Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars

Romanticism and War A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars

J.R. Watson

Romanticism and War

Also by J.R. Watson THE ENGLISH HYMN ENGLISH POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD EVERYMAN’S BOOK OF VICTORIAN VERSE THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS WORDSWORTH’S VITAL SOUL

Romanticism and War A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars J.R. Watson Emeritus Professor University of Durham

© J.R. Watson 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–80176–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watson, J.R. (John Richard), 1934– Romanticism and war : a study of British Romantic Period writers and the Napoleonic Wars / J.R. Watson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80176–8 (cloth) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Literature and the wars. 3. France—Foreign public opinion, British. 4. English literature—French influences. 5. Great Britain—Relations— France. 6. France—Relations—Great Britain. 7. Romanticism— Great Britain. 8. France—In literature. 9. War in literature. I. Title. PR129.F8W38 2003 820.9′358—dc21 2003050960 10 12

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgement

ix

Introduction Reading about war Writing, history and experience Chivalry and morality War and the individual Justifications War and wars Politics and the idea of the just war Postscript

1 1 4 8 10 13 14 17 20

1

Ways of Seeing War 1.1 The broken soldier 1.2 The minstrel boy 1.3 Fire, famine and slaughter

23 23 27 33

2

1793

39

3

1793 and after 3.1 Armies and navies 3.2 The campaign in the Low Countries 3.3 Poland

52 52 57 59

4

1795–1802 4.1 Jacobin and anti-Jacobin 4.2 1798: Switzerland 4.3 Before the peace: Thomas Campbell and the poetry of war

68 68 73 77

The Peace of Amiens and after, 1802–05 5.1 1802–03: Paris and Calais 5.2 1805: Heroism

84 84 95

5

v

vi Contents

6 Poetry and the Army: The War, 1807–08 6.1 After Trafalgar: the case of Scott 6.2 The army after 1800

108 108 115

7 Cintra and Corunna 7.1 The rebellion in Spain and the Convention of Cintra 7.2 1809: a hero and a poet

123 123 132

8 The Last Years 8.1 1809–13: the Peninsula 8.2 Towards the abdication: 1812–14 8.3 1815: Waterloo

144 144 151 159

9 Ways of Seeing War: The Poets 9.1 Wordsworth and the Thanksgiving Odes 9.2 Byron and warfare

174 174 182

10

11

Ways of Seeing War: The Soldiers 10.1 William Napier: The History of the War in the Peninsula 10.2 Carl von Clausewitz: On War

197

Afterwords: De Quincey, Ruskin and Hardy 11.1 De Quincey on war 11.2 Ruskin on war 11.3 Thomas Hardy and The Dynasts

217 217 220 223

197 207

Notes

230

Bibliography

245

Index

250

Preface This book was written at the suggestion of Professor Stephen Prickett and with the encouragement of Professor Marilyn Gaull. I am grateful to them. It is an attempt to write a straightforward account of the way in which the war of 1793–1815 was perceived by British Romantic period writers, and how they in turn helped produce perceptions of the war. In the process, I have tried to understand something of the complexity of war itself, a subject which has interested me ever since I was a peace-time soldier at the height of the Cold War. As a summary of that complexity, I would quote a passage from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth which I do not entirely agree with, but which I can understand and which may serve as an epigraph: It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem – a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as the war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality (Testament of Youth, 1933, 291–2). I do not agree that honour is dishonest and glory meretricious in war, but Brittain’s loss of fiancé, brother and close friends during the 1914–18 war gives her remarks an authority which has to be acknowledged and accepted as her own reading of painful experience. The remainder of her paragraph captures wonderfully the fascination and excitement of war, and one of the elements of the Romantic period which this book is intended to demonstrate is the extraordinary drama and intensity of the Napoleonic Wars, and their continuing interest. vii

viii Preface

I am very grateful to Dr Pamela Clemit for reading a draft of this book and making many valuable suggestions, and to my son David, another former soldier, for encouragement and help. J.R. Watson July 2002

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Orion Publishing Group Ltd for permission to use the paragraph from Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933.

ix

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Introduction

Reading about war In January 1813 Jane Austen was reading for pleasure. The book was Charles William Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, published in 1810. She said that it was ‘a book which I protested against at first’, but which ‘upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining.’1 She thought that Pasley wrote ‘with extraordinary force & spirit’. She was right: Pasley was a very attractive author, who wrote with clarity and energy, and with a liberal use of irony. His book would have pleased her, additionally, by its assessment of the importance of the British navy, in which her brothers were serving: ‘nothing but our naval superiority has saved us from being at this moment a province of France.’ 2 Pasley was a most interesting man and a notable soldier. As a young Lieutenant he met Coleridge in Malta in 1805 and rowed round Valletta harbour with him inspecting the fortifications (Pasley was a Royal Engineer). Later in the same year they met in Naples, and went on a tour of Calabria together. Coleridge described him as ‘the ablest Soldier, I ever met with.’3 Perhaps through Coleridge, he came to know Wordsworth, and stayed at Rydal Mount in the spring of 1815. By then he was a Colonel, who had had a distinguished war career: he had been an extra aide-de-camp to Sir John Moore on the retreat to Corunna, and had been seriously wounded at the siege of Flushing during the ill-fated Walcheren expedition of 1809. Austen would have approved of Pasley’s directness and common sense, and of the fact that he was writing from experience. Pasley had a soldier’s contempt for the unprepared nation: If we were at this moment unprovided with ships and seamen, and our arsenals emptied of naval stores; if blest and contented in our 1

2 Romanticism and War

own island, like the late unambitious, happy and virtuous republic of Switzerland, we had been living for centuries, pitying, but never mixing in the sanguinary wars of Europe by land and sea; till on a sudden, like the state I mentioned, we found ourselves on the point of being swallowed up by an unprincipled invader; would, I ask, our being the freest and most patriotic nation upon earth, in the case supposed, enable us to build, equip, and man a fleet, all at once, capable of defending the passage of the Channel against the navy of Europe, and of preventing a disembarkation of its armies on our shores?4 Pasley summed up Napoleon’s achievement by contrasting his efficiency and success with the superficial appearance of the armies of other countries, which looked good but were consistently defeated: Trusting always to foreign bayonets, never to our own, first we formed to ourselves the most magnificent ideas of Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies. Their soldier-like appearance, and wonderful steadiness under arms, their discipline, their valour, their tactics, their every thing, were subjects of our enthusiastic admiration, or rather of stupid amazement, insomuch that, at last, we seemed to fancy them more than mortals; when, to our utter astonishment, the French came forward, and beat them all, one after the other. 5 Pasley’s irony is not unlike Austen’s own, especially in her letters. So is his mock astonishment; and she would have appreciated his celebration of the feats of British arms (he must have been thinking of Wellington’s battles in the Peninsula, Vimiero in 1808 and Talavera in 1809): Then French enthusiasm, French valour, French manoeuvres, French generals, in their turn, became the subjects of our amazement and terror; and we talked of the dreadful power of Buonaparte with the same reverential awe, that the child feels for the more than human prowess of Jack the giant-killer; . . . . . . when lo! to confound the universe, and ourselves most of all, it was proved, that the humble, despised British troops, could beat these conquerors of the world! 6 Pasley’s writing and Austen’s appreciation of it are evidence not just of an interest in the war, but of a particular way of structuring an understanding of it. Pasley’s assessment of the war was that of a soldier, but it

Introduction

3

was also a rendering of it into a literary form, with its rhetoric and irony. In this process, the Swiss became emblems of peace-loving, happy republicanism; the Prussians, Austrians and Russians were governed by kings or emperors and had apparently invincible armies; Napoleon was a bogey-man, a character from a child’s story book, a giant-killer who had destroyed the old regimes; and the British unexpectedly proved to be the slayers of the giant-killer who had become, in his turn, the dreaded giant of Europe. Each of these images is important in considering the way in which the wars of 1793–1815 were understood by those who lived through them. The events, and the contemporary responses to them, were important in their constructions of ‘history’, their awareness of what they thought was going on, and their sense of the past as it related to the present. The fate of Switzerland, which Pasley discusses, is an example: it was invaded by the French in February 1798, and it became a cause célèbre to the first-generation Romantic poets. Greece performed a similar function for their successors, and proved to be an even more important cause. Certain individual figures assumed a remarkable importance: Nelson, Moore, Wellington, Napoleon. Napoleon was a self-made man, a product of the revolution, standing up for the republic against the crowned heads of Europe: he was both admired and feared, the subject of hero worship and admiration. The angry reaction to his coronation in 1804 from figures as different as Beethoven and Wordsworth was a natural response to the wonderful man that he had been, and the transformation of that man into another despot. And, as Pasley also saw, the armies of the Allies in Europe were widely perceived to have failed to live up to expectations. The British in Spain and Portugal, and on the seas, were a legitimate cause of pride, and there was outrage when that pride was offended, as it was in August 1808 when Wellington’s victories were, it appeared, thrown away by the Convention of Cintra. Above all, perhaps, there was a sense of the importance of these matters. In the year in which Switzerland was invaded, Jane Austen’s brother Frank was at Cadiz, ‘alive and well’, and expecting a raid by Lord St Vincent on Minorca or Malta. He had been a midshipman in 1791 and a lieutenant on a 32-gun Frigate, the Triton, in September 1796. His younger brother Charles became a midshipman in 1794 and a lieutenant in 1797. Both brothers later became admirals. Their careers were followed eagerly by their sisters and form the basis for the portrayal of the naval officers in Persuasion, who are contrasted so clearly with the effete civilians. The good sense of Admiral Croft and the courage and straightforwardness of his wife are examples of the kind of virtue celebrated by Pasley – modest,

4 Romanticism and War

courageous and trustworthy. In the same novel, Wentworth’s silence is as notable as his constancy: while he is socially skilled, he is unshowy and quiet; he makes no extravagant professions of emotion, but loves Anne with the same love that led him to propose to her eight years before. What we see in the marriage of Anne and Wentworth is a subtle rendering of the honourable values of faithfulness, courtesy, duty and loyalty which have emerged from a long and arduous war: Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth’s affection. His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance. 7 Jane Austen neatly turns the tables on Pasley’s stereotypes by claiming that naval officers make even better husbands than fighters, but this does not invalidate the original recognition that there are qualities in men that are to be valued, and that war brings them out.

Writing, history and experience As soon as we discuss Captain Pasley and Jane Austen, we become aware of problems. Even as certain passages are cited to make a point, they become the fragments from which a particular history can be constructed. We use them as evidence of the way in which people responded to events: we try to reassemble the sense of the world as it was in January 1813, when Jane Austen was reading. If we are attempting to contextualise the literary productions of the time, we engage in an exercise that can never entirely succeed, because we can never recapture the dense everyday accumulation of experience that was felt by those who experienced it. Carlyle wrote of it as the problem of history, the attempt to capture ‘the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to every man’: it is the only articulate communication (when the articulate and mute, intelligible or not, lie around us and in us, so strangely through every fibre of our being, every step of our activity) which the Past can have with the Present, the Distant with what is Here. 8

Introduction

5

The subject of the present study is the contribution of the articulate (we cannot know about the mute) to the understanding of war, and especially the war between France and the rest of Europe that lasted, with various temporary treaties and armistices, from 1792 to 1815. It is also a study of how the war affected the articulate, the English writers of the period, and particularly the poets of the time. It is therefore concerned with the war as seen by writers, and writers as interpreting war. It is therefore a kind of history itself, an attempt to understand the shaping of ideas, as well as the events themselves. For, as the French historian Paul Veyne put it, succinctly: ‘history is what we will choose.’9 I have ‘chosen’ to begin with Jane Austen reading Captain Pasley because Austen was one of hundreds of writers who lived through the war and who was interested in it: in her case she had relatives engaged in it, which gave her a special interest. Two other major writers served in the army: Cobbett as a stalwart non-commissioned officer from 1783 to 1791, Coleridge as a hopeless dragoon from 1793 to 1794 (others, such as Burns, Scott, Campbell, Wordsworth and Clare served in the local volunteers, or the home defence militia). But there were many others who lived through the day-to-day processes of war, with soldiers and sailors in the streets, and who were conscious of the ever-fluctuating fortunes of Napoleon and the Allies. The war affected their daily lives, economically, politically, and in other ways: it seeped into their work and their thinking. Soldiers camped in the fields; newspapers were full of history and analysis; seditious literature was banned; the continent was out of bounds to travellers, apart from a short period during the Peace of Amiens in 1802–03. Jane Austen was one of those writers who used the experience of war-time in art, who wrote about the war as bringing out certain values, who understood the way in which war affected society and its concerns, just as it was also the result of that society’s political and economic thought. Her interest in the navy and her enthusiasm for Captain Pasley of the Corps of Royal Engineers are evidence of the way in which writers gain experience, and one of the principal questions which this raises is about the war itself: what was it like to be living in a time of European conflict, a time of war that lasted, with two short breaks, for seventeen years? More important than this, however, is the way in which writers selected and organised their material: how they came to understand the meaning of war, its relationship to the rest of existence, its morality, its connection with human conduct, its reflection of society and its values, its understanding of nationhood and patriotism. At the deepest level, war is

6 Romanticism and War

a test of who we are: it affects our comprehension of ourselves as human beings, our self-awareness, our ‘fashioning’ of ourselves. For just as we understand ourselves better through art, and particularly through tragedy, so we come to see, in war, particular human virtues and vices. We order the experience of war, either as participants or onlookers, to understand the reasons for it, how we behave in it and what it does to us as human beings. We understand the story of David and Goliath, for example, in much the same way as Captain Pasley saw the army in the Peninsula and as Jane Austen understood the navy. Goliath was apparently invincible, the champion of the Philistines, and a threatening lout: ‘Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.’ David, an unlikely champion for the Israelites, was resourceful and clever, using a simple sling and stone to defeat an armed warrior: the only time that Goliath’s sword was used was to cut off his own head, in an act of retributive justice. The fact that David was a king, a poet and a musician becomes part of the pattern: his use of force was a single act of heroism, a piece of violence performed on someone who deserved it, who promised destruction and who appeared pitiless. But David was many things in addition to being a warrior: he was capable of such skill in war when necessary, but that this was only a part of his character. Rather differently, the Duke of Wellington, another soldier-musician, undertook a major, self-defining act as a young man when, in 1793 (aged 24), he burned his violin. He must have decided that his military career required total concentration, and that he should not allow himself to be distracted from it by such leisure pursuits as music. At first sight that makes him a lesser figure than David: but what he was doing was the equivalent of the vows of a medieval knight. He was dedicating himself to the profession of arms. His single-mindedness was pitted against Napoleon’s genius: against the intuitive skill of a commander who, as a young artillery officer at the siege of Toulon in 1794, had organised the siege guns and taken part in the assault himself. What kind of people were David, Wellington and Napoleon? What does war tell us about human beings? In particular, how would the writers of the romantic period have understood them? There are a number of interesting themes which emerge when we ask such a question. What, for example, do we understand as virtue? Is there such a thing as military genius, and if so, how does it relate to other manifestations of genius? How do we behave in victory, or in defeat? How do we explain the wonder of self-sacrifice? What does war have to do with patriotism, or nationhood? How does war affect our understanding of a society? Is war

Introduction

7

glorious, or abominable? What happens to those who suffer as a result of war? How does war relate to questions of gender? Can war be related to ideas of the sublime? These questions tumble out of a cornucopia of interrogatives which occur whenever we contemplate war, at any point in history. Does war necessarily degrade? It is very clear that it changes people: In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage; . . . (Henry V, III.i.3–8) Shakespeare is careful not to emphasise one condition as more desirable than the other: the athlete’s stiffening of sinews and summoning up of blood is followed by the image of disguise. But which is the true person? Can it be both, as the last act of Henry V would seem to suggest, when the warlike Henry woos the French princess? Do we all have both sides in us, the modest quiet one and the raging one? If so, which is the authentic, defining self? One legitimate and obvious response to the business of war is to see it as horrible. It turns men into animals, giving them the action of the tiger, or into butchers, as Macbeth became. Blake had no doubt about it: fighting is dehumanising. Although he was prepared to stand up for himself, and got into trouble for throwing an offensive dragoon named Scholfield out of his garden at Felpham, he also thought that: The soldier armed with sword and gun Palsied strikes the summer’s sun . . . . The strongest poison ever known Came from Caesar’s laurel crown. Nought can deform the human race Like to the armour’s iron brace. These lines from ‘Auguries of Innocence’ can only be conjecturally dated, but they were probably written in 1803 or 1804. They may be a response to the Scholfield incident, or caused by a dislike of soldiers generally, or (more probably) written in despair after the resumption of hostilities

8 Romanticism and War

following the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803. But they also represent an attitude to war which has a long and honourable history and a particular understanding of what war does to people. Conquest is poison; an armed man is unnatural, losing his humanity and his freedom of movement in the ‘iron brace’ of armour and striking the summer sun with palsy. The disciplined soldier in the armour’s iron embrace contrasts forcibly with the figures in Blake’s illuminated books who dance and sing, or with the naked dancer in ‘Glad Day’. War is obviously violent and contains brutality. Once it is started, it is hard to control. But it is not the same as indiscriminate aggression. Fighting and force used without due cause are the marks of the psychopath or the gangster. War is distinguished from both of these. It is so violent and dreadful in its consequences that it is only to be entered upon responsibly and with due care. It involves the killing of soldiers, and the distress of women and children; it devastates a countryside; it can lead to the subjugation of whole nations, or parts of a nation; it produces humiliation (and sometimes defiance) on the part of the loser, and pride on the part of the victor. Because of these things, war, if it is to be in any way tolerable in human affairs, requires rules: not shooting prisoners, not attacking civilian targets, not killing women and children.

Chivalry and morality The greatest poem in the English language about these matters was a favourite in the Romantic period. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene begins with a gentle knight, and expounds, in warlike episode after warlike episode, what it is to be both ‘gentle’ and a ‘knight’. As the preliminary stanza to the poem puts it, ‘Fierce warrs and faithfull loves shall moralize my song.’ Spenser was recorded as having said that he had undertaken the poem ‘to represent all the moral vertues, assigning to every vertue, a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same: in whose actions and feates of armed and chivalry, the operations of that vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed . . .’. Spenser was writing allegorically, about ‘vertues’: but his poem is charged with the chivalric values which moralise his song through wars. Charles Cowden Clarke famously recorded Keats reading it: he went through it ‘as a young horse would through a spring meadow.’10 Keats’ continued reading of Spenser owed much to his friendship with Leigh Hunt: because of this, it is hard to know exactly how or why Keats read Spenser, just as we cannot know how the others, such as Wordsworth or Shelley, read him. But one strong possibility is that Spenser, as well as

Introduction

9

being a poet of beauty and of mellifluous verse (as Hazlitt regarded him), was also the poet of war and chivalry. It was Hazlitt who told readers of The Faerie Queene that ‘if they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them.’ 11 Given Spenser’s explicit aim on the title page of ‘Fashioning . . . Morall vertues’, this is an astonishing suggestion; it can only mean that the chief interest would become for these readers either the poetic craftsmanship of the verses or the chivalric action. Hazlitt continued ‘Without minding it [the allegory] at all, the whole is as plain as a pikestaff’, which suggests that he was reading the poem as a series of stories about knightly conduct and about the overthrow of unprincipled and deceitful enemies by honest and brave soldiers. Spenser’s influence was found in many places: in Scott’s novels, in Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone, in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Beattie’s The Minstrel and Clare’s The Village Minstrel. It is found in Keats’ letter about climbing Skiddaw: ‘I felt as if I were going to a Tournament.’12 It is this spirit of romance and adventure which Spenser gave voice to, and that is as important as any specific debt, although Romantic period poets wrestled with Spenser almost as much as they did with Milton, writing over against Spenser’s great epic to produce their own version of a minstrel or a wanderer. In Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), for example, a knight is described as having come into the valley ‘on a war-horse sumptuously attired’, settling down, building a house, and raising a family. The knight and his children are dead long ago, and the house has disappeared, though a name remains on a gravestone. The Wanderer remembers that he was Bound by his vow to labour for redress Of all who suffer wrong, and to enact By sword and lance the law of gentleness. (VII.1042–4) The Wanderer even likens himself to the knight in certain respects: I too shall be doomed To outlive the kindly use and fair esteem Of the poor calling which my youth embraced With no unworthy prospect. (VII.1047–50) The Wanderer admits that the comparison is blending ‘low things with lofty’, but he still sees resemblances between himself and the knight of

10 Romanticism and War

old, although the crucial difference is that the knight would have had to be prepared to use force ‘to enact . . . the law of gentleness’.

War and the individual Force, the Wanderer suggests, is sometimes necessary. And because the writing of The Excursion took place at the time of the struggle against Napoleon, we may be tempted to speculate that the knight had, for Wordsworth, his modern counterparts. Certainly the concept which is being invoked here is that of an honourable use of force, used to maintain some kind of order and to discourage anarchy and brutality. The Wanderer’s ‘the law of gentleness’ suggests a peaceful co-existence with neighbours, whether on a personal or a national level; and his invocation of the knight as ‘bound by his vow’ to fight for it suggests Spenser’s moral virtues, and the concept of honour. It is significant that a number of plays of Shakespeare which were popular in the Romantic period were concerned with war and honour: Hamlet, Coriolanus, Henry V. Falstaff, also popular as a ‘character of Shakespeare’, was the subject of a number of critical essays, and it is interesting to see that the most famous of them, Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) began by going straight to the problem of his cowardice: The ideas which I have formed concerning the Courage and Military Character of the Dramatic Sir John Falstaff are so different from those which I find generally to prevail in the world, that I shall take the liberty of stating my sentiments on the subject . . . I am to avow, then, that I do not clearly discern that Sir John Falstaff deserves to bear the character so generally given him of an absolute Coward; or, in other words, that I do not conceive Shakespeare ever meant to make Cowardice an essential part of his constitution . . .13 Morgann’s essay was reprinted in 1820 and 1825. It suggests that the Falstaff debate was seen primarily in military terms: proper military men do not run away, do not feign death, do not boast, and do not tell lies. Morgann reminds us that Falstaff was ‘betrayed into those lies and braggadocios which are the usual concomitants of Cowardice in Military men and pretenders to valour’, but argues that he had ‘a spirit of boldness and enterprise’ which ‘in a Military age, tho’ employment was only occasional, kept him always above contempt.’14

Introduction

11

Whether Morgann was right or wrong is less important that the general preoccupation of his essay with the particular problem of cowardice. The figures in opposition to him in Henry IV Part 1, where he declares that honour is ‘a mere scutcheon’, are Prince Hal and Hotspur, the one appearing idle and useless, the other full of the energy of what Morgann would call ‘a Military man’. If Hotspur is also too full of ‘braggadocios’, he is no coward, and the eulogy which the Prince speaks over his dead body is full of respect, the brave victor saluting the brave victim. On a grander scale, this happens in Hamlet, one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in the period. In the final speech of the play, Fortinbras orders his men to ‘Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage’, and that final gesture welcomes Hamlet into the company of those who are prepared to fight and die: and for his passage The soldier’s music and the rite of war Speak loudly for him. (V.ii.390–2) Thomas Robertson’s essay on the play (1788) points out that Hamlet was described, even by Claudius, as ‘Most generous, and free from all contriving’, 15 and the nobility and bravery of his life go together. In another popular play, Richard III, the wicked Richard is defeated by the principled and good Henry; and that play, like Hamlet, was very popular. Edmund Kean was famous as Richard, as Garrick had been before him. John Philip Kemble was similarly famous as Coriolanus, and chose it for his farewell performance in 1817. Many of these plays were popular because they were vehicles for the star actors of the day; but they also directed the mind to problems of warfare, honour and heroism. Hazlitt, for example, noted the different responses to war, and Coriolanus’s rejoicing in it, of his mother and his wife – ‘the one is anxious only for his honour; the other is fearful for his life.’ He quoted at length from Act I scene iii: Vol. . . . Methinks I hear hither your husband’s drum; See him pluck Aufidius down by th’hair; As children from a bear, the Volsces shunning him. Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus: ‘Come on you cowards! you were got in fear, Though you were born in Rome’. His bloody brow With his mail’d hand then wiping, forth he goes,

12 Romanticism and War

Like to a harvest-man that’s task’d to mow Or all or lose his hire. Vir. His bloody brow? O Jupiter, no blood! Vol. Away, you fool! It more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba, When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword, contemning. Hazlitt described this as ‘one of the most natural traits in the play’, by which he meant the contrast between the two women rather than Volumnia’s unnatural addiction to blood and suffering.16 Volumnia says of Coriolanus ‘behind him he leaves tears’ (II.i.150), and the play certainly emphasises not only the deviousness of politics but also the horrors of war, and what they do to people. Shakespeare had already dramatised this in Henry V, a play which deals with war and peace, but most obviously with war. The dialogue between the king and the three soldiers, Bates, Court, and Williams, on the night before the battle, raises many of the questions which might be normally asked about war: how important is it that the war should be just? how important is conscience, and what is its relationship to obedience? Henry’s argument that death is a matter between the individual and God, and that ‘war is His beadle, war is His vengeance’ (IV.i.165) avoids the issues which the soldiers put to him: is the cause just, and the quarrel honourable? can soldiers die well who die in battle, ‘when blood is their argument’? The soldiers are noble, as well as brave, a trio to contrast with the squalid Bardolph, Nym and Pistol. And although the Chorus declares that ‘honour’s thought/ Reigns solely in the breast of every man’, it is clear that matters are more complicated than this. The war, and especially the battle of Agincourt, shows bravery and skill, the English fighting off a larger and more confident French army; but that courage has been surrounded by numerous less attractive elements of war – the scheming Archbishop of Canterbury, the traitors, the hangers-on, the breakers of rules (Fluellen has an important part to play as the man with the rule book). The productions of Shakespeare’s plays would often have concentrated the minds of the audience on matters of morality and honour. And as the war with France dragged on and opinions about it changed, most notably in 1798 and again in 1808, it would have become clear that what was needed, above all, were two things: a national belief in the war as just and necessary; and an understanding that the war would be prosecuted in a way which, as far as possible, allowed it to be honourable. So one of

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the principal themes which emerged was the rediscovery of chivalry, which was later found in every value judgement of Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula or in Scott’s Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk. The ordering of these and other books is calculated to condemn unchivalric and cowardly behaviour; and such condemnations are inherent in the memoirs of old soldiers, in the histories of the time, and in the poetry of battle.

Justifications Bates, Court and Williams think about war. They are examples of those for whom it is to be avoided wherever possible (‘so I would he were [in Thames up to the neck], and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here’), but who will do their duty. They do so for reasons that are honourable and cogent: obedience to the king, comradeship in arms, a sense of honour. War, with all its horror, brings out such qualities. It is not violence for its own sake, indulged in to gratify a lust for power (as in gang warfare), or to satisfy a psychopathic need to cause pain and death. Violence, pain and death are the necessary evils that accompany war. War itself is, in Clausewitz’s celebrated phrase, the continuation of policy with other means: in other words, there are, or ought to be, reasons for it. Often, of course, those reasons are bad ones, such as a desire to increase one’s territory or subjugate another country; but that kind of aggression produces its own response, so that at least one side believes that it is right and necessary to be fighting. Often, of course, matters are less clear-cut, and both sides are persuaded that they are right: armies are obedient to the state, and states have their own reasons for wanting to fight other states. In these cases, it becomes the work of governments and their propaganda departments to convince the soldiers that they are fighting honourably for a cause that they can believe in. By the steps that are taken to prepare for war, the conflict itself is distinguished from mindless violence. There are other differences, too: a soldier fights not for himself, but for his country, for others, the inhabitants of that country. He likes to think of it as being in a state of peace, security and happiness, and he fights for that. He is prepared to give his life for it, and in so doing he demonstrates how much it means to him. To be a warrior is to be courageous, but also responsible and noble: in some countries the warrior class is revered as the highest element of the society. In attempting to understand these things, we can recognise that there is more to the business of war than fighting and aggression. It involves

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some finer emotions than those of force. It also produces horror on an almost unimaginable scale. In the television age of the twenty-first century, we have become unhappily accustomed to images of bloodstained faces and weeping mothers: these have been the victims of war, the older people whose children have been killed, the defenceless whose houses have been destroyed, the farmers, peasants and small-holders whose lives have been ruined. Whoever starts a war, or provides a cause for it, bears a heavy responsibility for the consequences of it, if only because those consequences can never be accurately foreseen: a general may order an army to march from A to B, but it is hard to control what goes on in between, as Henry V discovered. War makes widows and orphans, destroys villages, ruins towns and cities, humiliates nations: pity and fear are the emotions aroused by war, as they are by tragedy. It is horrific and apparently senseless: ‘Unless we can make sense of war’, writes Michael Gelven, ‘we must assume that millions and millions of men who fought were all quite mad.’17 Indeed, the problem raised by the First World War was exactly that: the two sides facing each other in the trenches of France and Flanders appeared to be engaged in a destruction that, after 1916, made no sense and gained no ground. Gelven argues that war is a paradox: ‘Countless visions of twisted corpses make us weep, but they also leave us in awe of the sacrifice.’18 He suggests that war is ‘at once dreadful and inspiring’; of particular importance is the concept of vastness, which Gelven links with Kant’s account of the sublime, which ‘excites us because the disharmony between our finite understanding and the experience of hugeness or power reveals the awesome power of our minds.’19 War is curiously, disquietingly perhaps, linked with the sublime: a battle such as Waterloo was the subject of a great deal of poetry at the time, and continued to attract novelists such as Stendhal and Thackeray. Hardy, as a young man, loved to question Waterloo veterans. The battle held a fascination for him, as it did for many others, in the nineteenth century and after.

War and wars War was not confined to battlefields and armies. This was the period in which prize-fighting and boxing became important elements in national culture. Fighters such as Tom Cribb and Jem Belcher were national heroes, much sought after as companions by the aristocracy and regarded as types of brave and honourable conduct. Fights were reported in the most respectable publications, such as the Annual Register; Hazlitt’s essay, The Fight, describing the battle between Neate and the Gas Man (Hickman)

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is a classic example of a literary interest in such matters, not to be repeated until the days of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Gentlemen took boxing lessons and prided themselves on their prowess in ‘the noble art’. Descriptions of fights indicate that they were often bloody and exhausting, and tainted with all kinds of dubious practices associated with gambling: but boxing was thought to be a noble art, however brutal it may have been. Indeed, one of Wellington’s descriptions of Waterloo was of a terrible boxing match: ‘Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what the boxers call gluttons.’20 This was also an age of duels. Godwin deplored the ‘despicable practice’ as having been ‘invented by barbarians for the gratification of revenge’: It was probably at that time thought a very happy project for reconciling the odiousness of malignity with the gallantry of courage.21 It is indicative of the widespread practice of duelling that Godwin should have given it this attention; and later De Quincey also published an essay which was partly about duelling (1841).22 Duels became important indicators of honour and of the readiness to defend oneself against false accusation or calumny. Politicians such as Pitt and Tierney, and later Canning and Castlereagh, fought duels; Thomas Moore and Francis Jeffrey tried to, but were stopped by the police; John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, was fatally wounded in a duel in 1821. Pushkin died in one in 1837. The elaborate ritual of duelling, with seconds, was a part of a ceremony of personal honour. The killing of an editor or a poet was rare: but duels on paper were common. Reviewers used periodicals as battlefields, firing broadsides or sniper’s bullets at rival reviewers or at writers whose work they disliked. Byron’s attacks on them in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers were part of the confrontational atmosphere of literary journalism. This was not, of course, new: it can be found in the ‘flyting’ of Scottish Renaissance poetry, in the pamphlet wars of the seventeenth century, and in the mud-slinging of Grub Street. But it acquired a new importance and political resonance after the French Revolution, and especially after the publication, in November 1790, of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the words of Steven Blakemore, this book ‘precipitated a debate . . . which erupted into a great ideological war.’23 Blakemore’s word, very properly, is not ‘argument’, or ‘controversy’, but ‘war’. Similarly, one aspect of the age is defined by what Marilyn Butler called ‘the war of ideas’. Ideas fought for possession of the public mind: polemical writers used the weapons of wit and irony to combat others. Some of them, such

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as Leigh Hunt and his brother John, got into trouble for this: they were imprisoned for lampooning the Prince Regent. More seriously, Tom Paine left the country, and James Montgomery, poet and editor of the Sheffield Iris, was put in prison for attacking the conduct of the police. Literature encouraged political warfare, and even, at times, the violence of insurrection (Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, for example). The literary turbulence of these years mirrored the conflict in Europe. It also encouraged the idea of genius. In an age of polemics, the great contestants stood out as people of genius: Burke, Wollstonecraft and Byron. In military strategy, it was the age of Napoleon: it is fascinating to see the way in which Carl von Clausewitz writes of generalship with the example of Napoleon in his mind, for it relies on the same concepts of genius which are found in poetic theories of the time. On the British side there was one genius, Nelson; but his death at Trafalgar in 1805 turned him instantly into an even more powerful figure, the genius as martyr-hero. His funeral was an occasion of mourning that was unprecedented in its national expression of grief. It is possible to speak of figures such as Nelson as tragic heroes, because of the ‘dramatic’ nature of the war: the war was, of course, not a drama, but it was certainly the material of drama. It threw into relief the clash of mighty opposites, and the resulting action showed the contrast between the victors and the vanquished, the dead and the living, the courageous and the craven, the clever and the stupid. If Napoleon and Nelson were geniuses, they were also tragic in their fall, Nelson instantaneously, Napoleon lingering out an after-life at St Helena (the exile surveying the rock-limpet, as Turner memorably painted him). Each side had other tragic figures: Sir John Moore, desperately trying to control the chaos of the retreat to Corunna; Marshal Ney, commanding the rearguard on the retreat from Moscow and attempting to rally the French troops on the field of Waterloo. The battle of Waterloo itself was part of the ‘dramatic’ material, the final action which would determine the outcome of the whole epic, though not before Napoleon had staged his own mini-drama of the hundred days. It is hardly surprising that Hardy wrote The Dynasts in the form of ‘an Epic-Drama’ as a record and an interpretation of these great events. ‘Let Europe be the stage’, he wrote in a note in 1874 (wondering to himself later if this referred to The Dynasts).24 Hardy called the Napoleonic Wars ‘a vast international tragedy’,25 thus invoking another dramatic metaphor. They were of such length and ferocity that they were productive of much misery, both in terms of men killed and in terms of economic hardship (the price of bread remained high, and employment was depressed because of the Continental blockades).

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But these wars also conditioned the lives of those who lived through them, gave them subjects which they found compelling and engaging, and profoundly affected their views of human nature and of one another. What happened to the literature of the period in relation to the wars of the time is the subject of the next chapters. They are necessarily both exploratory and selective, if only because the evidence is so abundant and contradictory: opinions for the war and against it are related to views of patriotism, which in turn are related to ideas about the brotherhood of man, which in turn are connected with the ideas of a just war.

Politics and the idea of the just war The concept of the just war has exercised theologians and philosophers since the time of Saint Augustine, who developed the doctrine, and of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who refined it. It depends upon the following preconditions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

war must be declared by a legitimate authority; war must be waged in a just cause; war must be fought as a last resort; war must be undertaken with a right intention; war must be fought in the proper manner (that is, without destroying the innocent).

It is clear that, if these criteria are to be applied, declarations of war in the 1790s were acts of government which could be subject to intense argument. In the House of Commons itself, Charles James Fox and his political associates were resolute opponents of the war in 1793: so were most of those British radicals who supported the French Revolution. War was seen by both groups as the policy of an unrepresentative and tyrannical government, undertaken to preserve the established rule of monarchs and the aristocracy, and certainly not entered upon as a last resort or with the right intention. Whether or not the war would be fought in the proper manner would be revealed in the future: meanwhile, by every moral and ethical standard, the war was seen by its opponents to be wrong. And although this book is not about the responses to the Revolution in France, it has to be recognised that such responses profoundly affected the pacifism or militarism of the years that followed 1793. The writers, politicians, and agitators of 1793 and after were strongly influenced by recent history. The war against the American colonists,

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which had ended only ten years previously, was a war which, with hindsight, had been waged unjustly and which had ended disastrously. Readers of Tom Paine’s work written during that war could have seen that he was applying the doctrine of the Just War quite specifically, claiming the moral high ground: ‘It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if ever there was a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.’26 The American war had not been fought by Britain for a just cause, nor with a right intention. Paine described it as ‘a war of covetousness’: The fertile fields and prosperous infancy of America appeared to her as mines for tributary wealth. She viewed the hive, and disregarding the industry that had enriched it, thirsted for the honey.27 This appeared in The Crisis Extraordinary of 1780. The behaviour of Britain during that war was associated, in Paine’s mind, with the principles of hereditary monarchy and the tyranny that went with it; indeed in 1791, during the struggle for power between the king and the revolutionaries in France, he had returned to the subject of war in Part 1 of Rights of Man, in which he argued that frequently the causes of war were contested hereditary claims: All the civil wars in France arose from the hereditary system; they were either produced by hereditary claims, or by the imperfection of the hereditary form, which admits of regencies, or monarchies at nurse. . . . A government calling itself free, with an hereditary office, is like a thorn in the flesh, that produces a fermentation which endeavors to discharge it. But I might go further, and place also foreign wars, of whatever kind, to the same cause. It is by adding the evil of hereditary succession to that of monarchy, that a permanent family interest is created, whose constant objects are dominion and revenue. Poland, though an elective monarchy, has had fewer wars than those which are hereditary; and it is the only government that has made a voluntary essay, though but a small one, to reform the condition of the country.28 Paine was drawing attention to the unprincipled acquisitiveness of the crowned heads of Europe: he was writing at a time when the Empress of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the Archduke of Austria were all

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scrambling for Poland. He was also responding to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, and lamenting the fact that Burke, who had supported the American colonists, had decided to take alarm and attack the French Revolution and the National Assembly. Even in 1791, Paine was evidently foreseeing some kind of armed conflict: ‘I had seen enough of the miseries of war to wish it might never more have existence in the world, and that some other mode might be found out to settle the differences that should occasionally arise in the neighbourhood of nations.’29 This comes right at the beginning of the Preface to the English Edition of Rights of Man; in the Preface to the French Edition (it was translated almost immediately after publication) he was more specifically antimonarchical: The behavior of the English Government in its dealings with France is a palpable contradiction of all its pretensions of amity, however seemingly candid, and proves clearly that its official expressions of regard are illusory, that its court is a treacherous court, a demented court, which is a prominent factor in every European plot and quarrel, because it is in search of a war that will serve as an excuse for its insane prodigality. 30 Paine’s use of the word ‘court’ here, and his argument that the British government (here aligned with the ‘court’ of George III, in a rhetorical sleight of hand) was searching for a war to excuse its prodigality, suggest that his prejudice has overcome his judgement. But his opinions, extreme thought they are, are consonant with his views about war and government. William Godwin similarly believed that all wars originated with kings: It is perhaps impossible to show, that a single war ever did, or could have taken place, in the history of mankind, that did not in some way originate with those two great political monopolies, monarchy and aristocracy.31 This was published in 1793, not long after Paine’s Rights of Man, and at a difficult time for the French Revolution. It linked wars with kings and aristocrats, and saw both as counter-revolutionary. The French king had been guillotined in January, but there were plenty of others who were active in European political life, to whom deference was paid and by whom policy-making was determined.

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Near the beginning of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin set out his views on war: . . . the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is of all other beings the most formidable enemy to man. Among the various schemes that he has formed to destroy and plague his kind, war is the most terrible. Satiated with petty mischief and retail of insulated crimes, he rises in this instance to a project that lays nations waste, and thins the population of the world. Man directs the murderous engine against the life of his brother; he invents with indefatigable care refinements in destruction; he proceeds in the midst of gaiety and pomp to the execution of his horrid purpose; whole ranks of sensitive beings, endowed with the most admirable faculties, are mowed down in an instant; they perish by inches in the midst of agony and neglect, lacerated with every variety of method that can give torture to the frame. 32 Godwin’s ferocious rhetoric contrasts the luxury of courts with the hardships of a soldier’s life: he adds one more strain to the argument that war is evil. It is evil not merely because it destroys human beings (‘sensitive beings’) but because it is carried on simultaneously (‘in the midst of’) a court life of gaiety and pomp. He continued to insist on the importance of what he called ‘a just and upright war’, by which he meant a defensive war: ‘No war is justifiable but a war purely defensive.’ 33 He thought that ‘the utmost benevolence ought to be practised towards our enemies’, and that ‘the principle of war [was] incompatible with the genius of democracy.’34 Offensive war, in his view, was a result of the corruption of an undemocratic society, led by its most corrupt members. Thus Godwin and Paine were two of the many writers who took up a high moral position at the start of the war. They were engaged with the political imperatives of the time from a position which had its origins in the doctrine of the just war. But there were many other ways of seeing war, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Postscript The literature of the Romantic period in England has much to say about war, sometimes directly and sometimes more generally in its accounts of conduct and morality. In spite of this, there has not been a large critical literature on the topic. Betty T. Bennett’s British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793–1815 is an indispensable anthology with useful

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notes; Simon Bainbridge’s fine study, Napoleon and the English Romantics, naturally has a good deal to say about it; and there has been a welcome sign of interest in the collection of essays edited by Philip Shaw, Romantic Wars.35 Gillian Russell has examined the theatre of the period in The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1793–1815. But until recently it has been possible to read major books on English Romanticism without being given any sense that throughout the period in which these works were being produced, there was a war on, and a spectacular, absorbing and terrible war. If we take, as a convenient example, René Wellek’s attempt to conceptualise ‘Romanticism’ as a counter to A.O. Lovejoy’s suggestion that the word ‘has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign’, we are told that we find throughout Europe the same conceptions of poetry and of the workings and nature of the poetic imagination, the same conception of nature and its relation to man, and basically the same poetic style, with a use of imagery, symbolism, and myth which is clearly distinct from that of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. 36 The opening phrase of this quotation tempts the reader with any sense of history to respond that during this period ‘we find throughout Europe’ a major and most spectacular war: awe-inspiring and terrible battles, culminating in Waterloo; victories, capitulations, armistices, alliances, continental blockades; rebellions, as in Spain; great enterprises and great failures, such as Napoleon’s Italian campaign and his invasion of Russia in 1812; whole countries cynically and greedily partitioned, such as Poland, or occupied and robbed, such as Switzerland; disasters, such as the Duke of York’s campaign in the Netherlands from 1793 to 1795, or the Walcheren expedition of 1809; heroic retreats, such as the march to Corunna; crucial sea-fights, such as the Nile and Trafalgar. The historically minded reader might want to add a fourth dimension to Wellek’s three elements of Romanticism, ‘imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style.’ That fourth dimension would be conflict, the very principle of opposition itself, the way in which contraries meet and collide, as Blake saw them doing in Plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.’ These things provide the forces which establish who and what we are. In Blake’s time they had for him an internal significance which mirrored the discourse of conflict without the awareness of a nation in opposition to nation, so that, in Linda Colley’s celebrated word, the

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British nation was ‘forged’ in war.37 Blake would have appreciated the blacksmith image: he forged himself by opposition. Others, by contrast, fashioned themselves, constructed their selves, by what they were in conflict: Napoleon above all, but Nelson, Wellington, Moore, Ney and others also. Napoleon, as Clausewitz was later to indicate, was a military genius and an inspiring leader, whose presence on a battlefield was said to be the equivalent of 40,000 men. Nelson, similarly, had a strange intensity and force in battle. Wellington, in a less spectacular way, was a general who devoted every part of his dedicated energy to the winning of a campaign. Each of these figures found his destiny in war. To them must be added hundreds of others, some of whom are still known to us in their glory – Nelson’s captains, Napoleon’s marshals. But the conflict in which they thrived and made their names was only one example of a wider sense of conflict that was found at the time. It involved the sense of the self as opposed to others. It was found in the conflicts of individuals and of groups: in parliament this was the great age of debates, of Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan; it was found in the arguments about the war itself, in the fierce opposition of ‘Jacobins’ and ‘Anti-Jacobins’; it gave rise to rival ‘schools’ of poetry – ‘the Lake school’, ‘the Cockney school’. It produced the fierce antagonism of periodicals, and the pungent reviews of writers such as Jeffrey and Hazlitt. But war (like illness as described by Susan Sontag38) is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. That is one of the reasons why it is so interesting, and why there are such radical differences in the ways of seeing war.

