Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 342, April, 1844
The result was an earldom. The first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Spencer, having already written to Sir John the royal pleasure to promote him to a peerage, and the letter not having reached him previously to the battle, he thus had notice of the two steps in the peerage nearly at once.
Popular honours now flowed in upon him: London voted its freedom in a gold box, with swords to the admirals of the fleet and Nelson; vice-admirals Parker and Thompson were created baronets; Nelson received the red riband; the chief cities and towns of England and Ireland sent their freedoms and presents; and the king gave all the admirals and captains a gold medal.
We must now be brief in our observations on the services of this most distinguished person. We have next a narrative of the suppression of the memorable mutiny of 1798, whose purpose it was to have suffered the enemy's fleet to leave their harbours, to revolutionize the Mediterranean fleet, and, after putting the admirals and captains to death, proceed to every folly and frenzy that could be committed by men conscious of power, and equally conscious that forgiveness was impossible. The fleet under Lord St Vincent was on the point of corruption, when it was restored to discipline by the singular firmness of the admiral, who, by exhibiting his determination to punish all insubordination, extinguished this most alarming disaffection, and saved the naval name of the country.
On the resignation of Mr Pitt in 1801, and the appointment of Mr Addington as first lord of the treasury, a letter was written from the new minister to Lord St Vincent, offering him the appointment of first lord of the Admiralty. Having obtained an interview with the king, and explained the general tone of his political feelings, the king told him he very much wished to see him at the Admiralty, and to place the navy entirely in his hands. This was perhaps the only appointment of that singularly feeble administration which met with universal approval. There could be no question of the intelligence, high principle, or public services of the great admiral. Mr Addington came into power under circumstances which would have tried the talents of a man of first-rate ability. The war had exhausted the patience, though not the power, of the nation. All our allies had failed. The severity of the taxes was doubly felt, when the war had necessarily turned into a blockade on the Continent. We had thus all the exhaustion of hostilities without the excitement of triumph; and, to increase public anxieties, the failure of the harvest threatened a comparative famine. Wheat, which on an average of the preceding ten years had been 54s. a quarter, was now at 110s., then rose to 139s., and even reached as high as 180s. At one period the quartern loaf had risen to 1s. 10-1/2d. The popular cry now arose for peace. France, which with all her victories had been taught the precariousness of war, by the loss of Egypt and the capture of her army, was now also eager for peace. England had but two allies, Portugal and Turkey. At length the peace was made, and Lord St Vincent's attention was then drawn to an object which he had long in view, the reformation of the dockyards. This was indeed the Augean stable, and unexampled clamour arose from the multitude who had indolently fattened for years on the easy plunder of the public stores. However, the reform went on: perquisites were abolished, privileges taken away; and, rough as the operation was, nothing could be more salutary than its effect. The acuteness of the gallant old man at the head of the Admiralty could not be evaded, his vigour could not be defied, and his public spirit gave him an influence with the country, which enabled him to outlive faction and put down calumny. Yet this was evidently the most painful, and, to a certain extent, the most unsuccessful portion of his long career. Nominally a Whig, but practically a Tory—for his loyalty was unimpeachable and his honour without a stain—Lord St Vincent found himself in the condition of a man who presses reform on those with whom hitherto it has been only a watchword, and expects faction to act up to its professions.
The Addington treaty was soon discovered to be nothing more than a truce. Napoleon lived only in war; hostilities were essential to the government which he had formed for France; and his theory of government, false as it was, and his passion for excitement, whatever might be its price, made even the two years of peace so irksome to him, that he actually adopted a gross and foolish insult to the British ambassador as the means of compelling us to renew the conflict. The first result was, the return of Pitt to power; the next, the total ruin of the French navy at Trafalgar; the next, the bloody and ruinous war with Russia, expressly for the ruin of England through the ruin of her commerce; and finally the crash of Waterloo, which extinguished his diadem and his dominion together—a series of events, occurring within little more than ten years, of a more stupendous order than had hitherto affected the fate of any individual, or influenced the destinies of an European kingdom.
