A.D. 1801.

TREATY OF AMIENS.

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1800, he was authorized by the First Consul to negotiate for peace. This negotiation was broken off. To the weak government of Addington, M. Otto could apply with more hope of success. He was in indirect communication with the first minister in May; his visits to lord Hawkesbury were frequent during the summer. In August, Bonaparte was threatening invasion. The French armies were, for the most part, at home, eager for employment. A hundred thousand men were to come over in a flotilla of gun-brigs, or rafts-flat vessels of about 200 tons, armed each with four or eight heavy guns. Such a flotilla was collected at Boulogne. Nelson was sent in August to attack this flotilla, to cut it out of the harbour. He failed. "The First Consul," says Thiers," in seeing what were the first acts of Menou, had judged the campaign lost, and he was desirous, before the dénouement that he foretold, to have a treaty signed at London." The Preliminary Articles of Peace between the United Kingdom and the French Republic were signed at London, on the first of October, by lord Hawkesbury and M. Otto. Plenipotentiaries were to be named on each side, who should repair to Amiens, for the purpose of concluding a Definitive Treaty of Peace, in concert with the allies of the contracting parties.

The burst of popular enthusiasm at the news of Peace was, naturally, somewhat extravagant. There were illuminations in London for two nights. The rejoicings throughout the country were equally demonstrative of natural gladness that the war was at an end, no matter how. The king was not pleased with the peace. He said to lord Malmesbury, "Do you know what I call the Peace ?-an experimental Peace, for it is nothing else. But it was unavoidable." The marquis Cornwallis was appointed as plenipotentiary to conduct the negotiations at Amiens. He arrived in Paris on the 7th of November. He had two audiences of the First Consul; and then went to Amiens, to negotiate with Lucien Bonaparte. New demands were set up by the French, although they had originally professed to adhere to the preliminary treaty. At the end of January, Cornwallis had lost confidence in the negotiations terminating happily. Bonaparte had gone to Lyons, and had there accepted, from the deputies of the Cisalpine Republic, the Presidency of those States-in other words, the sovereignty. Nevertheless, the English government desired to conclude the peace, it can be obtained on terms consistent with our honour.' The Definitive Treaty was signed on the 27th of March, without any material variation from the Preliminaries. The question of Malta, upon which the war was ostensibly renewed, was left in a very ambiguous position. There was no ambiguity about Great Britain surrendering all the conquests she had made in the war, except Ceylon, taken from the Dutch, and Trinidad, taken from the Spaniards. The French were to evacuate Naples and the Papal States. Egypt was to be restored to the Sultan. The Republic of the Seven Ionian Islands was to be recognized. The integrity of Portugal was guaranteed. The French retained all that they had acquired in Europe by the war.

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CHAPTER LVI.

Ar the prorogation of Parliament on the 28th of June, Mr. Speaker Abbot, in addressing the king, said, "We now indulge the flattering hope that we may cultivate the arts of peace." The country generally did not indulge that hope. The people began "at last to apprehend that neither credit, satisfaction, nor even security, had been attained by the treaty of Amiens." Two months only had passed since the conclusion of that treaty, when Bonaparte found grounds of offence in paragraphs against him which continued to appear in the English papers. More serious cause of offence had been given on his part. Very soon after the conclusion of the peace, the First Consul had sent an army to Berne. In September, Piedmont had been formally annexed to the French territory. The First Consul had stipulated with the Batavian Republic, that he would withdraw the French auxiliary troops on the conclusion of the definitive treaty. At the end of October the British minister at the Hague reported that 11,000 French soldiers were halted on the Dutch frontiers, and that their pay and maintenance were demanded from the Batavian government. Whilst the negotiations at Amiens were proceeding, the French government was preparing an expedition upon the largest scale for the destruction of the government in St. Domingo, where, after a long struggle, the military genius and the political sagacity of Toussaint L'Ouverture had succeeded in establishing the civil and military dominion of free negroes, of which government he was the undisputed head-exercising a strict but just sway which allowed the agriculture and commerce of the great island to attain some degree of their ancient prosperity. Toussaint had manifested his confidence in the French by sending his children to be educated in Paris. A fleet of nearly a hundred and forty vessels, with twenty-one thousand troops, sailed from France on the 14th of December, 1801. Toussaint resisted for some time, knowing that the object of the French was to re-establish slavery, as they had done in Guadaloupe. Some of his generals were won over by the generals of Bonaparte, on receiving promises of honours and rewards, and Toussaint was finally compelled to submit. He retired to his farm in the mountains, where he remained for two months. But, being invited to a conference with the French generals, he left his retreat, was arrested, and with his wife and children was taken on board a vessel of war and carried to Brest. He was finally immured in the castle of Joux, near Besançon ; was subjected to the most frightful severities; and died there on the 27th of April, 1803.

