis was placed on the throne of Holland and Jérôme became King of Westphalia, at whose heart were George III’s hereditary Hanoverian lands.

Except for England, almost the whole of Europe from the south of Spain to the borders of Russia was now controlled by Napoleon, and within the year Prussia and Russia would be entirely defeated. Pitt himself, passing a map of Europe in the company of his niece Lady Hester Stanhope, gloomily told her to roll it up, because it would not be wanted for the next ten years. Pitt himself would not live to see them. His doctors sent him to Bath for the waters, but it did no good for a constitution shattered by exhaustion and poisoned by the port which doctors then prescribed as a cure-all. Instead of relaxing he was feverishly working at new permutations of alliances–would Prussia help?–but without success. He gave the dreaded order to withdraw the British army from northern Europe. Then the dying man sank into a fever of delirium. He called ‘Hear! hear!’ to imaginary debates in the House of Commons, and kept summoning his messenger to ask how the wind blew. If the wind was in the east the news travelled faster. Then just before he died on 23 January 1806, Pitt suddenly shouted in a voice of agony that his cousin watching by the bed could never forget, ‘Oh, my country! how I leave my country!’ He was only forty-six.

In England there was a sense of loss almost as if the sun had fallen from the sky. For more than twenty years Pitt had presided over the British government. For most of that time he had been considered an inspiring figure, whether as the personification of virtue when he was a young reformer, or more recently as the man whose prompt actions had saved Britain from revolution and French invasion. To millions of people the solitary figure of Pitt, the ‘watchman on the lonely tower’ as Sir Walter Scott called him after his death, often seemed to be all that stood between them and Napoleon. Every morning in Downing Street, he had been at his post in his severe black coat, methodically plotting the course of Napoleon’s latest troop movements and the latest engagements in all the different countries of Europe. He had been consumed by a patriotism which left no time for any other life than the late hours at the House of Commons. A sickly frame could not endure it for ever. And perhaps, as was said at the time, the news of Austerlitz was a blow from which he never recovered. Fox, who was himself to die later in the year, turned pale when he heard the news, and exclaimed that there was ‘something missing in the world’.

Meanwhile, just as Pitt had predicted, the map of Europe continued to be redrawn by Napoleon. On 14 October 1806 at Jena he destroyed even Prussia’s crack troops in a resounding victory and went on to occupy Berlin. Of the Third Coalition, only Britain and Russia now remained in the field. And by June 1807 it was only Britain. For after Russian troops had been beaten by Napoleon on their own borders at the Battle of Friedland, Russia decided to submit to France. At the Treaty of Tilsit of 1807 on a raft in the middle of the River Niemen, the Russian emperor agreed to Napoleon’s plan to parcel out Europe between them into zones of eastern and western influence. Russia was at liberty to help herself to Finland, Sweden and Turkey as long as she recognized that the rest of Europe was Napoleon’s, including the French-controlled Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Russia also agreed to join the Continental System, a comprehensive blockade which Napoleon had imposed against all English goods to try and starve Britain into surrender.

Under this policy, Britain was forbidden to export any of her goods to any of the ports of Napoleon’s satellites, and by now that meant all the ports on the continent. All British shipping of whatever kind was to be seized, as was the shipping of any country which had used British ports. Defiantly, Lord Grenville–the new Whig prime minister, who took office because there was no natural Tory successor to Pitt–had retaliated by issuing Orders in Council which denied the freedom of the seas to any of Napoleon’s allies. Thanks to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar it was really the French who were in a state of blockade. And in order to prevent the Danish fleet being pressed into service against her, Britain simply seized it. Nevertheless, these were desperate days. If help did not come soon from somewhere on the continent, to start a fightback against Napoleon, the British Isles might be starved into leading the half-life of a Napoleonic satellite.

This was anyway not a glorious era for the country. The dying Charles James Fox’s efforts got a bill passed in 1807 which made Britain the earliest European country to outlaw the slave trade, but Britons themselves were experiencing a different kind of slavery in the early factories. The unrelenting war effort and fear of revolution meant that there was neither the time nor the political will for social reforms. One year after the Whigs had formed a government they were turned out by George III for trying to give English Catholic officers rights equal to their Irish comrades. Henceforth the king would have only Tory governments, in which after Pitt’s death the reactionary or Ultra wing of the party predominated. MPs like Sir Francis Burdett, Sir Samuel Romilly, Samuel Whitbread and Henry Brougham, known as Radicals, were lone voices in Parliament drawing attention to the need for less savage laws, better treatment of the poor, and shorter and more representative Parliaments. They were a new generation of brave and unpopular politicians following in the footsteps of Fox and his nephew Lord Holland. The difference was that they were not connected to the great Whig aristocratic families. The Radical movement’s supporters were found in the large towns and among intellectuals who had been members of the Corresponding Societies until they were made illegal.