With the ministry of Mr Addington, Lord St Vincent retired from public life. He was now old, and the hardships of long service had partially exhausted his original vigour of frame. He retired to his seat, Rochetts in Essex, and there led the delightful life of a man who had gained opulence and distinction by pre-eminent services, and whose old age was surrounded by love, honour, and troops of friends. He appeared from time to time in the House of Lords, where, however, he spoke but seldom, but where he always spoke with dignity and effect.
In the month of March 1823, Lord St Vincent was seized with a general feeling of infirmity which portended his speedy dissolution. He had a violent and convulsive cough; yet his intellects were strongly turned upon public events, and he expressed an anxiety to know all that could be known of events in France, which was then disturbed; of the Spanish revolution, which then threatened to involve Europe; and even of the affairs of Greece. In the course of the evening of the 13th, while his physician and family were round him, his strength suddenly gave way, and at half past eight he died, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried at Stone in Staffordshire. He was succeeded in the peerage by his nephew, who, however, inherits only the viscounty.
In our general notice of Lord St Vincent's career, we have adverted as little as possible to the opinions which his biographer had introduced from his own view of public affairs. We have no wish to make a peevish return to the writer of a work which has given us both information and pleasure. But it is necessary to caution Mr Tucker against giving trite and trifling opinions on subjects of which he evidently knows so little as of the Romish question, or the state of Ireland. Nothing is easier than to be at once solemn and superficial on such topics; and when a writer of this order flings his epithets of "bigoted, harsh, and impolitic," and the other stock phrases of party organs, he only enfeebles our respect for his authority in the immediate matters of his work, and rather lowers our respect for his faculties in all. The question of Popery in Ireland, is not a question of religion but of faction. Religious controversy on Romish doctrines has long ceased to exist. Romanism has no grounds on which a controversy can be sustained. It cannot appeal to the Scriptures, which it shuts up; and it will no longer be suffered to appeal to its mere childish pretence of infallibility. Its only ground in Ireland is party; and the present unhappy condition to which it has reduced Ireland, exhibits the natural consequences of indulgence to Popery, and the only means by which its spirit can be rendered consistent with the order of society.
MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN
PART X
"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"
SHAKSPEARE.
On reaching the prison, I gave up all for lost; sullenly resigned myself to what now seemed the will of fate; and without a word, except in answer to the interrogatory of my name and country, followed the two horrid-looking ruffians who performed the office of turnkeys. St Lazare had been a monastery, and its massiveness, grimness, and confusion of buildings, with its extreme silence at that late hour, gave me the strongest impression of a huge catacomb above ground. The door of a cell was opened for me after traversing a long succession of cloisters; and on a little wooden trestle, and wrapt in my cloak, I attempted to sleep. But if sleep has not much to boast of in Paris at any time, what was it then? I had scarcely closed my eyes when I was roused by a rapid succession of musket-shots, fired at the opposite side of the cloister, the light of torches flashing through the long avenues, and the shouts of men and women in wrath, terror, and agony. I threw myself off my uneasy bed, and climbing up by my prison bars, endeavoured to ascertain the cause of the mêlée. But the imperfect light served little more than to show a general mustering of the national guard in the court, and a huge and heavy building, into which they were discharging random shots whenever a head appeared at its casements. A loud huzza followed whenever one of those shots appeared to take effect, and a laugh equally loud ran through the ranks when the bullet wasted its effect on the massive mullions or stained glass of the windows. A tall figure on horseback, whom I afterwards learned to be Henriot, the commandant of the national guard, galloped up and down the court with the air of a general-in-chief manœuvring an army. I think that he actually had provided himself with a truncheon to meet all the emergencies of supreme command. While this sanguinary, and yet mocking representation of warfare was going on, M. le Commandant was in full eloquence and prodigious gesticulation. "A la gloire, mes enfans!" was his constant cry. "Fight, mes