THREE:THE COSSACK'S CHALLENGE. (See p. 42.)When the Bourbons had entered Paris in 1814 they had shown the utmost liberality towards those who had driven them from France and had murdered those of their family on the throne and nearest to it. They did not imitate the summary vengeance of Napoleon, whose Government, in 1812, had put to death not only General Mallet, who had endeavoured to restore the Bourbons, but also thirteen of his accomplices, on the plain of Grenelle. When Louis XVIII. returned, there were numbers of the bloody Revolutionists who had voted for, and some who had acted in, the frightful atrocities of the Revolutionmany who had urged on the sufferings, the indignities, and the death of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, the Princess Elizabeth, the Princess Lamballe, and the worst form of death of the unhappy Dauphin. Yet no vengeance was taken, and numbers of these people were allowed to reside unharmed in Paris. Having been now again driven forth, and seen the readiness with which those who had sworn to maintain their Government had taken their oaths and betrayed them, it might have been expected that there would have been some severe punishments. But the natural mildness of Louis XVIII., and the wise counsels of Wellington and Talleyrand, produced a very different scene. Never, after such provocations, and especially to the sensitive natures of Frenchmen, was so much lenity shown. In the proclamation of Louis XVIII. of the 24th of July, nineteen persons only were ordered for trial, and thirty-eight were ordered to quit Paris, and to reside in particular parts of France, under the observation of the police, till their fate should be decided by the Chambers. Of the nineteen threatened with capital punishment, with trial before a military tribunal, only Ney and Labdoyre suffered; another, Lavalette, was condemned, but escaped by changing dresses with his wife in prison. It was also stated that such individuals as should be condemned to exile should be allowed to sell their property in France, and carry the proceeds with them. Yet more clamour was raised by the Buonapartists about the deaths of Ney and Labdoyre than had been made in any executions by the Imperial or the Revolutionary parties over whole hecatombs of innocent persons. As for Ney and Labdoyre, their treason had been so barefaced and outrageous that no reasonable person could expect anything but summary punishment for them. Ney had declared to Louis XVIII. that he would bring Buonaparte to him in a cage, and then carried over his whole army at once to the Emperor. Labdoyre had been equally perjured after the most generous forgiveness of his former treasons, and he had been particularly active in stimulating the Parisians to make a useless resistance to the Allies approaching Paris, by stating that the Bourbons were preparing a most sanguinary proscription. Both officers knew that they had no hope of life, no plea of protection, and they fled in disguise. Yet vehement reproaches were cast on the Duke of Wellington for having, as the Buonapartists asserted, broken the 12th article of the Convention of Paris, by which the city was surrendered to the Allied armies. Madame Ney, after the seizure and condemnation of her husband, went to the Duke, and demanded his interference on the Marshal's behalf, as a right on the ground of this article, which she interpreted as guaranteeing all the inhabitants, of whatever political creed or conduct, from prosecution by the restored Government. It was in vain that Wellington explained to her that this article, and indeed the whole Convention, related solely to the military surrender, and not to the political measures of the Government of Louis, with which the Duke had[115] publicly and repeatedly declared that he had no concern, and in which he would not interfere. When the Commissioners from the Provisional Government had waited on him, so early as the 2nd of July, at Estres, and claimed exemption for political offenders, he showed them the proclamation of Louis, dated Cambray, the 28th of June, making exceptions to the general amnesty, and distinctly told them that he had no orders to interfere with the measures of the Bourbon Government. To this the Commissioners had nothing to object, and they thus clearly understood that the British commander would not take any part in political, but merely in military measures. Nevertheless, when Ney was executed, the clamour was renewed that Wellington had betrayed him. We now anticipate, somewhat, to dispose of this calumny, for there never was a party so recklessly addicted to charging their enemies with breach of faith as that of Buonaparte and his followers. The foul charge was so industriously disseminated over Europe, that Wellington, at Paris, on the 19th of November, 1815, issued a memorial on the subject, which he first caused to be sent to all the Allied Powers and then to be published. In this most decisive document he stated that the Convention of Paris related exclusively to the military occupation of the place, and was never intended, and could not be intended, to prevent either the existing French Government, the Provisional, or any French Government that might succeed it, from acting towards political offenders as it might deem proper. He had refused before to enter into a question of settling the Government. To make this clear, he quoted the 11th article, providing for the non-interference of the Allied army with property; and the 12th:"Seront pareillement respectes les personnes et les proprits particulires; les habitants, et en gnral tous les individus qui se trouvent dans la capitale, continueront jouir de leur droits et liberts sans pouvoir tre inquits, ou recherchs en rein, relativement aux fonctions qu'ils occupent ou avaient occupes, leur conduite, et leur opinions politiques." Labdoyre was shot on the 19th of August, 1815, and Ney on the 7th of December.