1 Ways of Seeing War

1.1

The broken soldier

In The Deserted Village (1770), Goldsmith sketched a portrait of an old soldier, presumably a victim of the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1753: The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sate by his fire, and talked the night away; Wept o’er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch, and showed how wars were won. The broken soldier evokes pity and anger. This is a man who has been ruined physically, who walks with a crutch, whose life from now on is limited to begging. He has been hospitably looked after by the village preacher, but may not be so fortunate elsewhere: he was one of many during the wars of this time – the Seven Years’ War, the War of American Independence, the Napoleonic Wars – who were used by the army or navy and then cast aside. It was part of the ill-treatment which soldiers often received at the hands of the government: as soldiers they were subject to military discipline, exposed to danger, and dismissed when they were of no further use. The closest parallel, often invoked by those who were against war, was that of slavery. The image of the soldier or sailor as a slave, forced into the army or navy and deprived of his individual choice of action, was a recurrent one. And clearly, if such a view was held, then war was a sorry business, without justification at any time. And to a writer such as Blake, poetry which in any way seemed to encourage it was of doubtful value. In the preface to Milton, he criticised Shakespeare and Milton for being ‘curbed by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword’, meaning Homer and Virgil, whose 23

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epics were concerned with war. Here again the image of slavery appears, this time associated with poets: the ‘slaves of the sword’ were those whose values were those of military power. ‘We do not want either Greek or Roman models’, he continued, ‘if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever – in Jesus our Lord.’ Blake fought, but he fought as the Quakers did, with the weapons of love, and in the name of Jesus. The preface to Milton continues with ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, with its final conception of ‘mental fight’: I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land. Those who opposed the war had no trouble in marshalling arguments against it, not only in respect to this particular war (as Godwin and Paine did) but also in principle. They very properly saw war as cruel, bloody, and productive of misery, especially for those who were unable to defend themselves or who were already finding it hard to survive. As Wordsworth later said in the Advertisement to ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (a version of which was published as ‘The Female Vagrant’ in 1798) his topic was in part ‘calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject.’ War destroyed the innocent, the helpless, and the poor; suffering was more immediate and important than heroism. So Blake was not alone in believing that poetry should not be used to dignify war. William Crowe (1745–1829), Public Orator of the University of Oxford, wrote a poem on the Installation of the Chancellor, the Duke of Portland, in 1793, alluding to Homer and Virgil: In evil hour, and with unhallow’d voice Profaning the pure gift of poesy Did he begin to sing, he first who sung Of arms and combats, and the proud array Of warriors on the embattled plain . . . According to Crowe, the problem was that The imperious victor, oft unsatisfied With bloody spoil and tyrannous conquest, dares

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To challenge fame and honour; and too oft The poet, bending low to lawless power, Hath paid unseemly reverence, yea, and brought Streams clearest of the Aonian fount, to wash Blood-stain’d ambition. Crowe went on to argue that if the war was a just one, and only the guilty suffered, this poetry might be justified. But the misery of war ‘beats heaviest on the exposed Innocent’, while those who ‘stir its fury’ remain at a safe distance: Ah! who then regards The Widow’s tears, the friendless Orphan’s cry, And Famine, and the ghastly train of woes That follow at the dogged heels of war? Meanwhile the war poets, ‘in the pomp and pride of victory’ Sing their mad hymns of triumph, hymns to God O’er the destruction of his gracious works! – Hymns to the Father o’er his slaughter’d Sons! Detested be their sword, abhorred their name, And scorn’d the tongues that praise them. In 1793, these were seen as dangerously anti-war sentiments, and Crowe was not allowed to deliver it at the Duke’s installation. But it went on to have a considerable circulation: it was printed in the European Magazine ( June 1795), and later in a collection of Crowe’s poetry in 1804 (when he must have thought its sentiments to be still appropriate). Coleridge quoted it in Conciones ad Populum, or Addresses to the People in 1795, and again in The Watchman (2 April 1796), where he added the words ‘Quod qui non legit, legat, Qui legit, relegat’ (‘whoever has not read it should read it; who has read it should read it again’). 1 The arguments against war were not just general, but specific to that time and place. Many British writers thought that patriotism required them to stand up not for a ‘Rule, Britannia’ principle but for a different kind of patriotic ideal. The word was appropriated by those who acknowledged another (as they saw it a higher) loyalty than to nation, church and king. It has been well described by Lewis Patton:

26 Romanticism and War

In The Watchman, patriotism, used in this special sense, implied a wider allegiance and a higher loyalty than that owed to one’s country – a loyalty to the welfare of mankind. It was a word to couple with philanthropy, and its antonyms were despotism, aristocracy, and priesthood.2 Political systems here gave way to higher and more philosophical demands. Similarly, in A Moral and Political Lecture of 1795 Coleridge appealed over the heads of politicians and government to speak of ‘that small and glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested Patriots.’3 This was part of a system of morality that engaged with the transient politics of the 1790s: an anti-slave trade, anti-Royalist movement, that supported the French Revolution and saw British opposition to it as inexplicable. It was against war, as it was against poverty, slavery, oppression, monarchy and aristocratic power. A poem such as Blake’s ‘London’ condensed it into four verses: in David Erdman’s words, it was ‘infinite curses in a little room, a world at war in a grain of London soot.’4 In it the soldier’s sigh runs as blood down palace walls, an image that is surreal but effective as a representation of anguish and fear. Erdman suggests that this blood was emblematic of mutiny, rebellion and civil war; there were mutinies in the army and navy during these years.5 But rebellion and mutiny were obviously dangerous to the government, which countered not only with acts that threatened the freedom of speech, but also with show trials, espionage, and bribery. More effective, probably, was a propaganda which stressed the virtues of loyalty and duty: as Geoff Quilley has shown in a persuasive essay, mutiny was presented to new recruits in the navy as the opposite of that most seductive of all appeals to the soldier or sailor – the sense of duty. 6 Duty was used by Nelson, famously, at Trafalgar, but duty is a most dangerous word: although Wordsworth called it the ‘Strong daughter of the voice of God’ it can be used to persuade people to do things which they might not normally do when governed by the natural dictates of human feeling. Thus the idea of slavery, of the soldier as a slave or a thing in a red coat, became associated with the horrors of war as well as with the concept of slavery itself.7 Godwin thought, for example, that military discipline compelled soldiers to be machines. 8 This evil side of war is unavoidable, and some writers took an absolutist stance towards it: war was wicked, and poets should have nothing to do with it. Goldsmith suggests something more complicated: even though his soldier has been ‘broken’ (the adjective is deliberately final and shocking), his experience has given him the power to hold an audience. He also seems to be partly proud of what he has done, and partly

Ways of Seeing War 27

saddened by it. He weeps ‘o’er tales of sorrow done’, and yet he enjoys using his crutch to demonstrate arms drill, and – as a pretend musket – to show how wars were won. We could say that this adds to the sadness: that the poor man is deluded and foolish, and that he refuses to recognise that his life has been ruined. But the poem suggests a strange mixture of pride and sorrow, or of pride and guilt. Although he remembers past sorrows, and his part in them, something else makes him forget his wounds, at least in the retelling of old stories. Scott portrays a similar figure, with gentle and humorous affection, in the person of Sergeant More M’Alpin in the Introduction to The Legend of Montrose. He became ‘one of the most honoured inhabitants of Gandercleugh’, a man who had lost an arm during the Peninsular campaign and who was ‘in respect of military intelligence, and able commentaries upon the newspapers, gazettes, and bulletins, a very oracle, explanatory of all martial events, past, present, or to come.’ Both the broken soldier and Sergeant More M’Alpin are physically crippled by war, and both have some right to be thought of as victims of a cruel system (although the Sergeant is comfortably off financially). But Goldsmith and Scott both point to something else, which complicates the idea of war as purely tragic.

1.2

The minstrel boy

In one of his best known lyrics (from Irish Melodies V, 1813), Thomas Moore portrayed the minstrel boy as going off to the war: The Minstrel-boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you’ll find him; His father’s sword he has girded on, And his wild harp slung behind him – “Land of song!” said the warrior-bard, “Though all the world betrays thee, One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee!” The song’s lightness of tone and jaunty rhythm conceal its strange mixture of bravado and seriousness, even horror. It moves almost instantly from the minstrel boy going away in the first line to the image of the ranks of death in the second: it records the process of change from all that the minstrel boy stands for – poetry, song, youth – to the military

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precision of ‘the ranks of death’ (as if soldiers in their ranks are somehow personified as death, or death’s agents, row on row). The images make a kind of shorthand for a certain experience: what does a poet do in battle? and beyond that, what is the relationship between literature and war? The poem’s rapidity and musicality suggest an almost careless connection between the two: the minstrel, which was a romantic word for a certain kind of enthusiastic and patriotic poet (since James Beattie’s The Minstrel and Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel), appears to go off to the war without a thought or a sigh. However, he is not just a minstrel. He may have his wild harp – the harp that sang without fear or restraint, without rules and regulations, the harp of the wild lands perhaps – slung on his back, but he has his father’s sword too. The fact that it is his father’s sword suggests that he has a tradition of bravery and fighting to keep up (mothers are not part of this heroic pattern), that he belongs to a family that has seen service in earlier generations. The appeal of the poem is that there is no conflict between the two ways of life: the minstrel boy sings, and he fights. He is a warrior-bard, neither the one nor the other, but both, like David in the Old Testament. The second part of the first verse confirms this: he fights for the land of song, for everything that is caught up and included in that phrase. He fights for song, for art, for a way of life that is brilliantly signalled in the poem’s instant simplicities. The land appears to be under threat – ‘though all the world betrays thee’ – and certainly isolated in its defiance of the world. So the sword, even if it is the only one, will guard the rights of that country, and the faithful harp will praise it. The repetition of the italicised ‘One’ implies both individuality and defiance: no matter who else fails, or compromises, the minstrel boy and warrior-bard will remain true to each of his vocations. His harp will never be a false or faithless one, and his sword will guard the ‘rights’ of the country (in the age of a constant emphasis on the rights of man, the word has a significant contribution to make). The song has no easy or successful heroism. At the beginning of the second verse we learn that ‘The minstrel fell!’: The minstrel fell! – but the foeman’s chain Could not bring his proud soul under; The harp he lov’d ne’er spoke again, For he tore its cords asunder; And said, “No chains shall sully thee, Thou soul of love and bravery! Thy songs were made for the brave and free, They never shall sound in slavery!”

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Evidently ‘The minstrel fell’ does not mean that he has been killed, as might at first be supposed. He must have been taken prisoner and destroyed his harp as a symbol of defiance. It is a response to defeat and imprisonment which goes back to ancient times, to the captives in Babylon who wept when they remembered Zion, and hung their harps on the willow trees: For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalm 137: 3–4) Moore’s song takes this pattern and applies it to the contemporary situation. The boy ‘is gone’ to the war, and presumably he is a volunteer in one of the regiments serving under Wellington. But he is also a figure in a timeless and universal scene, in which there are conquerors and victims, survivors and dead, successful and imprisoned. Both of these are viewed with an intensity that is easy to explain: the survivors of a battle are heroes, the dead are ‘the glorious dead’, those who have given their lives for their country. It is customary to think of them as having made ‘the supreme sacrifice’, as having given their lives for freedom, or in the cause of righteousness and peace. They are linked, in some countries, with the pattern of self-sacrifice found in Christ himself, and in his teaching. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend’ is a text often associated with the war dead: the central monument in war cemeteries is the cross with a sword embedded in it. The courage of the fight is somehow welded (as the sword is welded to the stone) to the sacrifice of the fighter. For those who survive there is a similar complexity, mixing exultation and sadness, a memory like that of Wordsworth’s solitary reaper: Of old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago. It is for this reason that the establishment of a just case for war is so necessary and important: the doctrine of a ‘just war’ is not only a Christian response, but compulsory in political and moral terms. Governments spend much time in convincing people that a declaration of war is justified, in order that the terrible demands of war may produce what they see as the correct response, that the suffering and death may be thought to be worth while.

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The first great epic poem, Homer’s Iliad, discusses and establishes the reasons for the war against Troy, and the Greek expedition. It examines what makes men fight, or refuse to fight, and how they fight, brutally, or skilfully, chivalrously or just violently. It shows the intense relationships between friends and enemies in war, the tragic suffering of wives, the humiliation of a victim. In Book XII, Sarpedon puts the warrior’s position very simply: ‘in we go, whether we yield the glory to some other man or win it for ourselves.’9 Hector tells Andromache in Book VI that ‘I have trained myself always, like a good soldier, to take my place in the front line and win glory for my father and myself.’ 10 Yet the greatness of The Iliad is that it also engages with the human ties that make such bravery painful and difficult. Sarpedon dies thinking of his wife and his infant son; the tender moment when Hector’s little boy is frightened by the bronze helmet and the horsehair plume, and the conversation between Hector and Andromache, both stress the humanity which war can destroy. The Iliad ends not with slaughter, but with Priam’s meeting with Achilles to beg for the body of his son: Priam urges Achilles to ‘think of your own father’. What follows is a moment of extraordinary pathos: ‘Priam, crouching at Achilles’ feet, wept bitterly for man-slaying Hector, and Achilles wept for his father, and then again for Patroclus.’11 In Homer’s magnificent description of the encounter between Priam and Achilles, the cruelties of war are finally softened by courtesies. Achilles takes the ransom, but leaves ‘a couple of white mantles and a fine tunic’ in which he can wrap the body for Priam to take it home: The prince [Achilles] then called some women-servants out and told them to wash and anoint the body, but in another part of the house, so that Priam should not see his son.12 Achilles and Priam share a sensitivity and a dignity which interrupts their enmity, even as Achilles promises to hold off the fighting for eleven days to allow for the ritual of mourning: nine days of private grief, a tenth day to bury Hector and hold the funeral feast, and one more to build him a mound. Equally, they share an awareness of the past, each remembering his own loved ones: Priam had set Achilles thinking of his own father and brought him to the edge of tears. Taking the old man’s hand, he gently put him from him; and overcome by their memories they both broke down. 13

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We can recognise the importance, in all our dealings with war, of such a moment, when two enemies are momentarily reconciled, made one in humanity by being ‘overcome by their memories’. Memory creates sadness, in victory or in defeat: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them. Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen touches the same deep springs of memory and loss as those in Homer, uniting enemies in a common grief, and in a nobility that transcends hatred. ‘Epic poetry’, writes Kevin Crotty, ‘is exactly this memory of griefs – a making vivid, once again, of past experience.’ He shows how, in this process, human beings become aware of their own vulnerability; the emotion which emerges, during the course of The Iliad, is pity.14 At the same time, we are made aware that such emotion is not shared by all, and that in war not everyone is susceptible to the tears of sufferers or awake to the courtesies of warfare. Achilles makes Priam sleep out of doors, because if one of the Achaean generals came to visit, he would tell Agamemnon, and the return of the body would be delayed. And Hermes, who visits Priam in the night, urges him to escape with the body while the Greeks are asleep, because he would have to pay three times the ransom if they found out what had happened. In other words, Achilles’ chivalry is unusual: even Priam could be seen to be acting less than chivalrously when he slips away with the body in the night. It is a reminder of the constant pressures of war on the nobility of the human spirit, and that one noble-hearted general may be surrounded by others who are less scrupulous and less human. The literature of war shows such things as bravery, unhappiness, cruelty, suffering, and courage, from Homer and Virgil (whose hero is much buffeted by the Gods but ‘multa quoque et bello passus’, much enduring in war also) to poems such as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, to The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, down to modern films and novels about the two World Wars of the twentieth century. They examine bravery, actions of great pith and moment, the awe-inspiring movements of battle. They describe battles between good and evil, as Beowulf encounters Grendel and his mother. But they also awaken tragic emotions of pity and fear: one of the features of war, and of the responses to it, is the awareness of those who are victims, not just in battle, but by bereavement, loneliness,

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destitution, and starvation, not to mention such horrors as the raping of women or the killing of old people and children. At the same time, wars are fascinating. ‘War makes rattling good history’, says the Spirit Sinister, cynically but truly, in Hardy’s The Dynasts; ‘but Peace is poor reading.’15 It is hard to have to admit to this fascination with war, but it clearly exists (alongside the perception of war’s horrors), as the number of war films and military histories testifies. The Minstrel Boy is a lyric of energy and excitement: the boy goes off to take part in great and stirring events. Those events develop in ways that shape themselves into significant patterns also. What are sometimes called ‘the fortunes of war’ allow the spectators, or the historians, to see the ups and downs of fortune, the great wheel of success and failure. The invasion of Russia by Napoleon, and the same invasion one hundred and thirty years later by Hitler, are awe-inspiring examples of great events, which show the ancient pattern of pride going before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Napoleon’s great battles – Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram and the others – demonstrate a figure who rises to an almost inconceivable height of success, whose every action is crowned with glory, only to be inevitably, unsuccessful in the end, to fall, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, from power into ruin. The patterns of war can be dramatic, exemplary like great tragedy. The literature of war engages with matters that transcend the immediate action of the period itself. This is the literature which explores the kind of courage and skill in warfare that is found in Homer and Virgil, and the pity which is there also. Thomas Moore’s minstrel boy is an example of this, because he is a timeless figure, a warrior-bard. He has his father’s sword (even as Hector and Achilles, and Aeneas, are conscious of their fathers) and his harp, which will never sound in slavery. But when the minstrel boy ‘to the war’ is gone, he could, in one interpretation, be going to ‘the war’, the one which everyone knew about and was engaged in. Moore’s minstrel boy, in other words, may have been a boy soldier in the wars of 1793–1815, prisoner in some engagement in Flanders, or Spain, or the West Indies. And any study of the literature of conflict needs to take into account both the immediate and the more general, because attitudes to the immediate are affected by general principles of belief and action, just as those principles have to be revised with every war that develops, and which changes our view of what warfare is. The Napoleonic Wars came historically at a particularly interesting moment in the development of modern thinking about war. The general ideas (of chivalry, or heroism, or pity) intersect with the specifics of

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battle and strategy. In the case of chivalry, for example, there was a widespread belief, as Alice Chandler has shown, that wars were getting worse. She quotes from Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1760), with its emphasis on ‘the improved gallantry of the feudal times’, and from Mark Akenside’s Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England of 1758: Whither is England’s ancient spirit fled? Where are those valiant tenants of her shore, Who from the warrior bow the strong dart sped, Or with firm hand the rapid pole-axe bore?16 Chandler notes a general sense that ‘calculation’ was replacing courage. This was associated with a dislike of the power of money, so that Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, could arouse sympathy for Marie Antoinette in a famous contrast – ‘The age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded.’17 It was this need for chivalry and valour which Scott managed to express with such skill, and it was one of the things which made him so popular. The sense that the chivalry of medieval times had been, if not revived, then at least emulated in his own day, is found in Marmion (1808), where Scott pays tribute to Pitt, Fox and Nelson in the Introductions to the Cantos. His own response to the Napoleonic Wars was unquestioningly enthusiastic, the response of a mind which rejoiced in the possibility of heroic action. And there is also some evidence, from the memoirs of the time, of the kind of civilised warfare found in Homer: that after a battle, there was a pause to bury the dead or retrieve the wounded. It was one of the ways in which the horrors of war were sweetened by a restraining humanity. Perhaps the most spectacular and moving example of this was that of the famous Christmas encounter between German and British soldiers in 1914. Achilles would have understood their behaviour; but, of course, there were staff officers who, like Agamemnon and his other generals, ensured that there was no repetition of such a strange and wonderful event.

1.3

Fire, famine and slaughter

To see war in this way is to complicate what might seem at first to be a simple picture. War is horrible, and to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, much of the literature of the romantic period concentrates on the victims of war, and on the suffering which it inflicts on individuals and families. Sometimes this is portrayed by concentrating on specific cases, such as the figure of the starving widow and her children in Wordsworth’s first

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published poem, An Evening Walk (1793), published in the same spring that the war began; or the tragedy of Margaret in The Ruined Cottage, later to become part of Book I of The Excursion. On the same theme, Southey and Coleridge wrote The Soldier’s Wife (later shockingly and shamelessly abused by William Gifford in the Anti-Jacobin): Woe-begone mother, half anger, half agony, As over thy shoulder thou lookest to hush the babe, Bleakly the blinding snow beats in thy haggard face. Ne’er will thy husband return from the war again, Cold is thy heart, and as frozen as Charity! Cold are thy children – Now God be thy comforter! Among Shelley’s early poems in The Esdaile Notebook is ‘a Tale of Society as it is from facts. 1811’, which describes an aged woman who is crippled. She has a son: ‘one only son’s love supported her’: But when the tyrant’s bloodhounds forced her Child For tyrant’s power unhallowed arms to wield, Bend to another’s will, become a thing More senseless than the sword of battle field, Then did she feel keen sorrow’s keenest sting . . . The son returns, broken by the war but still loved: And tho’ his form was wasted by the woe Which despots on their victims love to wreak, Tho’ his sunk eyeball, and his faded cheek, Of slavery, violence, and scorn did speak, Yet did the aged Woman’s bosom glow; . . . The son has experienced things which have destroyed him as a human being. He has been pressed into service and become a thing, a military automaton; in the process he has become both slave and scorner, and engaged in violence: Her son, compelled, the tyrant’s foes had fought, Had bled in battle, and the stern control That ruled his sinews and coerced his soul Utterly poisoned life’s unmingled bowl And unsubduable evils on him wrought.

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He has fought, not gloriously against tyranny, but against the tyrant’s foes. His life has been ruined, and so has his mother’s: ‘It seemeth that their element is pain.’ Shelley’s title is itself a declaration of an authenticity of suffering – ‘a Tale . . . as it is from facts’. Such individual cases bring out the destruction of human life which is brought about by war. Another way of doing that is by creating myths, in which the destructive elements are personified, as they are in Coleridge’s Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, a War Eclogue of 1798, in which three witch-like figures come together on ‘a desolated Tract in La Vendée’, after the savage crushing of the rebellion in the west of France against the Revolutionary French government. Slaughter has ‘drunk the blood’ of ‘thrice three hundred thousand men’, and Famine tells her own ghastly tale: I stood in a swampy field of battle; With bones and skulls I made a rattle, To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow And the homeless dog – but they would not go. Shelley, who was probably given a sight of this poem by Southey, produced his own myth of war in December 1811 with ‘Falshood and Vice. A Dialogue’. ‘Falshood’ is probably intended to show religion, and ‘Vice’ is war: I have extinguished the noonday sun In the carnage smoke of battles won. Famine, Murder, Hell, and Power Were sated in that joyous hour Which searchless fate had stampt for me With the seal of his security, For the bloated Wretch on yonder throne Commanded the bloody fray to rise. Like me he joyed at the stifled moan Wrung from a Nation’s miseries. The ‘bloated Wretch’ is probably the Prince Regent, 18 although he stands for all the kings who, in Shelley’s view, were responsible for war. The Esdaile Notebook contains a poem on the battle of Austerlitz, which took place in December 1805 (though the poem probably dates from some years later, 1809 or after), entitled: ‘To the Emperors of Russia and Austria

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who eyed the battle of Austerlitz from the heights whilst Bonaparte was active in the thickest of the fight’. They are ‘Coward Chiefs’: who, while the fight Rages in the plain below Hide the shame of your affright On yon distant mountain’s brow . . . . . . Be s ure The tyrant needs such slaves as you. Shelley’s title suggests that he admired Napoleon, but that is not the case. As Kenneth Neill Cameron points out, he described Napoleon in a letter to James Hogg as ‘a hateful and despicable being.’19 His antimonarchical sentiments went hand in hand with his anti-war stance: in The Crisis, probably written in 1812, he described the whole political situation as a victory for tyranny over imprisoned liberty: When we see Despots prosper in their weakness, When we see Falshood triumph in its folly, When we see Evil, Tyranny, Corruption, Grin, grow and fatten; When Virtue toileth thro’ a world of sorrow, When Freedom dwelleth in the deepest dungeon, When Truth, in chains and infamy, bewaileth O’er a world’s ruin; . . . Shelley linked the whole business of war with the breakdown of the world’s rationality and morality: falsehood triumphs, virtue toils, and freedom is imprisoned. Wordsworth saw it in the individual figures of destitute widows and orphans, or in the discharged soldier, or in the figure of the ‘Old Man travelling’ in Lyrical Ballads, who is going many miles to visit his son ‘Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth, And there is dying in an hospital.’ The deliberate understatement makes this more effective than if Wordsworth had been rhetorical: the old man is an individual, but he also stands for all those who have lost loved-ones in battle. When Wordsworth later changed his mind about the war, and published a volume of Thanksgiving Odes in 1816, Shelley and Byron fiercely

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attacked the line ‘Yea, Carnage is thy daughter’ and by implication the whole idea that war could be justified. Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third writes Odes to the Devil, ‘in one of which he meekly said’: May Carnage and Slaughter, Thy niece and thy daughter, May Rapine and Famine, Thy gorge ever cramming Glut thee with living and dead! Mary Shelley’s note to the poem reminds the reader that Shelley greatly admired Wordsworth’s poetry, but that in some poems (presumably the Thanksgiving Odes) he was quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind, but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue . . . No poem contains more of Shelley’s peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. 20 Shelley was writing with the benefit of hindsight after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which invalidated Wordsworth’s blanket admiration for the British army expressed in the Odes; but his views, as summarised here by Mary Shelley, are those of one who regarded war as an unmitigated evil: not only did it bring suffering and foster brutality, but it also led to the suppression of truth and virtue. Byron argued in the same way, though characteristically in a more physical mode. While Shelley, and Mary, wrote of moral principles, Byron described war as brutal in Don Juan and showed it to be so in two wonderfully vivid cantos (VII and VIII). Byron and Shelley, and writers like them, represented an awareness of the horrors of war which made Wordsworth seem to have been morally insensitive and to have coupled religion and war in a way that was repugnant. This would seem to be the end of the debate about war. Yet it was not as simple as that: Wordsworth was not entirely devoid of feeling – indeed, in this case he could be said to have had too much, applied uncritically to the moment of victory. But what could have caused

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him to write in this way? What happened to his views about the war, and those of the other major romantic period writers? When, and why, did they change? How did the writers of the time respond to the spectacular events with which they were surrounded, to the failures and successes of warfare, the heroes and the villains, the daily or monthly news of campaigns? The chapters which follow consider this, first by trying to see the way in which the war developed, year by year and battle by battle, and the reaction of writers to it; and second, by seeing the war from a much wider point of view, in which the Napoleonic War is just the most spectacular example of a conflict which illustrates the principles and moralities by which warfare in general is judged. It seems possible to view this war, which lasted for some twenty years during the lifetime of many of the great writers of the age, as one of the most remarkable examples of what war is or can be: as a war which has something in common with other great wars, such as that between Greece and Troy, or the wars that a minstrel boy might have fought in at any time.

2 1793

The government of France declared war on Britain on 1 February 1793. Responses to this act, and to the British declaration of war which followed, were complex and varied, depending on a number of factors. The chief was the attitude, or spectrum of attitudes, to the French Revolution itself: the enthusiasm with which the fall of the Bastille had been welcomed in 1789 had been succeeded by a more doubtful and more measured approval, which, as the events unfolded, became more complicated. There was a certain fear, and even wonder, at the progress of the Revolution: it was a constant topic of discussion and pamphleteering, of cartoons and poems; and it formed a major part in influencing the fluctuations of British politics in an age of excitement and uncertainty. The case for war was put by the government and its supporters forcibly and with energy. The trial and execution of Louis XVI, which took place in January 1793, was one of the events which helped to shape public opinion, although it was not itself the cause of the war (which was the threat to the Low Countries by the French Republican armies). According to the Annual Register, whose views reflected those of the government, the French ambassador was instructed after the guillotining of Louis XVI that ‘the king can no longer, after such an event, permit your residence here.’1 The Register continued with a stern re-statement of official policy: the conduct of France towards foreign powers had been ‘strongly and uniformly expressive of a malignant and hostile spirit’: Thus, after a ten years peace, during which she had recovered from the wounds inflicted upon her in the unhappy dispute with the American colonies, was Great Britain once more forced to take up arms; not merely for the preservation of existence, as in former 39

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struggles, but of everything by which existence is rendered dear . . . . On the part of this country nothing had been omitted to avoid a rupture with France. More had, in truth, been done and suffered, for this purpose, than was reconcileable with the national dignity, or with any known maxim of a sound and enlightened policy. 2 In the Annual Register’s reading of events, the news of the execution of the king came as confirmation of all that was seen to be wrong with French politics. Although it was strongly biassed in favour of the government, it reflected the ideas of a susceptible public. Parson Woodforde, up in Norfolk, noted that Louis XVI had been ‘inhumanly and unjustly beheaded on Monday last by his cruel, bloodthirsty Subjects. Dreadful times I am afraid are approaching to all Europe. France the foundation of all of it.’ 3 Woodforde was obviously comfortable and conservative; but after an initial welcome to the news of 1789, a large section of British opinion had been powerfully influenced by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. Burke had taken alarm at the course of the revolution, and at the support for it in Britain: he cleverly used the queen as type of innocent victim, writing of Marie Antoinette as ‘glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy’. His account of the behaviour of the revolutionary mob on 5 and 6 October 1789 was calculated to appeal to those who subscribed to a romantic view of chivalry and manners: ‘Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.’4 It was in this ‘age of chivalry is dead’ spirit that poems were written with revealing titles such as ‘Written on the Murder of the late unfortunate Monarch of France’: Unhappy Louis! Well thy fate may claim The gen’rous pity that a nation shows;5 The Poet Laureate, Henry James Pye, addressed the war in his ‘Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday’ printed in the Annual Register: Stern battle shakes the avenging spear, And teaches headlong Arrogance to fear, Mercy herself shall consecrate the cause, While Justice points the sword that Indignation draws.

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Pye, by virtue of his position and his temperament, was well suited to the writing of poems in favour of the war and of the principle of monarchy, portraying the role of Britain under George III as the defender of justice and virtue. The king himself was personally popular, unlike his obese and self-indulgent son, later the Prince Regent. There were loyal addresses: in November 1792 there had been set up an ‘Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’,6 thus showing that the word ‘liberty’ could be appropriated by many groups, even by monarchists. This led to a good deal of organised violence in favour of the king and the church, not unwelcome to the government, and in some places actually encouraged by unscrupulous government agitators. Crude mobs, sometimes bribed with money and drink, became ‘Church and King’ mobs, destroying all that was seen to be against the two, such as the chapel, house and library of the great scientist and enlightened minister in Birmingham, Joseph Priestley, in July 1791. Their extreme violence was on the whole counter-productive, but at the same time poems were being written to celebrate church and king: one, to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia’, described France as a ‘bleeding corpse’ over which ‘wild Anarchy’ was standing, and continued: The Gallic lilies droop and die, Profan’d by many a patriot knave; Her clubs command, her Nobles fly, Her Church a Martyr – King a Slave. Chorus. – While Britons still united sing, Old England’s Glory, – Church and King. Yet – Faction’s darling child, Enjoys this sanguinary scene, And celebrates, with transports wild, The Wrongs, miscall’d the Rights, of Men. Chorus. – But Britons still united sing, Old England’s Glory, – Church and King.7 The allusion to ‘the Rights of Men’ was to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, a direct response to Burke: Part I was published in May 1791, dedicated to George Washington. Paine attacked what he called ‘the Quixote age of chivalry nonsense’, and accused Burke of being ‘ignorant of the springs and impulses of the French Revolution.’8 But Paine was not universally

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popular, except with the reformers, and radicals such as Blake. At Wakefield his effigy was drawn through the town and whipped, with a halter round its neck.9 Throughout the early 1790s the arguments raged, often with violence. Events on the continent were carefully scrutinised by both sides, as the Revolution took its course, producing what M.J. Sydenham has called a ‘second revolution’ in August 1792.10 In the previous month, the Duke of Brunswick had issued his manifesto from the eastern border of France, informing the population that those who offered no resistance to his armies would be protected, and warning the Parisians to take no action against the Tuileries and the Royal family. The people of Paris were to be held responsible for the safety of the king and queen, and if that safety was threatened, the city would be subjected to ‘exemplary and for ever memorable vengeance.’ This document, described by Louis Madelin as ‘Brunswick’s mad manifesto’, 11 had the predictable result of stiffening French resistance to the foreign invader, and led to the baffled retirement of Brunswick’s army after the battle of Valmy in September 1792. This battle, described by Goethe (who witnessed it) as beginning a new age in the history of the world,12 was one of the many events which enthused the sympathisers of the Revolution, and alarmed the British government; and when, in the following year, Louis XVI was guillotined and the French invaded the Low Countries, war was declared. To the reformers who had welcomed the Revolution and sent congratulations to its National Convention, the declaration of war by Britain was an appalling act. It particularly disturbed the members of the associations which were in favour of reform, the most notable of which was the London Corresponding Society, founded in 1791. Its leading members included Thomas Holcroft the dramatist, Thomas Hardy (the founder and first secretary, and a Scottish-born London shoemaker) and John Thelwall, a writer and lecturer, to whom the young Coleridge was to send an admiring letter in 1796. The society aroused suspicion in high places: in 1794, Thelwall and his associates were imprisoned and put on trial for high treason. They were acquitted of various trials between October and December: defending one of them, Thomas Erskine, their lawyer, noted that ‘The spirit which became prevalent about this time, which bore down everything before it, and prepared the nation for war, was an absolute horror of everything connected with France.’13 The war thus polarised opinion into those who sided with Burke and the government, and those who saw it, as Erskine did, as factitiously created by an anti-Jacobin or anti-Gallican mood. James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae (1791, another response to Burke), satirised Burke’s appeal to

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chivalrous notions by putting Marie Antoinette into a ludicrous parody of a Gothic novel: absurdly, the self-exiled Comte d’Artois, ‘the new model of French Knighthood’ is to issue from Turin with ten thousand cavaliers for the delivery of the peerless and immaculate Antoinetta of Austria from the durance vile in which she has so long been immured in the Thuilleries, from the swords of the discourteous knights of Paris, and the spells of the sable wizards of democracy. 14 In the face of the church and king party, Paine and Mackintosh argued the case for the revolution, and therefore against war. The London Corresponding Society sent a message to Paris: ‘Frenchmen, you are already free, and Britons are preparing to become so.’ 15 It was the last part of this sentence, and utterances like it, which alarmed the authorities. The support for France among radicals, and the blatant suggestion that the time was ripe for a revolution in Britain, led the government of William Pitt to issue a Proclamation in May 1792 against ‘wicked and seditious writings’, which provoked righteous anger among the radicals and sent Paine into exile in France (pursued at Dover by a hostile crowd) on 13 September. Blake produced a sweeping tirade against the tyranny of the British government and the ills of society in Europe, a Prophecy, with its titlepage ‘Lambeth 1794’: Every house a den, every man bound; the shadows are filled With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses of iron. Over the doors thou shalt not, and over the chimneys Fear is written. With bands of iron round their necks fastened to the walls The citizens, in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs Walk heavy; soft and bent are the bones of villagers. (132–7) Blake would have had religious as well as political reasons for opposing the war: his radicalism was part of his vision of a better society. In the same way, Methodists spread the gospel of Tom Paine.16 Quakers such as John Scott of Amwell were opposed to war on principle, and pointed out the reality behind the martial drum: I hate that drum’s discordant sound, Parading round, and round, and round; To me it talks of ravaged plains,

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And burning towns and ruin’d swains, And mangled limbs, and dying groans, And widow’s tears, and orphan’s moans, . . .17 Wordsworth had just returned from France when war was declared. He was busy with the publication of his first poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, the first of which is primarily about the Lake District landscape but which also contains the scene of the soldier’s widow, left destitute with her children. She bids her soldier come her woes to share, Asleep on Bunker’s charnel hill afar; (253–4) which indicates that Wordsworth had the American war in mind. When he came to revise the poem, a year later, he omitted ‘Bunker’s’, which suggests that his mind was already turning in 1794 to the distress arising from the new war. The connection between the two wars in his mind is confirmed by his description of a visit to the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1793, where he saw the British battle fleet preparing for war: I left the place with melancholy forebodings. The American war was still fresh in memory. The struggle which was beginning, and which many thought would be brought to a speedy close by the irresistible arms of Great Britain being added to those of the allies, I was assured in my own mind would be of long continuance, and productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation . . . He then visited Salisbury Plain, wandering on foot after the collapse of the cart in which he was travelling with William Calvert: The monuments and traces of antiquity, scattered in abundance over that region, led me unavoidably to compare what we know or guess of those remote times with certain aspects of modern society, and with calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject. 18 This is taken from a preface, written much later, to the revised version of the Salisbury Plain poems, the first of which, ‘Salisbury Plain’, was written in the immediate aftermath of his experience, and the second of which, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, dates from the years between

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1795 and 1799. The first of these, as Stephen Gill has observed, stood as ‘a record of Wordsworth’s earlier turbulent feelings, later recalled so vividly in The Prelude, about the war with France and the condition of England.’19 It tells the story of a woman, living happily with her father, until ‘Oppression trampled on his tresses grey’ (257). She turns for help to her lover, who marries her and looks after them both, and by whom she has three children. Then comes the war. He is thrown out of work: How changed at once! for Labor’s chearful hum Silence and Fear, and Misery’s weeping train. But soon with proud parade the noisy drum Beat round to sweep the streets of want and pain. (298–301) He enlists in the army, and is posted to America; his wife and children become camp-followers, an existence which she compares to that of dogs following other animals: Better before proud Fortune’s sumptuous car Obvious our dying bodies to obtrude, Than dog-like wading at the heels of War Protract a cursed existence with the brood That lap, their very nourishment, their brother’s blood. (311–15) The violence of the imagery here is an indication of Wordsworth’s distress and anger. So is the storm which the traveller has to endure. It was linked with something uncontrollable: a savagery, which was not the nobility of primitive society as seen by eighteenth-century philosophers but a simple brutality of force. During his solitary wanderings over Salisbury Plain, he had visions of the ancient Britons and of human sacrifice, which appear in both ‘Salisbury Plain’ (82–99, 424–32) and The Prelude (1850, XII.312–35). Indeed the force of ‘Salisbury Plain’ comes from the fact that it is not just an anti-war polemic, but an expression of a deeply-felt fear of violence and slaughter. The wanderings over the plain, which took three days, according to The Prelude, allowed Wordsworth to perceive in his lonely visions the kind of primitive life that had known only fear of animals and the struggle against other warlike bands. It was from a solitary experience of this landscape that the visions came: they were a projection of his disturbed mind, which contemplated the prospect of war against France with horror, and saw it as a renewed

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violence against humanity. In the final section of the poem, in which the narrator addresses the two protagonists (the soldier’s widow and the traveller), they are a ‘hope-forsaken pair’: although they are given food by other poor people, that is just a ‘green spot’ amid the wastes of the deserts of life. The problems of that life (‘the terrors of our way’, 432) are those of poverty and oppression, and to these are added the public problem of war: Nor only is the walk of private life Unblessed by Justice and the kindly train Of Peace and Truth, while Injury and Strife, Outrage and deadly Hate usurp their reign; From the pale line to either frozen main The nations, though at home in bonds they drink The dregs of wretchedness, for empire strain, And crushed by their own fetters helpless sink, Move their galled limbs in fear and eye each silent link. (442–50) Wordsworth’s poem works against war in several ways: by seeing the landscape full of storm, and having visions of fear and violent savagery; by showing the fate of an innocent woman and her children; and by a public declamation about private misery and public policy, which strove for empires abroad while neglecting domestic ruin. Wordsworth’s reaction to his experience in 1793 – the declaration of war, the stay in the Isle of Wight, the terrifying journey across Salisbury Plain – was predictable: not only was he radical in his sympathies, but he had personal ties with France because of his love for Annette Vallon and their child. The declaration of war, as he later put it in The Prelude (where the personal circumstances are not referred to), shocked him principally because it went contrary to all his notions of human progress and social behaviour. The revolution itself had not been, in his mind, a revolution so much as an evolution: human beings would naturally want to strive for a better society, one which was fairer, more equal, and more benevolent. The declaration of war was, for him, the revolution, the turning upside down of all his assumptions and beliefs. It involved the sudden realisation that the government did not share his views, and was at war with the very society for which he had cherished such hopes. This was clearly, for him and for other radicals, not a just war. On his return to England, he had brought with him the hope

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That if France prospered good men would not long Pay fruitless worship to humanity, And this most rotten branch of human shame (Object, as seemed, of superfluous pains) Would fall together with its parent tree . . . . He was referring to the slave trade, the abolition of which seemed as obvious a step as the reform of a corrupt French regime (the ‘parent tree’). Then came the declarations of war: Such was my then belief – that there was one, And only one, solicitude for all. And now the strength of Britain was put forth In league with the confederated host; Not in my single self alone I found, But in the minds of all ingenuous youth, Change and subversion from this hour. No shock Given to my moral nature had I known Down to that very moment – (The Prelude, 1805, X.222–35) Wordsworth’s reference to ‘all ingenuous youth’ suggests that he felt that the government represented an older generation: that it was unaware of idealism and simple political principle. The linking of the revolution with the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was common: both were seen as necessary steps towards the improvement of mankind, the removal of injustice and the triumph of humanity. Blake’s ‘Song of Liberty’, probably composed in 1792 or 1793, which ends The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, includes the call to new life: 12. Look up, look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! Return to thy oil and wine, O African, black African! (Go, winged thought, widen his forehead!) The poets who wrote against the slave trade, those who sided with Wordsworth and ‘all ingenuous youth’ were the idealists, the enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution; and so against the war. In 1792 the undergraduate Samuel Taylor Coleridge gained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode at Cambridge on the subject of the slave trade, and in the following year he was actively involved in agitating for an