braves! the honour of France demands it: the eyes of Europe—of the world—are turned upon you. Vive la Republique!" And all this accompanied with waving his hat, and spurring his horse into foam and fury. But fortune is a jade after all; and the hero of the tricolored scarf was destined to have his laurels a little shorn, even on this narrow field. While his charger was caracoling over the cloisters, and his veterans from the cellars and counters of Paris were popping off their muskets at the unfortunates who started up against the old casement, I heard a sudden rush and run; a low postern of the cloister had been flung back, and the prisoners within the building had made a sally on their tormentors. A massacre at the Bicêtre, in which six thousand had perished, had warned these unhappy people that neither the prison wall, nor night, was to be security against the rage of the bloodhounds with whom murder seemed to have grown into a pastime; and after having seen several of their number shot down within their dungeon, they determined to attack them, and, if they must die, at least die in manly defence. Their rush was perfectly successful; it had the effect of a complete surprise; and though their only weapons were fragments of their firewood—for all fire-arms and knives had been taken from them immediately on their entrance into the prison—they routed the heroes of the guard at the first charge. Even the gallant commander himself only shared the chance of his "camarades:" a flourish or two of his sabre, and an adjuration of "liberty," had no other effect than to insure a heavier shower of blows, and I had the gratification of seeing the braggadocio go down from his saddle in the midst of a group, who certainly had no veneration for the majesty of the truncheon. The victory was achieved; but, like many another victory, it produced no results: the gates of the St Lazare were too strongly guarded to be forced by an unarmed crowd, and I saw the prisoners successively and gloomily return to the only roof, melancholy as that was, which now could shelter them.
The morning brought my case before the authorities of this den. Half a dozen coarse and filthy uniformed men, and some of them evidently sufferers in the tumult of the night, for their heads were bound up and their arms bandaged—a matter which, if it did not improve their appearance, gave me every reason to expect increased brutishness in their tempers—formed the tribunal. The hall in which they had established their court had once been the kitchen of the convent; and, though all signs of hospitality had vanished, its rude and wild construction, its stone floor and vaulted roof, and even its yawning and dark recesses for the different operations which, in other days, had made it a scene of busy cheerfulness, now gave it a look of dreariness in the extreme. I could have easily imagined it to be a chamber of the Inquisition. But men in my circumstances have not much time for the work of fancy; and I was instantly called on for my name, and business in France. I had heard enough of popular justice to believe, that I had now arrived within sight of the last struggle, and I resolved to give these ruffians no triumph over the Englishman.
"Citizen, who are you?" Was the first interrogatory.
"I am no citizen, no Frenchman, and no republican," was my answer. My judges stared at each other.
"You are a prisoner. How came you here?"
"You are judges; how came you there?"
"You are charged with crimes against the Republic."
"In my country no man is expected to criminate himself."
"But you are a traitor: can you deny that?"
"I am no traitor to my king; can you say as much for yourselves?" They now began to cast furious glances at me.
"You are insolent: what brought you into the territory of France?"
"The same thing which placed you on that bench—force."
"Are you mad?"
"No—are you?"
"Do you not know that we can send you to the"—
"If you do, I shall only go before you."
This put an end to my interrogatory at once. I had accidentally touched upon the nerve which quivered in every bosom of these fellows. There was a singular presentiment among even the boldest of the Revolutionists, that the new order of things would not last, and that, when the change came, it would be a bloody one. Life had become sufficiently precarious already among the possessors of power; and the least intimation of death was actually formidable to a race of villains whose hands were hourly imbued in slaughter. I had been hitherto placed in scarcely more than surveillance. An order for my confinement as a "Brigand Anglais," was made out by the indignant "commission," and I was transferred from my narrow and lonely cell into the huge crowded building in the opposite cloister, which had been the scene of the attack on the previous night. I could, with Cato, "smile on the drawn dagger and defy its point." I walked out with the air of a Cato.