But there was one area of the Tory government’s policy that was dazzlingly successful. The decision to send a small army to the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 and support the resistance against the French there turned the tide against Napoleon and led eventually to his downfall. The theoretically straightforward little war in the peninsula, which the emperor dismissed as the Spanish Ulcer, became a cancer that destroyed the Napoleonic Empire. Until 1808 Bonaparte had been content to leave his southern neighbours as cowed allies. But the obstinate Portuguese refused to join in the Continental System against the British, with whom they had a long history of favoured trading status. Though the Spanish king Charles IV helped Napoleon capture Portugal, while the British evacuated the Portuguese government in warships, the emperor soon perceived that the warring Spanish Bourbon dynasty might be neatly replaced by his own brother Joseph, currently the King of Naples. In so doing Napoleon created his own Achilles’ heel. Passionately proud of their history, scornful of the French peoples living north of them, the Spanish were not having any Frenchman on their throne. Like all other European nations the Spaniards were defeated in pitched battle by Napoleon. But, unlike the other peoples of Europe who were crushed by Napoleon, Spain refused to accept the French occupation.

A series of spontaneous risings swept the peninsula. Though it was occupied by the cream of the French armies under General Junot, the bare rocky country would not be subdued. Spanish guerrilla armies hidden all over the hills breathed defiance at Napoleon. The new King of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, was forced humiliatingly to abandon the Spanish capital, Madrid, and to retreat with the French army to Bayonne, on the other side of the Spanish border. Meanwhile a self-appointed provisional government hidden in the Asturian Mountains of northern Spain sent a message to London asking for help. From this tiny foothold began the climb-back which would result in victory on the battlefield of Waterloo. In 1808, however, that was a happy outcome which could scarcely have been predicted.

The man put in charge of the peninsular expedition, Sir Arthur Wellesley, was a lieutenant-general in the British army, fresh from glory in India. Pitt had admired him for the way he ‘states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it’. Wellesley was now landed with a small force in Portugal and kicked off the Peninsular Wars with a flourish at Vimeiro when he defeated General Junot, whose troops outnumbered his by three to one. But the incompetence and shortsightedness of two more senior British generals who arrived immediately after the battle enabled Junot apparently to recover, and despite Wellesley’s victory an armistice was agreed in the form of the infamous Convention of Cintra. This allowed the French to evacuate Portugal with all their troops and arms and the gold they had looted from Portuguese churches, all of which were conveyed to France courtesy of the British navy at considerable expense. All those evacuated troops could of course be used against Britain in the near future.

The stupidity of these arrangements created a scandal in Britain, and Wellesley was the only commander to escape with his reputation. On the other hand, at least Cintra left Portugal free of all French soldiers, and thus made it a very good starting point for British operations against Napoleon in Spain. For there, at the end of 1808, the emperor himself arrived in his magnificent travelling Berlin carriage with his solid-gold campaigning dinner service. He was stung to the quick that the backward Spanish peasantry were defying the master of Europe. By 4 December he had defeated the Spanish forces and the French tricolore was once more flying over occupied Madrid.

As Wellesley was still in London giving evidence into the inquiry into the Cintra débâcle, the new commander of the British forces in Portugal was the affable and popular General Sir John Moore. He had just crossed into Spain to join up with the Spanish armies when he heard the news of their defeat. He was then at Salamanca, horribly near Napoleon and with insufficient troops to fight him. He courageously decided to draw the emperor north by threatening his communications with France. This would keep him away from the Spanish army, which was fleeing south to recover its strength.

Moore’s tactics worked. Napoleon went north towards Burgos, leaving the Spanish to regroup in the south, but Moore had to beat a rapid retreat over the bleak mountains of the Asturias in the raw Spanish winter, pursued by the furious emperor’s forces. He managed to get his men to Corunna in the north-west corner of Spain, where he had been promised that transport ships would be waiting to take him and his men back to England. But to their dismay there was nothing at the fortified town except sullen grey waves, while at their heels was Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon’s most gifted generals. It was then that Moore managed to rally his exhausted, mutinous, demoralized men to make a stand. Though the transports finally arrived and the British sent Soult packing, Moore himself died in the mêlée, and was buried hastily at dead of night outside Corunna’s walls with bayonets for spades. Moore’s legendary courage and daring inspired the famous poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, which begins so evocatively:

The arrival from Corunna of the piteous, emaciated British soldiers, who had almost perished as a result of administrative bungling, as well as the shame of Cintra, increased the unpopularity of the government at home. Headed by the Duke of Portland, one of the former Whigs sufficiently alarmed at the beginning of the French Revolution to join Pitt as a Tory, the administration was proving hopelessly incompetent, as disaster after disaster piled on Portland’s head. George III’s second son the Duke of York, who had shown himself an able administrator as commander-in-chief of the army, was forced to resign when his ex-mistress Mary Ann Clark (an ancestress of the writer Daphne du Maurier) revealed that she had used her favours to get commissions for wealthy friends.

Next came further military catastrophe at Walcheren, where the British had sent an invasion force to capture Antwerp in a bid to distract Napoleon and help Austria, which had once more declared war against France. For a moment in 1809, the Spanish risings had engendered the idea that the rest of occupied Europe would manage to throw off the Napoleonic yoke. The emperor had abandoned his pursuit of Moore to rush off to fight Austria, and it looked as if some of the German principalities would join her. But thanks to lack of co-ordination between the naval and military arms and poor reconnaissance the British forces never got nearer than Flushing and had to return home without striking a blow. Four thousand men died of fever that July at Walcheren, a small island in Zeeland above Antwerp. Meanwhile Austria had been shown by Napoleon’s decisive victory over her at Wagram in the same month how unwise it was to raise a finger against her overlord. She made peace and provided Napoleon with a second wife, the youthful Archduchess Marie Louise. By a strange turn of the wheel of historical fortune, she was the great-niece of Marie Antoinette.