The government of Mr. Addington had made some feeble remonstrances against the restless ambition of Bonaparte, who had now become Consul for life, with power to choose his successor. "A more absolute despotism," writes Romilly from Paris in September, "than that which now exists here, France never experienced." When the session of the new parliament was opened on the 23rd of November, the king's Speech

A.D. 1803.

SYMPTOMS OF RENEWAL OF WAR.

749

recommended that the means of security for preserving peace should be adopted. These means were represented by a vote for 129,000 land forces, and 50,000 seamen and marines. The necessity for an additional military establishment was supported by the statement that France had a total regular force of 427,000 men, and altogether had at command 929,000 men. The vote for additional seamen was urged as an imperious necessity, required on account of "a large armament being fitted out in the ports of a rival nation."

In the Moniteur of the 30th of January, 1803, Bonaparte published a Report of colonel Sebastiani, who had been sent by him to explore Egypt and Syria. This report betrayed views of hostile aggrandizement as regarded Great Britain, and, in consequence, the Cabinet directed lord Whitworth, our ambassador, to declare that until a full and unequivocal explanation was given, the fulfilment of the article of the treaty of Amiens respecting Malta could not be expected. Lord Whitworth had an audience of Bonaparte on the 18th of February, who harangued the ambassador for two hours, on the bad feeling shown towards him by England, and finally declared that he would not provoke war, but that he had an army of 400,000 men, with which he would attack us at home, command the expedition himself, run all risks, and sacrifice army after army till he succeeded. Within a day or two of this memorable interview, another cause of offence was blown by the winds over the straits of Dover. One of the French papers published in London, L'Ambigu, conducted by M. Peltier, a royalist emigrant, contained many bitter reproaches and insinuations against Bonaparte. The First Consul required that Peltier should be banished, but he was told that the law alone could give him redress. He then demanded the prosecution of Peltier by the attorney-general for “ libel on a friendly government." Mr. Perceval opened the case for the crown; Mr. Mackintosh defended Peltier. The jury returned a verdict for the crown. But the triumph of the First Consul in this impartial verdict of an English jury against an unscrupulous writer, must have been a small compensation for the surpassing eloquence of the English advocate, which was in reality the manifesto of the nation.

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On the 8th of March, a Royal Message was delivered to Parliament, for calling out the militia, "in consequence of the preparations carrying on in the ports of France and Holland, whilst important discussions are subsisting between his majesty and the French government." On the 13th, an extraordinary scene between Bonaparte and the British ambassador took place at the Court of the Tuileries, in the presence of two hundred persons, including the foreign ministers. Why armaments?" asked Bonaparte. "Against whom are these measures of precaution? I have not a ship of the line in the ports of France. But if you desire to arm, I also will arm; if you will fight, I will fight. You may destroy France, but you cannot intimidate her." There were two months more of diplomacy, but this scene at the Tuileries was the beginning of the end. The first orders that bore upon his design to carry into England one of the armies that had conquered Europe, date from the day when the First Consul first heard of the Message to Parliament of the king of England. On the 18th of May, the Declaration of War, and the various documents

by which the final measure was to be supported, were laid upon the tables of the two Houses of Parliament.

During the months of March and April a negotiation had been going on for the return of Mr. Pitt to power, in conjunction with Mr. Addington. Pitt would not come into office in the manner proposed. But he was tired, and so were his friends, of bolstering up a feeble government. On the 23rd of May, when the king's Message was to be taken into consideration in the House of Commons, Pitt made the finest speech, says Malmesbury, he ever made-strong in support of war, but silent as to ministers. Neither Pitt nor Fox voted for the condemnatory resolutions that were proposed, and Addington had therefore a large majority. Whoever was minister at that crisis, and would carry on the war vigorously, would have the support of the country. Bonaparte had committed an outrage upon British subjects which roused the national feeling. Two French vessels had been captured under English letters of marque. The First Consul, under the plea, which was a false one, that these captures had been made before the general declaration of war, arrested ten thousand English travellers in France. He detained them in captivity till his abdication in 1814 restored most of them to their homes. And now there was only one mind in Great Britain. "The land bristled." A patriotic Declaration was written by Mackintosh, and agreed to at the Royal Exchange amidst the cheers of five thousand of the most eminent citizens. Every town and city of the provinces made a similar declaration.