This change, intended for my infinite degradation until the guillotine should have dispatched its business in arrear, I found much to my advantage. The man who expects nothing, cannot be hurt by disappointment; and when I was conducted from my solitary cell into the midst of four or five hundred prisoners, I felt the human feelings kindle in me, which had been chilled between my four stone walls.
The prisoners with whom I was now to take my chance, were of all ranks, professions, and degrees of crime. The true crime in the eyes of the republic being, to be rich. Yet there the culprit had some hope of being suffered to live, at least while daily examinations, with the hourly perspective of the axe, could make him contribute to the purses of the tribunal. Those who happened to be poor, were found guilty of incivisme at once, and were daily drafted off to the Place de Grève, from which they never returned. But some of the prisoners were from La Vendée, peasants mixed with nobles; who, though no formal shape of resistance to the republic was yet declared, had exhibited enough of that gallant contempt of the new tyranny, which afterwards immortalized the name, to render them obnoxious to the ruffians at its head. It was this sturdy portion which had made the dash on the night of the riot, and their daring had the effect, at least, of saving their fellow-prisoners in future from being made marks, to teach the national guard the art of shooting. Even their sentries kept a respectful distance; and M. Henriot, wisely mindful of his flagellation, flourished his staff of command no more within our cloister. We were, in fact, left almost wholly to ourselves. Yet, if a philosopher desired to take a lesson in human nature, this was the spot of earth for the study. We had it in every shape and shade. We had it in the wits and blockheads, the courtiers and the clowns, the opulent and the ruined, the brave and the pusillanimous—and all under the strangest pressure of those feelings which rouse the nature of man to its most undisguised display. Death was before every eye. Where was the use of wearing a mask, when the wearer was so soon to part with his head? Pretence gradually vanished, and a general spirit of boldness, frankness, and something, if not exactly of dignity, at least of manliness, superseded the customary cringing of society under a despotism. In all but the name, we were better republicans than the tribe who shouted in the streets, or robbed in the tribunals.
I made the remark one day to the Marquis de Cassini, a philosopher and pupil of the great Buffon. "The reason is," said he, "that men differ chiefly by circumstances, as they differ chiefly by their clothes. Throw off their dress, whether embroidery or rags, and you will find the same number of ribs in them all."
"But my chief surprise is, to find in this prison more mutual kindness, and, in every sense, more generosity of sentiment, than one generally expects to meet in the world."
"Helvetius would tell you that all this was self-interest," was my pale-visaged and contemplative friend's reply. "But I always regarded M. Helvetius in the light of a well-trained baboon, who thought, when men stared at his tricks, they were admiring his talents. The truth is, that self-interest is the mere creature of society, and is the most active in the basest society. It is the combined cowardice and cruelty of men struggling for existence; the savageness of the forest, where men cannot gather acorns enough to share with their fellows; the effort for life, where there is but one plank in a storm, and where, if you are to cling at all, it must be by drowning the weaker party. But here," and he cast his eyes calmly round the crowd, "as there is not the slightest possibility that any one of us will escape, we have the better opportunity of showing our original bienséance. All the struggling on earth will not save us from the guillotine; and therefore we resolve to accommodate each other for the rest of our journey."