Military failure, reports of improper use of influence during the election, a scandalous duel between Canning, now foreign secretary, and the war and colonial secretary Viscount Castlereagh, and his own poor health brought about Portland’s resignation as premier. He was replaced by the former chancellor of the Exchequer, the right-wing Tory Spencer Perceval, who proved as unmemorable as Portland, and the trade slump continued. The Whig opposition, who had close links to manufacturers keen for the war to end, continued to attack the government for wasting money on the Peninsular War. But the one good thing about the Tory government was that it refused to abandon the peninsula. Indeed the only bright spot amid widespread gloom were Wellesley’s sustained military successes in Portugal.

At his own insistence Wellesley had been back on the peninsula since April 1809, having impressed upon his fellow Anglo-Irishman Castlereagh the urgency of his mission there. He was convinced that Portugal could still be defended with only 20,000 British troops and 4,000 cavalry alongside a newly recruited Portuguese army, while the Spanish guerrillas tied down the French in their own country. He believed that the peninsula was especially important as a theatre of war because it showed the other European nations that their French oppressor was not invincible. Vimeiro had emphasized that the Napoleonic column, that massive and alarming spectacle of moving soldiery and glinting metal, sixty men deep, which had evolved out of the overwhelming numbers of the untrained French citizen-army, could be outmanoeuvred. In terms of firepower most of the men were actually useless while in column formation, because those in the middle were never able to fire for fear of hitting their comrades. The Napoleonic column that had spread fear through Europe could be defeated if a thin line of infantry–thin because it was only two men deep to enable every man to fire–directed musket fire at it. This would be the pattern over and over again in encounters between Napoleon’s armies and Wellington’s.

Wellesley believed that it was essential to maintain the friendship of the Portuguese people. On landing he issued the strictest orders to his soldiers. It was absolutely forbidden to requisition anything from the locals or to lay hands on the female population. The Protestant British, who tended to deride what to them seemed the more superstitious elements of Roman Catholicism, were to be respectful of the Portuguese people’s religion. Anyone who laid a finger on a woman or stole a chicken was to be hanged. Wellesley’s measures were harsh but effective. The Portuguese, who scarcely had enough food for themselves, were particularly grateful for his orders. The disciplined behaviour of the British troops was a pleasing change from the pillage and looting of the French soldiers.

Wellesley forged the 20,000 men he had brought to the peninsula into a superior military instrument. But Portugal was once again threatened with invasion by the French from two directions. The odds were greatly against the English, and Wellesley chose to give battle only when he knew he could win, because, he said, ‘As this is the last army England has got we must take care of it.’ Though there were terrible losses of life, Wellesley pursued the French out of Portugal to Talavera, halfway across Spain, but after inflicting a crushing defeat there on Soult with the help of 30,000 Spanish troops, he decided that the British army’s position in Spain was untenable and retreated back to Portugal. His men now had to be even more carefully preserved because the French had put 200,000 soldiers into the peninsula. To this end Wellesley, now created Viscount Wellington of Talavera, constructed the strategical masterpiece known as the Lines of Torres Vedras. It was to be a lair in which Wellington’s army–the British troops and 25,000 Portuguese soldiers–would hole up over the winter.

The Lines of Torres Vedras–‘old towers’ in Portuguese–were actually a series of more than a hundred forts complete with redoubts, ditches and earthworks north of the city of Lisbon. Wellington’s army would be able to keep a steady holding pattern until hunger supplemented by ambushes drove the French out of Portugal. The fortifications were thrown up in such secrecy that the French had absolutely no idea of their existence. It was not until what was intended to be the French army of occupation under General Masséna got to within two days’ march of the Lines in the autumn of 1810 that they realized they could go no further. The whole British army had vanished into the hillside. Wellington had meanwhile given orders to the reluctant but nobly self-sacrificing Portuguese farmers to lay waste all the country around Torres Vedras and bring all their provisions and livestock within the Lines. He intended to hold out there indefinitely until starvation forced the French army to go away.

The British supply boats that he had waiting offshore permitted Wellington to sit out the winter of 1810–11 with his men. Outside Torres Vedras the French army under General Masséna prowled and ultimately starved, thanks to their policy of depending on the local produce. In the end, after waiting from October to March, in the course of which 30,000 French troops died, Masséna and his men were forced to abandon Portugal. In 1811 Wellington began his campaign to drive the French out of Spain. In that same year the Prince of Wales at last became regent, his father George III having been diagnosed as incurably mad. Although he had allied himself with the Whigs since his youth, the new prince regent was obliged to accept a Tory government, and the Peninsular War therefore continued unimpeded.

By April 1812 all four of the most important fortresses of Spain–Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida in the north, and Badajos and Elvas to the south–had fallen into British hands. But they had only done so after a series of sieges whose huge fatalities required gallant self-sacrifice on the part of the British soldiers. At Badajos Wellington wept at the appalling waste of life when the storming of an incomplete breech required his men to use the bodies of dead colleagues as bridges. Nevertheless his object had been attained: the road to Spain lay open, and, beginning with a magnificent victory at Salamanca, he began to achieve his aim of forcing the French out of the south of Spain and keeping them out.