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acquittal at the trial of William Frend (a Fellow of his College, Jesus), before the Vice Chancellor on the charge of having produced a pamphlet, Peace and Union, which argued against the declaration of war against France. 20 By December 1793, confused by debts, he had left Cambridge and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache; but this was something of a desperate aberration in his behaviour, and should not be thought to suggest whole-hearted support for the war. Indeed, in the summer after his discharge (April 1794), he met Southey, who was already an extreme radical. Southey, who felt ‘contempt and abhorrence’ for Pitt,21 had written Joan of Arc in 1793, a tenbook poem which ended with Charles VII’s coronation at Rheims. Joan warns the king that he will be especially accountable at the Day of Judgement if his land is not fairly and properly governed, and if he embarks upon unjust wars: If thou dost oppress Thy people; if to aggrandize thyself Thou tear’st them from their homes, and sendest them To slaughter, prodigal of misery; . . . If when thou hear’st of thousands who have fallen, Thou say’st, ‘I am a King’, and fit it is That these should perish for me; . . . The implication is clear: good kings do not sacrifice their people in war. Earlier in the poem, Southey writes of those who misuse power, making war for their own ends: prime ministers of death Who stalk elated o’er their fields of fame, And count the thousands they have massacred And with the bodies of the innocent, rear Their pyramid of glory! The use of the word ‘prime ministers’, was significant: through the metaphor, Southey was making a clear suggestion that Pitt was a warmonger. In 1793, therefore, there was a whole cluster of young poets whose radicalism and moral purpose led them to oppose the government of William Pitt, to be in favour of the French Revolution, and to be deeply disturbed at the declaration of war. Against them were ranged the vast forces of establishment Britain, the king, parliament, the government, ministers (prime or otherwise) of war, the army and navy, the official poets

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such as Pye; together with all those who were anti-French and who regarded these radicals as misguided or self-indulgent innocents, ingenuous in the wrong sense. Looking back on 1793, Pye wrote his ‘Ode for the New Year, 1794’ in the Annual Register with a hope for peace but also a firm sense of a just war, and a clear rebuke to those who wanted to ‘woo’ peace ingloriously, without working or fighting for it, the ‘timid’: Then if fell War’s tempestuous sound Swell far and wide with louder roar, If stern th’avenging nations round Threaten yon fate-devoted shore, Hope points to gentler hours again When Peace shall re-assume her reign – Yet never o’er his timid head Her lasting olive shall be spread, Whose breast inglorious woos her charms When Fame, when Justice, calls to arms. While Anarchy’s infuriate brood, Their garments dy’d with guiltless blood, With Titan rage blaspheming try Their impious battle ’gainst the sky, Say shall Britannia’s generous sons embrace In folds of amity the harpy race, Or aid the sword that coward Fury rears, Red with the widow’s blood, wet with the orphan’s tears? Pye used a simple formula, praising one side and damning the other, and his abuse of the French was part of the general Francophobia which was encouraged by the government, and which seems to have been very effective: it was this that caused Wordsworth to feel isolated in the village church when prayers were offered up for victory. He was part of a strong pro-French and anti-war minority, which rejoiced in French victories 22 and which thought of the war as morally wrong and whose views depended on more than just a dislike of the government and the establishment: it hoped for a fairer and better world, of liberty and equality. Wordsworth, for example, used the opposite technique to that of Pye, emphasising not the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ sides but dwelling on the suffering of individuals, and on moral principle. The freedom for slaves was a part of this moral crusade (the French Revolutionary government freed its slaves in 1794) and so was the hope of an end to tyranny and hereditary power. William Crowe’s Oxford installation poem, described in the

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previous chapter, came out of this situation. Its rejection by the university was seen as a symptom of establishment power and censorship, so that it was reprinted in places such as Coleridge’s The Watchman. As Nicholas Roe has pointed out, there was no reference to the war in Coleridge’s letters at this time. But his 1795 lectures, delivered in Bristol, contained much about it, particularly the February one ‘On the Present War’. He described the consequences of ‘this unjust because unnecessary War’, 23 which he described as ‘an Evil of . . . incalculable magnitude’. Like Wordsworth, he emphasised the human suffering that was involved. He noted the misery in the streets of Bristol, and the failure of campaigns in the Low Countries and in the West Indies: – I will not press upon your recollection the awful Truth, that in the course of this calamitous Contest more than a Million of men have perished – a MILLION of men, of each of whom the mangled corse terrifies the dreams of her that loved him, and makes some mother, some sister, some widow start from slumber with a shriek! These arguments have been urged even to satiety – a British Senator has sneeringly styled them mere common-place against wars. I could weep for the criminal Patience of Humanity! These arguments are hacknied; yet Wars continue!24 The statesman who (in reply to the radical Thomas Erskine) had described these anti-war arguments about loved ones as ‘common-place’ was Burke. Coleridge’s indignation against him was a part of his sense, which is very strongly expressed in this lecture, that Britain was becoming an evil state, full of spies and corruption, which was carrying on ‘a causeless War against a Patriot people.’25 Coleridge’s view of the matter was that not only were the politicians to blame, but the church as well (he noted that every bishop but one voted for the continuance of the war). As for the French people, they were so threatened with starvation and extermination, that it was no wonder that they rose up to defend themselves: Hunted on all sides, insulted by unceasing and brutal menaces, they felt the blended influence of terror and indignation – by the first they were impelled to become voluntary slaves to the bloody fanatics, whose wild energies seemed alone proportionate to the danger; by the latter their gentler feelings were suspended, and the military spirit with all its virtues and all its vices seized at once a whole nation.26

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The British, and the Prussians and Austrians, Wordsworth’s ‘confederated host’, were the aggressors, and the war was, in Coleridge’s view, clearly an unjust war, waged by a wicked government, supported by a corrupt church (there is a fine piece of invective against the wealth of bishops). He was certainly representative of all those who saw the young republic, however bad the Terror of 1793–94 might have been, as struggling to find its way towards a new society of freedom and equality. In its assessment of France it was close in spirit and feeling to Wordsworth’s unpublished ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, written probably in 1793 ‘by a Republican’ (as the first page puts it): Wordsworth had the same dislike of British institutions, in this case the church, the nobility, and the law. Like Coleridge, he defended the fledgling republic, even in its violence: a time of revolution is not the season of true Liberty. Alas! the obstinacy & perversion of men is such that she [the revolutionary state] is too often obliged to borrow the very arms of despotism to overthrow him, and in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence. She deplores such necessity, but the safety of the people, her supreme law, is her consolation.27 He was probably thinking of the way in which the French had defended themselves against the counter-revolutionary invasion of 1792 led by the Duke of Brunswick. Many years later, in 1818, he still remembered the capture of the first French fort, Valenciennes, as an act of ‘glaring rapacity’: From this moment the alliance of the French loyalists with the coalesced Powers [Austria, Prussia and Britain], seemed to have no ground of rational patriotism to stand upon.28 It was this ‘rational patriotism’ that Wordsworth would have liked to discover; but to many of his generation it was absent for the first years of the war, only to be recovered with renewed vigour in the later years, and particularly after the Peace of Amiens in 1802–03.

3 1793 and after

3.1

Armies and navies

Whatever be the arguments for and against war which raged through the country in 1793, the government responded to the French declaration, and it now had to engage in a campaign to save the Low Countries from French domination. It was forced to pay serious attention to the army and the navy. Both had been neglected following the final British surrender which ended the War of American Independence in 1783.1 The army, in particular, was amateurish, commanded by whoever had the money to raise soldiers. David Gates quotes one of those who enlisted: Our army was lax in its discipline, entirely without system, and very weak in numbers. Each colonel of a regiment managed it according to his own notions, or neglected it altogether. There was no uniformity of drill or movement. Professional pride was rare; professional knowledge still more so. 2 A few years earlier, when the size of the army was being reduced, recruits were more carefully chosen. William Cobbett, who joined the army in 1784, later found himself, as a Sergeant-Major, instructing the officers in drill. He recalled that when he was a recruit, the army was not concerned with numbers and could afford to be very selective. It wanted ‘Straight and tall fellows, and used to stare into our eyes to see if we squinted.’: They used to make us swear before they would accept of our voluntary offers, that we were not, and never had been, chimney sweeps, colliers, 52

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or miners; and that we were not Irishmen, and that we were not troubled with fits, including love-fits, for ought I know to the contrary.3 Cobbett’s history as a soldier demonstrates the problems of the army in his time. Discovering dishonesty in the regiment, he procured an honourable discharge for himself in 1791 in order to prosecute the corruption. His case collapsed in 1792 because no one was prepared to give evidence. By such corruptions, and by public policy, the army remained unreformed; its discipline was poor, its numbers were reduced and its old soldiers were discharged. One of them was encountered by the young Wordsworth in 1788, during his first long vacation from Cambridge: he was on his way home after a party, very late, when he came across a strange figure leaning on a milestone for support. When he was asked about his history, he ‘told in few plain words a soldier’s tale’: That in the tropic islands he had served, Whence he had landed scarcely ten days past – That on his landing he had been dismissed, And now was travelling to his native home. (The Prelude, 1805 text, IV.446–9) The brevity of the language emphasises the careless cruelty and the soldier’s straightforward telling of the facts without complaint. He had a strange air about him: he was ‘an uncouth shape’, thin and meagre (the editors of The Prelude suggest that he had served in the West Indies, where many soldiers died of fever4), with a mouth that ‘shewed ghastly in the moonlight’, and a ‘military garb’ which was ‘though faded, yet entire’ (411–15). Wordsworth questioned him ‘of what he had endured/ From hardship, battle, or the pestilence’ (471). The last of these is a reminder of how many soldiers were killed, not in battle, but by disease (not only in the West Indies but also in places such as the Low Countries, where the army was almost destroyed by fever in 1809 during the Walcheren campaign). The abrupt discharge of the soldier is skilfully implied by Wordsworth. Having served and lost his strength through disease, he has been brought home and then summarily dismissed. His answers to the young Wordsworth’s questions are not recorded, though he was ‘concise’, speaking as if half absent: Solemn and sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said

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There was a strange half-absence, and a tone Of weakness and indifference, as of one Remembering the importance of his theme, But feeling it no longer. (473–8) The poem captures perfectly the old soldier’s reluctance to say much about his battles, either because they are too painful to speak of, or because the hearer would not understand, or perhaps both. Whatever the reason, his demeanour and presence in the poem contrast most effectively with the Cambridge undergraduate, who has been out enjoying himself. He was the first of a number of figures in Wordsworth’s early poems who are seen as victims of the military system, of a world that he could have sympathy with, but only distantly imagine. They were cast off as useless when no longer required, or they had dependants who became destitute, such as the woman in An Evening Walk. The starving widow and the discharged soldier were characteristic of the neglect of the army and its dependants after the American war. The run down of the army after 1783 necessitated a rapid reversal of policy at the declaration of war ten years later. The government acted in 1793, in the words of Sir John Fortescue, ‘as foolishly as possible’. It hurriedly enlisted as many recruits as it could find, so that some of the regiments sent to the Low Countries consisted of ‘old men and weakly boys’, ‘because an extremely ignorant civilian [Henry Dundas, at the War Office] was too vain to consult his military advisers before giving military orders.’5 The system provided for local Militia, and in Scotland for regiments called ‘Fencibles’, so that ‘within a month of the declaration of war there were already three distinct forces, the Army, the Fencibles, and the Militia, all bidding against each other for the recruits which only the Regular Army could turn to account.’6 The great fear, expressed by Coleridge and by Godwin (among others), was that there would be a standing army, which would be used to implement government policy by force, especially if reinforced by German troops. E.P. Thompson quotes John Martin, speaking at the London Corresponding Society: ‘Will you wait till BARRACKS are created in every village, and till subsidized Hessians and Hanoverians are upon us?’7 Godwin called the system of a standing army ‘altogether indefensible’.8 According to Fortescue, one reason for the failure of the campaign in the Netherlands from 1793 to 1795 was the poor quality of the new soldiers. Meanwhile, wealthy people raised their own companies or

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even regiments. Sometimes whole communities or professions joined to produce companies of volunteers, such as the one to which Walter Scott belonged, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons. Evidently they had a good time, enjoying themselves in their role as part-time cavalry. Even the radical Robert Burns, who had used the Revolutionary song ‘ça ira’ in a poem of 1792, joined the Royal Dumfries Volunteers in 1795, buying his own uniform and attending parades regularly.9 Some may have enlisted for the chance to wear uniform and cut a figure. Wealthy people, without military qualifications of any kind, paid for regiments and then commanded them, while others bought commissions or promotion. Charles Lamb wrote a scornful epitaph on an ‘Ensign Peacock’ (which may not have been his proper name) of the ‘3rd Regt. of the Royal East India Volunteers’ who like other boys in this scarlet tainted age was ambitious of playing at soldiers, but dying in the first flash of his valour was at the particular instance of his relations buried with military honours! like any veteran scarr’d or chopt from Blenheim or Ramillies. (He was buried in sash and gorget.)10 Lamb must have seen the volunteers drilling in London, and his naturally sceptical observation would have been amused by the distance between the amateur soldiers and the real thing. His poem forgets any respect for the dead in celebrating the absurdity of a military funeral for one who was no soldier: Here lies a Volunteer so fine, Who died of a decline, As you or I may do one day; Reader, think of this, I pray; And I humbly hope you’ll drop a tear For my poor Royal Volunteer. He was as brave as brave could be, Nobody was so brave as he; He would have died in Honor’s bed, Only he died at home instead. . . . Lamb was clearly thinking of those volunteers who aspired to serve in the defence of the realm, rather than on active service: their uniformed presence in London must have been an irritation to a peace lover.

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In the regular army, volunteers made the best soldiers and sailors: sometimes they enlisted for the love of adventure, sometimes because they were ill-treated by employers, sometimes because they were discontented with home life in general. Occasionally women enlisted as soldiers or sailors, concealing their gender and taking part in fighting. A ‘Poetical Broadside’ of the period (anonymous and undated in the British Library) describes one, a ‘Female Drummer’: A maiden I was at the age of sixteen From my friends run away & a soldier I became, I listed for a drummer it’s the truth I’m telling now And they learnt me to beat on a drum row-de-dow. Many a prank I’ve seen on the field, And many a frenchman I have forced to yield, Many is the slaughter I’ve seen of the french, And so boldly I fought when I was a wench. A fighting top-gallant in my time I have been, With the noble Duke of York at the siege Valenciene, Favoured by my officers for fear I should be slain, And sent me to Old England recruiting back again. Although this sounds like a piece of romantic fiction, designed to increase enthusiasm for the war, it may reflect something of the volunteer spirit of the time. To supplement the volunteers were ‘quota men’, drafted as a quota from each county following the Quota Acts of March and April 1795. This was a less effective system, because counties used it to get rid of undesirable elements. But the least desirable method of recruitment was crimping, the kidnapping of young men who had been lured into public houses, often by prostitutes. Coleridge wrote about it in Conciones ad Populum (1795): ‘CRIMPING has been established into a trade, and accompanied with such an apparatus of horrors, as would arm MERCY with the thunderbolt.’11 An anti-crimping play, The Crimps, of the Death of Poor Howe, was published as a pamphlet in 1794, based on the story of a man who killed himself by jumping from a window after being taken by the crimpers. The crimpers were, in Fortescue’s words, ‘a race of greedy, unscrupulous scoundrels, some of them holding and disgracing the King’s commission, who made profit out of every boy or man that they could lay hold of by fair means or foul.’12 The naval equivalent of crimping was the press gang. Press gangs were, at their best, official persuaders of what were called ‘persons using

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the sea’ into the fighting service. 13 At other times they captured seamen on their return home after a voyage: Wordsworth’s sailor, who thought to have his reward ‘from his wife’s lips’ after two years service but who was seized by the press gang, has his equivalent in one recorded case: William Skill, seaman . . . we had pressed him out of the India fleet, just on his return from a three-year voyage, pleasing himself with the idea of beholding those he held most dear (a mother and sister) for whom he had brought presents many a long mile . . .14 On His Majesty’s ship Unité, Skill kept his presents intact, although ‘he made away – with most of his apparel for grog’. But he was put on board a vessel that was being towed as a prize, fell overboard and drowned. His tragic story must have been typical of the seamen of the time: pressed, herded into foul tenders, taken out to ships and then subjected to all the rigid discipline of the navy. Sailors were badly fed, underpaid and had poor medical care: it was these things which led to the mutinies of 1797 at Spithead and the Nore. The Spithead mutiny was conducted with skill and restraint, although it seems to have caused much alarm; the subsequent mutiny at the Nore was less successful, and its leader, Richard Parker, was hanged. Both mutinies, as Geoff Quilley has pointed out, led to a revision of the common image of the British seaman as the jolly Jack Tar, the heart of oak.15

3.2

The campaign in the Low Countries

These hasty measures were not enough to prevent the first engagement of the enemy, in the Low Countries, from being a disaster (indeed, as we have seen, Fortescue thought that they were the cause of the disaster). The Duke of York (the second son of George III) had a few British regiments at his disposal, some Hanoverian and Dutch troops, and an uneasy alliance with the Austrians. His attempt to take Dunkirk led to an ignominious retreat in 1793, recorded in the nursery rhyme (ironically imagining a hill where there was none, outside Dunkirk); and the defeat at the battle of Hondeschoote (September 1793) was the subject of Wordsworth’s silent rejoicing, as recorded in The Prelude. Even before that, James Gillray had caricatured the Duke of York, sitting with a plump girl on his knee next to the Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange (a much-disliked figure). Entitled Fatigues of the Campaign in Flanders, it was one of the first of many attacks on the Duke and his allies; and

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although much of what subsequently happened was probably not his fault, the Duke was widely believed to be responsible. With some embarrassment (because he was a royal duke, the second son of George III), he was recalled in 1795.16 The campaign itself, after a series of undirected and confused strategic movements, broke up in disarray with the withdrawal of the Austrians and the retreat of the British to Bremen in 1795: in March of that year what remained of the army, much reduced by sickness, embarked on home, leaving the Dutch to surrender to the all-conquering French. The young Arthur Wellesley, serving with the 33rd Regiment, observed the careless incompetence of the senior officers, often promoted through money or influential friends, and learned a hard lesson. ‘Why’, he said later, ‘ – I learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something.’17 Public opinion was dismayed by the failure of the campaign in the Low Countries. It was also incensed by the accounts of hardships which the army had to undergo in the field. The most notable of these, parts of which Coleridge reprinted in The Watchman, was An Accurate and Impartial Narrative of the War, by an Officer of the Guards, published in 1795. The author pointed out the corruption of the medical staff, who drank the wine intended for the sick, and the inadequacy of the general orders for the removal of the wounded: Constantly removed in open waggons, exposed to the intense severity of the weather, to drifting snow, and heavy falls of sleet and rain; frequently without any victuals till the army halted, and then but scantily provided; littered down in cold churches, upon a short allowance of dirty straw; and few of them enjoying the comforts of a single blanket, to repel the vigorous attacks of the night air; it is no wonder they expired, by hundreds, Martyrs to the most infamous and unpardonable neglect. 18 Another extract from the Narrative, included in The Watchman for 27 April, described some atrocities committed upon French prisoners by the Austrians, and the conditions under which the soldiers had to live: Such was the wetness of the season, while they were encamped near Campaign, that the soldiers every morning might be seen lading the water from their tents by hat-fulls; they were but scantily provided with straw, and consequently fell rapidly sick; two or three men of the guards were so affected, that they dropt down and died, when formed on the parade for picquet! . . .

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Two men were often placed in the same bed, the one complaining of a dysentery, the other of a putrid fever; death to both patients usually ensued from such ignorance, added to other instances of inhuman treatment and neglect, and the mortality was consequently great. . . .19 The Duke of York’s recall from the Netherlands proved to be salutary for the army in the long term. Building on his experience of failure, he set about reforming the army, a task made more difficult by its rapid increase in size after 1793. For the ordinary soldiers he improved their conditions, rations and health care; he began the building of proper barracks for soldiers; and he created the first Light Regiments, having become aware in the Netherlands of an army’s need for rapid movement. For the officers, he began the reform of the corrupt system in which individuals could purchase commissions and promotion: whereas it was said that ‘an officer who had money could purchase up to the rank of lieutenantcolonel in three weeks or a month’, the Duke insisted on at least some experience before promotion to a higher rank. 20 The campaign in the Netherlands was a failure. The situation in Europe was made more complicated by the position of Poland, which was being steadily dismembered by Russia, Austria and Prussia: this unprincipled alliance of states made the case against France weaker, because at least the French could be thought of by their supporters as defending the revolution. The situation in Poland was to occupy the poets and the press for many years.

3.3

Poland

In the seventeenth century, under John Sobieski (1674–96), Poland had been one of the largest and most powerful states in Europe. It stood as a bulwark against the Ottoman empire, and the rescue of Vienna from the Turks in 1683 was one of Sobieski’s greatest achievements. In the eighteenth century, however, Poland became a country of divided loyalties, and even at one point of rival kings. In its weakness, it became the prey of three powerful neighbours, Russia, Austria and Prussia, each anxious to acquire Polish territory, such as East Prussia and the Cossack land in western Russia. In 1772, the three major countries succeeded, in what became known as the first partition. A contemporary poem described it in an animal fable: Three ravenous creatures Of grim-looking features,

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Agreed a poor Pheasant to share; First an Eagle appear’d, Then a Vulture uprear’d, And the third was a rugged she Bear. The only powers that could have stopped this partition were Britain and France in alliance, but the Seven Years’ War was fresh in memory: so The Gallic cock saw Bruin lift up his paw and did nothing; while the Lion also refused to intervene, even though ‘Humanity bled/ While the vile plot was laid.’21 The partition was a serious blow to the status of Poland. But the loss of outlying territory also had the effect of encouraging Polish reformers and of forging a new patriotism. It reached its climax in the new Constitution of 3 May 1791, summarised as ‘The King with the nation, the nation with the King.’ To British political philosophers such as Burke, this was a fine ideal. It seemed that such a moment showed a successful accommodation between patriotism and reform: Poland was succeeding where France was struggling with its attempts to find a new constitution, its king a prisoner in the Tuileries. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Burke, who had denounced the French Revolution in the previous year, saw Poland as an exemplum: ‘In contemplating that change [from its earlier state of corruption], humanity has everything to rejoice and glory in; nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to suffer.’ He saw the change from an elective monarchy (which had been prone to pressure from outside) to a hereditary process as good: We have seen anarchy and servitude at once removed; a throne strengthened for the protection of the people, without trenching on their liberties; all foreign cabal banished, by changing the crown from elective to hereditary; . . . Ten millions of men in a way of being freed gradually, and therefore safely to themselves and the state, not from civil or political chains, which, bad as they are, only fetter the mind, but from substantial personal bondage.22 Burke’s eloquence, used here as for Marie Antoinette in the Reflections, celebrated a Poland that was short-lived. In 1790, the Russians under Suvorov had made strategic gains in the war against the Turkish Empire, including the capture, in December, of the fortress of Ismail (later the

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subject of Byron’s war cantos in Don Juan). The signing of a peace treaty between the Russians and the Turks left Catherine the Great’s armies free to invade Poland, which they did in 1792, with the connivance of Prussia. They were met with resistance from Polish armies under Poniatowski and Kosciuszko, but the Poles were forced to capitulate to greater and more experienced forces. This led to the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, in which Russia took a substantial part of Eastern Poland and the Prussians gained Poznan and Danzig; more significantly, the Polish Diet agreed to all Catherine’s conditions, thus making Poland a virtual Protectorate of Russia. The rebellion which followed was led by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, an army officer who had seen service under Washington in the American War of Independence. He attempted to enlist support from France, but the promises of help from his friends among the Girondins came to nothing when they fell from power on 31 May. The insurrection against the Russians and Prussians (Austria was seen as a neutral power) was postponed until the spring of 1794, when Kosciuszko proclaimed the ‘Act of Insurrection’ on 24 March at Cracow. The battle of Raclawice against the Russians on 4 April was an astonishing victory for Polish peasants with scythes against a trained and experienced army, and a successful rising followed in Warsaw. But in due course the Russians under Suvorov and the Prussians under Fersen proved too strong: on 9 October, at Maciejowice, Kosciuszko was surrounded by a much larger Prussian army, wounded and taken prisoner. He was reported to have said ‘Finis Poloniae’ on that occasion: and if this is only a legend, as historians believe, it had enough currency to mark it as the final statement of a tragic hero. He was seen as such in Britain: a London periodical, The Cabinet, published a poem, ‘Lines Written on the Capture of Gen. Kosciusko’, in which Liberty is found ‘weeping o’er thy fond, thy fav’rite child’: Poor Kosciusko! long shall live thy fame, And future infants learn to lisp thy name; Ages unborn shall weep the hostile deed, And curse the ruffian hand that made thee bleed! Shall mourn that morning, when the vital tide Purpled thy limbs, and bubbled from thy side, When first on thee was pour’d the dungeon’s gloom, Mocking the midnight darkness of the tomb; On thee – at once magnanimous and mild, In war a hero, and in peace a child.23

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The defeat at Maciejowice gave Suvorov’s Russian army its opportunity. It defeated the Polish army at Praga, took Warsaw, and slaughtered its defenders. There followed yet another partition of Poland, over which Russia and Prussia quarrelled and in which Austria joined. Huge tracts of Polish territory were ceded to the three powers. Kosciuszko and other leaders were deported to St Petersburg, and other Polish patriots fled abroad. The king, Stanislas II, abdicated on 25 November. Three weeks later, on 16 December, the Morning Chronicle published Coleridge’s sonnet, ‘Koskiusko’, which began with a reference to the battle of Maciejowice: O what a loud and fearful shriek was there, As tho’ a thousand souls one death-groan pour’d! Ah me! They view’d beneath an hireling’s sword Fall’n KOSKIUSKO! Thro’ the burthened air (As pauses the tir’d Cossac’s barb’rous yell Of Triumph) on the chill and midnight gale Rises with frantic burst or sadder swell The dirge of murder’d Hope! Coleridge’s note indicates that he had been reading reports of the battle: ‘When Koskiusko was observed to fall, the Polish ranks set up a shriek.’ In the sonnet, the shriek of despair is transferred from the soldiers to the cause for which they stood: it becomes the dirge of murdered Hope, which is associated with Polish freedom: While Freedom pale Bends in such anguish o’er her destin’d bier, As if from eldest time some Spirit meek Had gather’d in a mystic urn each tear That ever furrowed a sad Patriot’s cheek; Coleridge’s poem becomes a funerary urn, depicting oppressors and oppressed, tyrants and freedom fighters, hirelings and patriots: the Polish situation provided a clear model for those who needed to shape the patterns of politics and warfare into good and evil. In the process, strength in defence of freedom became an uncomfortable necessity. 24 The tragedy of Poland had all the ingredients of a political drama of the most powerful kind: three large countries, on three occasions (1772, 1793, 1795), greedily and cynically divided up a weaker one. The fact that those countries quarrelled with one another, were grasping and

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manipulative, and were against democratic change, added to the disfavour with which the whole matter was viewed throughout Europe. The failure of the French or the British to come to the aid of Poland was a further cause of shame. Coleridge’s rage against Catherine the Great is further seen in his Ode to the Departing Year, written in December 1796 and referring viciously to her death a month earlier: Stunn’d by death’s twice mortal mace, No more on Murder’s lurid face The insatiate Hag shall gloat with drunken eye! Manes of the unnumber’d slain! Ye that gasp’d on Warsaw’s plain! (43–7) The Polish situation received its most extensive coverage in Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope (1799), in which Campbell refers to a time When leagued Oppression pour’d to Northern wars Her whisker’d pandoors and her fierce hussars, Waved her dread standard to the breeze of morn, Peal’d her loud drum, and twang’d her trumpet horn; Tumultuous horror brooded o’er her van, Presaging wrath to Poland – and to man! Campbell saw the fall of Poland as a defeat not only for that country but for all humanity. The invaders were ‘leagued Oppression’ (Russia and Prussia); Polish insurrectionists were ‘ye gallant few’, and Kosciuszko was ‘Warsaw’s last champion’. His defeat meant that Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, And Freedom shriek’d – as Kosciuszko fell! The fall of Praga was followed by ‘horror and dismay’: A thousand shrieks for hopeless mercy call! Earth shook – red meteors flash’d along the sky, And conscious Nature shudder’d at the cry! Campbell wished his readers to see Poland as one of the most recent examples of freedom-fighting, comparable with other countries and other ages, ‘The Patriot Tell – the Bruce of Bannockburn!’

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Campbell became renowned for his championing of Poland. His friend John Walker Ord (1811–53) described him as ‘The Bard of Poland and of Hope’. He led the way in celebrating a country which appeared again and again as a model of a state which was freedom-loving yet dominated by a more powerful one. In The Power of Russia, for example, he envisaged historians of the future: But Poles, when we are gone, the world will mind Ye bore the brunt of fate, and bled for humankind. Poland’s tragic bleeding was seen as representing all humanity, the oppressed suffering at the hands of the greedy and unprincipled. The idea that Poland was somehow destined for this role, fated to suffer and be famous for it, is found again in his ‘Lines on Poland’: In fate’s defiance – in the world’s great eye, Poland has won her immortality! Where Campbell led, others followed, for various reasons. Often there was a simple admiration of Kosciusko, who was given a hero’s welcome in Britain in 1797, after his release from captivity in Russia. Charles Lamb, curious and whimsical, wrote to Coleridge: ‘Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kosciusko when he was at Bristol? I never saw a hero; I wonder how they look.’25 Coleridge, like Campbell, was intensely agitated by Poland and its fate, as we have seen: in The Watchman, he reprinted a story about a Polish officer who, after the third partition of 1795, refused to be dispersed into a Russian regiment and committed suicide with the words ‘Tell the Czarina [Catherine], before whom you only crawl and cringe, that Poland still contains Republicans.’ 26 In a further number of The Watchman, he reprinted a long extract describing Kosciusko from Stephen Jones’s The History of Poland (1795). Kosciusko’s visit to Britain was seen as that of a freedomfighter visiting the land of liberty, for example by Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844), the translator of Dante: whom our isle Clasps in her arms, with joyful boast That Liberty’s inviting smile Has won his steps to seek her coast; (Ode to General Kosciusko, 14–17)

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Leigh Hunt, who kept a bust of Kosciusko in his cottage, used Kosciusko differently, as a figure who fought only for his own country and distanced himself from both sides in the European war. His poem ‘To Kosciusko, who never fought either for Bonaparte or the Allies’ (The Examiner, 19 November 1815) presented Kosciusko as a kind of modern Cincinnatus, fighting and then retiring to the countryside, where his spade took the place of his sword. It was probably through Leigh Hunt that Keats came to admire Kosciusko (‘Good Kosciusko’ of his sonnet, printed in the Examiner in February 1817). In this sonnet, and in Sleep and Poetry, Keats aligns Kosciusko with Alfred the Great. In Sleep and Poetry, they are two of the figures in Hunt’s room: Great Alfred’s, too, with anxious, pitying eyes, As if he always listened to the sighs Of the goaded world; and Kosciusko’s worn By horrid suffrance, mightily forlorn. (385–8) Both are sufferers for the political wickedness of the world, figures who are full of pity for the enslaved and oppressed. Polish patriots, witnessing the overthrow of Austria and Prussia in 1805 and 1806, hoped for great things from Napoleon. But the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 set up only the Duchy of Warsaw, and Napoleon’s policy towards Poland was to disregard its aspirations to freedom while at the same time using its soldiers. Many Poles fought in the Grande Armée in the Russian campaign of 1812, hoping to assist at the defeat of their old enemy; but the disaster of the retreat from Moscow left them even more vulnerable than before. Byron remembered Poland’s fate, and the heroism of Kosciusko, in 1823, when writing The Age of Bronze, lamenting the fall of Napoleon and ridiculing the Congress of Verona. His lines summarised the position of Poland with accuracy and compassion, recalling first the conquest of Poland by the Russian army and then Napoleon’s failure to establish a secure independence for the country. Napoleon, the avenging angel, passes Poland by: Ye who dwell Where Kosciusko dwelt, remembering yet The unpaid amount of Catherine’s bloody debt! Poland! o’er which the avenging angel past, But left thee as he found thee, still a waste, Forgetting all thy still enduring claim,

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Thy lotted people and extinguished name, Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear, That sound that crashes in the tyrant’s ear; Kosciusko! (158–62) Kosciusko must have been much in Byron’s mind at this time, for in Canto X of Don Juan he was recalled as warming the traveller’s heart when Juan and Leila pass through the cold of Poland on their way from Moscow to London: But should we wish to warm us on our way Through Poland, there is Kosciusko’s name Might scatter fire through ice, like Hecla’s flame. (Don Juan, X.59) This comes just after Byron has reminded his readers of the retreat from Moscow: it turns the ice of the campaign into the ice of the heart, melted by Kosciusko’s memory. The juxtaposition is characteristically sharp: the tragedy of Poland in political terms is matched by her heroism, which made her a most potent symbol of all the nobility that the power politics of the Congress of Verona had destroyed. One further example shows how the Kosciusko legend continued to fascinate and inspire. In her account of the events of 1815, from the landing of Napoleon to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the British poet Helen Maria Williams described the advance of the Russian army into eastern France after Waterloo. A Polish regiment, which formed part of the army, had expelled the French from Troyes and were advancing upon Fontainbleau. In Williams’s words, they were ‘foraging in a neighbouring village, and were about to commit disorders’ when they heard the word of command bidding them to cease, pronounced in their own language, by a person in the dress of the upper class of peasants . . . He represented to the troops the useless mischief they were about to commit, and ordered them to withdraw. The officers coming up were lectured in their turn . . . To be thus tutored by a French farmer, in their own language, in such circumstances, and in such terms, was almost past endurance. Requested to identify himself, the Polish-speaking peasant

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drawing his hand across his eyes to wipe off a starting tear, exclaimed, with a half stifled voice, ‘I am Kosciusko!’ 27 So the Cincinnatus legend was invoked again to describe Kosciusko, who had, in Williams’s words, ‘withdrawn some years since from the guilty world of Bonaparte to cultivate a little farm’. He had rejected every offer from Napoleon, ‘who had learned to appreciate his worth. Kosciusko knew him well.’28 The Cincinnatus pattern is one of innocence and high principle against guilt and self-seeking, and perpetuates the idea of Polish heroism and nobility of mind. The example of Poland was one which helped strengthen feeling, during the 1790s especially, against oppressors of all kinds – strong countries against small ones, countries which sought to use opportunities to grab power or land, countries whose regimes were thought to be despotic. To a great extent, the example of Poland increased the favour in which France was held: the unprincipled conduct of Austria, Prussia and (most notably) Russia was seen by many as evidence of the way in which tyrannical despots imposed their expansionist policies on their people, and used their armies for wicked purposes. It was said, too, that the partition of Poland exceeded in cruelty anything done by the French, either to their own people (in the war in the Vendée) or to the people of neighbouring countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that the sympathy for Poland was found most vocally among those who were pro-French, and that it increased the distaste for war which was felt by the radicals, and which was so much a part of the literature of the 1790s.

4 1795–1802

4.1

Jacobin and anti-Jacobin

The campaign in the Netherlands had come to an inglorious end in 1795, but Britain continued to remain in a state of war with France, even when peace was being made between France and several of her enemies (Prussia, Holland, Spain). Britain and Austria were the remaining opponents, and the ‘peace party’ in Britain, led by Charles James Fox, were pressing for an end to the war. Fox thought that ‘everyone wanted it’ and that ‘Great Britain alone [was] the cause of preventing its accomplishment.’1 As we have seen, this view had the support of writers such as Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth: to them, as to Fox and his supporters, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, were threats to liberty which were far worse than the policies of the French.2 But Fox was in a minority in Parliament, unable to persuade some members of his own Whig party to support him (there had been a major defection of senior Whigs to Pitt in 1794), and his belief in the French Revolution made him a suspect figure. Cartoonists turned him into a Jacobin, dressed as a sansculotte, his swarthy features exaggerated to make him seem unshaven and unprincipled. ‘Jacobin’ was used to denigrate anyone who was thought to be pro-French: it was a way of smearing even the moderates who were unenthusiastic for war. Fox’s position, and that of the anti-war party, was further undermined by French preparations for invasion in 1796, which the government used to justify its policy. Joseph Farington, the painter and diarist, noted on 2 October that The French are said to be making a great number of gunboats, which are to carry 200 men each, – they are to have wheels, by which they 68

1795–1802

69

can be drawn on Shore, and a 24 pounder in the Bow of each which may be loosened, and run on shore at the head of the landing troops, . . .3 The French had proved their ability at Hondeschoote (September 1793), at the siege of Toulon (December 1793), and in putting down the revolt in the Vendée (1795), and although there had been a British victory at sea on 1 June 1794 (the ‘glorious first of June’), the French continued to be successful in repelling counter-revolutionary forces on land. In June and July 1795, an invasion by émigrés at Quiberon Bay, in southern Brittany, supported by British warships, was quickly defeated. Under these circumstances, the British government was easily able to hold to its line of opposing such a dangerous and threatening power. Napoleon’s victories over the Austrians in the astonishing Italian campaigns of 1796–97 increased the fear of French aggression: and in October 1797, Fox withdrew from politics completely, unable to see any possibility of peace. Mutinies in the navy in 1797 made the dangers seem worse. Those who opposed the war were seen as an unrealistic and self-indulgent minority, a view carefully promulgated by supporters of the government. For most people, the poets and radicals and mutineers were thought of together, as being representative of a certain pro-French, pro-Revolutionary way of thinking. For example, there was a determined and rigid antiintellectualism in Farington’s report of a conversation in December 1797 with Admiral Sir Alan Gardner about the naval mutinies: Sir Alan said a great change had taken place in the Navy, – the Sailors were no longer the same sort of men as formerly. – He thinks the Sunday Schools have done much harm, by giving education disproportionate to situation. – Newspapers are now regularly recd. on board Ships and do much harm, as they are chiefly the opposition papers.4 Sir Alan’s comments were those of a senior officer: stop the men from thinking for themselves, and especially prevent them from listening to supporters of the London Corresponding Society, or to Coleridge and his associates such as John Thelwall and William Frend. The pro-war party found its expression in the rhetoric of a conservative patriotism. The attempt by the friends of liberty to appropriate the word ‘patriot’, which has already been noted, may with hindsight seem significant to the student of Coleridge, but must in the 1790s have been seen as irresponsible by supporters of the government. The most effective expression of this robust view of the war as justified, and of objectors to

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it as eccentric or silly, can be seen in the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, which addressed the pro-French position in the introduction to its first number, dated 20 November 1797. Contemporary poets were accused of being pro-French, and lampooned, with a cartoonist’s technique of juxtaposing them to their predecessors: The old poet was a warrior, at least in imagination; and sung the actions of the heroes of his country, in strains which “made Ambition virtue”, and which overwhelmed the horrors of war in its glory. The Jacobin poet would have no objection to sing battles too – but he would make a distinction. The prowess of Buonaparte, indeed, he might chant in his loftiest strain of exaltation. There we should find nothing but trophies, and triumphs, and branches of laurel and olive, phalanxes of Republicans shouting victory, satellites of depotism biting the ground, and geniusses of Liberty planting standards on mountain-tops. But let this country triumph, or her allies obtain an advantage, straightway the “beauteous face of war” is changed; the “pride, pomp, and circumstance” of vistory are kept carefully out of sight – and we are presented with nothing but contusions and amputations, plundered peasants, and deserted looms. Our poet points the thunder of his blank verse at the head of the recruiting serjeant, or roars in dithyrambics against the lieutenants of press-gangs.5 The introduction to the second number, of 27 November, makes fun of the Jacobin by pretending that ‘he considers every rich man an oppressor, and every person in a lower situation as the victim of avarice, and the slave of aristocratical insolence and contempt.’6 In the 11 December number, the sanctimonious Jacobin poet declines to give ‘the splendid shilling’, to a soldier’s widow: ‘the Bard very calmly contemplates her situation, which he describes in a pair of very pathetical stanzas; and after the following well-imagined topic of consolation, concludes by leaving her to Providence.’ This is followed by a parody of Southey, ‘The Soldier’s Friend’: Come, little Drummer Boy, lay down your knapsack here: I am the Soldier’s Friend – here are some books for you; Nice clever books by Tom Paine, the philanthropist. The drummer boy then leaves, to tell his comrades that ‘the Sailors are all in a Mutiny’, while the Soldier’s Friend remains, starting his speech in clichés and ending it in gobbledy-gook:

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Liberty’s friends thus all learn to amalgamate, Freedom’s volcanic explosion prepares itself, Despots shall bow to the Fasces of Liberty, Reason, philosophy, “fiddledum, diddledum,” Peace and Fraternity, higgledy, piggledy, Higgledy, piggledy, “fiddledum, diddledum.”7 In the Anti-Jacobin, Liberty was frequently associated with Anarchy, even producing, in the 8 January 1798 number, an ‘Ode to Anarchy. By a Jacobin’. And by the summer of 1798, the names of those who were thought to hold such views were barely disguised in a long poem, ‘The New Morality’, which began where Pope’s Dunciad left off, The long arrears of ridicule to pay, To drag reluctant Dullness back to day; the target of this contemporary imitation of Pope was ‘the New Philosophy of modern times’, including ‘French Philanthropy’ whose boundless mind Glows with the general love of all mankind; – Philanthropy, – beneath whose baneful sway Each patriot passion sinks, and dies away. Remembering the French Revolution’s fondness for pageantry on such occasions as the Festival of the Supreme Being, the poet describes the work of Robespierre’s follower and stage manager, ReveillèreLepaux, whom atheists worship; – at whose nod Bow their meek heads the men without a God. The names which follow were those of the people described in Richard Holmes’s words as an ‘entire generation of radical preachers, dons, lecturers and literary intellectuals whose lives were inspired (and careers often wrecked) by the idealism of the early French Revolution.’8 In this poem they include Coleridge and Southey, their friend the poet Charles Lloyd, Charles Lamb, John Thelwall, Tom Paine, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. All are exhorted to bow down and worship by the crowd of red-capped votaries:

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C-----dge and S--th-y, L---d, and L--be and Co. Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux! . . . Th-lw--l, and ye that lecture as ye go, And for your pains get pelted, praise Lepaux! Praise him each Jacobin, or fool, or knave, And your cropp’d heads in sign of worship wave! All creeping creatures, venomous and low, Paine, W-ll--ms, G-dw-n, H-lcr-ft, praise Lepaux!9 By 1798, the two sides were as entrenched as ever. Southey published his anti-war lyric, ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, in The Morning Post;10 Wordsworth and Coleridge, busy writing Lyrical Ballads, had been tracked by a home office spy during their walks; others, threatened by government measures, were uneasily silent. At first sight Lyrical Ballads seems to have nothing to do with the war, to be an experimental volume which related particularly to common practice in poetic diction; and yet it can be, and perhaps should be read as radical in more than one sense. If it could not directly attack public policy, it could draw attention to ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’, as the Advertisement to the 1798 edition put it. The readers were requested to peruse the book and ‘ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents.’ But what were they talking about? If the book was to draw attention to the language of conversation outside the class of the rich and sophisticated, the question was neatly and almost surreptitiously posed: ‘what was the subject of conversation outside the world of London politics, of the Anti-Jacobin, of the government newspapers?’ We have already seen that Admiral Sir Alan Gardner thought that sailors were reading opposition newspapers, and getting ideas above their station. Now Lyrical Ballads was making public some of the things which people of the middle and lower classes must have talked about: poverty, suffering, crimping, wounded soldiers. Some of the poems, such as ‘Old Man travelling’ and ‘The Female Vagrant’ dealt with war directly. In the former, the old man is going, with excruciating slowness, to visit his son who is dying a wounds in a hospital in Falmouth; in the latter, injustice and unemployment are relieved only by ‘the noisy drum’ of the recruiting party, as it comes ‘to sweep the streets of want and pain’. The female vagrant loses her children and her husband in the campaign, the children by disease and the husband by the sword. To these indictments of war must be added the descriptions of civilian suffering: the cruelties of ‘The Thorn’ and ‘The last of the Flock’, the miseries of ‘The Convict’, the tyranny of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’. They form a group of poems whose

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purport is consistent, reminding the reader that the language of the middle and lower classes of society may often have talked of local tragedies, of the government’s failure to provide for the destitute, or the war widows, or those who fail through no fault of their own. Illegitimate children, as in ‘The Thorn’, are mourned by their mothers; old people, such as Simon Lee and his wife, have to fend for themselves. These poets were outside the clever world of the anti-Jacobins, just as (in the first poem in 1798) the ancient mariner is outside the society to which he returns. He has a story to tell, which compels him with his glittering eye to hold the wedding-guest spellbound. What he tells is a story of an unmotivated killing, which has been followed by the punishment of continuing to live. In the same way, Coleridge and Wordsworth were a part of the society which was waging war in a cause for which (in their view) there was no justification. The ancient mariner dramatises their position: they, like him, have seen terrible things and are forced to utter their predicaments and their judgements. The reader of Lyrical Ballads, if he or she had read with the eyes of those who had seen the sufferings that followed the declaration of war in 1793, would, like the wedding guest, have indeed been sadder and wiser; while the criticism of the government was so indirect and implied, that the two authors could not have been put in prison for their pains. What caused a change of heart was not government policy, which they continued to oppose, but events in Europe, most clearly the invasion of Switzerland.