I agreed with him on the philosophy of the case, and in return he introduced me to some of the Vendéan nobles, who had hitherto exhibited their general scorn of Parisian contact by confining themselves to the circle of their followers. I was received with the distinction due to my introducer, and was invited to join their supper that night. The prison had once been the chapel of the convent; and though the desecration had taken place a hundred years before, and the revolutionary spoil had spared but little of the remaining ornaments, the original massiveness of the building, and the nobleness of the architecture, had withstood the assaults of both time and plunder. The roofs of the aisles could not be reached except by flame, and the monuments of the ancient priors and prelates, when they had once been stripped of their crosses, were too solid for the passing fury of the mob. And thus, in the midst of emblems of mortality, and the recollections of old solemnity, were set some hundreds of people, who knew as little of each other as if they had met in a caravansery, and who, perhaps, expected to part as soon. The scene was curious, but by no means uncheerful. The national spirit is inextinguishable; and, however my countrymen may bear up against the extremes of ill-fortune, no man meets its beginnings with so easy an air as the man of France. Our supper was laid out in one of the side chapels; and, coarse and scanty as it was, I seldom recollect an evening which I passed with a lighter sense of the burden of a prisoner's time. I found the Vendéan nobles a manlier race than their more courtly countrymen. Yet they had courtliness of their own; but it was more the manner of our own country gentlemen of the last century, than the polish of Versailles. Their habits of living on their domains, of country sports, of intercourse with their peasantry, and of the general simplicity of country life, had drawn a strong line of distinction between them and the dukes and marquises of the royal saloons. Like all Frenchmen of the day, they conversed largely upon the politics of France; but there was a striking reserve in their style. The existing royal family were but little mentioned, or mentioned only with a certain kind of sacred respect. Their misfortunes prohibited the slightest severity of language. Yet still it was not difficult to see, that those straightforward and honest lords of the soil, who were yet to prove themselves the true chevaliers of France, could feel as acutely, and express as strongly, the injuries inflicted by the absurdities and vices of the successive administrations of their reign, as if they had figured in the clubs of the capital. But the profligacies of the preceding monarch, and the tribe of fools and knaves whom those profligacies as naturally gathered round him as the plague propagates its own contagion, met with no mercy. And, though they were spoken of with the gravity which became the character and rank of the speakers, they were denounced with a sternness which seemed beyond the morals or the mind of their country. Louis XV., Du Barri, and the whole long succession of corrupting and corrupted cabinets, which had at length rendered the monarchy odious, were denounced in terms worthy of gallant men; who, though resolved to sink or swim with the throne, experienced all the bitterness of generous indignation at the crimes which had raised the storm.
We had our songs too, and some of them were as contemptuous as ever came from the pen of Parisian satire. Among my recollections of the night was one of those songs, of which the refrain was—
"Le Bien-Aimé—de l'Almanac."
A burlesque on the title—Le Bien-Aimé, &c., which the court calendar, and the court calendar alone, had annually given to the late king. I can offer only a paraphrase.
"Louis Quinze, our burning shame,
Hear our song, 'old well-beloved,'
What if courts and camps are tame,
Pension'd beggars laced and gloved,
France's love grows rather slack,
Idol of—the Almanac.
"Let your flatterers hang or drown,
We are of another school,
Truth no more shall be put down,
We can call a fool a fool,
Fearless of Bastile or rack,
Titus of—the Almanac.
"Louis, trample on your serfs,
We'll be trampled on no more,
Revel in your parc aux cerfs,27
Eat and drink—'twill soon be o'er.
France will steer another tack,
Solon of—the Almanac!
"Hear your praises from your pages,
Hear them from your liveried lords,
Let your valets earn their wages,
Liars, living on their words;
We'll soon give them nuts to crack,
Cæsar of—the Almanac!
"When a dotard fills the throne,
Fit for nothing but a nurse,
When a nation's general groan,
Yields to nothing but its curse;
What are armies at thy back,
Henri of—the Almanac?
"When the truth is bought and sold,
When the wrongs of man are spurn'd,
Then the crown's last knell is toll'd,
Then, old Time, thy glass has turn'd,
And comes flying from thy pack
To nations a new Almanac!
"Mistress, minister, Bourbon,
Rule by bayonets, bribes, and spies,
Charlatans in church and throne,
France is opening all her eyes—
Down go minion, king, and quack,
We'll have our new Almanac!"