Wellington’s influence in the corridors of power over the war’s strategy was now unexpectedly helped by the tragic death in May of the prime minister Spencer Perceval. After Perceval had been shot by a crazed businessman named Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, the new prime minister Lord Liverpool made Wellington’s old ally Castlereagh foreign secretary. Meanwhile events in another part of Europe were aiding the allies. It was in 1812 that Napoleon finally overplayed his hand. He had parted company with the Russians over who should have Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and, believing that they were about to ally themselves with Britain as they were allowing British goods into their ports, in June he made the outstanding error of invading Russia.

His best soldiers were withdrawn from Spain to fight the new Russian foe, and were replaced by raw recruits. But not only was Napoleon badly overstretched. On its home territory the awakening colossus straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, which stretched from Poland in the west to China in the east, was too gigantic an enemy even for Napoleon. The 600,000 French soldiers he poured into Russia counted for nothing in its vast empty spaces. Like France herself, Russia was the nation in arms; and just as the French nation in arms in 1793 had proved too much for Europe, the Russian nation in arms was too much for Napoleon.

By 19 October Napoleon decided to abandon his attempt to conquer Russia, whose patriotic inhabitants were so determined to defeat him that they had burned their own capital, Moscow. It was far more important to return to his own empire, which he had been out of contact with for too long. The long and dreadful retreat from Moscow began. The ravenous once Grand Army broke up under the combined onslaught of hunger, the Cossacks and what Napoleon’s renowned general Marshal Ney called General Winter. Thousands of Frenchmen were abandoned to their fate. They died where they lay. Too weak to move they were buried alive in the snow or became the food of wolves. Those who did not die–and the dead numbered a staggering 170,000–made their way home often barefoot and without overcoats.

Unlike Wellington who provided for his men with meticulous care and invented the rubber boot which bears his name, Napoleon did not look after his soldiers. As Wellington said, ‘No man ever lost more armies than he did.’ Wherever he was, and in whatever circumstances, even if his men were starving, his aides were under orders to make sure that the ultimate luxury of white bread was available for the emperor.

Meanwhile, encouraged by the humiliation of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, the Prussians, Swedes and Austrians once more declared war on Napoleon, their soldiers paid for by British subsidies. Now that their ranks no longer consisted solely of patriotic Frenchmen, the emperor’s armies had lost some of the vigour and esprit de corps which had won the breathtaking campaigns of the past. Soldiers from Italy and the German Confederation of the Rhine made up much of their numbers. The Napoleonic Empire was beginning to pull apart under its own contradictions.

Against the inferior recruits in the French army in Spain, Wellington’s already triumphant campaign turned into a rout. By 1813 after a superb set of flanking movements he controlled the whole of the peninsula, and had pressed the French right back to the Pyrenees. Then in October of that year in central Europe the allies won a decisive victory. At the Battle of Leipzig the troops of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Sweden threw Napoleon and 190,000 French soldiers back across the Rhine. By January 1814 all the German states had risen against Napoleon, impelled by a proud new sense of German nationalism. Having defeated Soult, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees to join the invasion of France as allied soldiers advanced from all directions. By the end of March Tsar Alexander I was in Paris along with leaders of the other victorious nations, while Napoleon himself was forced to abdicate and retire to the Italian island of Elba.

The more far-sighted pointed out that Napoleon was far too near Italy for safety, and that the people of France should be consulted on the question of what sort of ruler they wished for. But the victors were too frightened of another French Revolution rocking their own thrones to do anything but immediately reimpose the Bourbon monarchy in the shape of Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI. Deliberations about the future shape of Europe were referred to a Congress at Vienna. But into the peacemaking–conducted in a self-conscious return to the style of the pre-war era by aristocratic diplomats in between glittering balls–broke hideous news. There was no point in continuing: Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The Hundred Days of his last campaign had begun.

He was on his way from the south back up to Paris with an army of his veterans which was snowballing by the hour. Marshal Ney, who had been sent to capture Napoleon and had vowed to bring him back in a cage, instead had joined his old comrade once more. The fat and unpopular Louis XVIII made no attempt to rally the French people. They scarcely knew him, as he had spent the war in England. All too mindful of his elder brother’s dreadful fate, he quickly got out of the country in an undignified scramble. Europe was back at war again.

It was decided that each great power should provide 150,000 men against Napoleon. The British forces under Wellington, who was by now not only a duke but commander-in-chief, were deputed with the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher to defend the southern Netherlands north-east of the French border. It was there that Napoleon decided he should strike. He needed a conclusive engagement to defeat that section of the allied armies to enable him to link up with his followers at Antwerp before Russia and Austria had time to invade from the east. The Battle of Waterloo turned out to be conclusive in another way. It was the final end of the man Wellington called ‘the great disturber of Europe’. But the situation was not straightforward. The victory of Waterloo was far from predictable. As Wellington, the Iron Duke, would himself say later, it was ‘a damned nice thing–the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life’.

Wellington’s best, most highly disciplined peninsular veterans were far away in America. They had been sent there for a new Anglo-American war which had broken out in June 1812 over the carrying trade. What he was left with was a force he described as ‘an infamous army’–27,000 raw recruits most of whom had never held a gun in their lives. ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy,’ he remarked, ‘but by God they frighten me.’ Moreover it was the emperor himself who was advancing out from France on 12 June 1815 with his most devoted partisans, veterans of twenty-two years’ campaigning.