4.2

1798: Switzerland

The invasion of Switzerland caused immense problems for the supporters of France and for the advocates of peace. The reasons for the strong feelings which this roused were complex. Here, it was thought, was another Poland, although this time the aggressor was France, the country of liberty and fraternity. In addition, the traditions and myths of Swiss independence were legendary: to violate Swiss independence was to destroy something which had been held up for centuries as precious. It had appeared briefly, for example, in James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), as a place where ‘unguilty Cities rise’: and, in their happy Streets, Nor cruel Deed, nor Misery, is known. For Valour, faith, and Innocence of Life, Renown’d, a rough laborious People, . . . (IV.330, 333–6)

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It was the land of William Tell, of defiant stands against more powerful neighbours, most memorably at Sempach in 1386 and at Morat in 1476. In the European imagination, Morat was linked with Marathon as an example of a great battle for freedom, by Byron for example: ‘Morat with Marathon twin names shall stand’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III. lxiv). The battle of Morat, and an earlier battle at Granson, are important events in Scott’s Anne of Geierstein (1829), in which Swiss valour and independence are much celebrated, and associated with Scott’s views on chivalry and war. Their nobility of conduct, bravery and straightforwardness contrast with the brutality of some characters (Archibald de Hagenbach) and the treachery of others (Campobasso). In addition to their chivalry, the Swiss were renowned for a certain primitive simplicity, celebrated by a well-known book, Archdeacon William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland of 1779. Wordsworth, who used Coxe’s work in his Descriptive Sketches of 1793, described the harsh climate of the upper valleys but concluded that Ev’n here Content has fix’d her smiling reign With Independance child of high Disdain. (323–4) It was this widely held view of Switzerland which caused such widespread indignation when the French invaded in 1798. The reality was different. During the eighteenth century the Swiss cities had become more feudal than before, with power concentrated in the hands of a few families. Attempts to challenge this, by reformers such as Samuel Henzi in Berne, had led to summary execution.11 Such brutal and repressive measures did not silence the call for reform; and the revolutionary example in France of 1789 was followed by agitations in the Valais, Geneva, the Pays de Vaud and later in Zurich. In 1797 Bonaparte visited Switzerland, and was welcomed as a hero by the reformers: the Directory, of which he was the most influential member, had, as R.W. Phipps put it, ‘a mania for revolutionizing every state on which they could lay hands,’12 and Switzerland, divided and fragile in its outdated government, was an ideal target. In January 1798 the Pays de Vaud proclaimed itself ‘The Republic of Lake Leman’, and the French marched in to support them. They were encouraged by reformers such as Peter Ochs, though opposed by the burghers of Berne; but in March 1798 Berne was taken, and the French established ‘The Helvetic Republic One and Indivisible’. Although they appeared in the guise of liberators, the French proceeded to treat the Helvetic Republic, in Dändliker’s phrase, ‘as conquered

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territory’. 13 The treasury of Berne went to fund Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, and high taxes were levied on the people. In August 1798, Switzerland abandoned its long-held neutrality, and became an acknowledged ally of France: this opened the way to the passage of armies of Austrians and Russians, with all the destruction which that involved, and the heroic marches and counter-marches across the Alps by Suvorov and his army. The tendency for myths to accumulate over the invasions of Switzerland is seen in the widespread belief that Napoleon was personally responsible. In fact, the French armies were commanded by Brune, and not by Napoleon (the fallacy that Napoleon was responsible for the subjugation of Switzerland has been neatly exposed by Simon Bainbridge, building on the work of J.C. Maxwell 14). Nevertheless, the undoubted occupation of Switzerland, and Napoleon’s position of power in France, could easily have led to the assumption that he was responsible in 1798. Wordsworth seems to have thought this in his sonnet ‘Thoughts of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, written in the winter of 1806–07 and published in 1807: There came a Tyrant, and with holy glee Thou fought’st against him; but hast vainly striven: Thou from thy Alpine holds at length art driven, Where not a torrent murmurs heard by thee. ‘Thee’ is Liberty, whose voice has been in the sea and the mountains. Wordsworth’s response is consistent with his remark to James Losh in a letter of 4 December 1821 that ‘after Buonaparte had violated the Independence of Switzerland, my heart turned against him.’15 So even though Napoleon was not present during the invasion of Switzerland in 1798, but in the words of J.C. Maxwell, ‘in the next few years the dominant role of Napoleon as the enemy par excellence led to his being seen also as the destroyer of Swiss independence.’16 He was the giant tyrant who, even during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, ‘threw his leg o’er Switzerland and Italy.’17 The French intervention in Switzerland, although replacing a feudal oligarchy, did more than suppress freedom, and give rise to laments. It destroyed the hope that France, in spite of all the problems of the Terror, would remain a nation of liberty. As John Beer has succinctly put it, ‘it was the first occasion on which the [French] Government could be said to have acted deliberately in a way which ran counter to the principles of the Revolution.’18 Coleridge, who had been a fierce

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opponent of the war against France, now turned with equal violence against the French. Like a man betrayed, he recalled his first enthusiasm for the Revolution (even to the detail of the tennis-court oath of 1789) in France; an Ode: When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, Bear witness with me, how I hoped and feared! but went on to invoke the personified spirit of freedom itself, even to the extent of asking for forgiveness for what he saw as his error: Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, From bleak Helvetia’s icy caverns sent – I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams! Heroes, that for your peaceful country perished, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain-snows With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherished One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes! The actual reasons for the French intervention are over-simplified in the enthusiasm of such rhetoric, but it is clear that for Coleridge, as for others, the invasion of Switzerland was more than just one more event in the ever-changing political situation. It was the destruction of freedom by those who had set out on the path of freedom. They had become, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘oppressors in their turn’. In their reading of history, Napoleon began to be responsible: he rapidly became so powerful in France that the attention was focussed upon him. He became, first, a figure in the forefront of the political scene when he took power in the coup of 18th Brumaire in November 1799. Coleridge thought this ‘a detestable Villainy’, and Southey agreed: ‘Buonaparte has made me anti-Gallican.’19 The phrase ‘anti-Gallican’ took the place of ‘antiJacobin’: but even in these years, Coleridge and Southey still had high hopes of him. By defeating the Austrians in Italy, he had struck a blow for Italian freedom; and Bainbridge quotes a letter of Southey in which he had high hopes of the expedition to Egypt in 1798. Bainbridge’s account of these years emphasises Landor’s praise of Napoleon in Gebir, ‘a mortal man above all mortal praise’, but also Landor’s disappointment in 1802 when Napoleon was made First Consul for life. The liberator of

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the Italian campaign had become a dictator. For Coleridge, however, he was the peacemaker, who had used his power to bring about what was hoped to be the end of the war. When the Peace of Amiens was signed on 25 March 1802, Coleridge thought Napoleon had still the power to transform the world. 20 The second invasion of Switzerland in 1802, therefore, began the long process in which he turned, in the eyes of a number of British writers, from a liberating general in the Italian campaign into a dictator and a tyrant. In that process, the contrast between the France which Wordsworth had known and admired in 1792 and the France which was now the conqueror of Switzerland is clear. Switzerland had become an emblem of a subjugated nation and a landscape that had been defiled. It was in this atmosphere of liberal confusion that the first initiatives for peace began.

4.3 Before the peace: Thomas Campbell and the poetry of war While the Jacobins and anti-Jacobins were quarrelling, other poets responded to the excitement of war, not just to a thoughtless patriotism but to the dramatic possibilities and the sublimity of it. While William Crowe condemned the poetry of war, others remembered Homer and Virgil, and relished the poetry of battle; an interesting example is Thomas Campbell, who read Homer and Virgil as a child. He also fought in a village gang: he took part in ‘stone battles’ on the outskirts of Glasgow against the boys of the neighbouring village of Shettleston, using stones and slings: he was once so badly injured that he had to be carried home. He was forbidden by his father to take part in such violent occasions: ‘He therefore contented himself with Homer’s descriptions, where there was certainly all the sublimity of battles, without any risk from the Shettlestone infantry.’21 Campbell (born 1777) grew up in an atmosphere of war and revelled in it. When he was an undergraduate at Glasgow, he watched the Glasgow Militia exercising on the College Green and wrote a poem ‘On the Glasgow Volunteers’: These are no hireling sons of men! No jealous tyrant’s grimly band, The work of freedom to debar, Or scourge a despot’s injured land! Nought but the patriotic view Of free-born valour ever fired

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To baffle Gallia’s boastful crew, The souls of Northern breast inspir’d.22 Later Campbell was to deepen and complicate his understanding of war. He lived in Germany for a year, from 1800 to 1801, where his first-hand experience of the battlefields affected him deeply. At Ratisbon, he saw ‘the richest fields of Europe desolated by contending troops’ and ‘peasants driven from their homes to starve and beg in the streets.’23 He described the battle outside the city, where the French under Grenier forced the Austrians under Klenau to retreat, as forming ‘the most important epoch of my life, in point of impressions’: but those impressions at seeing numbers of men strewn dead on the field – or, what was worse – seeing them in the act of dying, are so horrible to my memory, that I study to banish them.24 At the same time, he was clearly excited by being among soldiers. Ratisbon was taken by part of Napoleon’s army of Italy, and Campbell gave way to his enthusiasm before cutting himself short: Since the arrival of the gallant Republicans, we have many specimens of military evolutions extremely striking. Such fiery countenances and rapid manoeuvres, as these active little fellows exhibit, are only to be expected from the conquerors of Lodi and Marengo. It would rouse every spark of enthusiasm in your heart to see them marching with steady and measured steps to the war-song of Liberty [the Marseillaise]. Forgive the tedious digression on military sights. I beg your pardon – what is all this admiration of ‘the pomp and circumstance of war’, but a vain unfounded sentiment? God grant that we had peace!25 It was in this divided frame of mind that Campbell wrote The Soldier’s Dream, in which the armies sink to the ground after a battle, ‘The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die’, and the soldier dreams of his home, and of his wife and children; or ‘The Wounded Hussar’, in which, after a battle on the banks of the Danube, the girl searches for her lover and finds him, but he dies in her arms. The best of these is ‘Hohenlinden’, on the battle of 3 December 1800, where the winter landscape becomes a part of the poem’s atmosphere: the snow is first white and untrodden, then stained red with blood; the river Iser is ‘dark as winter’, then flowing with gore. The sun is low, on the December afternoon, and the fires are

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not the healthy and warm fires of a hearth-side but the ‘fires of death’, the torches by whose light the soldiers prepare. The black and white of the snow and the dark sky are illuminated by the red flashes of the guns, and then by the red blood: Then shook the hills with thunder riven, Then rush’d the steed to battle driven, And louder than the bolts of heaven, Far flash’d the red artillery. But redder yet that light shall glow On Linden’s hills of stainèd snow, And bloodier yet the torrent flow Of Iser, rolling rapidly. Campbell did not see the battle, as he had done at Ratisbon, but he had visited the scene a few months earlier; the poem imagines a December afternoon there, and the cries of the fighting soldiers: On, ye brave Who rush to glory, or the grave! Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave, And charge with all thy chivalry! Few, few, shall part where many meet! The snow shall be their winding-sheet, And every turf beneath their feet Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre. The waving of the Austrian banners, and the charging of the chivalry, is an ironic reminder that Hohenlinden was a disaster for them. Before the end of the year, the Austrians had had to accept an armistice, and in the February of the following year, 1801, they signed the Treaty of Lunéville, which secured for France the territory west of the Rhine. But the poem is remarkable not for its irony so much as for its combination of bravery and horror, in which the snow falls again over the dead bodies to become their winding-sheet. So many were killed (the poem implies) that ‘every turf’, that is the whole battlefield, will become a burial-ground. Campbell prayed for peace, but was stirred by war. Before returning to Britain, he had written not only ‘The Soldier’s Dream’ but also ‘Ye Mariners of England’. Having seen the all-conquering French armies, he

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was moved to put his faith in the navy as the force which would save England from invasion: Ye Mariners of England That guard our native Seas, Whose Flag has brav’d a thousand years, The Battle and the Breeze, Your glorious Standard launch again, To match another Foe, And sweep thro’ the Deep While the stormy Tempests blow – As with ‘Hohenlinden’, the poem relies for its effect upon atmosphere, the ‘sweep thro’ the Deep’, the blowing of the wind. As the ships survive the storm, so they will survive the war Till danger’s troubled night depart, And the star of peace return. In 1801, of course, this was still far off, although Britain, following the Treaty of Lunéville, was now Napoleon’s only major opponent. Napoleon attempted, with Danish help, to blockade British access to the Baltic: Campbell left Germany just in time, before his escape route was threatened. The threat was lifted by Parker and Nelson’s destruction of the Danish navy at Copenhagen (2 April 1801), but Campbell’s narrow escape must have given a particular urgency to his ‘Battle of the Baltic’ (originally ‘The Battle of Copenhagen’). In its earlier version, the poem contrasts the two sides: the Danish sailor is a red wolf, but the British sailor plays the game: Ere a first and fatal round Shook the flood, Every Dane looked out that day Like the red wolf on his prey, Ands he swore his flag to sway O’er our blood. Not such a mind possessed England’s tar; ’Twas the love of noble game Set his oaken heart on flame,

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For to him ’twas all the same – Sport and war.26 The contrast is between the savage and the civilised: Campbell was seeing the war in terms of a conflict between violence on the one hand and chivalry on the other. Something of the same mixture of feelings is observable in his remarks on the French army after Ratisbon, but the Hohenlinden destruction must have made him feel the horrible side of war more powerfully. Certainly, the British at Copenhagen become models of generous victors in the later version, ‘Battle of the Baltic’: Out spoke the victor then, As he hail’d them o’er the wave; ‘Ye are brothers! ye are men! And we conquer but to save: – So peace instead of death let us bring; This call for surrender sounds severe, but it was, according to the poem, greeted with joy: ‘Then Denmark bless’d our chief,/ That he gave her wounds repose’. Campbell’s ideal is of an army or navy which was resolute in battle (‘hearts of oak’ is the cry in this poem) but magnanimous in victory. Campbell returned to Britain, to live in London, where he joined the Volunteers in 1803, following the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, and was ‘very regular in his attendance at drill’, although he complained of fatigue: ‘But, oh, what fagging work this volunteering is! Eight hours under a musket!’27 He continued to be inspired by war, and by heroes, some of whom he knew. Sir John Moore (‘our dear great Moore’ 28), who was killed at Corunna in 1809, was friendly to him; and years later one of Moore’s officers, Edward Hodge, received a tribute in the ‘Ode to the Memory of Burns’: Such was the soldier – Burns, forgive That sorrows of mine own intrude In strains to thy great memory due. In verse like this, oh! could he live, The friend I mourn’d – the brave – the good – Edward that died at Waterloo! Campbell’s argument, in the Burns ode, is not only that ‘rustic life and poverty/ Grow beautiful beneath his touch’, but also that Burns had

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much to say to the soldier: ‘What patriot-pride he taught!’ He encourages ‘the nobler passions of the soul’: It is the muse that consecrates The native banner of the brave, Unfurling, at the trumpet’s breath, Rose, thistle, harp; ’tis she elates To sweep the field or ride the wave, A sunburst in the storm of death. Campbell’s alliance of poetry and warfare was, naturally, a complex one: it saw war as patriotic, bound up with the love of one’s country, symbolised by its emblem – rose, thistle, harp; it saw war as the occupation of the brave and noble, such as Nelson, or Moore, or Hodge; and as chivalric, with the victors acting with compassion and the losers with gratitude and dignity. It envisaged war, above all, as the necessary agent for peace: as the counter to tyranny and domination. It is no surprise, therefore, that Campbell’s editor, J. Logie Robertson, devoted a whole section of his edition to ‘Songs of Battle’. Campbell’s poems have tended to be neglected in recent assessments of the poetry of the period, perhaps because of their concentration on war: but Tennyson admired them, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (who liked them also) set ‘Battle of the Baltic’ to music for two choirs (one representing the British, the other the Danes). Washington Irving thought that ‘Ye Mariners of England’ and ‘Battle of the Baltic’ were ‘two of the noblest national songs we have ever seen’ because they were ‘totally free from that hyperbole and national rhodomontade which generally disgrace this species of poetry.’29 Scott was an enthusiast also. It was Scott who persuaded Campbell to publish ‘Hohenlinden’: ‘And there’s that glorious little poem, too, of Hohenlinden; after he had written it, he did not seem to think much of it, but considered some of it “d--d drum and trumpet lines.” I got him to recite it to me, and I believe that the delight I felt and expressed had an effect in inducing him to print it.’30 At some time during the war, therefore, Campbell’s work stood for something which complicated the general desire for peace. It celebrated defiance to the world in ‘Ye Mariners of England’ and chivalric behaviour in ‘The Battle of the Baltic’. It presented an ideology of war which was taken up with renewed vigour after 1803: Trafalgar was a kind of

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apotheosis of the English mariner figure, and the responses to the battles of Moore and Wellington were to be filled with the mixture of pride and sadness that is found in ‘Hohenlinden’. The idea that the British were good but also high-principled fighters was found everywhere in Wordsworth’s poetry of 1807 and after. But before those times came the peace.

5 The Peace of Amiens and after, 1802–05

5.1

1802–03: Paris and Calais

William Pitt resigned as Prime Minister in February 1801, not over the war but over the problem of Catholic Emancipation. His successor, Henry Addington, was widely seen as a lesser figure: ‘Pitt is to Addington/ As London is to Paddington.’ In this jingle can be seen the beginning of the myth of Pitt as the great Prime Minister who stood up to Napoleon, a myth that was naturally encouraged by the pro-war party, even as Pitt had been execrated by those who wanted peace. Addington, by contrast, was a cautious man: he faced a changing situation on the continent, in which France was making peace with a number of different countries, the most important of which were Austria and Prussia. Addington sent envoys to France, who succeeded in negotiating the Peace of Amiens, which was signed on 25 March 1802: although even before then, British visitors had begun to make their way to Paris for the first time since the Revolution. The peace was popular in many ways. It had been the subject of attempts and rumours for the previous year or two, and there had been abortive negotiations in early 1800, during which Coleridge had written a number of short pieces in the Morning Post advocating peace.1 His attack on Pitt in the Post on 19 March 1800, shortly after the collapse of earlier peace talks, was part of the same campaign: Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war – and he answers, SECURITY! Call upon his to particularise a crime, and he exclaims – JACOBINISM! Abstractions defined by abstractions! Generalities defined by generalities!2 84

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Addington was more to Coleridge’s liking. He responded more positively to Bonaparte’s emissaries than Pitt had done, and in so doing followed the example of those countries who had concluded peace with France at Lunéville in 1801. His peace gave a valuable space for the country to recover from the financial burdens of war and the difficulties of the trade blockade with Europe and the Baltic. He was able to abolish Pitt’s income tax, which had naturally been unpopular with those who had had to pay it; and he reduced the expenditure on the army and navy. And with the peace some writers found themselves freed from the duty of swimming against the tide of war: they could be patriotic again, without compromising their republicanism or their antipathy to the government. Southey wrote, many years later, that the Peace of Amiens, and Addington’s premiership, ‘restored in me the English feeling which had long been deadened; it placed me in sympathy with my country, bringing me into that natural and healthy state of mind upon which time, and knowledge, and reflection, were sure to produce their proper and salutary effect.’3 He meant by this that he changed his views after 1803, and that the peace was part of that process: it allowed the breathing space to consider which side was right, and to condemn the resumption of the war (which Southey, unlike Hazlitt, blamed on the French). However, it was a peace ‘which everyone was glad of but no one was proud of.’4 There was a certain amount of cynicism about it: Gillray’s cartoon, ‘The first Kiss this Ten Years! – or – the meeting of Britannia & Citizen François’ (1 January 1803) depicts a leering Napoleon leaning over to kiss an immensely fat and complacent-looking Britannia (Napoleon is said to have been delighted with it.). Addington was even said to have apologised for the peace.5 Nevertheless, visitors flocked to France, curious to see the French people and their cities. There was an immense interest in discovering what post-revolutionary France was like, and also in coming face to face with Napoleon himself; there was even a certain fear among British politicians and writers that visitors to Paris would be somehow turned into supporters of France ‘in the soft hour of Peace’, although Coleridge poured scorn on the idea that ‘we should flock to Paris, and all come back Jacobins.’6 Charles Lamb wrote tongue in cheek to his friend Thomas Manning, who was in Paris, in February 1802: You cannot conceive . . . the strange joy, which I felt at the Receipt of a Letter from Paris. It seemed to give me a learned importance, which placed me above all, who had not Parisian Correspondents. . . . You cannot write things so trifling, let them only be about Paris, which I shall not treasure. . . . Have you seen a man Guillotined yet? is it as good

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as Hanging? are the Women all painted, & the men all monkeys? or are there not a few that look like rational of both sexes? Are you & the first Consul thick?7 Manning must have replied with a rapturous description of Napoleon, whereupon Lamb replied: . . . your Letter was highly gratifying. Some parts want a little explication, for example, ‘the Godlike face of the First Consul.’ What God does he most resemble, Mars, Bacchus, or Apollo? or the God Serapis, who flying (as Egyptian Chronicles deliver) from the fury of the Dog Anubis (the Hieroglyph of an English Mastiff) lighted upon Monomotapa (or the Land of Apes) by some thought to be old France, and there set up a tyranny &c. – Our London Prints of him represent him gloomy & sulky, like an angry Jupiter. – I hear, that he is very small, even less than me, who am ‘less than the least of the Apostles’. . .8 Lamb, a small man, has turned Bonaparte into an even smaller one, a little cartoon figure, just as he depicts the French men as monkeys and the women as all painted.9 His affinity with Gillray, who invented the figure of ‘Little Boney’, is unmistakable: both were facetiously querying the infatuation of British visitors with the Napoleonic charisma. There were many British visitors to Paris. Many were artists, anxious to see the treasures looted from Italy and other countries. Joseph Farington, the painter and diarist, went there with Henry Fuseli, meeting many other painters during their stay, including Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy. Later Turner arrived from Switzerland, and the poet Samuel Rogers. Farington went to the monthly grand review at the Place de Carousel, and there saw Napoleon: I thought his general appearance better than I expected, and his countenance of a higher style than any picture or bust of him that I have seen. He has an intent and searching look, but his expression is confident. His complexion is not as I have heard it described waxy, but though wanting of colour sufficiently healthy. His person is slim, & I should judge him to be abt. 5 feet 6 Inches high.10 Like many British visitors, Farington was fascinated by Napoleon, and managed to get into the Tuileries Palace to see him at work. He and Samuel Rogers were in a crowd on the landing of the great staircase, when Napoleon came by and ‘passed me so close that I could have touched

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him’. But Rogers was disappointed, and thought Napoleon common: his countenance ‘was that of a little Italian.’11 Napoleon was still thought of by many as representing the revolution, and some British tourists were fearful of their reception. But Farington heard that in France ‘the word Jacobin is execrated’ and that ‘a remarkable change has taken place in the appearance of the people from what they were a few years ago, gloom, savage, without regard to dress or cleanliness. They are now coming fast round to chearfulness and civility.’12 Benjamin West thought that ‘the people of Paris appear to be in a much better state since the Revolution.’ The visitors went to the Opera, to the Tuileries, and of course to the Louvre. A young art student, William Hazlitt, much less grand than the Royal Academicians of Farington’s group, wrote of it with passion: I had made some progress in painting when I went to the Louvre to study, and I never did any thing afterwards. . . . I marched delighted through a quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of genius, a universe of art! I ran the gauntlet of all the schools from the bottom to the top; and in the end got admitted into the inner room . . . Reader, ‘if thou hast not seen the Louvre, thou art damned!’ – for thou hast not seen the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou hast not seen all these together, with their mutually reflected glories.13 Hazlitt, who continued to be an unqualified admirer of Napoleon, had no qualms about the thefts of pictures and other works of art. In his later Life of Napoleon he again used the image of walking for a quarter of a mile through the gallery, but he also praised the way in which the Louvre had been enriched. In an extraordinary piece of persuasive rhetoric, he did not bother to excuse Napoleon’s expropriations but bestowed on them his unqualified approval: As a gallery, the Louvre was unrivalled: even the Vatican shrinks before it. Not a first-rate picture is to be met with on the Continent, but it found its way to the Louvre. Among other claims to our gratitude and wonder, it shortened the road to Italy; and it was ‘a journey like the path to heaven’, to visit it for the first time. You walked for a quarter of a mile through works of fine art; the very floors echoed the sounds of immortality . . . School called unto school; one great name answered to another, swelling the chorus of universal praise. Instead of robbery and sacrilege, it was the crowning and consecration of art;

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there was a dream and a glory, like the coming of the Millennium. These works, instead of being taken from their respective countries, were given to the world, and to the mind and heart of man, from whence they sprung. 14 Hazlitt’s defence of Napoleon’s wickedness is perverse, but brilliant: he saw Napoleon’s looting as art made newly accessible, and thus as part of the new world order, sweeping away privilege, private patronage, and exclusive ownership: These masterpieces were the true writing on the wall, which told the great and mighty of the earth that their empire was passed away – that empire of arrogance and frivolity which assumed all superiority to itself, and scoffed at every thing that could give a title to it. 15 Hazlitt’s passionate admiration was not shared by the British politician who might have been expected to admire him most. Fox had been since 1789 a consistent supporter of the Revolution and an opponent of war, who had been cartooned by Isaac Cruikshank ten years earlier as ‘The Solicitor General for the French Republic’ (18 February 1793). Fox lost no time in visiting Paris, though not for political reasons. He worked in the national library on his life of James II, encountered some veterans of the Revolution, was applauded at the opera, and had an uneasy meeting with Napoleon. The First Consul, no doubt mindful of the propaganda value of such a meeting, is said to have addressed him with ‘considerable emotion’: ‘Ah! Mr Fox! I have heard with much pleasure of your arrival – I have desired much to see you – I have long admired in you the orator and friend of his country, who, in consistently raising his voice for peace, consulted that country’s best interests – those of Europe – and that of the human race.’16 Fox was wary of Napoleon, and the two did not get on well together. But reports of Fox’s visit soon got back to England, and were received with amusement by Gillray, who produced the grotesquely funny ‘Introduction of Citizen Volpone [the Fox] & his Suite at Paris’, and with indignation by Coleridge, who published two ‘Letters’ to Fox in The Morning Post on 4 and 9 November 1802. By now Coleridge had abandoned his antagonism to Pitt and the war, and become a fierce hater of Napoleon: he poured scorn on Fox’s willingness to meet the unscrupulous Talleyrand and

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the First Consul himself. What, said Coleridge, referring to a massacre at Jaffa in 1799 and to the revolt of the slaves under Toussaint l’Ouverture in St Domingo in 1802, had induced Fox to meet him? Was it the First Consul’s exploit at Jaffa, which has entitled him to the respect of the friend of humanity? or was it the re-establishment of the Slave Trade, and his truly Corsican faith to the Blacks in St. Domingo, which have recommended him by any bond of sympathy to the great FRIEND and ADVOCATE of the unhappy AFRICANS? Was it his message to the Legislature, his purgation of the Tribunate, his terror and hatred of free discussion by the Press, his contempt of popular elections and Representative Government, his jealousy of trials by Juries, his system of espionage . . .?17 There is a good deal more in the same anti-Bonapartist style, which was to some degree hazardous during the Peace of Amiens. Relations between Britain and France had improved to such an extent that the British Attorney General instituted proceedings for libel at Napoleon’s instigation against a French émigré who had called him a Monster and attacked his employment of ‘foreign Banditti’. 18 Fox evidently had his reservations about Napoleon’s integrity and future purposes;19 but while he was attending the First Consul’s levées, and Hazlitt was walking the galleries of the Louvre, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy took the opportunity in August 1802 to visit Calais, where they saw Annette Vallon, whom he had known and loved in 1792, and his child Caroline. Mary Moorman argues convincingly that they chose Calais because ‘Paris, as the seat of a government detested by Annette, would not have been acceptable to her,’ and that Wordsworth would not have wished to ‘be caught up in the crowd of English visitors, of whose tolerance of Bonaparte he could not approve.’20 The visit seems to have been as cordial as it could have been under the circumstances of Wordsworth’s impending marriage to Mary Hutchinson: it led to the composition of a number of sonnets, most notably ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and the sonnet to the nine-year old Caroline, ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.’ Earlier in 1802, Wordsworth had reflected on the situation in France, producing sonnets that indicated the depth of his unease. He was appalled at the apparently sycophantic way in which the English were flocking to Paris: Is it a reed that’s shaken by the wind, Or what is it that ye go forth to see?

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Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree, Men known, and men unknown, sick, lame, and blind, Post forward all, like creatures of one kind, With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee In France, before the new-born Majesty. The comparison with the Three Kings and their visit to Christ is a shocking indication of Wordsworth’s strength of feeling: When truth, when sense, when liberty were flown, What hardship had it been to wait an hour? Shame on you, feeble Heads, to slavery prone! The sonnet was published in The Morning Post on 29 January 1803, not long after Coleridge’s two ‘Letters to Mr Fox’ (4 and 9 November 1802). In the same issue appeared Wordsworth’s ‘I grieved for Buonaparté ’ (which had earlier been published in the same anti-Bonapartist newspaper on 6 September 1802), with its contrast between one who had been trained in battles and one who can ‘temper with the sternness of the brain/ Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood’. When Wordsworth thinks of Napoleon now he wonders, as if Napoleon were someone as far removed from humanity as he can imagine, ‘The tenderest mood/ Of that Man’s mind – what can it be?’ During the stay at Calais, his mind went back to the first time that he had visited the town, with Robert Jones on the walking tour to Switzerland in 1790. The sonnet beginning ‘Jones! as from Calais southward you and I’ remembered the time When faith was pledged to new-born Liberty: A homeless sound of joy was in the sky: From hour to hour the antiquated Earth Beat like the heart of Man: . . . now the only greetings were “Good morrow, Citizen!” a hollow word, As if a dead man spake it! Napoleon’s assumption of the office of First Consul for life was recorded in another sonnet (‘Festivals have I seen’), in which Wordsworth noted that Calais was not gay on Napoleon’s birthday; and two other sonnets referred to his political decisions: one to the extinction of the Venetian

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republic, which was ceded to Austria at the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797; the other to the leader of the slave revolt in St Domingo, Toussaint l’Ouverture. The latter anticipates Coleridge’s ‘Letter to Mr Fox’, with its reference to the re-establishment of the slave trade and to Napoleon’s ‘truly Corsican faith to the Blacks in St Domingo.’21 In the time of the early humanitarianism of the French Revolution, in 1794, the slaves had been freed by the National Convention. Napoleon reversed this edict, and in the rebellion which followed Toussaint L’Ouverture was arrested, brought to Paris and imprisoned. He was to die in April 1803, but Wordsworth was not to know that: he urged him to ‘Live, and take comfort’: Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. The nobly expressed association of L’Ouverture with the forces of natural life expressed Wordsworth’s sense that Napoleon was not only tyrannical but unnaturally cruel in his policy towards slaves. It is made clearer by the compassionate sonnet entitled ‘September 1, 1802’, describing the ‘whiterobed Negro’ on the boat from Calais, victim of one of ‘the capricious acts of tyranny that disgraced those times ... the chasing of all Negroes from France by decree of the government.’ Wordsworth’s horror at Napoleon’s racist policy led him to portray the woman in some detail: she did not respond to overtures of friendship, Yet still her eyes retained their tropic fire, That, burning independent of the mind, Joined with the lustre of her rich attire To mock the Outcast – O ye Heavens, be kind! And feel, thou Earth, for this afflicted Race! As opposed to Farington, or Samuel Rogers, or even Fox, Wordsworth assumed the mantle of the high moralist at this time, using the period of the Peace of Amiens to reflect on events and to denounce the way in which his fellow-countrymen were prepared to come to terms with Napoleon and even admire him. It was the beginning of a complex process in which he saw himself in relation to Napoleon, as Simon

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Bainbridge has brilliantly noted, the emperor as the deadly other who had to be struggled with, both as a poet and as a Grasmere Volunteer.22 The end of the peace came in May 1803. It had become clear that France was continuing to expand its navy, while Britain contracted its navy and army. Blockades of British exports had continued. However, the chief cause of the rupture was Malta, which the British had agreed to hand over to the Knights of St John. When Spain, in alliance with France, seized the property of the Knights in Spain, it appeared that ceding Malta would have put that island at risk of being taken over by Spain and then France. Arguments continued during the early months of 1803, and tensions increased: after a stormy meeting with Napoleon in March, the British Ambassador, Lord Whitworth, stopped being diplomatic and called for his papers on 2 May. War was declared again on 17 May. Hazlitt, always pro-Napoleon, described the resumption of war as pointless. In his pamphlet, ‘Free Thoughts upon Public Affairs: or Advice to a Patriot’ of 1806 he pointed ironically to the threat which the loss of Malta supposedly would have produced: It seems Malta was the enchanted island, into which Buonaparte was to convey himself by stealth, and thence passing easily into Egypt was, at another vast stride, to come down souse upon our possessions in India . . . Or, in the language of the day, Malta was the key to Egypt, and Egypt was the key to our Eastern conquests.23 Addington had placed his hopes for the future on a continuation of the peace, and, if it should be broken, on a defensive strategy, holding the channel with the navy and defending the shores of Britain with a reduced army (there were to be no more expensive and disastrous excursions to Holland or Flanders). The result was as he had expected, and partly prepared for: a threat of invasion. On the resumption of hostilities, Napoleon established a series of camps along the channel coast, and began operations for crossing the channel. The threat continued until the autumn of 1805, when Napoleon’s ‘army of England’ was marched away to win the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz. During this anxious time, British writers and cartoonists took measures to allay their very real fears by turning Napoleon into a caricature – half monster, half figure of fun. Gillray portrayed him as losing his temper, in a cartoon of 24 May entitled ‘Maniac-Raving’s – or – Little Boney in a Strong Fit’, and in August he likened Napoleon to Belshazzar with ‘The Hand-Writing upon the Wall’, showing Napoleon, with a grossly fat

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Josephine, preparing to dine on England, with dishes such as ‘Tower of London’, ‘St James’s’ and ‘Bank of England’. The writing upon the wall, ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ was a reminder of the message to Belshazzar, ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians’ (Daniel 5: 26–8). The message was clear: pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. It was comforting at a time of crisis, but hardly appropriate to a man who was at the height of his powers. Napoleon was at his most powerful in these years. But the attempt by British cartoonists to transform him into a figure of ridicule was made easier by his decision to be crowned Emperor of the French on 2 December 1804. At this point the powerful narrative which had made Napoleon the child and safe-guarder of the revolution had finally to be abandoned. A pseudonymous poet in the Gentleman’s Magazine took the opportunity to juxtapose Bonaparte as Emperor with the ideals of 1789. Robespierre, who had been guillotined just ten years before, in 1794, appears as a ghost: Wrapt in the sanguine shroud of guilt and fear, From the dark regions where the wicked dwell, Uprose the grimly ghost of ROBESPIERRE And bellowed thus around, with hideous yell: Where art thou, rampant power of Liberty Whose wild notes pierc’d the welkin’s startled ear? Equality! what’s now become of thee, To renovated Gallia once so dear?. . . What blasted vision now invades my view – What torment, passing all be Demons known? Is my dim sight deceiv’d? – Can it be true? Does BONAPARTE sit on CAPET’s throne? The self-crowning as Emperor was a significant moment in the demonisation of Napoleon, though one which was mingled with laughter and ridicule. The same poet who described the ghost of Robespierre played a variation on the theme in a neater epigram: When Old Nick heard that Bonaparte Was made French Emp’ror, he laughed hearty; And calling to him Robespierre,

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Told him the tidings, with a sneer. Quoth ROB, ‘to hear the news I’m glad; I always lov’d to see France mad.’ Gillray produced a brilliant cartoon depicting the event, ‘The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France, from the Church of Notre-Dame, Decr 2d 1804’, full of strutting and absurd figures, and with a little sulky Napoleon in the middle, following his obese Empress and the perplexed-looking Pope. To Wordsworth, it was altogether more serious. The celebrated passage in The Prelude in which he describes the coronation was his record of a moment in which the worst kind of history was being made, when, finally, to close And rivet up the gains of France, a Pope Is summoned in to crown an Emperor – This last opprobrium, when we see the dog Returning to his vomit, . . . (X.931–5) The revolting comparison is an indication of the way in which Wordsworth felt that Napoleon had not only assumed the imperial role and negated the liberties of 1789, but had become a figure who had betrayed his origins and strayed from his original purposes. Napoleon now became a figure upon whom was centred much of Wordsworth’s anger. Napoleon had destroyed his hopes for France and Europe, leaving nothing for Wordsworth ‘to venerate’, as he said in ‘October, 1803’: When, looking on the present face of things, I see one Man, of Men the meanest too! Raised up to sway the world, to do, undo, With mighty Nations for his Underlings, The great event with which old story rings Seem vain and hollow; I find nothing great; Nothing is left which I can venerate; . . . From this time forward, throughout the rest of the war, Wordsworth’s passionate opposition to Napoleon led him to an intense hatred: it was this which informed his writing on the Convention of Cintra, his almost desperate anxiety to have the latest news, and the extraordinary rhetoric of his final Thanksgiving Odes after the battle of Waterloo.24

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The Peace of Amiens was therefore an extraordinary pause in the war. It was one which helped crystallise opinion, in a number of ways. British visitors saw Paris, most of them for the first time since the early years of the Revolution, and had an opportunity to see the country against which they had been fighting since 1793. They admired the works of art which had been collected there, without, apparently, seriously questioning the morality of such an assembling of work from conquered countries. They were able to see Napoleon, the First Consul, at close quarters. But the resumption of hostilities in 1803 put an end to curiosity, and was followed by a second fear of invasion, following that of 1796. This one of 1804–05 was only prevented by the supremacy of the British navy in the channel. It is at this point that another element enters the equation: the concept of heroism. It had begun with the naval battles of the 1790s, and especially the Battle of the Nile in 1798; but it now began to shape the whole perception of the war and its pursuit.

5.2

1805: Heroism

In Susan Sontag’s remarkable novel, The Volcano Lover, Nelson is always designated as ‘the hero’. The name is inescapable: his national fame began with his dramatic intervention at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, when he manoeuvred his ship, the Captain, to prevent the Spanish detachment from escaping, confronting seven ships of the line. It continued with the astonishing Battle of the Nile in August 1798, when the French navy was destroyed in Aboukir Bay. This roused the enthusiasm of Europe. ‘You have made yourself, my dear Nelson’, wrote Sir William Hamilton, ‘immortal’.25 In fact, the immortality was to come later, but Sir William’s language was characteristic of the adulation which was bestowed upon Nelson in the aftermath of the battle. It continued after the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, which was a much more severe affair, so much so that his commander, Sir Hyde Parker, ordered Nelson to break off the action, which led to the famous turning of the blind eye. Immortality came four years later. The battle of Trafalgar, fought on 21 October 1805, saved Britain from the threat of invasion, and ensured the mastery of the seas for the remainder of the war. It was an intensely dramatic engagement, all the more so because the confrontation between the two fleets had been delayed for so long. Nelson’s plan to break the French line in two places was a daring one, and it was carried out with courage and determination. Nelson’s comment on his second-in-command Collingwood’s attack in the Royal Sovereign was a recognition of bravery – ‘See how that noble fellow Collingwood carries his ship into action!’ – and

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was also evidence of his infectious enthusiasm in battle. Thoughout his career, with such enthusiasm, Nelson had the power to inspire his sailors to bravery and self-sacrifice. His own death at the battle was tragic, yet also spectacular (he was wearing his full dress uniform), and sublime in its self-sacrifice. His funeral was one of the greatest and most elaborate of such occasions ever witnessed. The body, brought back from Trafalgar, lay in state at Greenwich, from where it was taken up the Thames by barge to the Admiralty at Whitehall; and on the following day, 9 January, a vast procession took the body to St Paul’s Cathedral. Thereafter accounts of the funeral, poems, articles, ballads, unauthorised lives, memoirs poured from the press; and, in due process of time, appeared the massive and impressive Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B., written by James Stanier Clarke, Librarian to the Prince Regent, and John M’Arthur, ‘Late Secretary to Admiral Lord Viscount Hood’. It was published in 1809, dedicated to the Prince Regent, in two sumptuous volumes: it is easy to believe, as the ‘Advertisement’ to Volume I claims, that ‘Neither labour, nor expense, has been spared’ to make the work worthy of a heroic subject. Opening the first volume, the reader would find, opposite the title page, an engraving of Benjamin West’s painting, ‘The Immortality of Nelson’. It was described in the text as follows: The leading point in the Picture presents Victory presenting the dead Body of Nelson to Britannia after the Battle of Trafalgar, which is received from the arms of Neptune, with the trident of his dominions and Nelson’s triumphant flags. Britannia sits in shaded gloom, as expressive of that deep regret which overwhelmed the united kingdom at the loss of so distinguished a character. In the other parts of the Picture are seen the concomitant events of his life. The Lion, under Britannia’s shield, is represented fiercely grasping the tablets with beaks of ships, on which are inscribed his memorable Battles, and the sons and daughters of the union are preparing the mournful sable to his memory. At the distance on the left, is represented the ‘wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.’ The winged Boys round his body are emblematic that the influence of Nelson’s genius still exists; other figurative and subordinate parts are introduced to give harmony and effect to the whole composition.26 Such a presentation involves much myth-making: the figure of Britannia, the association with Neptune, the figure of Victory itself. Nelson has become more than human, a figure in a scene with Gods and virtues, yet also a historical figure, with a record of battle honours.

