TWO:Government now resorted to vigorous measures; the Chartist leaders were brought to trial, and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. At a meeting of the National Convention held on the 14th of September, it was moved by Mr. O'Brien, and seconded by Dr. Taylor, that the Convention be dissolved. On a division, the numbers were for the dissolution eleven; against it eleven. The chairman gave his casting vote in favour of the dissolution. It was thereupon hoped, and, indeed, publicly declared by the Attorney-General, that Chartism was extinct and would never again be revived. It soon appeared, however, that this was a delusion, and that a most formidable attempt at revolution by force of arms had been planned with great care and secrecy, and on a comprehensive scale, the principal leader being a justice of the peace. Among the new borough magistrates made by the Whigs after the passing of the Reform Bill was Mr. John Frost, a linendraper at Newport. At the beginning of the Chartist agitation in 1838 Mr. Frost attended a meeting in that town, when he made a violent speech, for which he was reprimanded by the Home Secretary. But this warning was far from having the desired effect. During the autumn of 1839 he entered into a conspiracy with two other leadersJones, a watchmaker, of Pontypool, and Williams, of the Royal Oak Inn, in the parish of Aberystwithto take possession of the town of Newport, which was to be the signal for a simultaneous rising of the Chartists in Birmingham and in all other parts of the kingdom. But the weather was unfavourable and the night was dark. The divisions under the command of Jones and Williams failed to arrive at the appointed time, and the party under the command of Frost himself was late. The intention was to surprise Newport at about midnight on Sunday, the 3rd of November; but owing to the wetness of the weather it was not till ten o'clock on Monday morning that the insurgents entered the town in two divisions, one headed by Frost, and another by his son, a youth of fourteen or fifteen. They were armed with guns, pistols, pikes, swords, and heavy clubs. The mayor, Mr. Thomas Philips, apprised of their approach, had taken prompt measures for the defence of the place.
TWO:Though Buonaparte had been absent, his family had taken care to keep public opinion alive to his importance. His wife, Josephine, lived at great expense, and collected around her all that was distinguished in society. His brother Lucien had become President of the Council of Five Hundred; and Joseph, a man much respected, kept a hospitable house, and did much to maintain the Buonaparte prestige. Talleyrand and Fouch were already in Napoleon's interest, and Bernadotte, now Minister of War, Jourdain, and Augereau, as generals, were prepared to act with him. The Abb Siys, with his perpetual constitution-making, had also been working in a way to facilitate his schemes. He had planned a new and most complicated constitution, known as that of the year Eight, by which the executive power was vested in three Consuls. Of the five Directors Buonaparte left in office, the most active had been removed; Abb Siys had succeeded Rewbell, and two men of no ability, Gohier and Moulins, had succeeded others. Roger Ducos, also in the interest of Buonaparte, made the fifth. All measures being prepared, on the 18th Brumaire, that is, the 10th of November, Buonaparte proceeded to enact the part of Cromwell, and usurp the chief authority of the State, converting the Republic into a military dictatorship. The army had shown, on his return, that they were devoted to his service. Jourdain, Bernadotte, Moreau, and Augereau were willing to co-operate in a coup-de-main which should make the army supreme. He therefore assembled three regiments of dragoons on pretence of reviewing them, and, everything being ready, he proceeded to the Council of Ancients, in which the moderate, or reactionary, party predominated, on the evening of the 10th of November. They placidly gave way in the midst of a most excited debate on the menaced danger, and every member, including Lucien Buonaparte, who was the President, had just been compelled to take an oath to maintain inviolable the Constitution of the year Three, when Napoleon entered, attended by four grenadiers of the Constitutional Guard of the Councils. The soldiers remained near the door, Napoleon advanced up the hall uncovered. There were loud murmurs. "What!" exclaimed the members, "soldiersdrawn swords in the sanctuary of the laws!" They rushed upon him, and seized him by the collar, shouting, "Outlawry! outlawry! proclaim him a traitor!" For a moment he shrank before them, but soon at the instigation of Siys returned, and quietly expelled them. Thus Buonaparte, with an army at his back, was openly dictator. He removed to the Palace of the Luxembourg, and assumed a state little inferior to royalty. He revised the Constitution of the Abb Siys, concentrating all the power of the State in the First Consul, instead of making him, as he expressed it, a personage whose only duties were to fatten, like a pig, upon so many millions a-year.The night was cold, and the two armies lay on the ground. In the middle of the night Anderson of Whitburgh, a gentleman whose father had been out in the 'Fifteen and who knew the country well, suddenly recollected a way across the bog to the right. He communicated this to Hepburn of Keith and Lord George Murray, who went to waken the prince, who, sitting up in his heap of pea-straw, received the news with exultation. He started up, a council was called, and as it drew towards morning it was resolved to follow Anderson as their guide immediately. An aide-de-camp was despatched to recall Lord Nairn and his five hundred, and the army marched after Anderson in profound silence. It was not without some difficulty that they crossed it, after all; some of the soldiers sank knee-deep, and the prince himself stumbled and fell. When they reached the firm ground the mounted pickets heard the sound of their march, though they could not see them for the thick fog. The dragoon sentinels demanded who went there, fired their pistols, and galloped off to give the alarm.
TWO:On the 23rd of October Napoleon reached Erfurt, whose fortifications afforded him the means of two days' delay, to collect his scattered forces. As they came straggling in, in a most wretched condition, and without arms, his patience forsook him, and he exclaimed, "They are a set of scoundrels, who are going to the devil! I shall lose[72] eighty thousand before I get to the Rhine!" In fact, he had only eighty thousand men left, besides another eighty thousand in the garrisons in the north of Germanythus also lost to him. Of his two hundred and eighty thousand men, had utterly perished one hundred and twenty thousand. He sent orders to those in the garrisons to form a junction in the valley of the Elbe, and so fight their way home; but this was not practicable; and in a few months they all surrendered, on conditions. He here dismissed such of the Saxons and Baden troops as remained with him, and offered the same freedom to the Poles; but these brave menwith a generosity to which the betrayer of their country had no claimrefused to disband till they had seen him safe over the Rhine. Murat, with less fidelity, took his leave again, on the plea of raising troops on the frontiers of France to facilitate Napoleon's retreat, but in reality to get away to Naples and make terms for himself.On the 12th of October General Howe, who would have been better employed in driving the enemy before him than in waiting for his brother's useless negotiations, sent a considerable part of his forces, with flat-bottomed boats, through Hell Gate into the Sound, and landed them at Frog's Neck, about nine miles in the rear of Washington's position, thus cutting off all his supplies from the country. The ships ascended higher up the North River, cutting off the retreat into the Jerseys. Had Howe, instead of landing at Frog's Neck, done so at Pell's Point, he would have rendered Washington's retreat nearly impossible. But this was neglected till the 18th of October, by which time Washington, finding that he was getting gradually hemmed in, and Lee, who had now joined him from Sullivan's Island and the Carolinas, insisting that nothing but instant retreat could save them, they therefore made a rapid retreat into the open country called the White Plains. They had much difficulty in carrying away their artillery; and the whole of it must have been taken, had Howe shown any ordinary activity. Between this date and the 21st there was considerable skirmishing, which compelled Washington to retire farther into the White Plains, and from thence towards the Delaware.
TWO:MR. ALEXANDER'S LEVES IN KING'S BENCH PRISON. (See p. 310.)
