Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 by Arthur Bryant Page A

world. For that he needed obedience to his will. Except for a remote and half barbarous Russia and the moribund dominion of the Turks, he had already secured it throughout the Continent. But the English with their chaotic notions of individual rights still resisted him. And since their selfish stranglehold on the sea prevented him from overcoming them in battle, he had sought peace as the only means of relaxing it. Before he could renew the struggle he needed oceanic trading bases from which to revive France's industries and time to replenish his naval arsenals. His adversaries in their folly had allowed him both.
    It was his plan to use the breathing space that had been given him to build twenty-five battleships annually. In six or seven years, with two hundred sail-of-the-line, he would be as invincible on sea as on land. 2 Into the corrupt and indolent administration of the French marine—stagnant since the liquidation of its officers by the Terror— he would infuse the discipline, enthusiasm and efficiency that had made his armies the terror of the world. He would transform into impregnable fortresses the colonies and trading factories England had restored. Behind him a nation of more than thirty millions, drunk with military glory and avid for new conquests, was acclaiming him as the new Charlemagne and erecting in the Place Vendome a pillar like the column of Trajan to commemorate his victories.
    It was Bonaparte's belief that the English, seduced by his policy of recoiling to spring, would succumb without a struggle. In their individual greed and sloth they displayed a disregard for their aggregate interests so infatuate that their doom seemed only a question of time. 3 And in the unthinking summer of 1802, it was easy for a foreigner to suppose that pleasure, moneymaking, social display and faction monopolised the English mind. Wordsworth, passing through London, described a society dressed only for show, "glittering like a brook in the open sunshine":
    1 Minto, III, 257-8; Markham, 173, 178, 186-90; Barrow, 256, 276; Tucker, II, 144-62; Sherrard, 192 et set/.; Barbam, iii, 17-21, 68-72.
    2 Las Cases, IV, 8. "
    3 Even Nelson, happy at last with his beloved Hamiltons at Merton, wrote complacently that all the world was at peace except Lord Grenville and his friends.
    "The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more."
    Balls and masquerades succeeded each other nightly, fine ladies with feathers crowded on to the stage to hear Mrs. Billington sing at the ( Opera, health-seekers listened to the music on th e Pantiles at Tun bridge Wells, the Gentlemen of the Marylebone Cricket Club played a match against the Gentlemen of Hampstead and Highgate for five hundred guineas, and in the West Country hungry clothworkers rioted against the new machines that robbed them of their hereditary livelihood. Meanwhile Parliament, after debating Sir Richard Hill's Bill for abolishing bull-baiting, dissolved in search of the suffrages of an indifferent country. Thereafter for several weeks the shops of Brentford were-shut, and an idle, cheering, rioting crowd blocked the Exeter Road and treated passers-by to that astonishing spectacle of disorder and tumult which was libertarian England's peculiar contribution to the art of human governance. And all the while Bonaparte went quietly on with his plans for subjugating the world.
    Yet in their individual capacities the islanders still gave him trouble. They seemed to suppose that by signing a Peace they had secured the right to trade wherever they chose in his dominions. When they discovered that he had refused to allow their Government to insert any trade agreement in the peace treaty, and that their ships and goods were still liable to seizure in French ports, many of them became extremely angry. Moreover the First Consul kept finding new