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The volumes that follow are carefully paced and nicely judged. The first ends with the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, and then with the neat contrast of a family intimacy – his father’s letter to him on his receiving the Freedom of the City of Bath: The height of glory to which your professional judgment, united with a proper degree of bravery guarded by Providence, has raised you, few Sons, my dear child, attain to, and fewer Fathers live to see . . . The name and services of Nelson have sounded throughout the city of Bath, from the common ballad singer to the public theatre. Joy sparkles in every eye, and desponding Britain draws back her sable veil and smiles.27 Nelson becomes at once the hero and the dutiful son. The separation from Lady Nelson and the liaison with Lady Hamilton were unfortunate, but were not to be allowed to disturb the myth of the popular hero, especially since the second volume concentrated on Nelson in the great years of his fame and success. It began with a portrait in the grand manner: Such was the Character and such had been the professional Services of Horatio Nelson, when he succeeded in his 39th year to the rank of Rear Admiral . . . As a Commander, he not only possessed the most unshaken valour and inexhaustible spirit of enterprise, but he also enjoyed the happy and rare talent of inspiring his followers with an unbounded confidence of success in whatever he undertook . . . Patient of toil and hardship, but not of inaction, covetous of honour, but not of gold, he anxiously sought for situations of peril and exertion, where he might surpass the rest of his profession in supporting the dignity of his King, and the independence of his Country.28 This paragraph appeared below an engraving of Nelson’s ships, Agamemnon, Captain, Vanguard, Elephant and Victory, which provided an emblematic summary of his illustrious career. But the problems of his private life had still to be faced. Clarke and M’Arthur reminded their readers that he had taken leave of his wife in a generous way,29 and concluded, with an echo of Spenser and his heroes, that in the relationship with Lady Hamilton ‘his mind was affected by an extraordinary power, which almost merited the term Enchantment.’ 30 Any further attempt to enquire into the great admiral’s private affairs was firmly rebuffed: ‘The remaining portion of his biography is, therefore, exclusively devoted to his more splendid public character; to those astonishing and most important services, which he rendered to his Country when she most

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required them.’31 The biography then proceeded to a detailed account of Nelson’s two great later battles, Copenhagen and Trafalgar, with a detailed account of his death and his funeral, followed by an assessment of his character. They addressed one of the charges that was sometimes levelled at Nelson, that he was vain (the number of portraits painted during his stay in London from 1800 to 1801 was sometimes used as evidence of this): The consciousness of his great Abilities, and the zeal which incited them, frequently gave him an appearance of what has been vaguely termed vanity; which seems too common and degrading an appellation for that Passion, which has fed the flame of genius in the illustrious men of all ages. Nelson often felt and acknowledged a supernatural influence which raised him above the common level of mankind, and made him feel from his youth upwards, that he was born to perform great and unrivalled exploits: If God gives me life, he would often exclaim, I will be renowned.32 With this suggestion of genius there went, according to the biography, an attention to detail and a consideration for others. One of his captains, Blackwood, was quoted as saying that Nelson was not only ‘the greatest and best Admiral this Country could ever boast’, but that His discernment also made him assign to every Officer that service for which his abilities were best calculated; and though he would have Duty done, yet he never drew the cord too tight.33 The word ‘duty’ was chosen deliberately: it was a reminder of the famous signal at Trafalgar, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, and of Nelson’s final words, ‘I have done my Duty, I praise God for it.’ The importance of ‘doing one’s duty’ in warfare can scarcely be exaggerated, and the word ‘duty’ certainly became of great importance during this war; but here it was joined with something else, and that was widely recognised as genius, or as something (to use Clarke and M’Arthur’s term) under ‘supernatural influence’. From supernatural influence it was but a short step, in the final paragraph of the book, to Christianity: The whole Character of this great and lamented Admiral was consummated by this uniform sense of the blessed tenets of Christianity. This raised his mind above those mean and ignoble passions which depress the Abilities of so great a portion of mankind, and rendered

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him superior to the rest of his contemporaries, because he acted on a superior principle . . . Let us then consecrate his Memory by emulating the perfection of his Character, and the disinterested zeal of his Conduct . . .34 Nelson had now become not only one of the immortals but a pattern for holy living (and holy dying). This was made clearer by Southey’s much smaller Life of Nelson, published in 1813, which saw him as a model for young people. Southey had by this time lost his youthful radicalism, and was fully prepared to subscribe to a patriotic ideal: his Life had no pretensions to originality, and was heavily dependent on previous biographies, but he was right in realising that the two massive volumes of Clarke and M’Arthur were not suitable for children, and especially for those going to sea: ‘one is yet wanting, clear and concise enough to become a manual for the young sailor, which he may carry about with him, till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart’ (from the Preface). Southey had an eye for the telling anecdote. He noted that although the young Nelson was ‘never of a strong body’, he had as a child ‘already given proofs of that resolute heart and nobleness of mind’ which later distinguished him (I.5). But bravery was nothing without honour, and Southey chose an anecdote in which Horatio and his brother were put ‘on their honour’ to return to school through a snowstorm. As a young sailor, he was conscious that he possessed little ‘interest’, that is someone to speak for him in high places. Southey quotes him as follows: I felt impressed with a feeling that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount, and the little interest I possessed . . . I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. ‘Well, then,’ I exclaimed, ‘I will be a hero!’ and, confiding in providence, I will brave every danger. (I.24) Southey also lays great emphasis upon Nelson’s humanity, his care for his sailors and his nobility of conduct. This was combined, however, with a certain implacability of mind, a ferocity which is missing from many of the other great figures of the war. It is easy to imagine Wellington, for example, subscribing to the first two parts of the following instruction but

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not to the third. During his first command, the Agamemnon, to which he was appointed in 1793, Nelson told one of his midshipmen: First, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king: and, thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.’ (I.88–9) Such hatred of an enemy was unusual: it is conspicuously absent from many accounts of the war, such as Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula. It may have been over-simplified for the midshipman’s sake, but it indicates an element in Nelson which complicates the picture of his heroism. By advocating hatred, he gives credence to the belief that war is fire, famine and slaughter rather than a political necessity or an exciting adventure. His attitude to the French and his genius in pursuing it to its fulfilment are reminders of the necessary hardness of war. It was during his command of the Agamemnon that Nelson put in to Naples in 1793, where Nelson first met Sir William and Lady Hamilton, leading in due course to what Southey primly called ‘the only blot upon Nelson’s public character’ (I.90). Like Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey avoided the private life, preferring to concentrate on the final battles, and on Nelson’s fulfilment of his duty and on his popularity. His last brief visit to Britain had been concluded, as he left Portsmouth, by an unprecedented display of public affection. As Southey put it: England has had many heroes; but never one who so entirely possessed the love of his fellow-countrymen as Nelson. All men knew that his heart was as humane as it was fearless; that there was not in his nature the slightest alloy of selfishness or cupidity; but that, with perfect and entire devotion, he served his country with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength; and, therefore, they loved him as truly and as fervently as they loved England. (II.236) The religious language which Southey begins to use here is evidence of something close to canonisation (he points out that pieces of Nelson’s coffin were referred to as ‘relics of Saint Nelson’, II.277). Even Clarke and M’Arthur had allowed themselves to use words such as ‘sacred’. After Nelson’s body had been examined by the ship’s surgeon on its return to England on 11 December, it was prepared for burial: ‘His sacred remains were then wrapped in cotton vestments.’35 At the end of his funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral the ‘last holy dirge to the departed spirit of Nelson

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was heard throughout the dome. His Body is buried in peace, but his Name liveth evermore.’36 Throughout his life, Nelson was the recipient of extraordinary tributes, perhaps because his victories came at moments when they were particularly needed. After the Battle of the Nile, as Southey recorded, ‘Odes, sonnets, and congratulatory poems, of every description, were poured in upon Nelson, on his arrival at Naples’ (II.22). In Britain he was the subject of an additional verse to ‘God Save the King’: Join we great Nelson’s name First on the rolls of fame Him let us sing. Spread we his fame around, Honour of British ground, Who made Nile’s shores resound, God save the King!37 Copenhagen (2 April 1801) made him even more celebrated: partly because he ‘did not see the signal’, and partly because of his humane treatment of the Danes after the battle, described in Campbell’s ‘Battle of the Baltic’. Nelson’s hatred of the French did not extend to the Danes. Denmark, together with Russia and Sweden, had joined the coalition against Britain, but Nelson had the diplomatic sense to understand that the country was in a difficult position, flanked by its two powerful neighbours. As Southey put it, ‘there was nothing in this action of that indignation against the enemy, and that impression of retributive justice, which at the Nile had given a sterner temper to his mind, and a sense of austere delight, in beholding the vengeance of which he was the appointed minister’ (II.141). The responses to his previous battles were nothing compared to the reactions after Trafalgar. Nelson’s death, at the moment of his greatest victory, was part of a spectacular combination of events that led to multiple accounts of the battle, of Nelson’s death, of his funeral: poems, plays and songs. At Drury-Lane Theatre, on the evening of the day in which the news reached London, Mr Wroughton spoke ‘an Impromptu by R. Cumberland . . . with the most enthusiastic applause.’ At Covent Garden Theatre, an extra verse was sung to ‘Rule Britannia’, again ‘with great applause’. No fewer than nineteen poems on the subject of his death appeared in the November number of the Gentleman’s Magazine. His death was later painted by Daniel Maclise, with Nelson as a Christ figure, surrounded by his surgeons and his captains as disciples and mourning

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friends. The connection between Nelson and some Christ figure persists: in ‘To Patriotism’, published in 1808, the youthful Felicia Hemans (born 1793) again used the phrase ‘Nelson’s sacred name’: Oh! by the spirits of the brave, The heroes of Trafalgar’s wave; And by our Nelson’s sacred name, And by our Abercromby’s fame, Do thou Britannia’s sons inspire With all thy energy and fire: Teach them to conquer or to die With firm unshaken loyalty. Percival Stockdale (1736–1811), in ‘A Tribute to the Memory of Lord Nelson’, published in 1806, saw him carried up into the skies by angels: Was it, when vigilant Heav’n saw envy rise, That angels snatch’d their charge from mortal eyes? Cease, Muse, thy search, thankful for blessings giv’n Nor wish to see th’unerring ways of Heaven; Weep not, but rather from our Nelson’s mind, Do thou thy lesson learn, and be resign’d: . . . Similarly, the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1806 contained poems with lines such as ‘When, Victor in Trafalgar’s dreadful fight,/ Glory convey’d him to the Realms of Light!’ (‘Nelson’s Tomb. A Poem’) and Bright Piety illum’d his dying bed And wing’d his spirit to its kindred Heaven. Nelson was taken from his countrymen at the moment of victory by some divine ordinance, and by a process reserved for a few, such as Elijah. Southey’s life suggests this in its astonishing peroration: The most triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid that of the hero in the hour of victory: and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson’s translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory (II.280).

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Southey was right: one has to reach back to the great myths of the Old Testament to find a comparable scenario; and his Life of Nelson, written for young people many years after the event, nevertheless indicates something very important in the Romantic period conception of heroism, and in the making of this particular myth. The myth had its origins in fact: Nelson was brave, chivalrous, energetic, religious, patriotic, loved by his sailors and his sea captains, and idolised by the British public. Coleridge found himself in Naples when the news of Trafalgar came (as he remembered five years later): ‘never can I forget the sorrow and consternation that lay on every Countenance. . . . Numbers stopped and shook hands with me, because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and conjectured, that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held my hand, burst, themselves, into tears.’38 Although Nelson ‘was an Admiral, every inch of him’,39 Coleridge emphasised the human side of Nelson in his tribute in The Friend: ‘to his officers, his men, to the particular Ships themselves, his affections were as strong and ardent as those of a lover.’40 Thus it was that ‘when he died it seemed as if no Man was a Stranger to another: for all were made Acquaintances by the rights of a common anguish.’41 Nelson had the charisma to unite people: it was another of his remarkable powers. Coleridge goes on to quote from William Sotheby’s poem Saul, describing his funeral: Bright glow’d the sun, and not a cloud distain’d Heav’n’s arch of gold, but all was gloom beneath. A holy and unutterable pang Thrill’d on the soul. Awe and mute anguish fell On all. – Yet high the public bosom throbb’d With triumph. Sotheby catches the contrary moods here, awe mixing with anguish and again with triumph; but the soul feels this ‘holy and unutterable pang’, as if in the presence of something more than human. The over-long funeral was redeemed principally by the men of the Victory, who tore the ensign apart which was supposed to lie on the coffin, each taking a piece for himself, like devotees of a saint keeping a relic. Later the Victory itself was preserved from the breaker’s yard (unlike ‘the fighting Téméraire’ which was the subject of one of Turner’s greatest pictures) because it was ‘this sacred ship’.42 Words such as ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ and ‘immortal’ became closely associated with Nelson. Of the many tributes that were paid to him, Wordsworth’s ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ was one of the most distinguished, written

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probably in December 1805 or January 1806. When it was published in 1807, Wordsworth added an enthusiastic note: ‘The above verses were written soon after tidings had been received of the Death of Lord Nelson, which event directed the Author’s thoughts to the subject. His respect for the memory of his great fellow-countryman induces him to mention this; though he is well aware that the Verses must suffer from any connection in the Reader’s mind with a Name so illustrious.’ The poem generalises, and Nelson is never mentioned by name; but it idealises in ways which indicate that Wordsworth was enthused by accounts of his character. The happy warrior is a ‘generous Spirit’, whose adult life bears out the hopes of his boyhood, one whose ‘high endeavours are an inward light’. He ‘makes his moral being his prime care’, and is ‘skilful in self-knowledge’; his law is reason, but that turns out to be having principles: Whence, in a state when men are tempted still To evil for a guard against worse ill, And what in quality of act is best Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, He labours good on good to fix, and owes To virtue every triumph that he knows: . . . (29–34) He rises to command ‘by open means’, and remains there ‘on honourable terms’, and he does not look for wealth, or honours, or worldly state; but he sheds something more than goodness around him: Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace; (45–7) He is not a man who is mindlessly belligerent: although he naturally has ‘a faculty for storm and turbulence’, his soul is set upon ‘homefelt pleasures’ and ‘gentle scenes’. Above all, he looks forward in a state of continual self-improvement, perservering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpast: Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth For ever, and to noble deeds give birth,

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Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame, And leave a dead unprofitable name – Finds comfort in himself and in his cause; . . . (75–81) and he dies, drawing his last breath, not in the applause of men, but ‘in confidence of Heaven’s applause’. The portrayal of the hero may be based on Nelson, but what Wordsworth has done is to ignore Nelson’s human failings, such as his hatred, and invest him with an idealism which is more appropriate to a moral or religious figure: the discipline over himself, the ethical integrity and the ‘peculiar grace’, all suggest someone whose heroism would fit him for a Pantheon. The circumstances in which he finds himself are those of violence and battle, and the poem continually admits this, while putting forward a different set of values entirely. So the happy warrior is one who doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turns his necessity to glorious gain. (12–14) The business of war is not overlooked here: but in the character of the hero its horrors are an opportunity for conduct that is seen as not just noble, but even more remarkable than that. Wordsworth’s later note on the poem, dedicated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, switched the attention from Nelson to Wordsworth’s brother John, who had died in the shipwreck of the Earl of Abergavenny in February 1805. Here the heroism has given way to a serious reservation, not unconnected with Southey’s knowledge of Nelson’s hatred. Wordsworth had heard of the execution of the Neapolitan Francesco Carocciolo, one of the most difficult episodes of Nelson’s career; and for Wordsworth this destroyed the idealism of the happy warrior. Nelson was, it seemed, no different from others in his military behaviour, and Wordsworth’s disillusion was as great as his idealism had been: Lord Nelson carried most of the virtues that the trials he was exposed to in his department of the service necessarily call forth and sustain, if they do not produce the contrary vices. But his public life was stained with one great crime, so that, though many passages of these lines were suggested by what was generally known as excellent in his conduct, I have not been able to connect his name with the poem as

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I could wish, or even to think of him with satisfaction in reference to the idea of what a warrior ought to be. This not only contradicts the 1807 note, but injects a certain note of self-righteousness: but, as Richard Cronin has pointed out, Wordsworth’s strongly held view of war at this time was that it had to be based upon private and civic virtues. 43 Nelson and his captains and fellow admirals (Hardy, Troubridge, Collingwood, Riou) were celebrated in verse, prose and song: Campbell’s ‘Ye Mariners of England’, begun in 1799 and published in the Morning Chronicle in 1801, was a timely tribute to this great age of naval power. Individual captains were themselves heroes: Sir Thomas Troubridge, for example, was celebrated for his part in the battle of Cape St Vincent, and for his frustration at the Battle of the Nile, when his ship the Culloden, went aground in trying to negotiate the narrow passage between the shore and the enemy fleet. Seeing her plight, other ships managed to avoid the shoal; and Nelson (in a typically considerate and humane despatch) recognised Troubridge’s bravery and seamanship in spite of his inability to take part in the battle. The story was well known: Leigh Hunt versified the episode in a poem of 1803, ‘Christ’s Hospital’, part of which describes the battle, when Nelson, fearful name, Bore on the wings of victory and death Old Albion’s purple standard; saw thou not, Where eager Troubridge curs’d relentless fate That from the glorious path of sought renown Push’d him aside! The Battle of the Nile came at a time when a victory was badly needed, and the response to it was astonishing. Nelson’s return across Europe from Naples with the Hamiltons was marked by extraordinary tributes to him at foreign courts and assemblies. Haydn’s Missa in angustiis of 1798 was renamed the ‘Nelson Mass’; and at Eisenstadt, where the Austrian court was in residence, Haydn set to music a poem entitled ‘The Battle of the Nile’. It was written by Cornelia Knight, a friend of Lady Hamilton and one of the Nelson entourage. Haydn set ten of the seventeen stanzas for voice and piano, and the first performance was given by Lady Hamilton, accompanied by Haydn.44 If there was something slightly ridiculous in this, the potential for humour in the relationship was seized upon by James Gillray, whose 1801 cartoon, ‘Dido, in Despair!’ showed

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an enormously fat Lady Hamilton in an attitude (she made a speciality of dramatic performances of ‘Attitudes’). Her husband is asleep in bed, surrounded by a few fragments of his collection of antiquities, while Emma gazes through the window at the departing fleet. The caption runs: Ah where, & ah where, is my gallant Sailor gone? – He’s gone to Fight the Frenchmen, for George upon the Throne. He’s gone to fight ye Frenchmen, t’loose t’other Arm & Eye, And left me with the old Antique, to lay me down & Cry. While the cartoon is more about the Hamiltons than about Nelson (Gillray portrayed Hamilton mercilessly in other places), it is a reminder that Nelson’s heroism was accompanied by a very public affair which made him vulnerable to laughter and ridicule. The fact that he became a national hero in spite of this is a testimony to something more than duty and bravery. He had a charisma which caused his shortcomings to be forgotten, and his life and death were seen as a pattern of goodness and martyrdom that were very powerful, and which persisted as an ideal through the remainder of the war.

6 Poetry and the Army: The War, 1807–08

6.1

After Trafalgar: the case of Scott

Nelson was dead; the war continued. Before and after his coronation as Emperor in December 1804, Napoleon had concentrated his army at Boulogne. Thwarted in his invasion plans by the British navy’s command of the Channel, he changed plans, and moved in August 1805 against Austria and Russia. The battle of Ulm (October 1805), which caused the surrender of the main Austrian army under Mack, was followed by the brilliant victory over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in December 1805. In October 1806 Prussia was defeated at Jena, and the Russians again at Friedland (after the indecisive battle of Eylau in February 1807). The treaty of Tilsit which followed established Napoleon at the height of his power in Europe: the only country which escaped his rigorous control was Portugal. The threat of invasion of Britain in 1804 and 1805 (which caused Martello towers to be built round the coast, from Folkestone to the Orkney Islands) was the cause of a good deal of fear and rumour, often ill-informed. K. Watson quotes a prosperous tenant farmer of Hertfordshire, John Carrington: This month we are Threatened to be Invaded by one Boneparte, by the French, and England is to be Divided amongst the French And Every man to be killed, and the Women to be saved, so we are Raiseing of Men from 17 to 55 one class, and 15 to 60 the other class, so Nothing but Soldiering three times a week. 1 108

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This was the time that Thomas Hardy’s grandmother, who was born in 1772, remembered. Her grandson recalled her speaking of Bonaparte’s ‘ambition and arrogance’: Of how his threats woke warlike preparations Along the southern strand, And how each night brought tremors and trepidations Lest morning should see him land. (‘One We Knew’) The crisis, real or imagined, emphasised the importance of the local defence forces. Five hundred miles north of Hardy’s grandmother’s county were the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoons, of which Scott was quartermaster. He was in no doubt of the seriousness of the situation. He remembered, almost thirty years later, that ‘The threats of invasion were at this time instant and menacing’: The call by Britain on her children was universal, and was answered by some, who, like myself, consulted rather their desire than their ability to bear arms. Scott volunteered, not because he was a particularly good soldier, but because he enjoyed it. It occupied, he said, ‘many of the happiest hours of my life’. He thought that he had a part to play in ensuring that the Corps did the right thing at the right time: My services . . . were found useful in assisting to maintain the discipline of the corps, being the point on which their constitution rendered them most amenable to military criticism. In other respects, the squadron was a fine one, consisting chiefly of handsome men, well mounted and armed at their own expense. 2 The squadron sounds amateurish indeed, as though these were the young and well-to-do of Edinburgh enjoying themselves. For Scott, it was the fulfilment of a long-held wish to be a soldier: he wrote the squadron’s ‘War-song’, which began (predictably) ‘To horse! to horse!’ In addition to this public verse, there are signs of his deeply private emotions, notably in ‘The Bard’s Incantation’, sub-titled ‘Written under threat of an invasion in the Autumn of 1804’: There is a voice among the trees, That mingles with the groaning oak –

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That mingles with the stormy breeze, And the lake-waves dashing against the rock; There is a voice within the wood, The voice of the bard in fitful mood; The bard calls upon ‘Minstrels and bards of other days’ to awake: these are the minstrels whose harps were strung when the Norsemen invaded, and who since then have ‘every deed in song enroll’d’. They are mute, but they are exhorted to rise: Arise, the mighty strain to tell! Far fiercer than fierce Hengist’s strain, More impious than the heathen Dane, More grasping than all-grasping Rome, Gaul’s ravening legions hither come! The war has become poetic, a rich association of landscape, history and warfare. Scott had by that time edited Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03) and was at work on The Lay of the Last Minstrel, one part of which, according to Lockhart, had been written when the Quartermaster of the Edinburgh Light Dragoons ‘during a charge on Portobello sands, received a kick of a horse, which confined him for three days to his lodgings.’3 He even described the metre of the ‘Lay’ as being in ‘a lighthorseman sort of stanza’ (while at the same time acknowledging a debt to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’). The fight between Musgrave and Cranstoun in Canto V of the poem was the precursor of other single combats in Scott’s work; and the poem’s publication in 1805 was the first of several occasions in which he was immensely successful in engaging the public interest. The depictions of Scottish scenery and the speed of the narrative must have been partly responsible, but it is also possible that war and conflict were elements in the poems which were found irresistibly attractive in the years of Napoleonic danger. Marmion was a good example: its sub-title, ‘A Tale of Flodden Field’, was shrewdly chosen to appeal to the curiosity about war, even in another period. In fact, the poem has less to say about the battle than might have been expected: Scott admitted that ‘it does not give any historical account of the unfortunate Battle of Flodden, being in truth merely a political romance terminated by that memorable event.’4 In the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey seized upon this as a weakness of the poem, singling

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out ‘the neglect of Scotish feelings and Scotish character that is manifested throughout’: Marmion is no more a tale of Flodden Field, than of Bosworth Field, or any other field in history. The story is quite independent of the national feuds of the sister kingdoms; and the battle of Flodden has no other connexion with it, than from being the conflict in which the hero loses his life.5 Jeffrey’s dislike of the poem is significant. He was, as Edgar Johnson has suggested, one of those Scottish Whigs who was more concerned with reform than with war: All Europe was prostrate beneath Napoleon’s heel. England, they cried, must not bleed herself to death in a hopeless war. Far better to make peace while she could, and leave the unconquerable victor in possession of the spoils. 6 So Jeffrey was out of sympathy with Marmion. He even said that ‘there is scarcely one trait of true Scotish nationality and patriotism introduced into the whole poem’, a judgement which later critics have in turn found absurd. Scott was interested in all the things which Jeffrey could not respond to: his summer camps on Musselburgh sands with the Light Dragoons were brief moments in which he could realise in his own person the feeling of being a cavalryman (just as Byron, in 1815, drove his horse at a gallop across the field of Waterloo, where, a few months earlier, the Royal Scots Greys had charged). Jeffrey had no time for such things. Scott, he thought, ‘had brought chivalry again into temporary favour’ but it was ‘a taste too evidently unnatural to be long prevalent in the modern world.’7 To Jeffrey’s unromantic and rational eye, ‘to write a modern romance of chivalry, seems to be much such a fantasy as to build a modern abbey, or an English pagoda.’8 Scott was not writing ‘a modern romance of chivalry’ in Marmion, so much as drawing attention to chivalric values by presenting a tale of the early sixteenth century. In so doing, he presented the reader with a great deal of the trappings of medieval warfare, pikes, cannons, heralds, trumpets, scutcheons, and so forth; but those wars brought into the open questions of behaviour and dependability in a crisis (much as Conrad’s novels test people, show their behaviour in situations which most readers would never have to face: to attack Scott for writing about chivalry is equivalent to criticising Conrad for writing about the sea). Thus Marmion

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is concerned with courtesy (in Canto I), cruelty and betrayal (Canto II), guilt (Canto III), preparations for war (Canto IV), forgery and deceit (Canto V), and bravery in battle (Canto VI). Its philosophy of honour and duty may be seen in the exchange between Clare and de Wilton before Flodden. She pleads for a humble obscurity, suggesting that she and he might live together as shepherd and shepherdess. But she sees his face, and answers her own proposal: That reddening brow! – too well I know, Not even Clare can peace bestow, While falsehood stains thy name: Go then to fight! Clare bids thee go! Clare can a warrior’s feelings know, And weep a warrior’s shame, . . . To those who cannot respond to such things (foreseeing the response of the Jeffreys of this world), Scott’s answer is in the final section (XXXVIII) of the last Canto: I do not rhyme to that dull elf, Who cannot image to himself, That all through Flodden’s dismal night, Wilton was foremost in the fight; When the English army was in trouble, ‘He was the living soul of all’: That, after fight, his faith made plain, He won his rank and lands again; . . . The unjust accusation of treason, which Marmion and Constance have wickedly substantiated by means of a forged letter, disappears in the light of Wilton’s conduct in the battle. His faith, his loyalty, is ‘made plain’: no traitor could have behaved as he has done in the middle of a battle. Warfare becomes a test of veracity; it destroys falsehood. Even though Marmion was so clearly about heroism and war, written under the shadow of Napoleonic domination of Europe, its characters were unmistakably fictions, the creations of Scott’s imagination, passing to and fro through the Border landscape in their chivalric splendour. Scott boldly accentuated this contrast between 1807–08 and 1513 by prefacing each Canto with an introduction in an entirely different mode. Critics did not approve.9 Southey thought ‘You are alive to know what

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follows, and lo – down comes the curtain, and the fiddlers begin with their abominations.’10 These ‘abominations’ were verse letters or conversation pieces addressed to Scott’s friends, full of the weather, and the landscape, and reminiscences of old times, wonderfully intimate and human in contrast to the grand actions of the Cantos themselves. But they did more than strike the note of humanity. They indicated Scott’s awareness of the political situation in 1807–08, his views about Britain and its situation, and his assessment of the statesmen of his time. Marmion and de Wilton, James IV and Surrey, Clare and the Abbess, were juxtaposed to the great men of Scott’s time – how they acted, how they made decisions, whether they behaved with integrity or not. The process is reciprocal: the reader carries into the Cantos not only Scott’s descriptions of the same landscape and the same seasons or weather, but also the awareness of the contemporary world and its dilemmas. Medieval history throws light on Scott’s own day. In the introduction to Canto I, therefore, set in November 1807, Scott pays tribute to Nelson and Pitt, followed by Fox, who joined the government after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens. He records Napoleon’s triumphs at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland: When Europe crouch’d to France’s yoke, And Austria bent, and Prussia broke, It is in these times that the poet, inspired by his predecessors such as Spenser, Milton and Dryden (Scott had just finished his edition of Dryden) has to write. Scott’s metaphor for writing is that of the jousting at a tournament. The poet might ‘Essay to break a feeble lance/ In the fair fields of old romance.’ Even the writing of poetry is now a matter of combat in the lists, and Scott’s bold praise of Nelson and Pitt is itself an act of defiance, a throwing down of a glove against Napoleon and against those who would abandon the fight against him. The introduction to Canto III celebrates the Duke of Brunswick, killed at Auerstadt, ‘When valour bleeds for liberty’. As a further counterpoint, the figures of Wallace and Bruce appear, fighters for liberty (as Wordsworth had used Wallace in The Prelude Book I). Canto V describes Edinburgh, once a stronghold but now disarray’d Of battled wall, and rampart’s aid, As stately see’st, but lovelier far Than in that panoply of war.

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Scott was admiring the New Town, that symbol of progress, rational development and convenient living. But although Edinburgh now appears to be a peaceful city, it can still send out volunteers to man the defences against invasion. Scott is here paying tribute to his own squadron of Light Dragoons: Ne’er readier at alarm bell’s call Thy burghers rose to man thy wall, Than now, in danger, shall be thine, Thy dauntless voluntary line; For fosse and turret proud to stand, Their breasts the bulwarks of the land. The idealism of the volunteer soldier is the prelude to the Canto which describes the Scottish army of James IV camped outside Edinburgh; while the final introduction, to Canto VI, appears at first sight irrelevant but in fact serves as an underpinning of them all. It is a Christmas introduction, signifying the passing of time since Scott had begun the poem over a year earlier. It dwells on ancient customs of hospitality and ceremony, when ‘England was merry England, when/ Old Christmas brought his sports again.’ The excursion into England allows Scott to emphasise the way in which Scotland has preserved these traditions more carefully: ‘Still linger in our northern clime,/ Some remnants of the good old time.’ This is what we are fighting for: this is the precious inheritance that Pitt and Nelson fought and died for, the freedom that Wallace stood for. This is what has been disappearing all over Europe, as one by one the nations fall before Napoleon’s armies. It is this which gives point to the gallops on Musselburgh beach, the training of the volunteers. It was this which led an officer to read the battle scene from The Lady of the Lake to his troops in the lines of Torres Vedras.11 Scott’s Tory politics help to explain the great enthusiasm which was felt at the Spanish rebellion of 1808. The precocious Felicia Hemans, aged fourteen, wrote a long poem in couplets, ‘England and Spain; or Valour and Patriotism’, with a section saluting the Iberian bands! whose noble ardour glows To pour confusion on oppressive foes; Intrepid spirits, hail! ’tis yours to feel The hero’s fire, the freeman’s godlike zeal! At last there was a spontaneous popular movement against Napoleon’s domination of Europe, a development which thrilled writers such as

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Wordsworth, whose delight at the Spanish revolt is seen everywhere in the tract on the Convention of Cintra. In Edinburgh, Jeffrey was more sceptical. His article in the October 1808 number of the Edinburgh Review, ‘Don Cevallos on the Usurpation in Spain’, poured scorn on the rebels. His doubt was not without some justification, but for Scott and his friends it was a denial of all that they stood for (and were prepared to fight for). The article led to the foundation of the Quarterly Review, as a counter to the Edinburgh. Its founders hoped for a war policy which would see the beginning of the end of Napoleon, which (with hindsight) the rebellion of 1808 probably was; but at the time the Convention of Cintra and the retreat from Corunna must have made that downfall seem as far off as ever.

6.2

The army after 1800

Scott was the most popular poet of his day until the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. His response to the war was sophisticated, whole-hearted and enthusiastic. But the Napoleonic Wars also produced popular writing to an unprecedented degree, with broadsheet ballads, exhortatory poems, strategic analyses such as Captain Pasley’s, and memoirs by officers and ordinary soldiers. The war was subjected to scrutiny at every level, and from every point of view. We know more about what it felt like to be a soldier in these campaigns than we know about any previous war. Following the disaster of the campaign in the Netherlands from 1793 to 1795, the army had been steadily improved under the direction of the Duke of York. The 95th Regiment was formed as the Rifle Brigade, given dark green jackets, equipped with new Baker rifles and taught to march quickly; while the Royal Military Academy was founded in 1802 for the proper training of officers. And although the army and navy had been run down by the Addington government during the Peace of Amiens, they continued to improve thereafter, and became more effective and a source of national pride, first after Trafalgar, and later during the Peninsular War. The army under Moore and Wellington became an unusual fighting force, capable of marching great distances, of surviving extremes of heat and cold, and of remaining disciplined, except after sieges or during a desperate retreat such as the march to Corunna. It was supported, as armies often were, by a remarkable sub-army of camp followers, many of them women. One of these was celebrated in a Broadside Ballad (undated, British Library), ‘Young William of the Royal Waggon Train’, in which William is clearly one of those involved in the

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supply of provisions or ammunition. He is ‘A gay young soldier/ A serjeant in the waggon train’ (the formation of a corps of waggoners, the fore-runner of the Royal Army Service Corps and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was one of the achievements of the war). His sweetheart, Mary, pleads to go with him. He replies with caution, but she insists: If sick, or in sorrow, I will follow, To soothe your care and drown your pain, And in the battle hear the rattle Of your royal waggon train. So he agrees to marry her, and she goes with him: I’ll guard my ranger through each danger, And from the foe in France and Spain, So Heaven protect young faithful Mary And William of the Waggon Train. The middle-class equivalent of this devotion is Mrs Croft, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, who sails with her husband the Admiral and feels less anxiety when she is with him at sea than when she is left behind. Women at sea were usually the wives of officers; army women were more likely to be the wives of non-commissioned officers or privates, skilled at scavenging and experts at survival in all conditions. They were often close to battle, and observers of it. 12 The literature of battle, such as the poems of Thomas Campbell or the later accounts of individual actions such as Tolstoy’s of Austerlitz or Thackeray’s of Waterloo, has obscured the fact that military tactics evolved remarkably during the Napoleonic Wars. The army into which Coleridge enlisted in 1793 was very different from that which fought in the Peninsular campaign. Throughout the twenty years that followed, different combinations of artillery, infantry and cavalry were deployed in rapidly changing ways. The foot soldiers, equipped with muskets, fired in carefully ordered ways: the Prussians developed ‘cadence’ firing, in which all infantrymen did the same thing at the same time (as in modern arms drill), while the French had three ranks, with only the first two firing (the third rank’s task was to reload the muskets). The fire from these muskets was not very accurate, so that it was advisable to wait until the enemy were close before firing. Even then, the rate of hits was not high.13 Soldiers were taught to fire ‘volley fire’, introduced by the Prussians in the eighteenth century, as rapidly as possible. Sometimes the rifles became so hot that

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they had to be held with a sling or a piece of cloth.14 This made them more difficult to aim. The British infantry became famous for their steadiness under fire, and for their ability to wait until they could fire at close range, particularly in the Peninsular war. One of the ordinary soldiers who were memorialists of the war, Private Wheeler of the 51st Regiment, remembered that he and his comrades faced a French attack, and allowed them to come within a very short distance of us, and then we poured a volley into their faces and before they had well got over their surprise we were upon them with our bayonets.15 The bayonet charge was horrific, if only because the bayonet was itself such a primitive weapon, used only for sticking the steel into some enemy’s body. The encounter between two armies at close quarters must have been a severe test of nerve and courage. The French tended to rush forward, yelling with enthusiasm: the British were taught to be silent and steady. An anonymous Scottish soldier of the 71st Regiment described the moment of crisis in vivid terms: In our first charge I felt my mind waiver; a breathless sensation came over me. The silence was appalling. I looked alongst the line. It was enough to assure me. The steady, determined scowl of my companions assured my heart and gave me determination. How unlike the noisy advance of the French!16 The silence was occasionally broken by what came to be known as the ‘British cheer’, sometimes three cheers, a moment of great psychological importance. As Brent Nosworthy has written, it helped the soldiers ‘make the transition from struggling to maintain complete control to rushing in on the enemy with unbridled passion.’ He quotes from the writings of James Anton, who served with the 42nd Royal Highlanders: No movement in the field is made with greater confidence of success than that of the charge; it affords little time for thinking, while it creates a fearless excitement, and tends to give fresh impulse to the blood of the advancing soldier, rouses his courage, strengthens every nerve, and drowns every fear of danger or of death; thus emboldened amidst shouts that anticipate victory, he rushes on and mingles with the fleeing foe.17

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The infantryman was exposed to the most ferocious dangers on the battlefield, and the memoirs of such soldiers are valuable for their record of psychological tension, fear, despair and exultation. The cavalry were similarly situated, though more rapid in tactics and manoeuvering. There were heavy, medium (dragoons) and light (hussars) cavalry regiments, and their tactics were carefully considered in relation to their weight. They were armed with swords or sabres, and used either the cut or the thrust, the former being disabling and the latter usually fatal. The third force in a battle was the artillery, which was able to inflict significant damage on an army before it came within musket or charging range. At the battle of Valmy in 1792, it was the determined fire of the French artillery which cause the Duke of Brunswick’s forces to retreat. Firing either ‘round shot’ (cannon balls) or the new spherical shell invented by Henry Shrapnel in 1784 (a thin case filled with nails, small shot, or other destructive elements), the artillery could inflict significant damage on either cavalry or infantry. Sometimes artillery was stationed in front of infantry lines, to allow it to fire without impediment to its own side; at the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, Captain Norman Ramsay was overrun by the advancing French cavalry, and had to extricate himself by a heroic retreat, cutting his way back to the British lines. Ramsay had horses to pull his guns; and during this period there was a great advance in the rapidity of movement of lighter guns, with the development of horse artillery. Napoleon, who was an artillery officer by training, never lost his sense of the importance of rapidly moving well-placed guns; he had used them to devastating effect at the battle of Toulon in 1794. One of the tragic consequences for the French of the Russian campaign of 1812 was the loss of almost all of their artillery: the captured cannons can be seen in the Kremlin to this day. The tactics of battle depended on the general to plan them and the individual soldier to carry them out; and the wars of this period were conspicuous not only for the way in which poets and writers of fiction were moved to write about them, but also because of the way in which ordinary soldiers recorded their experiences. Recollections of campaigns and battles were set down by such natural writers as Rifleman Harris, who transferred from the 66th Foot to the Rifle Brigade and wrote Recollections of a Rifleman, or John Kincaid, who was a subaltern in the same unit. Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade shows a vivid narrative skill, as in this account of an incident in the Peninsular war near Ciudad Rodrigo, when the army moved quickly and unexpectedly during the early morning. It was

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an instance of the rapidity and uncertainty of our movements which proved fatal to the liberty of several amateurs and followers of the army, who, seeing an army of sixty thousand men lying asleep around their camp-fires, at ten o’clock at night, naturally concluded that they might safely indulge in a bed in the village behind until daylight, without the risk of being caught napping; but, long ere that time they found themselves on the high-road to Ciudad Rodrigo, in the rude grasp of an enemy. Amongst others, was the chaplain of our division, whose outward man conveyed no very exalted notion of the respectability of his profession, and who was treated with greater indignity than usually fell to the lot of prisoners, for, after keeping him a couple of days, and finding that, however gifted he might have been in spiritual lore, he was as ignorant as Dominie Sampson on military matters; and, conceiving good provisions to be thrown away upon him, they stripped him nearly naked and dismissed him, like the barber in ‘Gil Blas’, with a kick in the breech, and sent him into us in a woeful state.18 The comparison between the chaplain and the unworldly Dominie Sampson, from Scott’s Guy Mannering, shows Kincaid’s literary sophistication, and also reflects a soldier’s amusement at the discomfiture of an army follower; Kincaid had earned the right to make fun of the chaplain, because Kincaid had been one of the storming party at Badajoz, when the 95th Regiment lost twenty-two officers killed or wounded. He wrote of the bond that existed between soldiers who have undergone the same battle experiences: ‘We lived united, as men always do who are daily staring death in the face on the same side, and who, caring little about it, look upon each new day added to their lives as one more to rejoice in.’19 Kincaid’s skilful narrative is a salutary corrective to the bombast of much war poetry, written at home and published in the monthly magazines. He noted the horrors and the slaughter of war, but also the chivalry which frequently marked the conflict between the British and the French, with truces to bury the dead, and armies drinking water from the same stream. The historian of the Rifle Brigade describes the interchange of courtesies: At this time [1809] the understanding between the Riflemen on outpost duty and the French advanced posts developed, whereby throughout the Peninsular War the officers frequently saluted each other and the men refrained from causing useless alarms by firing.