Wellington himself had come to the conclusion that Napoleon would need to strike quickly before the Prussian and British armies could work out their strategy, but he had no idea just how soon that would be. Absolute success and the complete defeat of Napoleon would depend on the arrival of 30,000 Prussians under Blücher, to bring the combined Anglo-Dutch forces up to about 65,000, still 5,000 lighter than the French. But the two armies were a considerable distance from one another. Wellington and the Anglo-Dutch army were in the main path of the emperor’s advance, and in the event the Prussians very nearly never turned up to help them. For Napoleon’s intelligence was excellent as usual. He decided that the Prussians must be attacked first at Ligny and put out of action before he dealt with the Anglo-Dutch forces.

As a result of Napoleon’s secrecy and swiftness it was not until the afternoon of 15 June that Wellington discovered that his opponent had crossed the French border and was at Charleroi with 70,000 men. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me,’ said the furious duke. Not only were the Prussians being attacked at Ligny, but 1,500 French skirmishers had attacked an outlying Dutch division at Quatre Bras. This meant that the French were advancing up the highway to Brussels and were only twenty miles away.

Wellington now ordered his army forward to concentrate at the crossroads of Quatre Bras in order to divert Ney from Blücher and the Prussians at Ligny. Though there was an inconclusive draw between the two sides at Quatre Bras, by the end of the day Wellington had succeeded in his limited objective: the British had prevented the French getting any nearer Brussels. Meanwhile the Prussians had retreated eighteen miles from Ligny to Wavre, which was due east of Waterloo.

When the Prussian retreat became known, Wellington decided that Waterloo was where he should fall back to. He would make his stand there and hope that the Prussians would somehow come to his aid. The area crossed the highroad between Napoleon’s troops at Charleroi and allied headquarters at Brussels. It was bordered by the little village of Waterloo in the north, now on the outskirts of modern Brussels, and the Château de Hougoumont to the south with the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in the middle. Wellington had had his engineers survey the ground for the past week for the maximum advantage. Every building, every peculiar feature of the landscape, had to be adapted for defensive purposes.

In the middle of the night Wellington got word from the seventy-two-year-old Blücher, who had been seriously wounded at Ligny, that even if the old general had to be tied to his horse he would personally lead out his troops against Napoleon’s right wing the next day. As 18 June dawned, there was a terrific downpour, so often the prelude to victory for Wellington. The soldiers awoke to find themselves in a sea of mud, but were soon up and about preparing for battle in their red coats. Everywhere rode the duke in his cocked hat and civilian clothes, which he found more comfortable than regimentals, raising everyone’s morale by his phlegmatic and indefatigable presence.

Napoleon, for his part, rose late. He shared none of his generals’ fears about the British infantry or the battle itself, for he believed that the Prussians had been too badly mauled by Ligny to be able to join up with the British. Nor did he rate his opposite number. Rather curiously, considering the havoc Wellington had inflicted on his armies, Napoleon dismissed him as a ‘bad general’. He took his time waiting for the ground to dry out for better use of his cavalry. That was another mistake, for every hour that passed gave the Prussians more time to come to the aid of the Anglo-Dutch, hours during which Wellington was seen surreptitiously looking at his watch and wondering where they were.

The Battle of Waterloo began with an attack by the French on the Château de Hougoumont. Though it was set on fire, the British held it all day, protecting Wellington’s right as well as preventing the French advance up the highway to Brussels. The French fruitlessly used up troops trying to capture it, but they never did. Meanwhile the battle raged as again and again the French columns assailed the British positions without success. The British were very carefully arranged in squares by Wellington. Drilled in preceding months by their sergeant majors, the novice infantrymen had quickly learned the ‘steadiness’ under fire that according to the duke made the British the best soldiers in the world. They could not have had more need of it. For against their squares came first the fearsome French infantry columns and then for two hours the French cavalry. ‘This is hard pounding, gentlemen,’ said Wellington at one point, ‘try who can pound the longest.’

But each British soldier, as taught, continued calmly to take aim and fire, and then kneel and let the man behind him, whose gun was cocked, take aim and fire in his turn, as the first lot cleaned their guns and loaded once more. The French cavalry with their glittering cuirasses and high plumed helmets, galloped round and round the squares trying to put an end to the steady firing by breaking them up and finding a way through the troops. But nothing could shake the steady British line, though they could scarcely see in the smoke and scarcely hear in the din. All the while the beautiful French horses and their superb riders crashed one by one into the mud–looking, as Wellington later remembered, like so many up-ended turtles. But the squares held. Later when he examined the battlefield with its awful debris the duke found a whole square of men who had died in formation rather than let the French pass. When Wellington had been asked if he could defeat Napoleon, he had pointed at a redcoated infantryman and said, ‘It all depends on him.’ His confidence had been well placed.