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THREE:Towards the end of the year Soult had been recalled to Madrid, to take the place of Jourdain, who was remanded to Paris. Soult then determined to make an expedition into the south, to subdue Seville and Cadizthe last places of[601] consequence left to the Spaniards. He took King Joseph with him, or rather, perhaps, King Joseph was afraid to be left in the capital without his protection. The battle of Oca?a, and the destruction of Areizaga's army, left the passes of the Sierra Morena all open, and on the 21st of January Soult was at Baylen, where the army of Dupont had surrendered. Thence he pushed forward for Seville, sending other divisions of the army to traverse Malaga and Granada. Nothing could be more favourable to the visit of Soult than the then condition of Seville. The stupid, proud, ignorant Junta had refused all proffers of aid from the British, and they had, at the same time, worn out the patience of the people, who had risen upon them, and expelled them from the place. They then fled to Cadiz, in the hope of renewing their authority there; but they met with a still fiercer reception from the people of Cadiz, and were compelled formally to resign. As for the inhabitants of Seville, they talked of defending the city against the French, but there was no order amongst them, no authority, and they did nothing. Soult marched on from town to town, collecting a rich spoil everywhere, which the Spaniards had left behind them. They seemed to think of carrying away with them only their money, but a mass of other wealth fell into the hands of the French, and amongst it, as usual, great quantities of British cannon, muskets, and ammunition, which assisted in enabling the French to fight with us. Soult entered Cordova in triumph on the 17th of January, and Seville on the 1st of February, and there King Joseph established his court for some time.In preparing to meet the invasion of the Allies Napoleon had to encounter the most formidable difficulties. In Russia and in this German campaign he had seen the bulk of his veteran army dissipatednay, destroyed. After all his years of incessant drafts on the life-blood of France, six hundred thousand men could not be readily replaced. To replace a fourth of that number with well-disciplined troops was impossible. He could draw none from Germany, for his boasted Confederation of the Rhine had disappeared as a summer cloud, and the very princes on whom he had relied were marching against him in the vast army of the Allies. He could draw none from Italy; for there Eugene Beauharnais was contending, with only about forty-five thousand men, against the much more numerous Austrians; whilst his brother-in-law, Murat, his dashing cavalry general, was gone over to the enemy. Poland would send him no more gallant regiments, for he had grievously deceived the Poles; and his trusted ally of Denmark lay trodden under foot by his former companion-in-arms, Bernadotte. When he turned his eyes over France, which had so long sent forth her hordes to desolate Europe at his bidding, he beheld a prospect not much more cheering. The male population, almost to a man, was drained off, and their bones lay bleaching in the torrid sands of Egypt and Syria, the rugged sierras of Spain and Portugal, in the fens of Holland and the sandy flats of Belgium, on many a heath and plain in Germany, and far away amid the mocking snows of frozen Muscovy. The fields of "la belle France" were being cultivated by old men, by women, and mere boys. Those who had been so long buoyed up under the loss of husbands, fathers, and children, by the delusive mirage of the glory of the "grand nation," now cursed the tyrant whose insane ambition had led such millions of the sons of France to the great slaughter-house of war. The conscriptions, therefore, were very little attended to. Besides this, Buonaparte was well aware that there remained a strong leaven of Jacobinism in Paris and the large towns, and he was afraid of calling out city guards to set at liberty other soldiers, lest, in the hour of his absence and weakness, they should rise and renounce his authority.
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THREE:Saxe followed up his advantage by despatching L?wendahl against Bergen-op-Zoom, the key of Holland, and the masterpiece of the celebrated engineer, Cohorn. This was not only amazingly strong in its fortifications, but had a powerful garrison, and was covered by an entrenched camp of twelve thousand men. The trenches were opened in the middle of July, and might have defied all the efforts of the French, had not Baron Cronstrom, the commander, a man of eighty, suffered them to take it by surprise on the 15th of September. The French had led a vast number of men before this place, and its surrender ended the campaign.
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THREE:[See larger version]While these changes were being made in Italy, the British, with their new allies, the Russians, made an abortive attempt to drive the French from Holland. An army of seventeen thousand Russians and thirteen thousand British was assembled on the coast of Kent, and Sir Ralph Abercromby, who was destined to fall on a more memorable field, taking the command of a division of twelve thousand men, Admiral Mitchell put them across to the coast of Holland. Abercromby landed, and took the fort of the Helder, and our fleet, occupying the Texel, compelled the Dutch fleet to surrender and mount the Orange flag. So long as Abercromby commanded, he repelled all the attacks of the French general, Brune, with a force more than double in number; but on the 13th of September the Duke of York arrived with the remainder of the Anglo-Russian army and took the chief command. From that moment all went wrong. The old want of success followed the royal duke, who, whatever his courage, certainly possessed no abilities as a general. By the 17th of October, notwithstanding the bravery of his troops, he was glad to sign a convention by which he was allowed to withdraw his army, on condition of the liberation of eight thousand French and Dutch prisoners of war in England. In Switzerland, too, Massena defeated Korsakoff at Zurich, and Suvaroff, believing himself to have been betrayed by the Austrians, effected a brilliant retreat over the mountains.
