TWO:Such was the condition into which an army and navy, once illustrious through the victories of Marlborough and Blake, were reduced by the aristocratic imbecility of the Newcastles, Bedfords, and Cumberlands. This last princely general had, in fact, put the climax to his career. He had placed himself at the head of fifty thousand confederate troops, in which there were no English, except the officers of his own staff, to defend his father's Electorate of Hanover. But this ruthless general, who never won a battle except the solitary one of Culloden, against a handful of famished men, was found totally incompetent to cope with the French general, d'Estres. He allowed the French to cross the deep and rapid Weser, and continued to fall back before them as they entered the Electorate, until he was driven to the village of Hastenbeck, near Hameln, where the enemy overtook and defeated him. He then continued his retreat across the desolate Lüneburg Heath, to cover Stade, near the mouth of the Elbe, where the archives and other valuable effects of Hanover had been deposited for safety. At this time Richelieu succeeded to the command of d'Estres in this quarter, and he continued to drive Cumberland before him, taking Hameln, G?ttingen, and Hanover itself, and soon after Bremen and Verden. Thus were Hanover and Verden, which had cost England such millions to defend, seized by France; nor did the disgrace end here. Cumberland was cooped up in Stade, and compelled, on the 8th of December, to sign a convention at Closter-Seven, by which he engaged to send home the Hesse and Brunswick troops, and to disperse the Hanoverians into different quarters, not to serve again during the war.
TWO:But though the abandonment, for the present, of this enterprise, so fondly cherished by France, was calculated to cast a damp on the country, Buonaparte had another project ready which flattered the French pride of conquest. This was to seize on Egypt, as the preliminary to the fall of Britain. He had for some time entertained this idea, and had written from Italy to the Directory on the subject in the previous September. To insure the real destruction of England, he said, they must make themselves masters of Egypt. Malta and Corfu must be seized first, and for this purpose he conceived eight or ten sail of the line and twenty-five thousand men would suffice. The possession of Egypt, he contended, would draw all the commerce of the East thither, instead of taking the circuitous route by the Cape of Good Hope. He had thoroughly inspired Talleyrand with his scheme. Egypt was imagined to be much more wealthy than it was, and there were monuments of ancient art for Buonaparte and his right-hand bandit, Monge, to lay hands on. The Directory, which was extremely unpopular, uneasy at the presence of so popular and daring a person, were glad to be rid of him anywhere, the farther off the better. There were not wanting counsellors who already advised him to perpetrate a coup d'tat, and place himself at the head of affairs; but Buonaparte, not at all averse from the prospect, replied, "The pear is not ripe." He knew that, however popular with his own army, he was looked on with jealousy by the army of the Rhine, which served under, and prided themselves in, Moreau. He knew that the middle classes hated him for sweeping them away with grape-shot in the affair of the Sections. He hoped to make[465] himself yet more popular and more necessary, and that in the meantime the Directory would have completed their full measure of odium. He now therefore plunged into arrangements for this grand conquest of the East.The Government now resolved to follow up the vigorous step they had so tardily taken, by the prosecution of O'Connell and several leading members of the Association. They were arrested in Dublin on the 14th of October, charged with conspiracy, sedition, and unlawful assembly. The other gentlemen included in the prosecution were Mr. John O'Connell, Mr. Thomas Steele, Mr. Ray, Secretary to the Repeal Association, Dr. Gray, proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, Mr. Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, Mr. Barrett, of the Pilot, and the Rev. Messrs. Tyrrell and Tierney, Roman Catholic priests. Mr. O'Connell, with his two sons and several friends, immediately on his arrest, went to the house of Mr. Justice Burton, and entered into recognisances, himself in 1,000, with two sureties of 500 each. The tone of Mr. O'Connell was now suddenly changed. From being inflammatory, warlike, and defiant, it became intensely pacific, and he used his utmost efforts to calm the minds of the people, to lay the storm he had raised, and to soothe the feelings he had irritated by angry denunciations of the "Saxon." That obnoxious word was now laid aside, being, at his request, struck out of the Repeal vocabulary, because it gave offence. Real conciliation was now the order of the day.
TWO:The Spaniards had at length made Lord Wellington Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish armies,[56] but this appointment was little more than nominal, for the Spanish generals continued as froward and insubordinate as ever; and the Spanish Government was poorer than ever, its remittances from the South American colonies, which were asserting their independence, being stopped. Wellington's dependence, therefore, continued to rest on his army of British and Portuguesesixty-three thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry.
TWO:There were rumours of negotiations going on for a return of Pitt to power; but as Mr. Addington showed no disposition to resign altogether in favour of Pitt, these came to nothing. Already in the previous November Canning and Lord Malmesbury, two of Pitt's most zealous supporters, had set on foot an address to Addington begging him to resign. But this plan was abruptly stopped by Pitt himself, who felt that he was to a certain extent the creator of the Ministry. Now Addington made overtures to Pitt through Dundas, become Lord Melville. But his propositions were absurd. He stipulated that Greville and Windham, who had opposed the Peace of Amiens, should be excluded from the arrangements. He also wished that Pitt's brother, Lord Chatham, should be the nominal Prime Minister, while he and Pitt should be equal secretaries. At this, Pitt put a stop to the envoy's conversation. "Upon my word," he said afterwards, "I had not the curiosity to ask what I was to be." So England engaged in war, with her greatest statesman excluded from office.Parliament met on the 15th of November, and the very first object which engaged the attention of both Houses was Wilkes. In such fiery haste were Ministers, that Lord Sandwich, in the Peers, started up, before the king's speech could be considered, and declared that he held in his hand a most filthy and atrocious libel, written by Wilkes, called "An Essay on Woman." Wilkes never had published the filth. He had written, as it appeared, by the assistance of a profligate and now deceased son of Archbishop Potter, this "Essay on Woman;" but he had never published it. It had lain in his desk, and had only been read to two personsone of whom was Sandwich himself. When Wilkes, however, was driven to set up a printing press in his own house, he had printed a dozen copies of the "Essay on Woman," to give to his dissolute friends, whom he used to meet at the Dilettanti Club, in Palace Yard. Sandwich, aware of the existence of the essay, had bribed one of Wilkes's printers, named Curry, to lend him a copy of it, and had paid him five guineas as a guarantee for its safe return. The whole thing was a stupid parody of Pope's "Essay on Man;" in which, instead of the inscription to Bolingbroke, commencing "Awake, my St. John!" there appeared an invocation beginning, "Awake, my Sandwich!" and there were also ridiculous notes attributed to Warburton.