Nevertheless, it had not been until mid-afternoon that Wellington got sight of tiny flickering troop movements in the woods in the far distance to the east. These were the first signs of the Prussians whose horses and guns he had been anxiously watching for since daybreak. At six o’clock in the evening La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse holding the centre, fell to the French. It was then that Napoleon tried to drive in Wellington’s line between the farmhouse and Hougoumont. But the French were held off by the 52nd Regiment, whose attack on the left flank of the French ended in the use of bayonets. Just before sundown Napoleon sent in his elite Imperial Guard. But even they were beaten off by the allied infantry. For the first time ever the most legendary warriors in Europe broke ranks and abandoned the battlefield.

And then, just before eight o’clock with only about half an hour of daylight remaining, the Prussians at last arrived. Blücher was more dead than alive, but he had not failed his allies. Here he was, his long white moustache black with dust, but as energetic as ever, able to deploy his army to chase the French back into France. From beneath his tree, mounted on his chestnut mare Copenhagen, veteran of so many battles, Wellington waved his hat three times towards the French. The British could go forward at last. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’ he shouted. Up to the ridge came line after line of scarlet-clad infantrymen, charging on to pursue the terrified French. It was the end. Napoleon fled for Paris, where he immediately abdicated in favour of his son, the King of Rome, hoping that the child could become King of France in his stead. A short time later he was safely isolated in mid-Atlantic on the island of St Helena, borne there by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Bellerophon. He had thrown himself on the mercy of the prince regent and the English, who, he said, were the most generous of the allies. He died on St Helena six years later.

Radical Agitation (1815–1820)

The Battle of Waterloo rid the world of the menace to peace that Napoleon represented so long as he was free. But the widespread support his Hundred Days had received in France ensured that the peace settlement made in 1815 was far more punitive than had been first envisaged. Although France’s borders reverted to those of the pre-revolutionary period, a humiliating army of occupation was put into northern France for five years, paid for by the French and commanded by Wellington, who also became Britain’s ambassador to Paris. To underline the fact that Napoleon was no longer the master of Europe, all the treasures he and his soldiers had looted from round the world, such as the four horses of St Mark’s in Venice and sumptuous paintings from the Vatican, were returned to their rightful owners. So furious were the Parisians at this, for they now considered that the loot belonged to them, that the works of art were taken away at dead of night to avoid rioting.

All round France, which had terrorized Europe for a generation, her neighbours were strengthened to prevent her breaking out again. The former Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) were joined to Holland under a prince of the House of Orange to give France a more formidable presence on her north-east frontier. Further south her eastern border was more strongly defined by consolidating the 300 pre-war principalities into a German Confederation of thirty-nine states. Within the Confederation Prussia was reinforced by the addition of two-fifths of the former kingdom of Saxony and territory in the Rhineland. Such an entity would make the French think twice before they tried to expand their borders again.

For similar reasons the mountain kingdom of Piedmont was also enlarged. Norway was taken away from the Danes, who had been allies of Napoleon until very recently, and combined in one kingdom with Sweden. South of the Alps, though most of her princes were restored to the status quo ante, Italy was back firmly under the protection of Austria. Russia, the new player in European power politics whose giant armies overshadowed the Congress, used the peace settlement to expand westward. The conference agreed to her demand to include the so-called independent kingdom of Poland in her empire; it was the price to be paid for Russian aid in the war.

The political thrust of the post-1815 settlement was thus strongly conservative, and where it did not interfere with the imperial ambitions of the great powers, it was legitimist–that is, it restored the ruling families who had been in power before the French Revolutionary Wars. As Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary in charge of the peace negotiations put it, ‘We want disciplined force under sovereigns we can trust.’ The problem was that the conservative statesmen running the Congress, particularly the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, were so determined to bury the dangerous ideas which the French Revolution had set free in the world that they completely ignored the wishes of the native populations.

For all the conservative aims of the peace, the history of the next hundred years was to be the working out of the effects of the French Revolution as the Poles, the Italians and the Germans revolted against the settlement. The French Revolutionary ideals resurfaced in powerful offspring, liberalism and nationalism, that were not confined to Europe. Further wars and revolutionary convulsions produced a unified Italy, a unified Germany and conflagration in the decaying Ottoman Empire. England herself, whose Parliament already had a version of democracy in place, by expanding the suffrage over the next hundred years did just enough to prevent her own revolutions. There were sufficient far-sighted members of both Houses to see what had to be changed to fit the post-revolutionary age. Parliament itself could provide the safety valve so lacking on the continent. Nevertheless it was a bumpy ride.

Though Britain’s conference negotiators were the Ultra or extreme Tory Anglo-Irish aristocrats Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, their sense of what a Parliamentary democracy would not tolerate made Britain a leavening liberal presence among the repressive eastern European powers. Britain refused to join a new international organization to police Europe, an anti-democratic straitjacket called the Holy Alliance and proposed by the excitable Tsar Alexander I. It would permit the great powers to intervene in one another’s affairs if they thought that Christianity, peace or justice were threatened, or, more bluntly, if the government became too liberal for their liking. Given her representative system of government Castlereagh and Wellington knew that Britain would never countenance the powers interfering by force in a country’s internal affairs. On Holy Alliance principles, one of the first places to be invaded might be Britain.