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THREE:This action was the height of imprudence. The true wisdom would have been to have taken no notice of such a discussion by an obscure association. On the 13th of March Sir Francis Burdett moved that Mr. John Gale Jones should be discharged, questioning the legality of his commitment, and declaring that, if the proceedings of Parliament were not to be criticised like everything else, there was an end of liberty of speech and of the press. This motion was rejected by one hundred and fifty-three against fourteen. The speech of Sir Francis was printed by Cobbett in his Weekly Register, a publication possessing high influence with the people. It was also accompanied by a letter of Sir Francis, commenting in strong language upon this arbitrary act, and[596] questioning the right of such a House to commit for breach of privilege, seeing that it consisted of "a part of our fellow-subjects, collected together by means which it is not necessary to describe.""The Clare election supplied the manifest proof of an abnormal and unhealthy condition of the public mind in Irelandthe manifest proof that the sense of a common grievance and the sympathies of a common interest were beginning to loosen the ties which connect different classes of men in friendly relations to each other, to weaken the force of local and personal attachments, and to unite the scattered elements of society into a homogeneous and disciplined mass, yielding willing obedience to the assumed authority of superior intelligence hostile to the law and to the Government which administered it. There is a wide distinction (though it is not willingly recognised by a heated party) between the hasty concession to unprincipled agitation and provident precaution against the explosion of public feeling gradually acquiring the strength which makes it irresistible. 'Concede nothing to agitation,' is the ready cry of those who are not responsiblethe vigour of whose decisions is often proportionate to their own personal immunity from danger, and imperfect knowledge of the true state of affairs. A prudent Minister, before he determines against all concessionagainst any yielding or compromise of former opinionsmust well consider what it is that he has to resist, and what are his powers of resistance. His task would be an easy one if it were sufficient to resolve that he would yield nothing to violence or to the menace of physical force. In this case of the Clare election, and of its natural consequences, what was the evil to be apprehended? Not force, not violence, not any act of which law could take cognisance. The real danger was in the peaceable and legitimate exercise of a franchise according to the will and conscience of the holder. In such an exercise of that franchise, not merely permitted, but encouraged and approved by constitutional law, was involved a revolution of the electoral system in Irelandthe transfer of political power, so far as it was connected with representation, from one party to another. The actual transfer was the least of the evil; the process by which it was to be effectedthe repetition in each county of the scenes of the Clare electionthe fifty-pound free-holders, the gentry to a man polling one way, their alienated tenantry anotherall the great interests of the county broken down'the universal desertion' (I am quoting the expressions of Mr. Fitzgerald)the agitator and the priest laughing to scorn the baffled landlordthe local heaving and throes of society on every casual vacancy in a countythe universal convulsion at a general electionthis was the danger to be apprehended; those were the evils to be resisted. What was the power of resistance? 'Alter the law, and remodel the franchise,' was the ready, the improvident response. If it had been desired to increase the strength of a formidable confederacy, and, by rallying round it the sympathies of good men and of powerful parties in Great Britain, to insure for it a signal triumph, to extinguish the hope of effecting an amicable adjustment of the Catholic question, and of applying a corrective to the real evils and abuses of elective franchise, the best way to attain these pernicious ends would have been to propose to Parliament, on the part of the Government, the abrupt extinction of the forty-shilling franchise in Ireland, together with the continued maintenance of civil disability."
THREE:
THREE:From Cuddalore, Tippoo and Bussy, the French general, turned their forces against Wandewash; but they were met by Coote, though he was now sinking and failing fast. They retreated, and he attempted to make himself master of the strong fort of Arnee, where much of the booty of Hyder was deposited; but Hyder made show of fighting him whilst Tippoo carried off all the property. Tippoo was obliged to march thence towards Calicut, where the Hindoo chiefs, his tributaries, were joining the British under Colonel Mackenzie. Hyder at this moment was confounded by the news of the peace made by Hastings with the Mahrattas, and expected that those marauders would speedily fall on Mysore. His health was fast declining, and yet he dared not introduce his allies, the French, into his own territory, lest he should not so readily get them out again. Besides[332] his suspicions of the French, he had constant fears of assassination. Hyder died in December, 1782.
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THREE:News of this most extraordinary defeat acted on the French, on all sides, like the concussion of some violent explosion. They fell back and fled in confusion before any enemy appeared. General Clausel, who was advancing from Logro?o with fifteen thousand men, fled back to Saragossa with such precipitation, and thence through the central Pyrenees into France, that he left all his artillery and most of his baggage on the road. The same was the case with General Foy, who fled from Bilbao to Bayonne in hot haste, with General Graham at his heels. Except at San Sebastian and Pampeluna, where the garrisons were soon besieged, the French were scarcely to be found in Spain, except those with Suchet in the south-east.