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When the Riflemen were ordered to attack, they held up the butts of their rifles and tapped the brass ‘greased patch’ box as a signal that they were in earnest. Without such signal the ordinary movements of both piquets were unmolested. At Bayonne in 1814 Wellington wished to get to the top of a hill occupied by the French. He ordered his Rifle escort to drive the enemy away and, when as he thought they had got too close to the French, he ordered them to fire. An old soldier called out ‘No firing!’ and holding up the butt of his rifle, tapped his signal. The French retired. 20 Kincaid noticed a civilised ending to one day’s fighting in the Pyrenees: ‘we found the tables ready spread, and a comfortable dinner waiting for us . . . This was one of the most gentleman-like day’s fighting that I ever experienced, although we had to lament the vacant seats of one or two of our messmates.’21 The description catches perfectly the extraordinary mixture of dinner and death, of what seems at first sight to be a callous acceptance of the loss of one’s fellow officers, but which was probably an acceptance of the inevitable and necessary; together with a determination to make the best of the situation. A soldier would behave well in battle, and then eat well if the opportunity arose. Soldiers of all ranks would rejoice at unexpected pleasures, especially food and wine. But the juxtaposition which Kincaid produces with such insouciance had its other side. The drunkenness after the storming of Badajoz, for example, was appalling, and so was the sacking of Villafranca during the retreat to Corunna. Any town which refused to surrender was seen as legitimate plunder, and a successful siege was frequently followed by looting, rape and killing. William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons thought that it was a reaction to the fighting: ‘The dead and dying in the breach were the most shocking thing ever seen, and perhaps a little plunder was necessary to drown the horror.’22 The realities of military life were recorded in diaries and memoirs, such as those of Tomkinson, Kincaid or Harris. They make a salutary contrast to the armchair braggadocio of magazines such as the Annual Register by recording the good and the bad. In a masterpiece such as Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, the pattern of behaviour which emerges is that of honour, courage and bravery on the one hand, and duplicity, incompetence, pride and carelessness on the other. These books describe moments which only soldiers can know: There is nothing in this life half so enviable as the feelings of a soldier after a victory. Previous to a battle there is a certain sort

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of something that pervades the mind which is not easily defined; it is neither akin to joy or fear, and, probably, anxiety may be nearer to it that any other word in the dictionary; but when the battle is over, and crowned with victory, he finds himself elevated for a while into the regions of absolute bliss! 23 But at other times they chronicle of the miseries of army life, such as the Accurate and Impartial Narrative reprinted by Coleridge in The Watchman in 1795, or a description of being on fatigues in Spain. This was from a Journal of a Soldier of the 71st Regiment during the War in Spain, which described the soldier’s duty as feeding the Commander-in-Chief’s dogs: I at this time got a post, being for fatigue, with four others. We were sent to break biscuit, and make a mess for Lord Wellington’s hounds. I was very hungry, and thought it a good job at the time, as we got our own fill while we broke the biscuit, – a thing I had not got for some days. When thus engaged, the Prodigal Son was never once out of my mind; and I sighed, as I fed the dogs, over my humble situation and my ruined hopes.24 The soldier was remembering St Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 15, where the prodigal son leaves home, spends all his money, and ends up feeding pigs: ‘And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.’ It was an apt parallel for a hungry soldier in the Peninsular campaign, although his complaining has to be balanced against those for whom the experience was more to do with heroism than hunger. That campaign in the Peninsula was watched with great eagerness in Britain, from the moment of the Spanish rebellion of 1808 onward. That rebellion gave hope where before there had been none. Felicia Hemans, aged fourteen, who had two brothers fighting in the war, and who had just written England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism, enthused: The noble Spaniards! surely, surely, they will be crowned with success: I have never given up the cause, notwithstanding the late disastrous intelligence . . . Glorious, glorious Castilians! may victory crown your noble efforts. Excuse me for dwelling so much on this subject; for Spain is the subject of my thoughts and words --“my dream by night, my vision of the day.”25

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The ‘disastrous intelligence’ was that of the threat to Sir John Moore’s army in Northern Spain, which led a month later to the retreat to Corunna. Disappointments, such as that retreat, however gallant, and disillusioning acts, such as the signing of the Convention of Cintra, were felt with anger and frustration. The intense interest taken in the war after 1808 is one of the most remarkable features of the literature of the time.

7 Cintra and Corunna

7.1

The rebellion in Spain and the Convention of Cintra

Napoleon was at the height of his power in 1807. France was the supreme power in Europe, her frontiers secure on the natural features of the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. But Napoleon’s next step was to prove the beginning of a costly war in the Iberian peninsula which was to be one of the causes of his downfall. He used the excuse of a Spanish royal family quarrel to intervene in Spain and depose the king, Ferdinand. Ferdinand had been made king on the abdication of his father, Charles IV, and both weakly resigned all rights of government to the French, encouraged by the Queen and her favourite, Manuel de Godoy. In the words of a poem printed in The Morning Chronicle in July 1808, ‘the wonder-working NAPPY/ Let loose a king-demolishing Decree’. Spaniards! ’tis ruled by me and fate, That I alone can save your state; CHARLES and your Monarch late Confess sincerely, without feigning, They’ve ta’en a great dislike to reigning.1 Napoleon then gave the crown to his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. In a notebook poem, Wordsworth blamed the Spaniards for accepting this too easily: A foreign Tyrant speaks his impious will, And Spain hath owned the monarch which he gave . . . The Spaniard hath approached on servile knee The native Ruler all too willingly. (PW.III.416) 123

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The Spanish rebellion which followed was more heartening. Like the invasion of Switzerland ten years before, it was a turning point. To British ‘patriots’, who had been at first troubled by the justness of the war and then by its lack of success, it offered a sudden hope. They could welcome the Spanish revolt, and thus find themselves on the same side as the majority of their fellow countrymen. They were no longer isolated, and could at last support government policy: hence their enthusiasm. As Margaret Russett has described it: The ‘new-born spirit of resistance’ (Prose Works I.228) that manifested itself in the Spanish Revolution combined the populist appeal of an anti-aristocratic uprising with a rebuke to Napoleon’s territorial ambitions, providing an uncontroversial opportunity to rejoin nationalist and republican rhetoric.2 For Wordsworth, the rebellion fitted the conception which he had developed in the writing of Poems in 1807, in which (as Richard Cronin has pointed out), the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty celebrate the idea that war goes hand in hand with civic virtue and personal freedom. War was right when allied to individual nobility and goodness: these poems ‘always accede to the premiss that to celebrate war in and for itself is to render oneself monstrous, like Napoleon.’3 The rebellion marked a significant alteration in the power balance of Europe; not many years before (at Trafalgar, for example) Spain and France had been in alliance. The movement in Spain encouraged the British government to send an army early in 1808 to Portugal under Sir Hew Dalrymple and Sir Arthur Wellesley. With characteristic enthusiasm, Walter Scott saw the whole proceeding in terms of romance, thinking of Scotland’s heroic past. Fresh from the writing of Marmion, he wrote to his brother Thomas in June 1808: Excellent news to-day from Spain – yet I wish the patriots had a leader of genius and influence . . . A Wallace, Dundee, or Montrose, would be the man for Spain at this moment. It is, however, a consolation, that though the grandees of the earth, when the post of honour becomes the post of danger, may be less ambitious of occupying it, there may be some hidalgo among the mountains of Asturias with all the spirit of Cid Ruy Diaz, or Don Pelayo, or Don Quixote if you will, whose gallantry was only impeachable from the objects on which he exercised it. It strikes me as very singular to have all the places mentioned in Don Quixote and Gil Blas now the scenes of real and important events.

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Gazettes dated from Oviedo, and gorges fortified in the Sierra Morena, sounds like history in the land of romance.4 The British army under Wellesley beat the French under Marshal Junot at Vimiero on 21 August, but the victory was thrown away a few days later by the signing of the Convention of Cintra (30 August), which allowed the French army to sail away from Portugal, ready to fight again. The Treaty was widely condemned: Lord Sidmouth described it as a ‘breakdown of the country’s honour.’5 Byron later attacked it (in 1812, with the advantage of a few years’ hindsight) in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘Here Folly dash’d to earth the victor’s plume’, he wrote: ‘Britannia sickens, Cintra! at thy name’ (I.xxv–xxvi). At the time, there was widespread anger at the treaty. Angry or satirical poems poured into the magazines and newspapers, such as the one addressed ‘To Sir A.W.’: JUNOT, we thought, was safe in hand: And did you fight to set him free? ’T had cost him much to go by land; You kindly sent him home by sea.6 Wordsworth wrote to Richard Sharp on hearing the news: ‘We are all here cut to the heart by the conduct of Sir Hew and his Brother Knight in Portugal. For myself, I have not suffered so much upon any public occasion these many years.’7 Two days later, he reported that ‘We are all in a rage about the Convention in Portugal’, and that if Dalrymple or Wellesley were to show his face among us, ‘the very Boys would hiss them out of the Vale.’ 8 (Wordsworth did not know that Wellesley signed because he was unwilling to be disloyal to his newly appointed Commanderin-Chief.9) Southey thought that ‘Since the execution of the Brissotins no public event ever distressed me so deeply.’10 Wordsworth and his friends tried to get up a meeting in Westmorland to condemn the treaty, but were prevented from doing so by the opposition of Lord Lonsdale.11 Wordsworth’s pamphlet, On the Convention of Cintra,12 was published in part in The Courier in December 1808 and January 1809, and later as a much enlarged work in its own right. De Quincey, who saw it through the printer in London, had to put up with a great deal of rewriting and cancellation, which were an indication of the strength of Wordsworth’s feelings on the topic.13 Many years later, he told Isabella Fenwick: It would not be easy to conceive with what a depth of feeling I entered into the struggle carried on by the Spaniards for their deliverance from

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the French. Many times have I gone from Allan Bank in Grasmere Vale, where we were then residing, to the top of the Raise-gap as it is called, so late as two o’clock in the morning, to meet the carrier bringing the newspaper from Keswick. (PW III.455) His agitation poured out in a sonnet that is all one sentence, beginning Not ‘mid the World’s vain objects that enslave The free-born Soul – that World whose vaunted skill In selfish interest perverts the will, Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave – not in such a world does the poet have his thoughts, but in dark wood and rocky cave And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill With omnipresent murmur as they rave Down their steep beds, that never shall be still: It is in this world of wild and natural power, ‘this school sublime’, that Wordsworth weighs ‘the hopes and fears of suffering Spain’. By associating the Spanish uprising with the sublime forces of nature, Wordsworth was revealing his passionate involvement with what was happening. It was a passion that drove Landor to Spain as a volunteer, 14 and which fuelled the righteous anger of the British public. Wordsworth was voicing widely held beliefs: when Scott read his essays in The Courier of 27 December 1808 and 13 January 1809, he told Southey that ‘I much agree with him’: Alas! we want everything but courage and virtue in this desperate contest. Skill, knowledge of mankind, ineffable unhesitating villainy, combination of movement and combination of means, are with our adversary.15 Napoleon appears here as a skilful but unprincipled enemy. Courage and virtue were ours, and little else, but they were enough to allow Scott to take the moral high ground. Wordsworth similarly took his stand on what he saw as natural goodness, a goodness which he associated with the natural world, but also with Britain itself. Britain at war was still the country that Wordsworth believed in and was passionately

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attached to, and from 1808 onwards, he saw the war as necessary because it was concerned with the high principles of virtue and liberty. In the composition of the pamphlet he had the help of Coleridge and the support of Southey, producing a kind of ‘Lakers’ view of the matter. As Margaret Russett has pointed out, ‘the composition of Cintra took on the spatial character of a political delegation, with Grasmere at the center of authority and De Quincey serving as the author’s agent in London.’16 As Russett suggests, the last named was the ‘foot-soldier’, whose job it was to obey the orders from an increasingly impatient and demanding Wordsworth, whose passion about the events in Spain caused him to become both fierce and anxious about his text. In pamphlet form, On the Convention of Cintra was not a great success in its own time: by the time that it was published in June 1809 much of the indignation had evapourated. But it is of great interest to the student of war in this period: as an impassioned work of prose on the subject it is Miltonic in its grandeur and intensity. As Mary Moorman put it, ‘No one but a poetic man could have written Cintra.’17 She also observed that A.V. Dicey reprinted it in 1915 ‘to strengthen national enthusiasm for the war against Germany’, which raises the intriguing possibility that some soldier on the battlefield of the Somme may have had Wordsworth’s tract in his knapsack. Dicey’s gesture was understandable: On the Convention of Cintra is not only a noble defence of national independence and liberty, but it also makes a case for a reasoned, high-principled and properly fought war. Wordsworth began by recalling the shock of hearing the news. It produced ‘a conflict of sensations’ (recalling the phrase he had used about his shock at the declaration of war with France in 1793 in The Prelude – ‘A conflict of sensations without name’). He likened the news of the signing of the treaty to ‘an earthquake which rocks the ground under our feet.’18 Dalrymple and Wellesley had changed all things into their contraries, hope into despair; triumph into defeat; confidence into treachery, which left no place to stand upon; justice into the keenest injury . . . – to those over whom they had been masters, who had crouched to them by an open act of submission, they had made themselves servants, turning the British Lion into a beast of burthen, to carry a vanquished enemy, with his load of iniquities, when and whither it had pleased him. 19 The phrase about the British Lion recalls the patriotic poems which appeared in magazines or on broadsheets during the war: it is a measure

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of the disturbance in Wordsworth’s mind that he should have begun to think in such broad terms. He saw the matter as one of national pride and duty: the Spanish people had rebelled, and the British, ‘the most favoured Nation upon earth’, had acted disgracefully, ‘as if it had been our aim to level to the ground by one blow this long-wished-for spirit.’ 20 The word ‘spirit’ is used by Wordsworth with great frequency in the pamphlet. He associates it with the pride of the Spanish people, and with the high principle of the war against what he sees as depraved and greedy opponents. Along with ‘spirit’, the word ‘principle’ becomes very significant: Wordsworth uses it when discussing what he calls ‘intellectual courage’ (which he found absent in the signatories of the Convention). Intellectual courage is ‘never found without one or other of the three accompaniments, talents, genius, or principle’: ‘talents’ are matured by experience, or by ‘the rapid insight of peculiar genius’, which will supply higher motives than mere talents can furnish for encountering difficulty and danger, and will suggest better resources for diminishing or overcoming them.21 But that quality of talent can exist in persons whose moral character is depraved, as well as in those who are noble. What is required above all is ‘Principle’: I mean that fixed and habitual principle, which implies the absence of all selfish anticipations, whether of hope or fear, and the inward disavowal of any tribunal higher and more dreaded than the mind’s own judgment upon its own act . . . he, in whom talents, genius, and principle are united, will have a firm mind, in whatever embarrassment he may be placed; will look steadily at the most undefined shapes of difficulty and danger, of possible mistake or mischance; nor will they appear to him more formidable than they really are. For HIS attention is not distracted – he has but one business, and that is with the object before him.22 Examples which Wordsworth gives include Washington, Lord Peterborough (who had fought in Spain one hundred years before) and Nelson – ‘Would that we had a man, like Peterborough or Nelson, at the head of our army in Spain at this moment!’ If Nelson had been there, Wordsworth suggests, the treaty would not have been signed: it was ‘from want of this intellectual courage’ that the generals signed. The argument that it was to prevent further bloodshed is dismissed with a lofty scorn, using the

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words ‘national independence and liberty’ that Wordsworth was later to use for a section of his poems: For national independence and liberty, and that honour by which these and other blessings are to be preserved, honour – which is no other than the most elevated and pure conception of justice which can be formed, these are more precious than life: else why have we already lost so many brave men in this struggle? – Why not submit at once, and let the Tyrant mount upon his throne of universal dominion, while the world lies prostrate at his feet in indifference and apathy, which he will proclaim to it is peace and happiness? 23 The image of the tyrant mounting up to a throne before a prostrate world is cartoon-like. This is an argument for a just war, fuelled by an anger and a morality which are essential parts of the high principle which goes with the spirit of a people and the cause of freedom. The failure of the British generals was the failure to prosecute such a war: they ‘acted as if they had no purpose but that the enemy should be removed from the country in which they were, upon any terms’. Wordsworth was now arguing for war, not peace: for a war which would assert ‘the rights of human nature’ and would illuminate Europe. By signing the peace, the British generals had betrayed the Portuguese, with what he calls ‘a contempt of justice and decency’. The French were called upon to relinquish a territory to which they never had any right, and to liberate the Spanish prisoners who had the ‘right to be free, as having been treacherously and cruelly dealt with by men who were part of a power that was labouring to subjugate their country.’24 Wordsworth argued against the Convention of Cintra, therefore, because it was against nature, and because it was unprincipled. He then added a further argument – that the British character had hitherto been seen as honourable and noble, and that this gesture had shocked the world. The passage concerning national honour was a sustained one, full of patriotic idealism, and ending with a lament of extended rhetoric: O sorrow! O misery for England, the land of liberty and courage and peace; the land trustworthy and long approved; the home of lofty example and benign precept; the central orb to which, as to a fountain, the nations of the earth ‘ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw light;’ – O sorrow and shame for our country; for the grass which is upon her fields, and the dust which is in her graves; – for her good men who now look upon the day; – and her long train of deliverers

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and defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton; whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach; and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to redeem! 25 The historical allusions are important for the sense of nationhood; so Wordsworth goes on to suggest that the problem with such political action as the Convention of Cintra is that it destroys any nobility of feeling. The British people will turn inwards, selfishly. ‘There is no middle course: two masters cannot be served:’ Justice must either be enthroned above might, and the moral law take place of the edicts of selfish passion; or the heart of the people, which alone can sustain the efforts of the people, will languish: their desires will not spread beyond the plough and the loom, the field and the fireside: the sword will appear to them an emblem of no promise; an instrument of no hope; an object of indifference, of disgust, or fear. 26 This is an echo of the sonnet, ‘London, 1802’, written after his return from France in the September of that year: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. The poem links altar and pen, and also sword. Its reflective sadness is found again in the pamphlet on the Cintra treaty, but now suffused with anger and something almost like despair. The sonnet suggests that Wordsworth was seeing contemporary events in the light of history, and trying to shape that history, seeing the treaty as a moment which must be repudiated and rectified. As he writes in the opening to what is really the second movement of the work – ‘How far is it in our power to make amends for the harm done?’27 The problem, he argues, is that governments become cut off from the feelings of human nature. Politicians not only become separated from the rest of mankind, but they also ‘look down contemptuously upon those who endeavour to supply (in some degree) their want.’ 28 Quoting from his own Ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, Wordsworth roundly asserts that ‘These spectators neither see nor feel.’ It therefore ‘behoves those

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who are authority – to look to the state of their own minds.’ Having done that, they should ‘pour into the Peninsula a force of two hundred thousand men or more.’ 29 He thought that ‘two signal overthrows in pitched battles would, I believe, go far to destroy’ the French army, and that the other countries who were allied with the French would then desert them. He based his argument upon the power of national feeling, and on an antipathy to tyrants which arises whenever ‘a People, which has lived long, feels that it has a Country to love; and where the heart of that People is sound.’30 The argument which follows is based upon this sense of historically based patriotism: Love and admiration must push themselves out towards some quarter: otherwise the moral man is killed . . . Perdition to the Tyrant who would wantonly cut off an independent Nation from its inheritance in past ages; turning the tombs and burial-places of the Forefathers into dreaded objects of sorrow, or of shame and reproach, for the Children!31 Resistance to such tyranny is the duty of those who love their country. Wordsworth gives the example of Saragossa, which held out heroically against the French from June to August 1808 and again during the winter of 1809. It is in such people that he places his trust: ‘Here then they, with whom I hope, take their stand. There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages.’32 The eloquence again emphasises the spirit, the moral power of the mind which goes out from itself in love and patriotic fervour. It is this which Wordsworth opposes to the power of Napoleon, who appears throughout not just as an oppressor and a tyrant, but as an incarnation of the Devil himself. When he describes Napoleon, it is in terms of the Satan of Paradise Lost: With what Satanic pride must he have contemplated the devotion of his servants and adherents to their law, the steadiness and zeal of their perverse loyalty, and the faithfulness with which they stand by him and each other!33 He is ‘this Enemy of mankind’, echoing the Hebrew meaning of Satan which Milton uses at the beginning of the poem (‘the arch-enemy,/ And thence in heaven called Satan’, I.81–2); and he is ‘the invading Usurper’, who holds out ‘lure’ to ‘the inferior orders of society’ and ‘attempts to cajole the wealthy and the privileged’. Opposed to him is the bravery which has ‘a visible affinity with deliverance, with patriotism, with hatred

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of oppression, and with human means put forth to the height for accomplishing, under divine countenance, the worthiest ends.’34 The invocation of the religious pattern of deliverance, found in the Old Testament and used as a metaphor for forgiveness of sin in the New Testament, is clearly calculated to imply that this is a war of good against evil, of the divine energy of patriotic inspiration against the wicked oppression of deceitful and tyrannic power, calculated to work against humanity by the adversary of mankind. In writing On the Convention of Cintra, Wordsworth changed from being against the war to being in favour of it. But this is not so much of a volte-face as it appears at first sight: as critics such as Margaret Russett have pointed out, he appealed to the same political instincts that had led him to praise the Revolution, now using ‘Jacobin’ rhetoric against former Jacobins.35 The Spanish nation were revolutionaries, fighters against tyranny, and into their cause went all the energy of feeling that Wordsworth had used fifteen years before to condemn the war against the youthful French republic. It was not Wordsworth who had changed, so much as the political situation, from the French invasion of Switzerland onwards. His pamphlet, therefore, is a record of the opinions of one who regarded the war from the point of view of principle, first as wrong and then as necessary.

7.2

1809: a hero and a poet

The ‘hero’ of this section is Sir John Moore, whose death and burial at Corunna became the stuff of legend and heroic history, not on the scale of Nelson’s death and burial, but with its own tragic grandeur. Moore was a fine and conscientious officer, who has always been associated with the early years of the Rifle Brigade.36 One of its subalterns, John Kincaid, thought that the regiment ‘fired the first and last shot in almost every battle siege, and skirmish in which the army was engaged during the war.’37 Moore commanded it at Shorncliffe from 1803 onwards. He was sent to Portugal in 1808 with the army under Dalrymple, Burrard and Wellesley, but he was not a signatory to the Treaty of Cintra and so escaped the widespread public anger that followed. While the other generals returned to Britain, not sure (in Wellesley’s words) whether they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or roasted alive,38 Moore remained behind in Lisbon. In September 1808, now commanding the only British army, he was ordered to advance into Spain with an army of 20,000 men, to be reinforced by a further 15,000 under Sir David Baird which was sailing to Corunna. Moore knew that the order from London underestimated the

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difficulties of weather and supplies: ‘They talked of going into Spain as of going into Hyde Park’, he wrote. 39 Encouraged by faulty intelligence, the politicians, especially Castlereagh, were also badly wrong in their estimate of Spanish strength, determination and unity. As the Annual Register put it with some understatement, when Moore arrived at Salamanca he found ‘that things were not in the flourishing state they were represented and believed to be in, in England.’40 The aim of the expedition was to reach Madrid. But Napoleon had moved quickly to suppress the revolt in Spain, and he defeated the Spanish armies in a series of engagements. Moore found himself, even after the junction with Baird, facing a vastly superior force. Instead of retiring to Lisbon, however, he courageously set out to attack Soult’s army on the Meseta, the flat plain between Burgos and Leon, only to find himself threatened by Napoleon’s own army advancing northward from Madrid. In terrible weather, he retreated north-westwards over the Galician mountains towards Corunna: ‘my sole object is to save the Army’, he wrote.41 Disorder broke out among the less well-disciplined regiments in towns such as Villafranca del Bierzo and Bembibre. Robert Blakeney, of the 28th, admitted that his division ‘imbibing a good deal of the bad example and of the wine left behind by the preceding columns, did not march out of Bembibre so strong as when they entered it.’42 Blakeney describes the town as full of drunken soldiers, lying in the streets ‘while the wine oozing from their lips and nostrils seemed the effect of gunshot wounds.’43 The remains of the army struggled back to Corunna, including the women and children who were followers of their men in campaigns. Henry Crabb Robinson, the correspondent of The Times at Corunna, was shocked at what he called ‘this laborious and dishonourable campaign, which has had all the suffering, without any of the honours of war.’44 Moore’s death during the battle of Corunna, which was fought to enable the British soldiers to embark, was a desperate hero’s end. ‘You know’, he told his friend Colonel Anderson, ‘that I have always wished to die this way. I hope the people of England will be satisfied: I hope my country will do me justice.’45 Reports of his personal bravery under difficult circumstances, and his death in battle, established him as a noble figure in a tragedy, at least after the first shock of the news of the retreat. William Napier, whose brothers George and Charles fought in the campaign, described the reaction after the exhausted and dishevelled troops had landed at the southern ports. The country recoiled from the sight of a defeated army, and the politicians were quick to blame anyone but themselves:

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The nation, at that time unused to great operations, forgot that war is not a harmless game, and judging of the loss positively, instead of comparatively, was thus disposed to believe the calumnies of interested men, who were eager to cast a shade over one of the brightest characters that ever adorned the country.46 Moore’s letters were laid before Parliament in his justification. Canning, attempting to defend Hookham Frere, the British representative with the Junta whose intelligence had encouraged the advance, attacked Moore’s conduct of the campaign. The Duke of York, who was nominally Commander-in-Chief (but whose reputation and career were badly affected in 1809 by the scandal about his relationship with Mary Anne Clarke and her sale of commissions), weighed in by describing Moore as ‘an example to the army’. Wordsworth, busy writing the pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra, in which he was arguing fiercely for the greatness of Spain, persuaded De Quincey to write a ‘Postscript’ entitled ‘On Sir John Moore’s Letters’, which continued to assert the enthusiasm and bravery of the Spanish rebels, while praising Moore’s honour: the only way to understand what had happened was to blame the government. There was debate in Parliament: the Annual Register remembered those ministers from whom the general had repeatedly met with slights and injustice, and who had discovered and loudly declared, that he had found all things in Spain the very reverse of what the ministry had represented them to be. 47 After Cintra, wrote one satirical poet: They sent gallant MOORE with an army so good, To beat BONAPARTE in Spain, But as they forgot to supply it with food, The army was marched back again.48 More lyrically and mythologically, a poem in The Athenaeum referred to Moore riding on the battlefield With gleaming sword and waving plume, Like some wild meteor of the gloom. After his death in the battle, the author (perhaps remembering that Marshal Soult had ordered a monument to be erected in Moore’s honour)

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demonstrated how a funerary monument was thought appropriate for fallen heroes: And shall he thus unhonoured lie, Nor know a grateful monarch’s care? No, raise the mausoleum high, Place his sad sacred relics there, And, on recording marble, tell How my brave warrior fought and fell. Moore’s heroic failure had an appeal that was only a little less affecting than victory and death. The scene was painted, like the death of Wolfe and the death of Nelson, this time with the body being folded into a winding sheet by the light of a lantern. Poems were written, as they had been about Nelson, the earliest in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1809. Entitled ‘Epitaph’, it flew in the face of any critical public opinion, claiming Moore as a Christian general: In length of days, and life’s enjoyments, poor, Yet rich in highest honours, here lies Moore! Bless’d in the wish his friends in arms to save! Lull’d in the lap of Victory to the grave! The Christian liv’d the life that Angels prize! Another, in March, saw his life as ‘perfect’, again suggesting the superlatives of a national monument: England’s tried soldier from his dawn of youth, His deeds were godlike, and his words were truth: His life was perfect – glorious was his fall; Gallia’s torn banners form’d his funeral pall! . . . Both of these claim Moore as an English hero, as if it was easier to evoke a local, ‘English’ patriotism when writing about the war. It was left to Thomas Campbell, who (as a fellow Glaswegian) had known Moore slightly, to remind readers that Moore was Scottish: Pledge to the much-lov’d Land that gave us birth, Invincible, romantic, Scotia’s shore! Pledge to the mem’ry of departed worth, And first, amidst the brave, remember Moore!49

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Other poems followed in the succeeding months, one in July ‘By a Noncommissioned Officer of the Fifty-first Regiment’ (the 2nd Yorkshire, or West Riding Regiment, which had served in the campaign). But the most remarkable one was by an obscure Irish clergyman, Charles Wolfe, who is thought to have read Southey’s account of the last weeks of Moore’s life in the Annual Register. The word ‘glory’, which is so important as a concluding moment in the poem, appears in the prose account: Thus Sir J. Moore, by a rare union of natural sagacity, military skill, firmness of mind, vigilance and circumspection, decision and promptitude of action, extricated the British army with great glory . . . from a situation in which the imprudence of both the British and Spanish governments, the puerile and frantic interference of some individuals, and the treachery of others had involved it. 50 The poem makes its point by emphasising the unusual nature of the burial. This was the commander of the army, but there was none of the pomp and circumstance which might have been expected. Perhaps the implied contrast is with the splendid obsequies for Nelson: Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note, As his corpse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried. The persona of the poem is a soldier himself, it seems: all the details of the burial, as they were reported, are found in his authentic-sounding account: We buried him darkly at dead of night, The sods with our bayonets turning; By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light And the lantern dimly burning. Again and again the negatives stress the unusual nature of the burial. There was no coffin, no sheet or shroud, and the prayers were ‘few and short’: the whole thing was done hastily, in the last hours before the evacuation of the troops: We thought, as we hollow’d his narrow bed And smoothed down his lonely pillow,

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That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head, And we far away on the billow! The contrast is between the homely action of smoothing down the pillow, and the actual circumstances of a grave on a cold January night, with the enemy’s guns firing, and the need to leave the job half done. Moore (as the author would have known) was buried in a grave that was only three feet deep, which is alluded to in the lines But half of our heavy task was done When the clock struck the hour for retiring: so the soldiers leave their general, in a shallow grave in a Spanish field beside the ramparts of Corunna. The last verse returns to the strangeness of it all, with no gravestone and no memorial: Slowly and sadly we laid him down, From the field of his fame fresh and gory; We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone – But we left him alone with his glory. The sudden blaze of the last line throws its light back on to everything that has gone before. The dead man is now ‘alone’, not only in the grave, with his soldiers far away, but ‘alone with his glory’, as if he, and he alone, has reached some pinnacle of existence unknown to lesser men. The word ‘glory’ has been held back to give it its maximum effect. Moore, even in his defeat, was a hero, ‘gallant’ Moore. In spite of the arrival in Britain of a battered and defeated army, the account of his resistance at Corunna was deeply satisfying to a nation which had only recently endured the shabby accommodation of the Convention of Cintra. Even so, it was probably too early to appreciate, as Napier later did, that the march north which Napoleon was forced to undertake prevented him from advancing west and taking Lisbon (Napier argued that this was one of the turning points of the war, and that Moore was responsible.). Nevertheless, his reputation remained high and honourable, while that of the government and Hookham Frere suffered. The government’s response was naturally to defend itself, with all the political arts at its disposal; but it also took the decision, rapidly, to send Sir Arthur Wellesley with an army to Portugal. The hope for a hero, after the deaths of Nelson and Moore, was to be fulfilled by him, slowly but carefully, and finally most spectacularly, during the years that followed.

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The poet is Reginald Heber, later to become Bishop of Calcutta and finally in his own way a hero, dying suddenly on the battlefield of Christian mission (for which he wrote ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’) in 1826. In 1809, his poem Europe was a clergyman’s commentary on the current situation: its full title was Europe: Lines on the Present War, with the sub-title ‘Written in MDCCCIX’, the two titles making the poem’s interests very clear. Heber had also written a sonnet to Rowland Hill, one of Wellington’s most distinguished generals: whose high daring with renew’d success Hath cheered our tardy war, what time the cloud Of expectation, dark and comfortless, Hung on the mountains; and yon factious crowd Blasphemed their country’s honour, babbling loud! The ‘factious crowd’ is presumably a reference to those who were against the war: Heber makes his dislike for them as clear as his admiration for Hill, who had been present at a number of actions: to whose young might, By Toulon’s leaguer’d wall, the fiercest bow’d; Whom Egypt honour’d, and the dubious fight Of sad Corunna’s winter, and more bright Douro, and Talavera’s gory bays; Wise, modest, brave, in danger foremost found. – Europe continues this strain of patriotic fervour, but at much greater length: it is a sustained attempt to come to terms with a protracted and difficult war, one which hung in the balance in 1809, and which Heber was well placed to observe. He began the poem by going back in time, with a reference to his travels in Europe between 1805 and 1807, before he took Holy Orders. It was the time of the Prussian intervention against Napoleon: When Frederic bent his ear to Europe’s cry, And fann’d too late the flame of liberty; The Prussian intervention had been a disaster, leading to the battle of Jena; it was the event which had given rise to Wordsworth’s despairing sonnet about the seemingly unstoppable Napoleon: Another year! – another deadly blow! Another mighty Empire overthrown!

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Heber had been in Dresden at the time, and he remembered that he had heard the ceaseless jar, The rattling waggons, and the wheels of war; The sounding lash, the march’s mingled hum, And, lost and heard by fits, the languid drum; O’er the near bridge the thundering hoofs that trode And the far-distant fife that thrill’d along the road. The poem evokes the atmosphere of war with some skill: the sounds of armies on the move and the sudden excitement of hurried riders. Heber was fascinated by the conflict around him, and clearly subscribed to the idea of a just war. Peace, he says, is very sweet, but so is war. He does not even use the phrase ‘war is necessary’: he prefers the extraordinary ‘war is sweet’: But sweet no less, when justice points the spear, Of martial wrath the glorious din to hear, To catch the war-note on the quivering gale, And bid the blood-red paths of conquest hail. This anticipates Wordsworth’s view of war as the work of God in the 1816 Thanksgiving Odes. But 1816 was a long way off: Heber was writing at a time when the idea of war as a glorious establishing of justice, freeing Europe from Napoleon over the blood-red paths of conquest, was a remote possibility: Oh! song of hope, too long delusive strain! And hear we now thy flattering voice again? But late, alas! I left thee cold and still, Stunn’d by the wrath of Heaven, on Pratzen’s hill. Pratzen’s hill is a reference to the battle of Austerlitz (December 1805), in which Napoleon defeated the Austrian and Russian armies by allowing them to attack on the flank and then destroying their weakened centre on the heights of Pratzen. It was to be vividly described by Tolstoy in War and Peace, and Hardy in The Dynasts, as a defeat for the inflexible and over-confident military planners when faced by the genius of an intuitive master of the battlefield; Heber, fired with his concept of the ideal war, preferred to see it more simply, as a place where ‘youthful faith and high-born courage rest’ and where ‘ancient

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honour’s shield’ was ‘vilely thrown away’. His memory goes back to other defeats, yet hoping ‘that fate, by justice led’ will eventually rid Europe of Napoleonic rule: That conscious right would tenfold strength afford, And Heaven assist the patriot’s holy sword, And look in mercy through th’auspicious sky, To bless the saviour host of Germany. The continual references to heaven indicate Heber’s theological problem, as a clergyman: where is God, while all this tyranny is allowed to flourish? ‘can the Eternal Mind/ Care for a sparrow, yet neglect mankind?’ In his visionary mind, he sees ‘Europe’s Angel’ on a Swiss mountain, who tells him ‘Not yet, not yet, the day of rest’. He goes on to allude to the battles of Auerstadt, Wagram and Eylau, and the death of the Duke of Brunswick (Charles William Ferdinand, mortally wounded at Auerstadt in October 1806). These are all records of a gloomy picture; so too is the state of England after the death of Pitt in 1806. Pitt, in Heber’s eyes, was the great patriot: Still in that breast thy country held her throne, Thy toil, thy fear, thy prayer, were hers alone, Thy last faint effort hers, and hers thy parting groan. In contrast to Pitt’s selfless devotion to duty was the decadent cultural scene, which Heber described with a clerical loathing. It is evident that his Christianity was of the strenuous and martial kind, as he described how: Faint, vapid fruits of slavery’s sickly clime, Each tinsel art succeeds, and harlot rhyme! . . . While youth’s enervate glance and gloating age Hang o’er the mazy waltz, or pageant stage; Each wayward wish of sickly taste to please, The nightly revel and the noon-tide ease – These, Europe, are thy toils, thy trophies these! This diatribe against decadence was Heber’s lament for a corrupt and feeble European society which had failed to respond to the challenge of post-revolutionary France. It is part of the picture that he was painting of a continent in 1809, a place of inadequate coalitions, of

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unsuccessful battles and of decadent art. This, Heber affirms, is what poetry should be grappling with, preferably from the theatre of war itself (which is why he emphasises the fact that he was in Dresden in 1806). Three years after Jena and his stay in Dresden, Heber noted that in 1809 it was Austria’s turn to try to deny Bonaparte control of central Europe, an attempt which ended with the battle of Wagram in July. The failure of Austria makes the next part of the poem all the more important: it is as if Wordsworth’s ‘Another year! – Another deadly blow!’ had occurred yet again. This is when the poem turns to the Spanish rebellion as a source of hope. This, Heber suggests, is a genuinely popular rebellion, one that enlists ‘the strenuous arm’ and ‘the patriot ardour’ of those who live and work in Spain – shepherds, ploughmen, even bullfighters. Their revolt is glorious, and needs to be supported, so that this part of the poem becomes a plea to the British government to intervene. Heber blamed the politicians for what seemed to be its failure in 1808 and 1809: Woe, trebly woe to their slow zeal who bore Delusive comfort to Iberia’s shore! Who in mid conquest, vaunting, yet dismay’d, Now gave and now withdrew their laggard aid; Who when each bosom glow’d, each heart beat high, Chill’d the pure stream of England’s energy, And lost in courtly forms and blind delay The loiter’d hours of glory’s short-lived day. This must be a reference to Vimiero, and the failure of the government to give sufficient support for that victory to be exploited. To this must be added the disgrace of the Convention of Cintra, (What time base truce the wheels of war could stay, And the weak victor flung his wreath away;) and misfortunes of the retreat to Corunna, where ‘yon dark column toils its seaward way’. Moore’s death is an example of heroism, giving courage and hope: E’en in that hour his hope to England flies, And fame and vengeance fire his closing eyes.

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Heber’s argument is that Britain has been standing by while the Russians, Austrians, and Prussians suffered the great defeats of 1805, 1806 and 1809; now Britain must act, and act quickly: Yet, yet awake! while fear and wonder wait On the poised balance, trembling still with fate! And he ends the poem with a rhetorical series of assertions – ‘And yet the end is not!’ – with an elaboration on the exclamation – ‘No, by God!’: No! by His viewless arm whose righteous care Defends the orphan’s tear, the poor man’s prayer; Who, Lord of Nature, o’er this changeful ball Decrees the rise of empires, and the fall Wondrous in all His ways, unseen, unknown, Who treads the wine-press of the world alone; The attributes of God are now enlisted to justify war against France: it becomes a matter of ‘righteous care’, so that the God who comforts orphans (perhaps those who have lost parents in battle) and is prayed to by the poor (who are suffering because of war) is the God who will eventually triumph. He is the God who has trodden the winepress alone (from Isaiah 63:3), whose suffering, in Heber’s rendering, gives him a special affinity with the suffering people of Europe. But, as the last line puts it, ‘Spain, the brave, the virtuous, shall be free.’ Europe is a poem reflecting on the war at a significant moment and from a particular point of view, that of a brilliant young Oxford clergyman (he was 26 in 1809) who had won the Newdigate prize and been a Fellow of All Souls’, and who saw the war partly in terms of politics and strategy, and partly in terms of religion. He was commenting on the events of the previous few years with the eye of a conservative observer and a contributor to the new Quarterly Review, but also with the eye of a clergyman who believed in the reality of Christian warfare (he wrote ‘The Son of God goes forth to war,/ A kingly crown to gain’). The fight against Napoleon was a fight for righteousness, for the poor, for freedom, for justice, and for the widows and orphans. Wagram, and before it Jena, became defeats for goodness; Vimiero a victory for the right. His poem contrasts interestingly with Felicia Hemans’s England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism, written when Hemans was fourteen, which ended with a prayer not to the God of battles but to the God of peace:

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O send on earth thy consecrated dove, To bear the sacred olive from above; Restore again the blest, the halcyon time, The festal harmony of nature’s prime! Bid truth and justice once again appear, . . . Two of her brothers served in the Peninsular campaign, one under Moore in the retreat. This may have given her plea for peace an added edge. At other parts of the poem, however, she celebrates the idea of the war for freedom, as the ‘Iberian bands’ fight not for ‘dominion’s boundless reign’ but for a nobler end, Your land, your laws, your monarch to defend! For these, for these, your valiant legions rear The floating standard, and the lofty spear! The fearless lover wields the conquering sword, Fired by the image of the maid adored! The image of the fearless lover indicates a romantic idealism, but even at fourteen Hemans’ poem (or Felicia Browne’s, as it should more properly be called, because it was written before her marriage to Captain Hemans in 1812) shows the crusading spirit: an enthusiasm for the Spanish cause which was not just the excitement of a fourteen-year-old but was widespread characteristic in the poetry of the time. Indeed, her final appeal for peace is more unusual. Heber is more typical in his fervour, and his poem is evidence of a religious response to the war in its final years. Written when the war was still in the balance, though at a time when Bonaparte still looked invincible, it was a call to arms in the cause of righteousness, and a rousing assertion of the war as a just war. Napoleon’s conquests in Europe brought out, for some commentators, the religious and moral arguments of freedom and righteousness: it is this which makes understandable the response to the final years of the war.