What Britain could agree to was practical and pragmatic. In order to keep the peace in Europe and prevent another Napoleon ever arising, the victorious great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, formed a Quadruple Alliance to stop by armed intervention any aggression by France which would alter the Congress of Vienna settlement. Castlereagh had been sufficiently impressed by the recent co-operation between the powers to believe that a permanent system of conferences, like the Congress of Vienna, which he called the Concert of Europe, was a good way of hammering out issues before anyone resorted to war. By the second Congress in 1818, France had finished paying her war indemnity early, so Castlereagh got her occupying army withdrawn and France herself welcomed back into the fold of great powers. He believed that this would ensure Europe’s future stability, for if France continued to be a European pariah it would make her disruptive and dangerous.

However, the Congress system which Castlereagh had such hopes for was hijacked by the Holy Alliance and Britain pretty well withdrew from it. The next few years were dogged by uprisings and demands for more liberal rule in Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont. By 1820 the Congresses were issuing claims that they had the right to put down revolutions in foreign countries as well as clamping down on the press and on liberal teachers in the German universities. As a result Britain no longer attended in an official capacity, sending observers to Congress meetings rather than ambassadors. Britain, said Castlereagh, whose own king was the product of a revolution, could not logically ‘deny to other countries the same right of changing their government’ by similar revolutions. Thus by the 1820s Britain was once more the friend of constitutional change abroad, as she had been before the French Revolution.

As befitted the nation over which shone the glory of Waterloo and the honour of removing the menace of Napoleon, and which had financed a great deal of the war, Britain did extremely well out of the peace. After Trafalgar she had seized the opportunity to rid herself of any rivals at sea, and she remained the dominant country in the carrying trade. She now usefully expanded her trading bases throughout the world, adding Malta, the Ionian Islands, the small island of Heligoland off the coast of Hanover and some important former French West Indian islands–St Lucia, Tobago and Mauritius–to her colonial possessions. The route to India was safeguarded by her continuing to hold the Cape of Good Hope, which she had captured from the Dutch, as well as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), at the foot of India. Britain’s naval and commercial supremacy was confirmed.

Thanks to the British delegation the 1815 Peace Treaty contained within it a clause condemning slavery, in the face of Spanish and Portuguese protests. The efficient mobilization of British public opinion by the Anti-Slavery Society made it impossible for Castlereagh to draw up a treaty determining the shape of post-war Europe without registering a protest at the continued reliance of European economies on slave labour. By 1817, in return for £70,000, Portugal and Spain had both abolished their slave trade. The Netherlands had outlawed it the year before, and it continued to be outlawed in all French territories, as it had been by the French revolutionary government in 1793.

What has been called Britain’s second Hundred Years War ended with France most conclusively beaten. In the new century Russia was the power whose activities Britain regarded with the most suspicion. But now that peace was established the government’s most pressing problem was the domestic situation. The severe hardship and dislocation caused by twenty years of war combined with the industrial revolution was tearing the country apart. What was happening at home needed urgent attention and bold surgery. But surgery in the shape of Parliamentary reform, which the starving working class and the disfranchised middle classes were united in calling for, the Tories were most reluctant to grant.

The British government’s sympathy for liberal movements abroad did not extend to democratic campaigns at home. The end of the war had given these campaigns new impetus for it exacerbated the already miserable living conditions of the working classes. Even during the war the Radical and democratic electoral movements had grown hugely because the galloping pace of increased mechanization had caused a steady stream of people to be laid off from their jobs. Social distress convinced them they required a voice in Parliament to make the government more responsive to their needs. In Parliament reform was called for by Radical MPs such as Henry Brougham the legal reformer and Sir Francis Burdett and their allies, the greatly reduced Whigs, including Lord John Russell and Lord Grey.

From 1811, the year the Prince of Wales became regent, there was rioting among labourers in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottingham in protest against the use of improved textile machinery in place of hand labour. At times hardship had been so acute that the poor had to sell their household furniture for food. Many of them, like the Luddites, skilled stocking-makers in Nottingham under the leadership of Ned Ludd, smashed the machinery that was making them redundant, for Pitt’s Combination Acts had prevented any bargaining with their masters. In 1813 seventeen of them had been executed for their protests.

In 1815 their situation was made worse by 200,000 ex-soldiers flooding home to seek jobs, as well as the abrupt closing of the factories that during the war had produced uniforms, tents and armaments. British textile industries were badly affected by the swift post-war revival of manufacturing on the continent. As for farming, agricultural wages were still being kept low by the impact of the Speenhamland system of support from the rates. Even outside agriculture wages had remained unchanged since the war began. Prices, however, had risen 200 per cent, more in the case of bread due to a recent run of poor harvests and the high cost of cultivating moorland during the war. In the days before enclosures when factory workers had been subsistence farmers, the price of bread would never have affected them, but now they were no longer in a position to grow their own food. What was needed was cheaper food.

For manufacturers the solution was simple. They imported cheap foreign wheat to feed their workers. But the landowners believed that was ruining British farmers. Without thought for interests other than their own, and with astonishing insensitivity, in 1815 their Tory representatives in the Commons and Lords passed a new Corn Law. Henceforth foreign corn could be imported only if the price of wheat rose to a certain level, eighty shillings a bushel. In 1815 when the Corn Law Bill was passing through Parliament there were furious riots round the Houses of Parliament as starving workers tried to use physical force to get MPs to vote against the bill, which they had no other means of resisting.