When I returned to the place where my mattress was flung, the crowd had already sunk to rest, and there was a general silence throughout the building. The few lights which our jailers supplied to us, had become fewer; and, except for the heavy sound of the doubled sentries' tread outside, I might have imagined myself in a vast cemetery. The agitation of the day, followed by the somewhat unsuitable gayety of the evening, had thrown me into such a state of mental and bodily fatigue, that I had scarcely laid my side on my bed, untempting as it was, when I dropped into a heavy slumber. The ingenuity of our tormentors, however, prohibited our knowing any thing in the shape of indulgence; and in realisation of the dramatist's renowned mot, "traitors never sleep," the prison door was suddenly flung open—a drum rattled through the aisle—the whole body of the prisoners were ordered to stand forth and answer to their names; this ceremony concluding with the march of the whole night-guard into the chapel, and their being ordered to load with ball-cartridge, to give us the sufficient knowledge of what any attempt to escape would bring upon us in future. This refinement in cruelty we owed to the escapade of the night before.
At length, after a variety of insulting queries, even this scene was over. The guard marched out, the roll of their drum passed away among the cloisters; we went shivering to our beds—threw ourselves down dressed as we were, and tried to forget France and our jailers.
But a French night in those times was like no other, and I had yet to witness a scene such as I believe could not have existed in any other country of the globe.
After some period of feverish sleep I was awakened by a strange murmur, which, mixing with my dreams, had given me the comfortless idea of hearing the roar of the multitude at some of the horrid displays of the guillotine; and as I half opened my unwilling eyes, still heavy with sleep, I saw a long procession of figures, in flowing mantles and draperies, moving down the huge hall. A semicircle of beds filled the extremity of the chapel, which had been vacated by a draft of unfortunate beings, carried off during the day to that dreadful tribunal, whose sole employment seemed to be the supply of the axe, and from which no one was ever expected to return. While my eyes, with a strange and almost superstitious anxiety—such is the influence of time and place—followed this extraordinary train, I saw it take possession of the range of beds; each new possessor sitting wrapt in his pale vesture, and perfectly motionless. I can scarcely describe the singular sensations with which I continued to gaze on the spectacle. My eyes sometimes closed, and I almost conceived that the whole was a dream; but the forms were too distinct for this conjecture, and the question with me now became, "are they flesh and blood?" I had not sunk so far into reverie as to imagine that they were the actual spectres of the unhappy tenants of those beds on the night before, all of whom were now, doubtless, in the grave; but the silence, the distance, the dimness perplexed me, and I left the question to be settled by the event. At a gesture from the central figure they all stood up—and a man loaded with fetters was brought forward in front of their line. I now found that a trial was going on: the group were the judges, the man was the presumed criminal; there was an accuser, there was an advocate—in short, all the general process of a trial was passing before my view. Curiosity would naturally have made me spring from my bed and approach this extraordinary spectacle; but I am not ashamed now to acknowledge, that I felt a nervelessness and inability to speak or move, which for the time wholly awed me. All that I could discover was, that the accused was charged with incivisme, and that, defying the court and disdaining the charge, he was pronounced guilty—the whole circle, standing up as the sentence was pronounced, and with a solemn waving of their arms and murmur of their voices, assenting to the act of the judge. The victim was then seized on, swept away into the darkness, and after a brief pause I heard a shriek and a crash; the sentence had been fulfilled—all was over. The court now covered their heads with their mantles, as if in sorrow for this formidable necessity.
But how shall I speak of the closing scene? However it surprised and absorbed me in that moment of nervous excitement, I can allude to it now only as characteristic of a time when every mind in France was half lunatic. I saw a figure enveloped in star-coloured light emerge from the darkness, slowly ascend, in a vesture floating round it like the robes which Raphael or Guido gives to the beings of another sphere, and, accompanied by a burst of harmony as it rose, ascend to the roof, where it suddenly disappeared. All was instantly the silence and the darkness of the grave.