8 The Last Years

8.1

1809–13: the Peninsula

The retreat to Corunna, and the death of Moore, left the country in some disarray. Or as William Napier, soldier and historian, put it, ‘The reverses experienced in Spain had somewhat damped the ardour of the English people.’1 This was compounded in 1809 by the resignation of the Duke of York, whose mistress, Mary Anne Clarke, was accused of selling commissions and buying influence. As the arguments raged about who was to be blamed for Moore’s retreat and death (the government fought off a motion to condemn Hookham Frere in February), enthusiasm for the Spanish rebellion waned, to be replaced by a new hope in Austria and the Archduke Charles. As Napier was to put it scornfully, ‘it was more agreeable to the aristocratic feelings of the English cabinet, that the French should be defeated by a monarch in Germany, than by a plebeian insurrection in Spain.’ 2 The only relief from a season of bad news was the valiant defence of Saragossa, which endured two separate sieges in the winter of 1808–09. Wordsworth wrote two sonnets about it, celebrating its heroism: These desolate Remains are trophies high Of more than martial courage in the breast Of peaceful civic virtue: they attest Thy matchless worth to all posterity.3 Perhaps because Saragossa indicated that all hope was not extinguished, it was decided to send an army to Portugal under Sir Arthur Wellesley, by now perceived as having had a subordinate role in the Cintra disgrace. He landed at Lisbon on 22 April 1809 to find Portugal in chaos, and 144

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morale low. Soult was in possession of Oporto; and Moore had put on record that he thought Portugal was indefensible against a superior force. 4 If the last British army had been forced to embark at Corunna, there was every expectation that the process might be repeated at Lisbon. Wellesley seems to have transformed the situation very quickly: when he landed at Lisbon, the nation was dismayed by previous defeats, distracted with anarchy, and menaced on two sides by powerful armies, one of which was already in possession of the second city in the kingdom. In twenty-eight days he had restored public confidence; provided a defence against one adversary; and having marched two hundred miles through a rugged country, and forced the passage of a great river – caused his opponent to flee over the frontier, without artillery or baggage.5 The ‘great river’ was the Douro, which Wellesley had crossed in order to take Oporto, but although he caused Soult to retire precipitately, he could not press home his advantage. Napier once again blamed the politicians: The English cabinet, though improvident in its preparations, was very fearful of misfortune, and the general durst not risk the safety of a single brigade, except for a great object, lest a slight disaster should cause the army to be recalled. 6 Whether or not he was right to blame the government, Napier’s comment reveals something of the insecurity of 1809. What followed was the making of a hero, not on the scale of a Nelson, but one to whom the British people increasingly looked for hope after a series of disasters. The dedication of Napier’s great history, at the head of the first volume (1828), summed up the feeling finely. It saluted ‘Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington’: This History I dedicate to your Grace, because I have served long enough under your command to feel, why the Soldiers of the Tenth Legion were attached to Caesar. Wellington had by then acquired the status of a legendary figure. It is irrelevant to question the truth of this, as Sir Charles Oman did in 1902: whatever defects Wellington may have had (Oman listed a number of episodes in which he seemed ungrateful or lacking in human warmth,

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which does not seem a very serious indictment), in 1809 he provided a very necessary stability and order to Portugal, and gave hope where none had been before. Even Byron, who was later no friend to Wellington, commented (in the notes to Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage): The Convention of Cintra was signed in the palace of the Marchese Marialva. The late exploits of Lord Wellington have effaced the follies of Cintra. He has, indeed, done wonders: he has perhaps changed the character of a nation, reconciled rival superstitions, and baffled an enemy who never retreated before his predecessors.7 In the summer of 1809 Wellesley advanced into Spain, and beat a French army at Talavera (28 July 1809), although hampered by the incompetent Spanish general Cuesta (Byron, who was riding through Spain with his friend Hobhouse at the time, questioned if it was a victory at all8): Sorely were we puzzled how to dispose of that victory of Talavera; and a victory it surely was somewhere, for every body claimed it. The Spanish dispatch and mob called it Cuesta’s, and made no great mention of the Viscount [Wellesley]; the French called it theirs . . . and we have not determined what to call it, or whose, for certes it was none of our own. However, Massena’s retreat is a great comfort, and as we have not been in the habit of pursuing for some years past, no wonder we are a little awkward at first. No doubt we shall improve, or if not, we have only to take to our old way of retrograding, and there we are at home. 9 Byron’s cynicism was partly justified by the lamentable record of the previous years, but he failed to perceive the importance of Talavera to a nation desperate for some success. The Annual Register carried an ‘Account of the glorious Battle of Talavera’ (in the same issue as an Austrian description of the Battle of Wagram), and a list of ‘Departed Heroes of the glorious Battle of Talavera’. Wellesley was rewarded with a peerage as Viscount Wellington. Talavera was a landmark battle: even though he was forced to retreat to Portugal, Wellington’s success contrasted strongly with the disastrous Walcheren expedition led by Lord Chatham, which took an army to the Low Countries in 1809 only to see it decimated by fever. The Gentleman’s Magazine described it in a poem in the February 1810 number, entitled simply ‘Walcheren’:

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Ah! wretched spot, by Nature’s hand unblest, Where fell Disease high rears her spotted crest, Where horrid fogs eternally prevail, And fatal damps from poisonous floods exhale, Where blasts pestiferous taint the sullen air, And spread around contagion and despair . . . In the Peninsula Wellington’s strength was in his patience and defensive skill, and in keeping his army healthy and well supplied. Byron noticed, in his ride through Spain in 1809, ‘the ball-pil’d pyramid’ of ammunition dumps: All who have seen a battery will recollect the pyramidal form in which shot and shells are piled. The Sierra Montana was fortified in every defile through which I passed on my way to Seville. 10 Byron’s mercurial and capricious mind is often hard to pin down in Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which is, in part, a commentary on this period of the war. His attitude to the battles will be discussed later, but his presence is noted here as that of an acute but uneasy observer of battlefields. He visited Talavera shortly after the battle, and thought of the dead who met ‘To feed the crow on Talavera’s plain’; and remembered that he had seen Albuera, where a very bloody battle took place in May 1811. In describing Albuera as ‘glorious field of grief’ (xliii) he summed up the horror and the glory of war. Others were less complex in their attitudes, pouring out celebrations for each victory. Between Talavera and Albuera, the French consolidated their hold on Spain by defeating the forces of the Spanish Junta. They were subsequently harassed by irregular bands of guerillas, which were more effective than the Spanish armies: they disturbed the peace, and provided Wellington with invaluable intelligence of enemy movements and strengths. The French took the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida in July and August 1810, but were repulsed at Bussaco in September. Wellington retired to the ground around Lisbon, which he fortified as the line of Torres Vedras, or old towers, leaving Massena’s army at the end of its supply lines and vulnerable to the Spanish winter. The French retreated to Spain in March 1811, followed by the British armies: the two battles of Fuentes d’Onoro, which was a close-run affair (‘If Boney had been there,’ said Wellington, ‘we should have been beat’11) and Albuera, though indecisive, weakened the French still further.

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Wellington’s patience, for which he was frequently criticised in Britain by the Whig opposition (though staunchly supported by Lord Liverpool at the War Office), bore fruit in 1812, which was the year of the turning of the tide in the war of the Peninsula. Ciudad Rodrigo was retaken in January and Badajoz in April, both expensively and violently. The battle of Salamanca (22 July 1812) destroyed the army of Marmont, who had succeeded Massena, and Wellington entered Madrid in triumph on 12 August. Walter Scott had been hailing Wellington as the great commander since 1808, and now felt that his faith had been justified. The French retreat of 1811 was ‘all owing to the coolness and generalship of Wellington’: I rejoice with the heart of a Scotsman in the success of Lord Wellington and with the soul of a Seer to boot. I have for three years been proclaiming him as the only man we had to trust to.12 Scott realised that Napoleon’s power depended in part on the myth of his invincibility in battle: ‘The downfall of Bonaparte’s military fame will be the signal of his ruin’, he wrote. 13 In a frenzy of enthusiasm he wrote The Vision of Don Roderick in the spring of 1811, giving the profits to Portuguese war sufferers. The poem, written in Spenserian stanzas, had a Spenserian view of the war. It began with visions of earlier Spanish history, but at the end of Part II turned to a time when War a new and dreadful language spoke, Never by ancient warrior heard or known; Lightning and smoke her breath, and thunder was her tone. (II.xxvi) The British army was described in terms of some rather picturesque expedition in an epic: It was a dread yet spirit-stirring sight! The billows foam’d beneath a thousand oars; Fast as they land the red-cross ranks unite, Legions on legions brightn’ning all the shores. Then banners rise, and cannon signal roars, Then peals the war-like thunder of the drum, Thrills the loud fife, the trumpet-flourish pours,

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And patriot hopes awake, and doubts are dumb, For, bold in freedom’s cause, the bands of ocean come! (II.lvi) Scott went on to name their constituent parts – English, Scottish (‘loved warriors of the Minstrel’s land’) and Irish – and all was now ready for a description of the campaign. But Scott disappoints the reader by refusing to respond to the challenge, perhaps because he was uneasy about writing the account of a modern battle when his own soldiering had been confined to manoeuvres: Now on the scene Vimeira should be shown, On Talavera’s fight should Roderick gaze, And hear Corunna wail her battle won, And see Busaco’s crest with lightning blaze: But shall fond fable mix with heroes’ praise? Hath fiction’s stage for truth’s long triumphs room?. . . . . . Or may I give adventurous fancy scope, And stretch a bold hand to the awful veil That hides futurity from anxious hope . . .? (II.lxi–lxii) By reaching out a hand to pull back the veil of the future, Scott wonders if he will see Europe rousing at the tale Of Spain’s invaders from her confines hurl’d, While kindling nations buckle on their mail And Fame, with clarion-blast and wings unfurl’d, To freedom and revenge awakes an injured world? (II.lxii) Because it is in the future, such a vision is impossible. But at the end of Part II, the poet asks to be vouchsafed ‘one note of pride and fire, a patriot’s parting strain!’ In Part III that note turns out to be a very brief survey of the war of 1810–11. Gaul’s leader (Masséna) looks across Portugal (Lusitania) and thinks that he will engineer a repeat of the flight from Corunna. The eagles, he says rhetorically, will never stoop

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’till high on Lisbon’s towers They close their wings, the symbol of our yoke,’ (III.ii) To which the poet replies with a similar orotund rhetoric: And shall the boastful chief maintain his word, Though Heaven hath heard the wailings of the land, Though Lusitania whet her vengeful sword, Though Britons arm, and Wellington command? No! grim Busaco’s iron ridge shall stand An adamantine barrier to his force; . . . Scott perpetuated the myth of good and bad armies. When the French retreated, they perpetrated all kinds of war crimes, pillage, rape, killing, and destruction, whereas the British were seen as models of humanity and kindness: The rudest sentinel, in Britain born, With horror paused to view the havoc done, Gave his poor crust to feed some wretch forlorn, Wiped his stern eye, then fiercer grasp’d his gun. (III.vii) This third part also paid tribute to General William Beresford, who was besieging Badajoz when Soult interrupted him, leading to the battle of Albuera, in which the Portuguese fought alongside the British and the loss of life was horrifying. Scott sympathetically noticed that Beresford was putting his reputation as a soldier on the line: He braved the shafts of censure and of shame, And, dearer far than life, he pledged a soldier’s fame. (III.xv) The Vision of Don Roderick shows a particular view of the war in the Peninsula as the beginning of the end for the French as an occupying army. Scott clearly had no hesitation in applauding the efforts of the British and their allies. He saw them as fighting for freedom, and he clearly had no idea of the horrors of modern warfare, such as the scenes which occurred after the reconquest of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. Indeed, beside Byron’s (much later) description of the siege of Ismail, in

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Don Juan, Scott’s poem appears facile and naive, although he was voicing a widespread relief that matters were improving. Wellington’s entry into Madrid was followed by a march northward to lay siege to Burgos, which proved abortive. His withdrawal in the autumn of 1812 was probably the worst time in his Peninsular career, and temporarily dented his popularity at home; but it was overshadowed by Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and by the following year Wellington was back in northern Spain, winning the battle of Vittoria over Napoleon’s brother, King Joseph. The victory was hailed throughout Europe: Beethoven composed ‘Wellington’s Victory’ in honour of it, and a Te Deum was sung in the Cathedral of St Petersburg.14 ‘What an awakening of dry bones seems to be taking place on the Continent!’, wrote Scott.15 By 1814, Southey was able to write his Carmen Triomphale, For the Commencement of the Year 1814, characteristically using the occasion to draw attention to his own new appointment as Poet Laureate, ‘Whose earliest task must be/ To raise the exultant hymn for victory’. He had already written a series of ‘Inscriptions’, commemorating Moore’s and Wellington’s battles, with titles such as ‘For a Monument at Vimiero’, ‘At Coruña’, ‘Talavera’, ‘For the Lines of Torres Vedras’ and ‘At Fuentes d’Onoro’. By the spring of 1814 Wellington was in France, and on 6 April Napoleon abdicated. Wellington was made a Duke, and given the post of Ambassador to Paris. At his entry into Paris, he appeared, one eyewitness recalled, ‘the Roman of old – save in pomp.’16 The fancied resemblance to a Roman was part of the mythologising of Wellington which went on at this time: Napier’s suggestion that his soldiers felt for him as the Tenth Legion felt for Caesar, was representative of Wellington as an emblem – the modern Caesar. Equally imaginative, however, was Napoleon’s rumoured comment on leaving Fontainebleau for Elba, associating himself with the spring – that he would be back with the violets. The consequence was the final spectacular act in the great European drama.

8.2

Towards the abdication: 1812–14

Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814 caused widespread rejoicing. In Edinburgh, Scott lit candles in all the windows of his house in Castle Street, and wrote to his friend Matthew Weld Hartstonge: Mine own eyes have seen that which I had scarcely hoped my Son’s should see, the downfall of the most accursed and relentless military despotism that ever wasted the blood and curbed the faculties of

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a civilized people. – I should have as soon expected the blade of a sword to bear a crop of corn, on its polished and hardened side, as any good or liberal institution to flow from Bonaparte. If he survives the ruin he has created, and it is strange he should even wish to survive it – it will be no slight proof of the Civilization of our age, which does not follow with private revenge even the most atrocious criminal. 17 Scott’s opening phrase is taken from the Song of Simeon (Luke 2: 29–32) in which the old priest, seeing the infant Jesus, says ‘mine eyes have seen thy salvation’. Scott saw the end of the conflict with Napoleon, which he naturally thought final, as the victory of good over evil, of civilisation over brutality. It was a salvation of Europe. The destructive monster had been tamed and exiled, and treated with a leniency which was a mark of a civilised and mature society; even as Napoleon himself, in Scott’s eyes, had created a system that ‘wasted the blood and curbed the faculties of a civilised people’. Southey, on the other hand, was outraged at the leniency which was shown to Napoleon. His ‘Ode, written during the Negotiations with Buonaparte, in January, 1814’ is crude and uncompromising: Who counsels peace at this momentous hour, When God hath given deliverance to the oppress’d, And to the injured power? He was indignant at the possibility that Napoleon might be allowed to retain his sovereignty (as indeed he did at Elba): Woe, woe to England! Woe and endless shame, If this heroic land, False to her feelings and unspotted fame, Holds out the olive to the Tyrant’s hand! Woe to the world, if Buonaparte’s throne Be suffer’d still to stand! Southey’s righteous indignation blames Napoleon for all the suffering of Europe from the end of the Peace of Amiens onwards: One man hath been for ten long wretched years The cause of all this blood and all these tears; And the poem ends by calling not for mercy but for vengeance:

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Oh! by the virtuous blood thus vilely spilt The Villain’s own peculiar private guilt, Open thine eyes! too long hast thou been blind! Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind! This widespread rejoicing and these harsh calls for vengeance were owing to the ways in which Napoleon had come to be seen increasingly as a tyrant and an aggressor. In Spain, Wellington had slowly gained the upper hand over the French marshals; in the rest of Europe, however, following the defeat of the Austrians at Wagram (July 1809), Napoleon had strengthened his economic blockade systems, and came close to ruining some British industries, causing the kind of unrest and misery which Byron drew attention to in debates in the House of Lords. It was during this period that even someone as pacific as the young Percy Shelley could describe Napoleon as ‘a hateful and despicable being.’ 18 Looking back on these years, Shelley recalled how much he hated ‘the tyrant’. In ‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, he began unambiguously: ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant!’ The poem concludes that virtue has other opponents, ‘old Custom, legal Crime,/ And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time’, but the recollection of his earlier hatred is nevertheless still vivid. His poem ‘The Crisis’, probably written in 1812, describes a world in ruins: When we see Despots prosper in their weakness, When we see Falshood triumph in its folly, When we see Evil, Tyranny, Corruption, Grin, grow and fatten; When Virtue toileth thro’ a world of sorrow, When Freedom dwelleth in the deepest dungeon, When Truth, in chains and infamy, bewaileth O’er a world’s ruin; . . . He hoped for a new awakening, but the reality was pressing; and even though he could hope that ‘the votaries of virtue may raise their eyes to heaven’, he was powerfully aware of the current situation. His poem, ‘a Tale of Society as it is from facts. 1811’, saw it not in broad terms of ruin and evil, but, as Wordsworth had done earlier, in personal tragedy. An aged woman is crippled and helpless, but ‘one only son’s love supported her’, until he is the victim of the press gang. As a soldier he becomes a thing, not a human being: But when the tyrant’s bloodhounds forced her Child For tyrant’s power unhallowed arms to wield,

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Bend to another’s will, become a thing More senseless than the sound of battle field, Then did she feel keen sorrow’s keenest sting . . . He returns, a worn out soldier, ‘his form wasted’, with a ‘sunk eyeball’ and ‘faded cheek’. The widow rejoices at his return, but he has been degraded and ruined: Her son, compelled, the tyrant’s foes had fought, Had bled in battle, and the stern control That ruled his sinews and coerced his soul Utterly poisoned life’s unmingled bowl And unsubduable evils on him wrought. All Shelley’s poems of this period, when they mention war, recoil in horror from the suffering which it engenders, and the inhumanity which it produces. He makes little distinction between Napoleon, as the French tyrant, and the other royal figures, such as the Emperors of Russia and Austria, and the Prince Regent, ‘the bloated Wretch on yonder throne.’19 His anger at the protracted business of war is expressive of an emotion which helps explain the relief and thanksgiving which followed its ending, although he would never have written lines of such violence as those of Southey. The word ‘tyrant’, which was so frequently linked with Napoleon (and in Shelley’s case, with others) occurs with some frequency in this period: In other days the North could light, With savage and barbarian might, A desolating flame; But now, the champion of the just, She lifts the injur’d from the dust, And brands a Tyrant’s name. This poem, ‘The Russian Chiefs. An Ode’, was a reference to the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812, and the terrible retreat which followed. This was an event which not only ruined a great army, but which demonstrated to the world that the Emperor was fallible, although Clausewitz, in On War, had the sense to realise that it was less obvious at the time. He saw the Russian campaign in the autumn of 1812 as less of a giant tragedy, complete with hubris, and more of a classic example of a ‘defensive war’ in

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which the Russians ‘unintentionally’ followed a strategy which would lead to Napoleon’s downfall.20 Clausewitz’s analysis (that of a professional soldier who was present at Borodino) had nothing to say about the way in which the Russian campaign could become tragedy or myth. But Shelley’s Ode goes on to suggest, much more imaginatively, that Napoleon’s success in reaching Moscow was like the success of Satan after the Fall in Paradise Lost, when he returned in triumph to find dust and ashes: In Moscow’s patriot fire There was the sullen Moloch’s bed; On ashes he reclined his head; A ruin for his throne. The burning of Moscow gave a new twist to the ancient legend: Napoleon and his army were now like the serpents in Milton’s epic, ‘with soot and cinders fill’d’ (X.570). It was all part of the mythologising of Napoleon into a monster and an anti-Christ figure. A more literal version of the campaign was found in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1813, where a poem by ‘William Thomas Fitzgerald, Esq.’ was grandly entitled ‘Let Russia’s Triumph rouse the World to Arms! Addressed to the Nations groaning under Buonaparte’s Yoke’. The poem suggested that Napoleon’s armies were made up in part of soldiers conscripted from the nations which he had already conquered, and their leader was described with the abusive word ‘Corsican’: see the blood-nurs’d Corsican advance With all the strength of half-exhausted France, With Vassal Nations mingled in his train, Slaves from the Tiber! Bondsmen from the Maine! Who, dragg’d to fight in quarrels not their own, Extend that thraldom under which they groan! . . . The French arrival in Moscow, but are forced to leave, and the onset of winter are seen as nature protesting against Napoleon’s unnatural conquests: The Elements against his crimes conspire, And prove as fatal as both sword and fire, Compell’d to seek for safety in retreat, His armies suffer ev’ry day defeat!

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Death-struck, and bleach’d by life-consuming frost, He sees his wretched legions hourly lost; Shame and Confusion hang upon his rear, Where Death rides awful on the Cossack’s spear! The author hopes that nations will now rise against Napoleon: ‘Then shall the groaning World, from bondage free,/ Taste all the sweets of Peace and Liberty.’ The longing for peace conveyed in the last line is palpable: it explains Scott’s rejoicing and Southey’s ferocity, while the rejoicing at the retreat itself, at ‘Death riding awful on the Cossack’s spear’, is explained and excused by the hope that the long invincibility of Napoleon might at last be coming to an end. The sense that the empire was beginning to crumble at last was strong in the spring of 1813. The Gentleman’s Magazine quoted a State Paper, ‘Addressed to the People of France’ by the future king, Louis XVIII. Divine providence was invoked against the evil one, and the French throne was invested with a sanctity from the great medieval monarch: ‘The moment is at length arrived, when Divine Providence appears ready to break in pieces the instrument of its wrath. The Usurper of the Throne of St Louis, the devastator of Europe, experiences reverses in his turn.’ The propaganda of these anti-Bonapartist documents is evident, but they were indicative of a significant change in the perception of Napoleon: he may no longer be all-powerful and all-conquering. This even allowed Southey, in the middle of all his hatred, to write with glee: Morbleu! Parbleu! What a pleasant excursion to Moscow! This poem, ‘The March to Moscow’, was published in The Courier (which had published Wordsworth’s letters on the Convention of Cintra in 1807–08) in January 1813. Southey has plenty of fun at Napoleon’s expense, and is partly moral and partly sadistic in sending him to hell: Too cold upon the road was he, Too hot had he been at Moscow; But colder and hotter he may be, For the grave is colder than Muscovy: And a place there is to be kept in view Where the fire is red and the brimstone blue, Morbleu! Parbleu!

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In another poem, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, Tsar Alexander now had the crown of victory, as heroes had done in the past: ‘High o’er their names, thine, Alexander! shines,/ Vict’ry around thy brow her laurel twines’. Britain gave money to the war, and this is seen in terms of religious ethics: Britannia, like a ministering angel, bears Her wealth, to dry th’ afflicted widow’s tears. This poem (March 1813), was entitled ‘Lines written on the Defeat of the French Army in Russia’. With its figures of victory and a ministering angel, it resembles a piece of grandiose war sculpture, but it is evidence of a pervading sense of righteousness and renewed hope. This was given substance by the battle of Leipsig. Tsar Alexander, who had been so celebrated in verse during the previous year, pursued Napoleon out of Russia, and after a summer of unsatisfied negotiation with both sides, Austria finally joined Prussia and Russia in a final coalition, together with Britain, Spain, Portugal and Sweden. The battle of Leipsig, sometimes called the ‘Battle of the Nations’, took place on a huge scale and over three days, 16–18 October 1813. It ended with an allied victory and the withdrawal of French forces across the Rhine. It was celebrated by Anne MacVicar Grant in her poem, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen’, which again stressed the righteousness of the cause: Great Austria comes in righteous arms arrayed, To break the league unrighteous power had made; Bavaria joins the allies, and they are seen in imagery which is appropriately formidable: Roused like a lioness her chains she spurns, And with vindictive wrath impatient burns: Once more opposed in dread array she shines, And sternly her collected powers combines With Russia’s puissant force and Sweden’s iron lines. The Swedish prince, Charles, is compared to Coriolanus: Thus Coriolanus led his Volscian powers To threaten haughty Rome’s imperial towers; Thus vanquished Rome, her race of madness run, Shrunk from the terrors of her exiled son.

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The comparison suggests that revenge comes to those who have been badly treated. So now the three great powers come together to confront Napoleon before Leipsig, ‘the palm of mighty victory to claim’: Three days their force conflicting armies tried, And thrice repulsed dismay’d the Gallic side, And checked their daring hopes, and sunk their wounded pride. Who can the glories of the fourth display Or paint the imperial chiefs in dread array, When Leipsic, waking from Oppression’s trance, Saw the triumphant cavalcade advance? There is a suggestion of Spenserian mythological import here, as the city wakes from its trance, imposed upon it by ‘Oppression’, and the Gallic side, like some vast monster, is ‘sunk’ in its wounded pride. Unlike the battle in heaven in Paradise Lost, the process has taken four days rather than three, but the parallel of the defeat of evil is clear. In the same strain of celebrating the triumph of good over evil, William Sotheby described Napoleon’s abdication in ‘A Song of Triumph’ (1814), inviting the earth to ‘Lift unto heav’n the triumph of thy voice!’ Sotheby went back to the experience of 1812, this time with a personification of ‘Freedom’, but also with a fine sense of what happened in the campaign: ’Twas Freedom stood, at Gallia’s fated hour, On the red crest of Kremlin’s burning tower, And lanc’d with vengeful hand the flames on high When Moscow’s blaze illum’d the northern sky, . . . The retreat is described vividly, as ‘some famish’d legion’ freezes, one of many it would seem, and whole armies vanish under the snow: When day was slaughter, night without repose, Save when bleak winds some famish’d legion froze, When horse and horseman fell without a blow, And armies vanish’d, sepulchr’d in snow. Sotheby’s final assessment of Napoleon in 1814 is in accord with that of Scott and Southey and MacVicar Grant, infused with the application of Paradise Lost to the contemporary situation. He remembers that Napoleon is still living, a tower, like Satan in Book I, ‘Earth’s gaze – earth’s curse – earth’s mockery – man of crime!’; but he then compares Napoleon

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in his exile to the figure of guilt who fascinated several Romantic-period writers: Hide thee from earth’s wide rage, a second Cain Condemn’d to live, to brood on English slain, And roam o’er Elba’s rocks, a pension’d slave, Till the dark death-worm battens on thy grave. These condemnations based on the Old Testament and on Paradise Lost demonstrate the widespread sense that Napoleon deserved no pity and was to be blamed for the sufferings of Europe. Such a display of righteousness was mixed with a fair degree of self-satisfaction, a rejoicing that the dictator was now a slave, and that the destroyer of peace was now finally rendered impotent. But there was to be one more twist to the story.

8.3

1815: Waterloo

Napoleon absconded from Elba on 26 February 1815 and landed in the south of France on 1 March. ‘O Lord, O Lord’, wrote Scott to Southey, ‘that we should be back at the old heigh-ho’ for want of a little precaution – and to hear the nonsense which the people talk in London about the alteration of that mans nature and disposition is enough to make a dog sick.21 This letter was actually written in Edinburgh on 20 June, after the battle of Waterloo but before the news arrived. Scott had been in London during the spring and early summer, watching with anxiety as Napoleon reestablished his personal control in France. The ‘hundred days’ of heroism and failure were some of the most remarkable of even his astonishing life: as his old regiments refused to fight against him, and his marshals rallied to his cause, the uninspiring Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, fled. The astonished diplomats who had been struggling to negotiate a stable post-Bonaparte Europe at the Congress of Vienna went their separate ways, declaring Napoleon an outlaw: Napoleon Bonaparte, by again appearing in France with projects of confusion and disorder, has placed himself beyond the protection of the law and rendered himself subject to public vengeance. 22

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Wellington was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the allied army in Flanders. The scene was set for the first confrontation between the two in a dramatic fashion. As in the final act of Richard III, the protagonists of good and evil were finally to be brought face to face. Even before the battle, therefore, the situation was tense with European hopes and fears, and with personal loyalties and rivalries. The battle which followed on 18 June was a tremendous one, with huge losses on both sides. ‘The usual salutation’, wrote John Kincaid of the Rifle Brigade, who had been battle-hardened in Spain on meeting an acquaintance of another regiment after an action was to ask who had been hit? but on this occasion it was, ‘Who’s alive?’23 In the year which had followed Napoleon’s abdication, the army of the Peninsula, battle-hardened and forged into a successful fighting force, had been disbanded. The army which Wellington now had at his disposal was a makeshift affair, with some of his old soldiers, but with many less reliable ones. ‘We were’, wrote Kincaid, ‘take us all in all, a very bad army’: Our foreign auxiliaries . . . were little better than a raw militia . . . Our heavy cavalry made some brilliant charges in the early part of the day; but they never knew when to stop.24 If Wellington had had his Peninsular army, thought Kincaid, the whole battle would have been over much sooner. As it was, ‘I never heard of a battle in which everybody was killed; but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns.’25 Wellington’s disposition of the army, and his conduct before the battle, contrasted powerfully with Napoleon’s rhetoric: while Napoleon’s soldiers were given an ‘Order of the Day’ on 15 June, reminding them of the victories of Marengo and Friedland (both fought on 14 June), Wellington attempted to preserve confidence and steadiness. Similarly, Napoleon’s rapid and skilled aggression as he marched into Flanders contrasted with Wellington’s ability to wait before making a decisive move, for fear of committing his army in the wrong place and at the wrong time. His decision to allow the Duchess of Richmond to hold a ball on the night before the preliminary battle of Quatre Bras was typical of the attempt to preserve calm. It became a most powerful symbolic moment, in which the officers of Wellington’s army danced before going into battle.

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It must have been a splendid scene, a picture of ancient chivalry, as Byron saw it: There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men . . . (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III.xxi) Byron’s spectacular description of the ball, and its interrupted pleasure, is a magnificent juxtaposition of two things – enjoyment of life and the suddenness of death. This is made specific in the person of the Duke of Brunswick, the ‘fated chieftain’ who was killed the following day at Quatre Bras, trying to rally his fleeing countrymen. Byron then portrays the breaking up of the dancing: Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro, And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago Blush’d at the praise of their own loveliness; And there were sudden partings, such as press The life from out young hearts, . . . (III.xxiv) Skilfully, the effect of war is seen on the faces of the young women rather than in any attempt to describe the battle. Byron’s description of it is purposely brief: Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty’s circle proudly gay, Till midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The morn the marshalling in arms, – the day Battle’s magnificently stern array! The thunder-clouds close o’er it, which when rent The earth is cover’d thick with other clay, Which her own clay shall cover, heap’d and pent, Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent! (III.xxviii) The battle itself, with its fluctuating fortunes and its to-and-fro of tactics and counter-tactics, is lost in the rapidity of Byron’s view: from

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love and life one day to the buried clay the next, all indiscriminately mingled in a ‘red burial’, a burial of blood.26 Byron had viewed the battlefield in the spring of 1816, when the spring Came forth her work of gladness to contrive, With all her reckless birds upon the wing, I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring. (III.xxx) He was shown the battlefield by a Brussels friend, Pryse Lockhart Gordon, who noted that the poet was ‘silent, pensive, and in a musing mood’, although he and the accompanying Dr Polidori later galloped across the field. 27 He wrote to John Cam Hobhouse: The Plain at Waterloo is a fine one – but not much after Marathon & Troy – Cheronea – & Platea. – Perhaps there is something of prejudice in this – but I detest the cause & the victors – & the victory – including Blucher & the Bourbons.28 Byron’s dislike of the restored Bourbon regime in France was widely shared (and had been one reason why Napoleon’s return had been so welcome to many of the French people); but his description of the battle of Waterloo is the finest in English until Thackeray’s in Vanity Fair. Later, Byron was to be less fair to Wellington, whom he regarded as tarred with the same brush as Castlereagh, friend and restorer of the monarchs of Europe. And his magnificent combination of love and war, of the dance and the battle, is even in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage undercut by the first lines of the preliminary description: And Harold stands upon this place of skulls, The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo! (III.xviii) The ‘place of skulls’ is a reference to Golgotha (St Mark’s Gospel, 15:22). Once again religion is invoked, not on this occasion to pronounce on good and evil, but to suggest horror and sacrifice. Later Byron became more detached from the ‘silent, pensive’ self who had ridden over the field, and more political. In Don Juan he looked back on Waterloo with a jaundiced eye in Canto IX (written 1822). Wellington was ‘Villainton’

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(as in a mock French pronunciation), the man who had restored the old corrupt monarchies and ‘repair’d Legitimacy’s crutch’: And Waterloo has made the world your debtor (I wish your bards would sing it rather better). (IX.iii) Byron was attacking Southey and Wordsworth, and all the band of triumphalists who had rejoiced unhesitatingly at the outcome of the battle. He then went on to attack the war itself, in the process of detracting from Wellington’s universal popularity: You are “the best of cut-throats:” – do not start; The phrase is Shakespeare’s, and not misapplied: – War’s a brain-splattering, windpipe-splitting art, Unless her cause by right be sanctified. If you have acted once a generous part, The world, not the world’s masters, will decide, And I shall be delighted to learn who, Save you and yours, have gain’d by Waterloo? (IX.iv) Byron was pursuing his own private agenda here, in which the victory at Waterloo, and Wellington’s subsequent fame, and the general celebration of the downfall of Napoleon, became for him evidence of a monstrous edifice of self-satisfaction, cant and national humbug. Previously, Byron had used the Waterloo Gazette to pinpoint the way in which a callous system recorded their death wrongly, thereby nullifying their heroism: Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose. (VIII.xviii) This was Edward Grose of the First Guards, whom Byron had known and liked at Cambridge.29 The neglect shown by the printers of the Gazette was part of the whole edifice of shabby treatment which Byron seized upon to contrast with the rhetoric of triumphalism. To get someone’s name wrong on a roll of honour, or a list of the dead, was not only carelessness: it suggested a disregard for what that person had been, for his individuality

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and self-hood. Byron was pushing towards an awareness of the kind of dehumanising which war brings, in which men fall unnoticed or unrecorded, or (as in this case) mis-recorded. War, and the reporting of it, can destroy lives, even as it makes heroes. But the unspoken rebuke in these pages was to Southey, whose attack on Byron in the preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821) had already been brilliantly demolished in The Vision of Judgment. The Waterloo passage in Don Juan was only one more episode in the war between the poets, concerned this time with Southey’s tedious and self-congratulatory publication of 1816: The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo: by Robert Southey, Esq. Poet Laureate. The title page, in its general pomposity, was a provocation in itself, and a standing invitation to marvel at the wrong way in which literature could be used to discuss war. The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, and Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Odes volume, both published in 1816, were simply the last of those hundreds of poems written during the many years of war which exhorted soldiers to bravery, or called on Britannia to rule the waves, or indulged in bellicose birthday odes to George III, as Henry James Pye had done for the Annual Register. As might be expected, Southey’s poem was determinedly Christian in its reading of recent history. The politics of the final years of Napoleon’s power was seen as part of a struggle between good and evil, with evil as the military despotism that would inevitably ‘brutalise and degrade mankind’. The words come from the ‘Advertisement’, which summarised the working of the poem, first as a description of Southey’s own visit, and then as an allegory, intended to expose ‘the gross material philosophy which has been the guiding principle of the French politicians, from Mirabeau to Buonaparte’. This materialism is associated by Southey with revolutionary power; he sets against it the spiritual values of Christianity. Thus the struggle against Napoleon (‘that Tyrant’) was a struggle between good and evil principles, and never was there a victory so important to the best hopes of human nature as that which was won by British valour at Waterloo, . . . The peace which she has won by the battle of Waterloo, leaves her at leisure to pursue the great objects and duties of bettering her own condition, and diffusing the blessings of civilization and Christianity. So the war was fought for a peace which would allow Christianity to flourish. That peace is demonstrated as domestic happiness, with an

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extended ‘Proem’, describing Southey at home with his family. These are, the blessings of peace, and from them the poet is able to rise to heights of reflection and poetic insight. He prays for inspiration as he climbs, Milton-like, ‘to the height of that great argument’, and hopes to bind round his temples ‘the laurel which my master Spenser wore’. This was presumably a compliment to himself as Poet Laureate, and certainly Southey was eager to point out his own greatness:

Me most of all men it behoved to raise The strain of triumph for this foe subdued, To give a voice to joy, and in my lays Exalt a nation’s hymn of gratitude, And blazon forth in song that day’s renown . . . For I was graced with England’s laurel crown. (vi)

As he is comforted by his domestic bliss, so he has to leave it, to rise above it as a Poet Laureate and to leave it physically to make the pilgrimage to Waterloo. He describes the journey, step by step, to Dover, then to Ostend and Bruges, and finally to Brussels, where for the first time he seems to become affected with something other than complacency, when seeing the wounded in hospitals or on waggons. Then comes the section entitled ‘The Field of Battle’, beginning with the graves behind the British line and then proceeding to the various points of the battlefield – La Haye Sainte, Hougoumont, Papelotte Farm. But Southey passes over the chance to describe the battle itself, perhaps realising his own insufficiency but disguising it rather piously:

Deem not that I the martial skill should boast Where horse and foot were stationed, here to tell, What points were occupied by either host, And how the battle raged, and what befell, And how our great Commander’s eagle eye Which comprehended all, secured the victory. This were the historian’s, not the poet’s part; Such task would ill the gentle Muse beseem, Who to the thoughtful mind and pious heart, Comes with her offering from this awful theme; . . . (III.xxxii–xxxiii)

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He described how, three months after the battle, the corn was beginning to grow, and the sunshine was playing over the green fields. The pears were ripening at Hougoumont: Who would have thought, to see this garden fair, Such horrors had so late been acted there! Later, after visiting Quatre Bras and Ligny, Southey again emphasised the horror of the battle, but he was unequivocal about who was responsible: The tales which of that field I could unfold, Better it is that silence should conceal. They who had seen them shuddered while they told Of things so hideous; and they cried with zeal, One man hath caused all this, of men the worst, . . . Oh wherefore have ye spared his head accurst! (IV.xxxvi) Southey’s implacable anger at Napoleon’s first abdication, his desire to see ‘the tyrant’ punished (if not executed) returns with even greater force after Napoleon’s final defeat. It is as though the ‘hundred days’ and the battle of Waterloo were a final vindication of those who saw Napoleon as Satan, the wicked destroyer of the peace of Europe. In the second part of The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, this is made plainer. It is cast in the form of a vision, in the same manner as Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick had been a few years before. The poet finds himself on the field of Waterloo, climbing a tower with a crumbling and insecure base, where he finds an old man who purports to represent wisdom. The old man’s wisdom is very worldly: he argues that there are no lessons to be gained from history, and that there is no after-life: Regard not what has been, nor what may be, O Child of Earth, this Now is all that toucheth thee! (I.xvi) The old man, who obviously represents some kind of devil figure, proposes a politics without principle, in which the most powerful human beings are those who have no conception of what he calls ‘unreal good’ (I.xxii). The poet replies that this was the creed of Napoleon:

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Such, I made answer, was the Tyrant’s creed Who bruised the nations with his iron rod, Till on yon field the wretch received his meed From Britain, and the outstretched arm of God! Behold him now, . . . Death ever in his view, The only change for him, . . . and Judgement to ensue! (I.xxv) From the conversation with the ‘evil prophet’, the poet is transported to the sacred mountain, and to a course of instruction from the heavenly Muse, or heavenly Teacher: the final section of the poem is called ‘The Hopes of Man’, and in it the Muse describes Europe, ‘this moral, intellectual heart of Earth’, as having been rescued at Waterloo from Napoleon – in guilt the first, Preeminently bad among the worst . . . He sought thro’ evil means and evil aim, And all his ruthless measures were designed To enslave, degrade, and brutalize mankind. (IV.xvii, xix) The Muse then describes how On Waterloo The Tyrant’s fortune in the scale was weighed, . . . His fortune and the World’s, . . . and England threw He sword into the balance . . . down it swayed: And when in battle first he met that foe There he received his final overthrow. (IV.xxiv) So that the poem concludes with a celebration of Britain, as a country where ‘undefiled as in their native spring,/ The living waters of Religion flow’ (xxxi), a happy and beautiful land of freedom and righteousness, a place of hope for the future. The notes, which occupy a substantial thirty-five pages, are partly historical and partly a comment on events in the recent war, such as the sacking of the Abbey at Afflighem and the burning of books; and Southey notes that the countryman from Mont St Jean who showed him over the battlefield of Waterloo

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spoke with the bitterest hatred of Buonaparte, as the cause of all the slaughter and misery he had witnessed, and repeatedly expressed his astonishment that he had not been put to death. My house, said he, was full of the wounded: . . . it was nothing but sawing off legs and sawing off arms. Oh my God, and all for one man! Why did you not put him to death? I myself would put him to death with my own hand.30 Southey was evidently pleased to be able to quote a source, close to the experience of the battle itself, who agreed with his view that Napoleon should have been more severely punished, first in 1814 and even more in 1815. Southey’s visit to the battlefield was in September. Scott had preceded him, in an instantaneous and immediate response to the battle. Stuck in Scotland when the news came by the promise to attend a wedding, he became ‘very restless’, desperate to see the place itself. He set off at the end of July with three companions, hiring a cutter from Harwich because he could not bear to wait for the next packet, and ‘was on the memorable field of battle about five weeks after it was fought.’31 He described it in a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch: All the more ghastly tokens of the carnage are now removed the bodies both of men and horses being either burned or buried. But all the ground is still torn with the shot and shells, and covered with cartridges, old hats, and shoes, and various relics of the fray which the peasants have not thought worth removing. Besides, at Waterloo and all the hamlets in the vicinage, there is a mart established for cuirasses; for the eagles worn by the imperial guard on their caps; for casques, swords, carabines, and similar articles. 32 Scott was just the kind of person for whom such a scavenger’s market was intended, and he bought ‘two handsome cuirasses’. But he also noticed a grim effect on the landscape in front of the chateau of Hougoumont: In this spot vast numbers had fallen; and, being hastily buried, the smell is most offensive at this moment. Indeed, I felt the same annoyance in many parts of the field; and, did I live near the field, I should be anxious about the diseases which this steaming carnage might occasion.33

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This detail found its way into the poem which he wrote during his stay in Paris, The Field of Waterloo, the profits of which were to go to a fund for widows and orphans of the battle. Remembering that this had been a peaceful agricultural land, where the crops were growing, Scott writes of another harvest ‘gather’d in by sterner hands/ With bayonet, blade, and spear.’ He describes the actual appearance of the ground: Ay, look again: that line, so black And trampled, marks the bivouac; Yon deep-graved ruts the artillery’s track, So often lost and won; And close beside, the harden’d mud Still shows where, fetlock-deep in blood, The fierce dragoon through battle’s flood Dash’d the hot war-horse on. These spots of excavation tell The ravage of the bursting shell; And feel’st thou not the tainted steam, That reeks against the sultry beam, From yonder trenched mound? ‘Look again’: the command is not just to look more closely, but to look with understanding and feeling: there, five weeks ago, just there, was the greatest battle of modern times, the one which determined the fate of Europe. Scott uses rhymes very skilfully to convey the rapidity and urgency of battle, when describing the crucial period of the fight when the British infantry formed squares to fight off the cavalry charges of the French: Fast as their ranks the thunders tear, Fast they renew’d each serried square, And on the wounded and the slain Closed their diminished files again, Till from their line, scarce spears’ lengths three, Emerging from the smoke they see Helmet, and plume, and panoply; . . . Down were the eagle banners sent, Down reeling steeds and riders went, Corslets were pierced, and pennons rent, And, to augment the fray, Wheel’d full against their staggering flanks,

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The English horseman’s foaming ranks Forced their resistless way. Although this is what Scott himself might have called ‘drum and trumpet’ poetry, it describes the course of the battle with energy and accuracy. The poem’s base, however, is firmly in the place, as Scott imagines it (from the accounts which he had read and the people he had spoken to), and the title, ‘The Field of Waterloo’ is exact as a description of what follows. More individual and imaginative, though rooted in the reality of the soaking rain which fell, is the other poem he wrote at this time, ‘The Dance of Death’, which describes a Highland soldier on the night before the battle, ‘Chill and stiff, and drench’d with rain’. He has a vision (comparable to the vision which the Scottish soldiers saw before Flodden) of a phantom band who ‘wheel’d a revel dance,/ And doom’d the future slain.’ The soldier-seer hears the phantoms sing, with repeated chorus: ‘Wheel the wild dance While lightnings glance, And thunders rattle loud, And call the brave To bloody grave, To sleep without a shroud. Scott’s mind is again preoccupied with the steaming mounds of buried soldiers, as his phantoms sing: ‘Wheel the wild dance! Brave sons of France, For you our ring makes room; Make space full wide For martial pride, For banner, spear, and plume. Approach, draw near, Proud cuirassier! Room for the men of steel! The rain falls through the night, and the phantoms greet the fateful dawn: ‘Burst, ye clouds, in tempest showers, Redder rain shall soon be ours! See! the east grows wan –

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and so the soldier awakes and tells his comrades, before his own death in the battle. Scott wrote about the battle yet again, in Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816). This series of letters is addressed to various correspondents, including some to ‘his cousin the Major’ (who, we learn, fought in the American war at Bunker’s Hill) which include a series describing the campaign of 1815 and the battle of Waterloo itself. The description of the battle is a spirited piece, as one would expect, with particular reference to cavalry (Scott, who had some knowledge of cavalry from his time in the volunteers, disapproved of the conversion of light dragoons into the even lighter hussars), and to what he called ‘the Scottish amor patriae’: ‘The Scotch Greys coming up to the support of a Highland regiment, all joined in the triumphal shout of “Scotland for ever!”’ Such flag-waving was balanced by the account of some Hanoverian hussars, whose commanding officer withdrew his forces from the field and fled to Brussels, ‘and alarmed the town with a report that the French were at his heels’ (which gave a hint to Thackeray for Chapter XXXII of Vanity Fair, in which a Belgian soldier flies to his sweetheart in Brussels, justifying his action by asserting that the army had been destroyed). He is naturally contrasted with the heroism of the brave commander: During this scene of tumult and carnage, the Duke of Wellington exposed his person with a freedom which, while the position of the armies, and the nature of the ground, rendered it inevitably necessary, made all around him tremble for that life on which it was obvious that the fate of the battle depended. There was scarcely a square but he visited in person, encouraging the men by his presence, and the officers by his directions. Many of his short phrases are repeated by them, as if they were possessed of talismanic effect.34 Scott’s account reaches an appropriate crescendo with the final attack of the Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at seven o’clock in the evening. According to this narrative, Napoleon addressed them with the words ‘There, gentlemen, is the road to Brussels!’ The portrayal is one of hubris, of a Shakespearian tragic error which can be relished in the light of the final result. Against that stands the opposing force, and Scott acknowledges the Shakespearian parallel: None listened to the shout with more eager hope than our own Great General, who probably thought, like the Avenger in Shakspeare,

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“There thou shouldst be: By this great clatter one of the greatest note Seems bruited.” – (472) So, at the repulse of the Imperial Guard which followed, Napoleon ‘looked down, shook his head, and became, according to the expression of his guide, pale as a corpse’ (473). His hasty retreat ‘was much less than honourable to a soldier, who had risen by personal courage and conduct to the greatest pitch of power that was ever enjoyed by an individual’ (473). Scott’s implied comparison between the two generals was part of his view of the battle as involving chivalry as well as bloody conflict. He describes one officer as saying to another ‘You are uncommonly savage to-day’, and receiving the reply: “What would you have me do?” answered the other, by nature one of the most gentle and humane men breathing; “we are here to kill the French, and he is the best man to-day who can kill most of them;” (467) After the battle was over, however, the British soldiers, after attending to their own wounded, ‘carried their succours to the disabled French’ without deigning to remember that the defenceless and groaning wretches who encumbered the field of battle in heaps, were the same men who had displayed the most relentless cruelty on every temporary advantage which they obtained during this brief campaign. They erected huts over them to protect them from the weather, brought them water, and shared with them their refreshments – showing in this the upright nobleness of their own dispositions, and giving the most vivid testimony of their deserving that victory with which Providence had crowned them – a victory as unparalleled in its consequences, as the battle itself was in its length, obstinacy, and importance. (474) In his treatment of the battle, therefore, Scott anticipates Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula by encouraging a view of soldiering as a necessary and honourable activity. He then adds the human side in Paul’s next letter, not the Major but to his sister Margaret, with its account of the field of battle and the guide who showed them over it (De Coster, who had been Napoleon’s guide too), together with stories

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such as that of Wellington’s cook, behind the lines in the village of Waterloo, who refused to stop cooking when fugitives told him that the battle was lost, and who served dinner that night as usual. Other signs of human feeling are recorded for Margaret – a copy of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd, picked up from the ground where a Scottish regiment had been stationed; French poems, in manuscript, on paper ‘bearing stains of clay and blood’. For Margaret, Scott transforms the battle by linking it to those of the Middle Ages, and associating it with the patterns of chivalry: Had these relics of minstrelsy, or any thing corresponding to them in tone and spirit, been preserved as actual trophies of the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, how many gay visions of knights and squires and troubadours, and sirventes and lais, and courts of Love and usages of antique chivalry, would the perusal have excited! (478) The comparison with Agincourt, greatly to the British credit, is characteristic of Scott’s uncanny ability to see contemporary events and historical ones as intertwined, connected to one another by something that transcends the accidents of time. In that sense, Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk is the successor to Marmion, with its much abused interpolations between the cantos. It was also Scott’s way of signifying the importance of Waterloo, as a battle which would stand beside the most famous ones of the middle ages.

