reason, of harbouring revolutionary designs. The return of the Channel fleet to its duty emboldened the admiralty to refuse any concessions, and the vigorous measures of repression taken proved effective. One by one the mutinous crews surrendered; and the arrest of the ringleader, Richard Parker, on board the “Sandwich,” on the 14th of June, brought the affair to an end.[1] Battle of Camperdown. The seamen regained their reputation, and those who had been imprisoned their liberty, by Duncan’s victory over the Dutch fleet at Camperdown (October 11), by which the immediate danger was averted. Though the French attempt at a concerted invasion had failed, however, the Directory did not abandon the enterprise, and commissioned Bonaparte to draw up fresh plans.
At the close of the year 1797 the position of Great Britain was indeed sufficiently alarming. On the 18th of April, during the very crisis of the mutiny at Spithead, Austria had signed with Bonaparte the humiliating terms of the preliminary peace of Leoben, which six months later were embodied in the treaty of Campo Formio (October 17). On the 10th of August Portugal had concluded a treaty with the French Republic; and Great Britain was left without an ally in Europe. The mutiny at the Nore, the threat of rebellion in Ireland, the alarming fall in consols, argued strongly against continuing the war single-handed, and in July Lord Malmesbury had been sent to Lille to open fresh negotiations with the plenipotentiaries of France. The negotiations broke down on the refusal of England to restore the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch. But though forced, in spite of misgivings, to continue the struggle, the British government in one very important respect was now in a far better position to do so. For though Great Britain was now isolated and her policy in Europe advertised as a failure, the temper of the British people was less inclined to peace in 1798 than it had been three years before. The early enthusiasm of the disfranchised classes for French principles had cooled with the later developments of the Revolution; the attempted invasions had roused the national spirit; and in the public imagination the sinister figure of Bonaparte, the rapacious conqueror, was beginning to loom large to the exclusion of lesser issues. Henceforth, in spite of press prosecutions and trials for political libel, the government was supported by public opinion in its vigorous prosecution of the war.
If the danger of French invasion was a reality, it was so mainly owing to the deplorable condition of Ireland, where the natural disaffection of the Roman Catholic majority of the population—deprived of political and many social rights, and exposed to the insults and oppression The Act of Union with Ireland. of a Protestant minority corrupted by centuries of ascendancy—invited the intervention of a foreign enemy. The full measure of the intolerable conditions prevailing in the country was revealed by the horrors of the rebellion of 1798, and after this had been suppressed Pitt decided that the only way to deal with the situation was to establish a union between Great Britain and Ireland, similar to that which had proved so successful in the case of England and Scotland. He saw that to establish peace in Ireland the Roman Catholics would have to be enfranchised; he realized that to enfranchise them in a separated Ireland would be to subject the proud Protestant minority to an impossible domination, and to establish not peace but war. The Union, then, was in his view the necessary preliminary to Catholic emancipation, which was at the same time the reward held out to the majority of the Irish people for the surrender of their national quasi-independence. It was a bribe little likely to appeal to the Protestant minority which constituted the Irish parliament, and to them other inducements had to be offered if the scheme was to be carried through. These inducements were not all corrupt. Those members who stood out were, indeed, bought by a lavish distribution of money and coronets; but the advantages to Ireland which might reasonably be expected from the Union were many and obvious; and if all the promises held out by the promoters of the measure have even now not been realized, the fault is not theirs. The Act of Union was placed on the statute-book in 1800; Catholic emancipation was to have been accomplished in the following session, the first of the united parliament. But Pitt’s policy broke on the stubborn obstinacy of George III., who believed himself bound by his coronation oath to resist any concession to the enemies of the Established Church. The disadvantage of the possession of too strait a conscience in politics was never Resignation of Pitt. more dismally illustrated. To the Irish people it was the first breach of faith in connexion with the Union, and threw them into opposition to a settlement into which they believed themselves to have been drawn under false pretences. Pitt, realizing this, had no option but to resign.
The resignation of the great minister who had so long held the reins of power coincided with a critical situation in Europe. The isolation of Bonaparte in Egypt, as the result of Nelson’s victory of the Nile (1798), had enabled the allies to recover some of the ground lost to France. Bonaparte breaks up the coalition. But this had merely increased Bonaparte’s prestige, and on his return in 1799 he found no difficulty in making himself master of France by the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. The campaign of Marengo followed (1800) and the peace of Lunéville, which not only once more isolated Great Britain, but raised up against her new enemies, to the list of whom she added by using her command of the sea to enforce the right of search in order to seize enemies’ goods in neutral vessels. Russia joined with Sweden and Denmark, all hitherto friendly powers, in resistance to this claim.
Such was the position when Addington became prime minister.
He was a man of weak character and narrow intellect, whose
main claim to succeed Pitt was that he shared to
the full the Protestant prejudices of king and people.
His tenure of power was, indeed, marked by British
Addington ministry.
The peace
of Amiens.
successes abroad; by Nelson’s victory at Copenhagen, which
broke up the northern alliance, and by Abercromby’s victory
at Alexandria, which forced the French to evacuate Egypt;
but these had been prepared by the previous administration.
Addington’s real work was the peace of Amiens (1802),
an experimental peace, as the king called it, to see
if the First Consul could be contented to restrain
himself within the very wide limits by which his authority in
Europe was still circumscribed.
In a few months Great Britain was made aware that the experiment would not succeed. Interference and annexation became the standing policy of the new French government; and Britain, discovering how little intention Bonaparte had of carrying out the spirit of the treaty, Renewal of the war. refused to abandon Malta, as she had engaged to do by the terms of peace. The war began again, no longer a war against revolutionary principles and their propaganda, but against the boundless ambitions of a military conqueror. This time the British nation was all but unanimous in resistance. This time its resistance would be sooner or later supported by all that was healthy in Europe. The news that Bonaparte was making preparations on a vast scale for the invasion of England roused a stubborn spirit of resistance in the country. Volunteers were enrolled, and the coast was dotted with Martello towers, many of which yet remain as monuments of the time when the “army of England” was encamped on the heights near Boulogne within sight of the English cliffs. To meet so great a crisis Addington was not the man. He had been ceaselessly assailed, in and out of parliament, by the trenchant criticism, and often unmannerly wit, of “Pitt’s friends,” among whom George Canning was now conspicuous. Pitt himself had remained silent; but in view of the seriousness of the crisis and of a threatened illness of the king, which would have necessitated a regency and—in view of the prince of Wales’s dislike for him—his own permanent exclusion from office, he now put himself forward once more. The government majorities in the House now rapidly dwindled; on the 26th of April 1804, Addington resigned; and Pitt, after his attempt to form a national coalition ministry had broken
- ↑ A vivid account of the mutiny and its causes is given in Captain Marryat’s King’s Own.