It had become a sort of popular tradition in France that an army might be transported from Calais to Dover in flat-bottomed boats. France, by a common movement of its departments and its towns, offered flat-bottomed boats to the government. These boats were to be built in the interior, and, creeping along the shores from the mouths of various rivers, to be united in the ports of La Manche, where they were to take on board a hundred and fifty thousand men, ten thousand horses, and four hundred pieces of ordnance. On the 23rd of June, the First Consul, accompanied by Madame Bonaparte, set out to visit the coasts of the Channel from the Seine to the Scheldt. In the autumn of 1803 his plans of invasion were becoming mature. A portion of his army was to invade Ireland from Brest. There were Irish fugitives in France with whom the First Consul negotiated. He would send an expedition of eighteen thousand men, with an ample supply of arms, if they would furnish twenty thousand insurgents. Robert Emmett, who with his elder brother had been implicated in the Rebellion, had returned to Ireland in 1802, and had set about organizing a new rebellion. The peace was not at an end when young Emmett began to swear in conspirators. On the 23rd of July-the government being aware that mischief was brooding-the insurrection broke out in Dublin. It was marked by an act of peculiar atrocity-the murder of the venerable lord Kilwarden, the Lord Chief Justice, a man of the most upright and amiable character, who came amongst an armed mob, in his carriage, accompanied by his daughter. The nephew of lord Kilwarden was also murdered. The daughter escaped. The insurrection, if so it can be called, was put down in a few hours. Robert Emmett was tried, and was executed with others, whose names are forgotten.

A.D. 1803.

MENTAL PROSTRATION OF GEORGE III.

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There were a hundred and twenty thousand Frenchmen encamped at Boulogne and its neighbourhood. The First Consul passed much of his time amongst these troops. He put them through exercises on land and on water. In England nearly four hundred thousand men, providing their own clothing, receiving no pay, having no privilege but what they considered an exemption from being balloted for the militia, had sprung up at a word. At Walmer Castle William Pitt had taken the command of three thousand volunteers. What Pitt was doing as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports was being done by every Lord-Lieutenant of England and of Scotland. Minister or mechanic, lawyer or labourer, peer or peasant, all were inspired by one spirit. On the 26th of October, the king reviewed the Volunteers of London in Hyde Park-twelve thousand four hundred. On the 28th the king reviewed fourteen thousand six hundred of the Volunteers of Westminster, Lambeth, and Southwark. During six months of the Session, which the king opened on the 22nd of November, night after night was spent in reprobation, or in defence, of the Volunteer system. Pitt stood up steadily for supporting and encouraging the Volunteers. He truly said that ministers had rather retarded and enfeebled the volunteer system, than contributed anything to its force and efficiency. The want of arms was a formidable obstacle to the efficiency of the Volunteers. In March the government set up works at the Tower "for stocking and fitting muskets." In April they were able to stock 350 in one week.

On the 12th of February the king's mind was again affected. He remained incapable of transacting business in public till the 23rd of April, but he was able to perform the mere formal acts of sovereignty. Mr. Pitt, on the 22nd of April, wrote a letter to the king, stating that he could not, consistently with a sense of duty, forbear any longer a direct opposition to the measures of administration. There was some negotiation, through the Chancellor, respecting a new administration, at the head of which Mr. Pitt should be. Pitt finally wrote to lord Eldon, proposing that an administration should be formed on a broad basis, "combining the best talents and the great weight of property of the country ;" and with that view earnestly recommended including lord Grenville and his friends, and Mr. Fox and his friends. This letter was submitted to the king on the 2nd of May, and his majesty replied on the 6th. He required of Pitt, before he would consent that he should form an administration, that he would never agitate or support Catholic Emancipation or the Repeal of the Test Act. To the admission of Mr. Fox in the administration the king expressed an absolute negative. The Grenvilles refused to take office without Fox. In an evil hour Pitt accepted the post of prime minister, under the limitations prescribed by the king. On the 10th of May, Addington resigned.

On the 17th of February, the French Minister of Justice made a Report to the First Consul, of the discovery of a conspiracy. It begins thus :"New plots have been hatched by England." The Report implicates Pichegru, Georges, and Moreau-with others designated as brigands. Georges and Pichegru, after some time had elapsed, were apprehended. Georges was executed; Pichegru was found strangled in prison; and Moreau was exiled. The complicity of the Addington ministry with the scheme of