Lord Liverpool’s government, in particular the alarmist home secretary Addington (the former prime minister, who was now Lord Sidmouth), didn’t see that the hungry people smashing machinery or taking to the streets had no other means of redress. They believed that these outbreaks marked the beginning of Britain’s own long-deferred revolution. The period between 1815 and 1822 was unprecedented for protests against the government and the savagery of official reaction. One of the chief hindrances to dealing intelligently with the post-war social and economic dislocation was the government’s identification of any demands by the working man with the Jacobinism which had destroyed the property-owning classes in France.

The government panicked. Laws were passed which punished machine-breaking with the death sentence. As the Romantic poet Lord Byron said in an angry speech to his fellow peers in the House of Lords, a life was now valued at less than a stocking frame. Since no police force existed, Sidmouth used spies to try and round up the ringleaders. Instead these spies acted as agents provocateurs, deliberately inciting isolated pockets of the most disaffected workers to overthrow the government and encourage mob violence when what most of the protesters actually wanted was specific reforms within the system. For the miracle was that despite the widespread misery there was no real uprising by the British people. Most people believed in the ability of Parliament to right their wrongs. They marched and attended meetings to discuss Parliamentary reform addressed by Radicals like the most famous journalist of his generation, William Cobbett, and by speakers like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. Though the government might see Hunt as a dangerous agitator, like Cobbett he agitated for reforms through Parliament.

Unfortunately in December 1816 at a vast Parliamentary-reform gathering at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell organized by the Radicals, the machinations of Sidmouth’s agents and extremist elements ensured that all the worse suspicions of the government were confirmed. The meeting was taken over by the Spenceans, the revolutionary followers of Thomas Spence who believed all land should be nationalized. What had been intended as a peaceful demonstration turned into a riot. Some of the demonstrators were flying the tricolore and wearing the Caps of Liberty which had been so prominent during the massacres in Revolutionary France. Calling for a Committee of Public Safety they began to march east to seize the Tower of London, but were broken up at the Royal Exchange in the City.

Similar disturbances, none of them serious, continued throughout 1817. Then, for a year, good harvests and cheaper bread calmed the country. But in 1819 the combination of bad harvests, which once again meant that people couldn’t feed themselves, and the failure of the Radical Sir Francis Burdett’s bill in favour of universal manhood suffrage, caused violent episodes to start up again. Still the government refused to see the agitation for Parliamentary reform for what it was. Tragically when an enormous and peaceful demonstration in favour of reform took place on the outskirts of Manchester at St Peter’s Fields, in August 1819, it was treated as the beginning of the uprising.

Because the Radicals abhorred violence and wanted to distance themselves from people like the Spenceans, no one was allowed to carry anything which might possibly be interpreted as a weapon. The authorities were to have no excuse to claim provocation. The presence of women, children and indeed babies in the crowd was intended to show once and for all that these were demonstrators who believed in peaceful ways. As they came on with hand-painted banners waving above them to ask for the reform of the Corn Laws, votes for everyone and the representation of their areas in Parliament the only danger they posed was in their numbers. They were 40,000 strong. Nevertheless the atmosphere was friendly and orderly; the mothers had provisions for their families in their covered baskets.

The meeting had been approved by local magistrates, but they had since lost their nerve. At St Peter’s Fields, therefore, were drawn up large numbers of yeomen cavalry, some of whom had been at Waterloo. Their behaviour now was far from distinguished. When the Radical speaker Henry Hunt got to the platform, he saw that magistrates were there waiting for him. In order to prevent any trouble he said that he was quite willing to be arrested. But the magistrates insisted that he speak. Halfway through his address, however, they sent soldiers in to arrest him. Not unnaturally the crowd disliked this. As with indignant cries they tried to stop Hunt being dragged off, the magistrates told the waiting cavalry to charge into the crowd.

Into the mass of wives and babies and banners rode the soldiers. Hewing and hacking with their sabres, their horses’ enormous hooves tossing children into the air, they killed eleven people, including a child, and badly injured 400 more. The disgusted nation gave the event the sarcastic nickname ‘Peterloo’. From every section of society a torrent of indignation poured out against the oppressive Tory government. The son of the MP for Horsham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a powerful poem The Mask of Anarchy, advising the victims of the government to shake off their chains. ‘You are many, they are few,’ he told them.

The Tory government followed Peterloo with the repressive Six Acts. These made it almost impossible to hold outdoor meetings, tried to destroy the Radical press by extending stamp duties to all kinds of journals which put most of them beyond the reach of the working man, widened magistrates’ powers to search private property for seditious literature and got rid of jury trials in certain cases. Thwarted by such methods Radical agitation died down. Only the discovery of the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820, a plot to assassinate the Cabinet organized by a Spencean named Thistlewood who intended to set up a provisional government, did a little to convince public opinion that perhaps behind the reformers a hideous revolutionary conspiracy really had been lurking.

The Radical movement’s imagination was soon caught by the plight of the prince regent’s wife, Caroline of Brunswick. For in 1820 George III died. The virtuous young king of golden hair and iron will had long ago declined into a hopeless lunatic at Windsor, his hair long and white. Despite his condition the nation genuinely mourned a man who had been such a familiar figure for so long–he had reigned for fifty-nine years–and was known for his unassuming and simple ways and his exemplarily uxorious relationship with Queen Charlotte. The sybaritic and sophisticated prince regent at last became king as George IV after a regency of nine years.