Page:EB1911 - Volume 09.djvu/586

Rh down on the king’s refusal to admit Fox, became head of a government constructed on a narrow Tory basis. Of the members of the late government Lord Eldon, the duke

of Portland, Lord Westmorland, Lord Castlereagh and Lord Hawkesbury retained office, the latter surrendering the foreign office to Lord Harrowby and going to the home office. Dundas, now Lord Melville, became first lord of the admiralty, and the cabinet further included Lord Camden, Lord Mulgrave and the duke of Montrose. Canning, Huskisson and Perceval were given subordinate offices.

Save for the commanding personality of Pitt, the new government was scarcely stronger than that which it had replaced. It had to face the same Whig opposition, led by Fox, who scoffed at the French peril, and reinforced by Addington and his friends; and the whole burden of meeting this opposition fell upon Pitt; for Castlereagh, the only other member of the cabinet in the House of Commons, was of little use in debate. Nevertheless, fresh vigour was infused into the conduct of the war. The Additional Forces Act, passed in the teeth of a strenuous opposition, introduced the principle of a modified system of compulsion to supplement the deficiencies of the army and reserve, while the navy was largely increased. Abroad, Pitt’s whole energies were directed to forming a fresh coalition against Bonaparte, who, on the 14th of May 1804, had proclaimed himself emperor of the French; but it was a year before Russia signed with Great Britain the treaty of St Petersburg (April 11, 1805), and the accession to the coalition of Austria, Sweden and

Naples was not obtained till the following September. In the following month (October 21) Nelson’s crowning victory at Trafalgar over the allied fleets of France and Spain relieved England of the dread of invasion. It served, however, to precipitate the crisis on the continent of Europe; the great army assembled at Boulogne was turned eastwards; by the capitulation of Ulm (October 19) Austria lost a large part of her forces; and the last news that reached Pitt on his

death-bed was that of the ruin of all his hopes by the crushing victory of Napoleon over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz (December 2).

Pitt died on the 23rd of January, and the refusal of Lord Hawkesbury to assume the premiership forced the king to summon Lord Grenville, and to agree to the inclusion of Fox in the cabinet as secretary for foreign affairs. Several members of Pitt’s administration were admitted

to this “Ministry of all the Talents,” including Addington (now Lord Sidmouth), who had rejoined the ministry in December 1804 and again resigned, owing to a disagreement with Pitt as to the charges against (q.v.) in July 1805. The new ministry remained in office for a year, a disastrous year which saw the culmination of Napoleon’s power: the crushing of Prussia in the campaign of Jena, the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine and the end of the Holy Roman Empire. In the conduct of the war the British government had displayed little skill, frittering away its forces on distant expeditions, instead of concentrating them in support of Prussia or Russia, and the chief title to fame of the Ministry of all the Talents is that it secured the passing of the bill for the abolition of the slave-trade (March 25, 1807).

The death of Fox (September 13, 1806) deprived the ministry of its strongest member, and in the following March it fell on the old question of concessions to the Roman Catholics. True to his principles, Fox had done his best to negotiate terms of peace with Napoleon; but the breakdown

of the attempt had persuaded even the Whigs that an arrangement was impossible, and in view of this fact Grenville thought it his duty to advise the king that the disabilities of Roman Catholics and dissenters in the matter of serving in the army and navy should be removed, in order that all sections of the nation might be united in face of the enemy. The situation, moreover, was in the highest degree anomalous; for by an act passed in 1793 Roman Catholics might hold commissions in the army in Ireland up to the rank of colonel, and this right had not been extended to England, though by the Act of Union the armies had become one. The king, however, was not to be moved from his position; and he was supported in this attitude not only by public opinion, but by a section of the ministry itself, of which Sidmouth made himself the mouthpiece. The demand of George III. that ministers should undertake never again to approach him on the subject of concessions to the Catholics was rejected by Grenville, rightly, as unconstitutional, and on the 18th of March 1807 he resigned.

The new ministry, under the nominal headship of the valetudinarian duke of Portland, included Perceval as chancellor of the exchequer, Canning as foreign secretary and Castlereagh as secretary for war and the colonies. It had given the undertaking demanded by the king;

those of its members who, like Canning, were in favour of Catholic emancipation, arguing that, in view of greater and more pressing questions, it was useless to insist in a matter which could never be settled so long as the old king lived. Of more importance to Great Britain, for the time being, than any constitutional issues, was the life-and-death struggle with Napoleon, which had now entered on a new phase. Defeated at sea, but master now of the greater part of the continent of Europe, the French emperor planned to bring Great Britain

to terms by ruining her commerce with the vast territories under his influence. In November 1806 he issued from Berlin the famous decree prohibiting the importation of British goods and excluding from the harbours under his control even neutral ships that had touched at British ports. The British government replied by the famous Orders in Council of 1807, which declared all vessels trading with France liable to seizure, and that all such vessels clearing from France must touch at a British port to pay customs duties. To this Napoleon responded with the Milan decree (December 17), forbidding neutrals to trade in any articles imported from the British dominions. The effects of these measures were destined to be far-reaching. The Revolution had made war on princes and privilege, and the common people had in general gained wherever the Napoleonic régime had been substituted for their effete despotisms; but the “Continental System” was felt as an oppression in every humble household, suddenly deprived of the little imported luxuries, such as sugar and coffee, which custom had made necessaries; and from this time date the beginnings of that popular revolt against Napoleon that was to culminate in the War of Liberation. Great Britain, too, was to suffer from her own retaliatory policy. The Americans

had taken advantage of the war to draw into their own hands a large part of the British carrying trade, a process greatly encouraged by the establishment of the Continental System. This brought them into conflict with the British acting under the Orders in Council, and the consequent ill-feeling culminated in the war of 1812.

It was not only the completion of the Continental System, however, that made the year 1807 a fateful one for Great Britain. On the 7th of July the young emperor Alexander I. of Russia, fascinated by Napoleon’s genius and bribed by the offer of a partition of the world, concluded the

treaty of Tilsit, which not only brought Russia into the Continental System, but substituted for a coalition against France a formidable coalition against England. A scheme for wresting from the British the command of the sea was only defeated by Canning’s action in ordering the English fleet to capture the Danish navy, though Denmark was still nominally a friendly power (see ). Meanwhile, in order to complete the ring fence round Europe against British commerce, Napoleon had ordered Junot to invade Portugal;

Lisbon was occupied by the French, and the Portuguese royal family migrated to Brazil. In the following year Napoleon seized the royal family of Spain, and gave the crown, which Charles VI. resigned on behalf of himself and his heir, to his brother Joseph, king of Naples. The revolt of the Spanish people that followed was the first of