9 Ways of Seeing War: The Poets

9.1

Wordsworth and the Thanksgiving Odes

Wordsworth’s abhorrence of Napoleon, which is so evident in the tract On the Convention of Cintra, continued until the end of the war. His reading of the battle of Waterloo was that it was (in the words of one of the sonnets which he wrote in the year which followed) ‘this victory sublime’. 1 The sonnet followed Southey in seeing the end of the war as the triumph of good over evil in the same Paradise Lost imagery. The bardfigure can worthily rehearse the hideous rout, Which the blest Angels, from their peaceful clime Beholding, welcomed with a choral shout. This has clear echoes of Milton’s ‘hideous ruin’ (I.46) and ‘so huge a rout’ (VI.873), and Wordsworth, like many others, evidently saw the battle as one which had dealt the final blow to a power that he regarded as evil and even Satanic. In association with this Miltonic pattern is Wordsworth’s figure of ‘the Bard’, who is a successor to Gray’s Bard and to the inspired author of Paradise Lost: The Bard, whose soul is meek as dawning day, Yet trained to judgments righteously severe; Fervid, yet conversant with holy fear, As recognizing one Almighty sway: He whose experienced eye can pierce the array Of past events, – to whom, in vision clear, 174

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The aspiring heads of future things appear, Like mountain-tops whence mists have rolled away: Assoiled from all encumbrance of our time, He only, if such breathe, in strains devout Shall comprehend this victory sublime; The Bard needs to have all the virtues – a meek soul, a right judgement, a holy fear – and to be able to look back on the past and aspire to the future, seeing things with a God-like overview, ‘assoiled from all incumbrance of our time’. He, and he only, can do justice to such a battle. The battle of Waterloo has become an event which, by its sublimity, defines the poet who would write about it. Lesser poets, who have not recognised the almighty sway, or comprehended the past and the future, cannot hope to do justice to it. Wordsworth was celebrating his own idealised self here: he saw the battle as calling for the loftiest poet to record it. It was of a piece with his anger at those who still had some sympathy with Napoleon (whom Wordsworth, like others, called ‘the Corsican’), such as Byron or Brougham: Mr. B. is not content with scribbling in the Edinburgh Review to the praise and glory of the Corsican, but he must insult the people of England by expressing in their House of Legislature, and that of the three kingdoms, his hope that that great man may be kindly treated in his insular prison.2 To John Scott, editor of The Champion, Wordsworth wrote crossly – ‘You yourself, appear to me to labour under some delusion as to the merits of Lord Byron’s poetry’, and when one of the correspondents in Scott’s magazine praised Byron’s verse, Wordsworth airily dismissed him: ‘a very foolish Letter upon the Verses that appeared in the Chronicle – I have not seen them, but I have no doubt that what he praises so highly is contemptible as a work of Art, like the Ode to the Emperor Nap.’ 3 ‘I have not seen them’ suggests a mind that was firmly set in its opinions. To Wordsworth, Napoleon was a wicked destroyer of the peace of Europe, and Byron was a bad poet, his badness confirmed by his pro-Bonapartist sympathies. Similarly, in his response to the battle of Waterloo, Wordsworth developed an extreme sense of righteousness. It was not only the downfall of an evil emperor, as he saw it, but a pride in his own country’s part in that downfall. During the autumn that

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followed the battle, his sonnets were rich with a sense of relief and a love of England, its seasons and weather: While not a leaf seems faded, – while the fields, With ripening harvests prodigally fair, In brightest sunshine bask, . . .4 The sonnet is entitled ‘September 1815’, a title that draws attention to a month and a year – that September, when the world was again finally at peace. Nature, in its autumnal beauty, is however, deceptive: the north wind is a foretaste of winter, ‘of bitter change’, when the flowers must beware and the birds must protect themselves. But that winter is a season that is potent to renew, Mid frost and snow, the instinctive joys of song, – And nobler cares than listless summer knew. Winter is strenuous and has its nobility: Wordsworth was thinking of nature in terms of easy listless summer and hard winter, but his choice of the word ‘nobler’ suggests a transposition of the peace/war antithesis into the movement of the seasons. Peace is easy, war is noble. The same pattern is found in the poem to Benjamin Robert Haydon, probably composed in the same week as the ‘September’ sonnet (30 November– 2 December) where the word ‘strenuous’ describes the artist’s endeavour and discipline: Still to be strenuous for the bright reward, And in the soul admit of no decay, – Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness: – Great is the glory, for the strife is hard! The juxtaposition of glory and strife is part of Wordsworth’s preoccupation with an inner warfare which mirrors the outer warfare of the European political scene in 1815. Napoleon had been seen off by the same qualities of bravery, discipline and strong-mindedness that were required of the artist. Wordsworth, to put it at its simplest, was inspired by the British part in the war because it chimed with his own concept of the poet or artist as disciplined and heroic. Thus the ‘Advertisement’ to the small volume which he published in 1816, containing two extensive Pindaric Odes, stated that

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the present publication owes its existence to a patriotism, anxious to exert itself in commemorating that course of action, by which Great Britain has, for some time past, distinguished herself above all other countries. Conscious of the economic hardship which was one result of the war, Wordsworth nevertheless insisted on emphasising ‘the splendor of this great moral triumph’. It was a moral triumph, a victory over evil, and that victory would (he thought) be gladly paid for by those who understood its significance. He went on to praise the British army, giving expression to what he called ‘feelings tending to encourage a martial spirit in the bosoms of his countrymen’: The British army, both by its skill and valour in the field, and by the discipline which has rendered it much less formidable than the armies of other powers, to the inhabitants of the several countries where its operations were carried on, has performed services for humanity too important and too obvious to allow any one to recommend, that the language of gratitude and admiration be suppressed, or restrained . . . Other armies might plunder and spread misery through the countryside where they passed: Wordsworth argued, as others had done, that the British army was more disciplined than that of other countries. From this it was a short step to the idea of chivalric war, to the idea of knightly conduct implied in the performing of services to humanity: Every man, deserving the name of Briton, adds his voice to the chorus which extols the exploits of his countrymen, with a consciousness, at times overpowering the effort, that they transcend all praise. This was extraordinary; but praise was not enough. The country had to realise that freedom depended upon military power, properly used, in the defence of the realm; and the Advertisement concluded with an attack on an economically minded member of Parliament who wanted to abolish the Royal Military Academy, founded by the Duke of York during the war to train officers: ‘Most unwise advice’, said Wordsworth, ‘has rarely been given!’5 The two Odes which followed were entitled ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ and ‘Ode, Composed in January 1816’. They were later divided into three odes, and given titles of successive years, ‘Ode, 1814’, ‘Ode, 1815’ and ‘Ode composed

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in January 1816’. ‘They were poured out with much feeling’, Wordsworth told Henry Crabb Robinson; he also said that the correction of them ‘cost me more health and strength than anything of that sort I ever did before.’6 This combination of rapid composition with a subsequent difficult correction suggests an exhilarated engagement that led Wordsworth into an uncritical writing of these effusions; indeed, Mary Moorman has described one section of the January 1816 Ode as ‘the nearest thing to rhetorical bombast that he ever composed.’ 7 The poems demonstrate the astonishing fervour with which he greeted the downfall of Napoleon and the coming of peace. The language is deliberately inflated, as if, like his Waterloo bard, Wordsworth was seeking to respond to this great moment of history with a Pindaric form. The first poem, for example, begins with an address to the sun which lasts for thirty-five lines, followed by a reminder that ‘this day’s sacrifice’ (the ‘Thanksgiving Day’ on 18 January, seven months after the battle on 18 June) comes from a holier and deeper source even than that of the natural world. The direct questions come next: ‘Have we not conquered? – By the vengeful sword?’ These are answered instantly: Ah no, by dint of Magnanimity; That curbed the baser passions, and left free A loyal band to follow their liege Lord, Clear-sighted Honour – and his staid Compeers, Along a track of most unnatural years, In execution of heroic deeds; (57–63) The personifications crowd in here, making a chivalric procession of the war, a war which in the memory ‘Shall live enrolled above the starry spheres’ (69). The poet has his own duty: – Who to the murmurs of an earthly string Of Britain’s acts would sing, He with enraptured voice will tell Of One whose spirit no reverse could quell; Of one that mid the failing never failed: Who paints how Britain struggled and prevailed, Shall represent her labouring with an eye Of circumspect humanity; . . . (67–74)

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In contrast to this absolute purity of purpose and practice, the French empire is the ‘dominion of the impure’ (92), and the power of Napoleon is That Soul of Evil – which, from Hell let loose, Had filled the astonished world with such abuse (95–6) and which has waged war ‘against the life of virtue in mankind’ (106). So Wordsworth celebrates the ‘prowess’ of Britain, localising it more intimately by linking it to his love for England. The lines on England were admired so much by the painter John Constable, that he quoted them in the introduction to the letterpress of his English Landscape in 1833: O England! dearer far than life is dear, If I forget thy prowess, never more Be thy ungrateful son allowed to hear Thy green leaves rustle, or thy torrents roar! (141–4) From this country goes forth the ‘healing power’ which will cure ‘heart-sick Europe’, and the assurance is given (in italics, for emphasis, in the first printing): – The shock is given – The adversaries bleed – Lo, Justice triumphs! Earth is freed! Wordsworth sees this as the work of God, and the re-establishing of virtue, asking for it to be commemorated in future years, in ceremonies which will unite ‘the living generations and the dead’ (240). With the idea of observance and commemoration of the fallen, Wordsworth turns to the concept of God: ‘Nor will the God of peace and love/ Such martial service disapprove.’ God is not only a peaceful God, but one who is the God of battles: We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud And magnify thy name, Almighty God! But thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, – Yea, Carnage is thy daughter! (277–82)

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It was these lines which were parodied to deadly effect by Shelley in ‘Peter Bell the Third’, and produced for shocking effect by Byron in Don Juan. Both poets felt the inadequacy of Wordsworth’s language as a response to war. Similarly Landor, in ‘A Satire on Satirists’, described Wordsworth as ‘the Grasmere cuckoo’, who ‘Devoutly fathers slaughter upon God.’8 Shelley, Byron and Landor found Wordsworth an easy target. His lines seem grossly insensitive to the sufferings of war, some of which he had portrayed himself in the poems written during the 1790s. In the context of the Thanksgiving Odes volume, however, the lines were clearly intended to indicate the ways in which he regarded the conflict against Napoleon, and particularly the last battle, as necessary and justified – even as a crusade against evil. The religious element is explicit in the second of the Odes, ‘Composed in January 1816’. It was written, like Southey’s and Scott’s ‘vision’ poems in the form of a dream, in which the glorious form of St George descends upon a peaceful English landscape. Duty has been done, says the figure: I, the Guardian of this Land, Speak not now of toilsome duty; Well obeyed was that command – (25–7) Now is the time for celebration, for an exultation which is strangely mixed with a dirge, presumably of sadness for the fallen, Breathed from a soft and lonely instrument, That kindled recollections Of agonised affections; And, though some tears the strain attended, The mournful passion ended In peace of spirit, and sublime content! (70–77) Wordsworth then goes on (perhaps because his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon was trying to revive British history painting) to suggest that British painting and sculpture should emulate Greek art in commemorating heroism and victory – thus, in the process, suggesting that British feats of arms are comparable with those of ancient history: Victorious England! bid the silent Art Reflect, in glowing hues that shall not fade, These high achievements, – even as she arrayed

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With second life the deed of Marathon Upon Athenian walls: So may she labour for thy civic halls; And be the guardian spaces Of consecrated places, Graced with such gifts as Sculpture can bestow, . . . (82–90) Finally come the poets, who will ‘give the treasure to our British tongue’, so that the whole world will own that the progeny of this fair Isle Had power as lofty actions to achieve As were performed in Man’s heroic prime; (127–9) Recent actions are to be a stirring part of national history. Wordsworth was giving expression to the very powerful feeling that the events from 1808 to 1815 would go down to posterity as major contributions to the sense of national identity and European history. The pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra had revealed the extent of Wordsworth’s hatred for Napoleon and all that he represented. The two ‘Odes’ of 1816 echo the pamphlet’s condemnation of Napoleon as the arch-fiend, and the first contains a sustained religious invocation – ‘O enter now his temple gate!’ – not in some grand minster, says the poet, but ‘in the bosom’, the minds of people, where ‘the banner of our joy we will erect’ and Shall simply feel and purely meditate Of warnings – from the unprecedented might, Which, in our time, the impious have disclosed; (341–5) These evils of the ‘impious’ are to be an example for the future, and resisting them a duty. The lessons of history will be learned: Of mysteries revealed, And judgments unrepealed, – Of earthly revolution, And final retribution, (348–51) and this will be

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An offering not unworthy to find place, On this high DAY OF THANKS, before the Throne of Grace! (353–4) It is easy to disparage these poems, and they certainly do not seem to show Wordsworth’s habitual fine concern for the simplicities of ordinary human living. They are singularly remote from the poems written twenty years before, with their portraits of the sailor’s widow, or the discharged soldier, or of Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’. In their defence, it might be argued that Wordsworth was responding to a national mood, which was as tangible and real as the miseries of the years from 1793 to 1796: a mood of thankfulness and relief, and a celebration of the successful defence of liberty. Although liberty had been closely associated with France in the 1790s, by 1808 it had come to be seen as under threat from tyranny, shockingly from the same France. This tyranny was particularly evident in the domination of Spain by a foreign power, so that from 1808 to 1815, there was only one appropriate course of action – God sanctioned, righteous. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the praise of righteousness should sound like national self-righteousness.

9.2

Byron and warfare

No such sense of righteousness, or self-righteousness, is found in Byron. Indeed, he saw such things as allied to cant and humbug, and his attacks on Wordsworth and Southey in the years that followed 1815 are rich with his own awareness of all that was wrong with the British society which Wordsworth praised so fulsomely. Byron’s response to the end of the war was much more complex, therefore, although he did not go about like Hazlitt, drunk and unshaven with depression after Waterloo. The relationship between Wordsworth and Byron was never an easy one, and it later became distant and even hostile; although it is intriguing to notice that on the day of the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, they probably dined together at Samuel Rogers’s.9 They came to differ about poetry, and also about war: Byron was sensitive to the slaughter, usually played down the heroic, and never came to regard Napoleon as Satanic. The lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III describing him at Waterloo – ‘There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men’ (xxxvi) are puzzled and regretful rather than vengeful in the mode of Southey or triumphant in the thanksgiving of Wordsworth. Napoleon was misunderstood and reviled, a figure with whom Byron could sympathise in 1816, one whose spirit was ‘antithetically mixed’ and who was ‘extreme in all things’. He was

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‘Conqueror and captive of the earth’ (xxxvii) both literally and figuratively, one who had spent times both ‘battling with nations’ and ‘flying from the field’ (xxxviii), but who in the end became a tragic hero. Had he won at Waterloo, Byron notes in Don Juan, ‘It had been firmness’, but ‘now ’tis pertinacity’ (XIV.lxxxix–xc). This is not only a judgement on Napoleon, who lost, but on the fickleness of human favour: it is part of Byron’s ‘placing’ of Napoleon, above all those (including generals and statesmen) who responded to him or fought against him, or who participated in the peace process after he had gone from the scene. Byron’s view of warfare was affected by his embittered view of Britain in the disillusioned years that followed Waterloo. During the war itself, however, he had written poems in which the mood swings from black satire to admiration, to cynicism, and to sheer wonder at the extraordinary course of affairs. In the unfinished rhapsody, ‘The Devil’s Drive’ of 1814, there is terrible satire: “And what shall I ride in?” quoth Lucifer then – “If I followed my taste, indeed, I should mount in a waggon of wounded men, And smile to see them bleed. But these will be furnished again and again, . . . On a leap from Moscow to France, the devil hovers for a moment to look upon the battlefield of Leipsig: For the field ran so red with the blood of the dead, That it blush’d like the waves of hell! Then loudly, and wildly, and long laugh’d he: “Methinks they have here little need of me!” Earlier, in Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1812, the battlefields of Talavera (28 July 1809) and Albuera (16 May 1811) were treated almost together. Albuera was a battle which had not been fought when Byron visited that part of Spain in 1809 and in the time scale which he was following for his pilgrim Childe: the Albuera stanzas were therefore written with hindsight, in a strange tone of weary cynicism which grudgingly acknowledges the courage of the two armies but which ends by emphasising the transience of fame. It is the ‘glorious field of grief’, which suggests the normal combination of glory and sadness, but it is also ‘A scene where mingling foes should boast and bleed’. The word ‘boast’ here suggests a kind of martial swagger to which

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Byron was always sensitive, and its juxtaposition to ‘bleed’ makes a shocking commentary on human behaviour, almost as though there is nothing to war but boasting and bleeding. Having shocked the reader, however, he draws back, only to be dismissive again: Peace to the perish’d! may the warrior’s meed And tears of triumph their reward prolong! Till others fall where other chieftains lead Thy name shall circle round the gaping throng, And shine in worthless lays the theme of transient song. (I.xliii) The ‘gaping throng’ were presumably those who have newspapers and gazettes read to them, and the ‘worthless lays’ were poems written in honour of the battle. Byron was not only suggesting (in 1812, of all times) that these things were transient, but that they were also poor literature, and the thought that others will fall in other battles undermines the importance of the battle in which these soldiers died. The point is made in the stanza which follows, which points the finger at mercenaries: Enough of battle’s minions! let them play Their game of lives, and barter breath for fame: Fame that will scarce reanimate their clay, Though thousands fall to deck some single name. In sooth ’twere sad to thwart their noble aim Who strike, blest hirelings! for their country’s good, And die, that living might have proved her shame; Perish’d, perchance, in some domestic feud, Or in a narrower sphere wild Rapine’s path pursued. (I.xliv) There are several ideas jostling for space here: these are soldiers, first, who ‘barter breath for fame’, who die for the fame of having been slain in battle. Yet that is reduced to a ‘game’, the most solemn sacrifice turned into a gamble: the futility of it is given a sharper edge by the suggestion that honour comes, not to the thousands who fall, but to the ‘single name’, presumably the general. That idea, which is slipped in to the verse, is followed by a patronising glance at their end – ‘ ’twere sad to thwart their noble aim’ – and a ferocious use of the word ‘blest’ – there they go, bless them. The final insults are added in the last three lines, which produce an entirely new idea: that the soldiers who died might have

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been brawlers or even rapists. They are also ‘hirelings’, anticipating Byron’s expressed dislike of mercenary troops in a letter of 1822.10 Talavera had been fought when Byron was in Spain, so that the lines given to Childe Harold were legitimately part of the pilgrimage. The letter written to his mother from Gibraltar on 11 August 1809, two weeks after the battle, already suggests a scepticism about official reports, which was to remain a central element of Byron’s attitude to war: ‘in England they will call it a victory, a pretty victory! two hundred officers and 5000 men killed all English, and the French in as great force as ever.’11 In the poem the comments on the battle are pointed and political. They belong to the radical Byron who was to speak in the House of Lords, in the year that these verses were published, 1812, in favour of the stocking-weavers of Nottinghamshire. The last of the four verses (xxxix–xlii), in particular, suggests that soldiers are the broken tools of tyrants: There shall they rot – Ambition’s honoured fools! Yes, Honour decks the turf that wraps their clay! Vain Sophistry! in these behold the tools, The broken tools, that tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human hearts – to what? a dream alone. (xlii) The verse swings between the savage irony of line 2 and the straightforward condemnation of the remainder of the stanza. These are ‘honoured’, but they are the honoured fools of Ambition, suggesting a deeply ambivalent attitude towards warfare. Byron told his mother that ‘I should have joined the army but we have no time to lose before we get up the Mediterranean & Archipelago’, 12 but this probably refers not to some kind of enlistment, but to the way in which travellers joined an army and watched battles. However, as a civilian English milord in a country where his country’s armies were fighting a major war, Byron must have felt uneasy in his mind. His response is to undermine the whole business, combining a genuine interest in the actual fighting with a scorn for the politics behind it. Talavera is presided over by Death and Red Battle, before whose shrine ‘three potent nations meet’ (xxxix: the nations were Spain, Britain and France). The sight is magnificent, but Byron spoils it as a spectacle by reminding the reader that these are human beings with friends and brothers (it is all very splendid to look at, but . . .):

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By Heaven! it is a splendid sight to see (For one who hath no friend, no brother there) Their rival scarfs of mix’d embroidery, Their various arms that glitter in the air! (xl) The brilliant description of the armies as ‘rival scarfs’ suggests a bird’s eye view of the battle, with the coloured uniforms making patterns and winding like a scarf. Close up, of course, the whole thing is different. The poet asks political and human questions: Can despots compass aught that hails their sway? Or call with truth one span of earth their own, Save that wherein at last they crumble bone with bone? (xlii) This final line on Talavera has the effect of reducing all the effort of battle to a futile episode in the short life of a tyrant. Where will these monarchs and their policy be in a few hundred years’ time? What is the purpose of all this expenditure of energy? The sharpness of the contrasts is seen in a later presentation, that of the battle of Waterloo in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, with its description of the dancing followed by the partings, the early morning departures, the shrill of the Scottish pipes; and then, ‘the unreturning brave’, for whom a few dramatic days meant the difference between life and death. Byron had galloped across the battlefield, perhaps, as Leslie Marchand has suggested, imagining himself in a cavalry charge; but he remained throughout ‘silent, pensive, and in a musing mood’.13 The poem captures the battlefield emotions very successfully, acknowledging the awesome nature of the battle while lamenting its cost in human life. Later in the Canto, when he was approaching the Alps, Byron had shaken off the spell of the place, and saw Waterloo (as he had always regarded it) as the triumph of a coalition of lesser men against the greatest genius of the age. He deliberately offered a contrast between Waterloo and the battle for Swiss independence at Morat. Morat was ‘a spot should not be pass’d in vain . . . the proud, the patriot field’, compared favourably with the bad battles, Waterloo and ‘Cannae’s carnage’ (the word ‘carnage’ echoing Wordsworth). It was a part of Byron’s poetic and moral strategy to set contemporary feats of arms in a wider perspective, as part of the human endeavour which is subject to the great movements of history, and the vast forces

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of nature. The ocean, with which Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ends, is a reminder of this: Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin – his control Stops with the shore; . . . (IV.clxxix) So wars and battles, empires and nations, all seem insignificant beside the power of the sea: The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war – These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar. (clxxxi) The neat insertion of the claim to be ‘lord of thee’ undercuts ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves’ and the patriotic slogans of other such songs; and the references to the Armada and to Trafalgar are not only putting those two things together in a way which reduces both (two of the many sea-battles), but is a more precise reminder of what happened on each occasion – that the Armada was destroyed by a storm, and the prizes at Trafalgar were also lost in the high seas that followed the battle. It is from this perspective that Byron described his muse, at the end of Canto VI of Don Juan, as being about to ‘take a little touch at warfare’ (960). This is a deliberate piece of underplaying: it sounds as if the muse, having dealt with love, fancies a change. It is also part of the comic pretence that Byron is writing an epic. What follows, however, is far more than ‘a little touch’ at war poetry: it is a sustained and accurate rendering of a siege, in all its brutality and horror. Byron wrote of it to Thomas Moore: These cantos [VI–VIII] contain a full detail of the siege and assault of Ismael, with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business,

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your mercenary soldiery . . . With these things and these fellows, it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it against fearful odds, but the battle must be fought.14 Byron uses a war metaphor for writing a poem against war. It was also part of a more general attack against governments. As Jerome J. McGann has pointed out, Don Juan gained a new impetus at this point, in 1822, when Byron turned the poem in a political direction in order to attack what he thought of as ‘the degraded and hypocritical [leaders of] the present English generation.’15 The introduction lulls the reader into a frame of mind from which the next two cantos will be a rude awakening into a serious demonstration of the horrors of war. They give an account of the Siege of Ismail (which had taken place in 1790, during the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire) based on Chapter 30 of volume 2 of Gabriel de Castelnau’s Essai sur l’Histoire ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie, published in Paris in 1820. Byron’s general account of the battle follows Castelnau closely, with specific details, such as the arrival of the Russian general, Suvorov, taken almost word for word. Castelnau’s chilling account of Suvorov’s instructions from Prince Potemkin also appears: ‘Vous prendrez Ismaël à quel prix que ce soit’ is given a straight translation in Canto VII.xl (‘You will take Ismail at whatever price’), followed by Byron’s interpolation: “Let there be light!” said God, “and there was light!” “Let there be blood!” says man, and there’s a sea! (xli) In this grotesque juxtaposition, Prince Potemkin’s command becomes an antithesis of all that is creative and wholesome, a violent un-creating of humanity and a production of a sea of blood. It is one of the many ways in which Byron provides an ironic commentary on the events related in Castelnau’s history. One of the ways in which he does so is through the introduction of Homer. Homer had been condemned by William Crowe, in his Installation Poem for the Oxford Chancellor. Crowe’s attack on military poetry was appropriate to 1793, when it was written, but also determinedly unusual: politically necessary, but poetically untypical. Byron uses Homer more cleverly, as a reflecting point, a text which gives rise to all kinds of related understanding. The references to Homer come near the end of Canto VII,

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where the poem pauses, following Castelnau’s narrative, in which the failure of the first bombardment was followed by the arrival of Suvorov. Byron interjects again, as he does throughout: the action is followed by the reflection, followed in turn by the action. He acknowledges the primacy of Homer in matters of war poetry, with a rhetorical flourish which begins two stanzas (lxxix, lxx) – ‘Oh, thou eternal Homer!’ – but the contrast is between Homer’s magnificent poetry and the foul realities of modern war: The work of Glory still went on In preparations for a cannonade As terrible as that of Ilion, If Homer had found mortars ready made; But now, instead of slaying Priam’s son, We only can but talk of escalade, Bombs, drums, guns, bastions, batteries, bayonets, bullets, Hard words, which stick in the soft Muses’ gullets. (lxxviii) The deflection of the obvious point – that bombs and bayonets are horrible – into the idea that the words do not suit the muses is typical. Byron leaves the dreadful point ignored, thus forcing the reader to acknowledge it: modern warfare has become a matter of mortar-bombs rather than of individual combat. Similarly, ‘the work of Glory’ is an ironic use of the concept of war as glorious: it follows a stanza in which Byron reminds us that Suvorov was a man ‘who calculated life as so much dross’ and that he would take no notice of women’s tears. Glory is associated with ruthlessness. But, of course, glory was associated with warfare. Byron takes the argument one stage further by admitting this, and then undercuts it in a different way: Medals, ranks, ribbons, lace, embroidery, scarlet, Are things immortal to immortal man, As purple to the Babylonian harlot: An uniform to boys, is like a fan To women; there is scarce a crimson varlet But deems himself the first in Glory’s van. But Glory’s Glory; and if you would find What that is – ask the pig who sees the wind! (lxxxiv)

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This is no longer a glory that is juxtaposed to tears and misery, so much as a glory that is a young man’s dream, as fragile as the extravagant uniform. The repetition, ‘Glory’s Glory’ suggests its elusive or even meaningless quality: it can only be defined in its own terms, and if you want to know what those are, there follows a vulgar answer.16 Castelnau’s narrative describes the beginning of the siege, and the strategic importance of Ismail, situated on the left bank of the Danube: it was impossible for the Russians to advance into Bulgaria without capturing it. The initial attempt, on 30 November 1790, was a bombardment which failed because the batteries were badly constructed; the Russian fleet then attacked, and had to retire, though much bravery was shown on both sides. Sixteen days later, Suvorov arrived with orders to take the citadel at all costs: the assault was made on 22 December, and was bloodily successful. Castelnau’s account emphasised that ‘cet assaut d’Ismael est un évenement a nôter entre les plus hardis de ce genre’: Il donne une idée exacte de la nation qui l’a entrepris, du general qui l’a commande, et honore tous les militaires qui y ont pris part. 17 Byron recoils from this strictly military view. He questions the whole edifice of heroism and the purpose of warfare. His request for poetic help is not only ironic, but undermines the officialdom of war: Oh, ye great bulletins of Bonaparte! Oh, ye less grand long lists of kill’d and wounded! Shade of Leonidas, who fought so hearty, When my poor Greece was once, as now, surrounded! Oh, Caesar’s Commentaries! now impart, ye Shadows of glory! (lest I be confounded), A portion of your fading twilight hues, So beautiful, so fleeting, to the Muse. (lxxxii) With this reminder of the distance between war and the accounts of war, Byron moves into the final account of the siege in Canto VIII of Don Juan. The reader now comes to the siege with a mind full of reflection and with uncertainty about war and glory: All was prepared – the fire, the sword, the men To wield them in their terrible array, The army, like a lion from his den,

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March’d forth with nerve and sinews bent to slay, – A human Hydra, issuing from its fen To breathe destruction on its winding way, Whose heads were heroes, which cut off in vain, Immediately in others grew again.

The portrayal is cleverly distanced: after the previous canto, the ‘All was prepared’ comes with a chill horror. Yet the comparison with the hydra is absolutely right as a description – as if from a vantage point, or from the air – of a besieging army, its columns like hydra-heads on long necks winding towards the ramparts, and its heroes, the leaders of the ‘forlorn hope’ at the head of each column, cut down, only to be replaced by others. The action is bound to lead to death and destruction on a grand scale, and Byron takes the opportunity to undermine all the poetry of war, and especially Wordsworth’s. He uses the one moment at which Castelnau offers criticism of the operation. Describing the way in which Suvorov trained his troops before the final assault, he says that Suvorov showed the soldiers how to climb the walls, and instructed the recruits in how to use the bayonet, using fascines, or brushwood figures, made to look like Turks. Castelnau comments in a footnote that he thought ‘cet exercice, ces leçons de carnage’ below the dignity of a field marshal. 18 His word ‘carnage’ was Wordsworth’s: The columns were in movement one and all, But of the portion that attack’d by water, Thicker than leaves the lives began to fall, Though led by Arseniew, that great son a slaughter, As brave as ever faced both bomb and ball. “Carnage, (so Wordsworth tells you) is God’s daughter:” If he speak true, she is Christ’s sister, and Just now behaved as in the Holy Land. (VIII.ix) The images become more incongruous, the rhymes more terrible: Three hundred cannon threw up their emetic, And thirty thousand muskets flung their pills Like hail, to make a bloody diuretic . . . (VIII.xii)

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Between the action, the commentary goes on, the irony heavy (‘Yet I love glory; – glory’s a great thing’). The soldiers attack the battery: Being grenadiers, they mounted one by one, Cheerful as children climb the breasts of mothers, O’er the entrenchment and the palisade, Quite orderly, as if upon parade. (VIII.xv) There is something unreal and horrifying about the orderliness of it: as parade-ground drill was designed to instill habits of automatic obedience to orders, so Byron hints at the machine-like nature of the process, in which the soldiers seem to lose all humanity. Before that, however, the image of children climbing the mothers’ breasts is a reminder of another world of human tenderness and love. The contrast between war and other activities continues throughout the description which follows. Juan walks over the walls of Ismail, and the ‘thirst of glory . . . pervaded him’ – And here he was – who upon woman’s breast, Even from a child, felt like a child; (VIII.lii-liii) The most sustained example of the use of this contrast is the digression on Daniel Boone, the backwoods pioneer from Kentucky, who lived a simple, harmless and retired life, far from courts and kings, and far from battles and sieges. His children were ‘tall, and strong, and swift of foot’, and were ‘simple . . . not savage’ (lxvi): Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers, And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil; (lxvii) This digression is preceded by a quotation from the peaceful and mild Cowper, ‘God made the country, and man made the town’, wrenched grotesquely out of context but given a terrible meaning (Daniel Boone and his family contrasted with the siege), and it is ended with the jocular: So much for Nature: – by way of variety, Now back to thy great joys, Civilization!

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And the sweet consequence of large society, War, pestilence, the despot’s desolation, The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety, The millions slain by soldiers . . . (lxviii) The horrors of the final stages of the siege are then described, with Juan rescuing a small child from being slaughtered, and the cross flying over the city instead of the crescent: the crimson cross glared o’er the field, But red with no redeeming gore; the glow Of burning streets, like moonlight on the water, Was imaged back in blood, the sea of slaughter. (VIII.cxxii) The contrast is between the blood of Christ as a symbol of redemption and the blood on the streets, which (in a ghastly detail) throws back the glow of the fire. The image of ‘the sea of slaughter’ is brilliantly conceived as a representation of the terrible: it is as though the bodies of the slain make an uneven surface, with blood as plentiful as water. Byron was using the siege of Ismail for his own purposes: to discredit Wordsworth and Southey for their response to Waterloo; to question the universal admiration of Wellington; and to pour scorn on the superficiality of much of the literature of war, from the inaccurate Gazette to the poetry of patriotic rejoicing. The Don Juan war cantos pretend to be part of the epic structure of the poem – ‘My poem’s epic’ – but they subvert the epic tradition by describing modern warfare in all its ruthlessness. Suvorov’s mission to take the town at all costs is part of this modern approach to war: it involves men obeying orders that subordinate humanity to the need to win. This is why the intervention by Juan to save the little girl from being killed by two Cossacks is so important. It suggests that he has retained some humanity, some sense of right and wrong in the middle of all the grotesque horrors of war, of indiscriminate slaughter and individual brutality – signified in the animal ferocity of the wounded Turkish soldier who bites through the Achilles’ tendon of a Russian officer. Juan’s action is not just a good deed in a naughty world: it is a reminder of what war ought to be about, and usually (in modern times) is not. Juan’s care for a defenceless child shows that he has not become ruthless like everyone else, from Suvorov downwards (and

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behind him, the Russian imperialism of Catherine the Great). He has, in Byron’s creation of his role, been brave but also human. Byron approved of wars fought in defence of freedom, as his mention of Morat suggests. But writing in 1822, he was looking back at the Napoleonic and pre-Napoleonic Wars with an eye that saw the end result: all the bravery, all the deaths, all the real soldiery and chivalry, ending in the Congresses of Vienna and Verona (the latter the subject of ‘The Age of Bronze’, 1822–23), the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, and the glorification of Wellington. The contrast between Wellington, enriched by gifts from grateful nations, and the soldiers who died on the battlefields of the Peninsula and Waterloo, was one contrast which fuelled Byron’s indignation. This must be why the section in Don Juan which immediately follows the siege of Ismail, at the beginning of Canto IX, goes on at such length and so bitterly about Wellington. Seen after a gap of seven years, Waterloo was a carnage that had apparently solved nothing. Wellington had become successful, admired, and rich; Napoleon had died in 1821; Europe had gone back to its old state of hypocrisy, cant, and corruption in high places. Godwin’s detested monarchy and aristocracy had returned to their seats of power. Byron’s attitude to war in Don Juan reflects his distance from the war, with its bravery and its horror: he could see that it brought out the best in people, but that it usually brought out the worst. Byron forces the reader to look at what he or she would rather not contemplate, and in so doing he encourages respect for the chivalric soldier and horror at the brutal one. But his greatest condemnation is reserved for the generals and politicians, for those who say that a town must be taken ‘at all costs’, and for those who send armies into a campaign without counting the cost in human life. And throughout, Byron was continually revising his views, changing his awareness of history. His final discussion of Napoleon, in ‘The Age of Bronze’, written in December 1822 and January 1823, just after the ‘war’ cantos of Don Juan, continues the reflection on the age, on warfare and its aftermath, and on history. The excitements of the early years of the war have receded in the memory:

Reader! remember when thou wert a lad, Then Pitt was all; or, if not all, so much, His very rival almost deemed him such. (10–12)

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Wars are part of the ever-changing narrative of human history, but (as in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) everything is transient and ‘The theme is old/ Of “Dust to dust”’ (23–4). Napoleon had died in 1821: Byron remembered him as a Colossus, a Tamburlaine (Tamerlane), ‘the Tamer of the Great’, ‘whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones’ (67, 51). The petty restrictions that he suffered on St Helena, and the shabby treatment of his coffin, are both referred to (as evidence of British officialdom and petty-mindedness) before Byron returns to the memory of his greatness: Ye Alps, which viewed him in his dawning flights Hover, the victor of an hundred fights! Thou Rome, who sawst thy Caesar’s deeds outdone! Alas! Why past he too the Rubicon? The Rubicon of man’s awakened rights, To herd with vulgar kings and parasites? (135–40) This is a traditional retrospective view of Napoleon, believing in him as the child of the Revolution and the supporter of human rights, but lamenting his coronation and all that followed. The battles and the campaigns are briefly surveyed – Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Russia, the burning of Moscow, until, after Dresden, ‘exhausted Fortune quits the field,/ And Leipsic’s treason bids the unvanquished yield’ (207–08). Then comes the story of the ‘hundred days’: Oh, France! Retaken by a single march, Whose path was through one long triumphal arch! Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo, Which proves how fools may have their fortune too Won, half by blunder, half by treachery; (221–6) It is against the background of these stirring deeds and times that Byron goes on to describe the empty luxury of the Congress of Verona. The city which knew Catullus, Dante, and the Scaligers, the Capulets and the Montagues, now has to behold Alexander I, ‘the coxcomb Czar’ and the gluttonous Louis XVIII, together with all the other European power-brokers: Jews, authors, generals, charlatans, combine, While Europe wonders at the vast design:

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There Metternich, power’s foremost parasite, Cajoles; there Wellington forgets to fight; (712–15) Now Wellington is being attacked, not for winning Waterloo, but for being at a Congress. He has become one of the victors, presiding over a Europe that was much the same as before the Revolution. In ‘The Age of Bronze’, Byron’s position becomes a generalised attack, not on the horrors of war, but on the whole post-war situation, over which the recently dead Napoleon towers like a giant presence. Byron was of course right to attack poems that glorify war, or which call the nation to arms without regard to the consequences in human terms. His work often contrasts finely with the emptiness of rhetoric and the enthusiasm for the war of non-combatants. In portraying the siege of Ismail, or the events surrounding the battle of Waterloo, he demonstrates to the reader something of the realities of war which are too easily overlooked: the horrors of ‘total war’, the terrible process of a siege, the suffering of civilians, the dreadful aftermath of a battle. He makes Wordsworth appear pompous and triumphalist, and he injects a salutary dose of scepticism about war into the discourse of the time. But Byron’s anti-war poetry also has about it a touch of opportunism: he was writing in the time of the disillusion of peace, after the Peterloo massacre and the discontents of the poor which followed the years of war; he was writing during the peace conferences and after Napoleon’s death in 1821. His attacks on Wellington go on for too long in Canto IX of Don Juan, and his determination to minimise the importance of heroic action detracts from the very real points he is making about the horrors of war. Above all, perhaps, the war cantos of Don Juan came out of books: Byron was personally a brave man, but he had never been in a battle. For a more authentic and balanced account, we must turn to two soldiers who fought in the war, Napier and Clausewitz.

10 Ways of Seeing War: The Soldiers

10.1 William Napier: The History of the War in the Peninsula History, we know, is made up of different narratives, each of which tells its own version of events. The Napoleonic Wars were spectacular examples of this: they had an extraordinary after-life in the literature of the nineteenth century. The succession of defeat and victory had been so dramatic that the years that followed were spent in absorbing and digesting the great events of 1793 to 1815. Byron was only one of many poets who tried to understand the life of Napoleon, and to assess the results of the congresses that followed. There were lives of Napoleon, and accounts of the war, and an unusual number of reminiscences from soldiers themselves. Even during the campaigns themselves, letters from officers in the army were published in newspapers (sometimes containing information useful to the other side, so that Wellington was forced to issue a General Order against such letter-writing 1). Letters from Portugal and Spain, written during the march of the British Troops under Sir John Moore, by an Officer appeared as early as 1809; and shortly after the end of the war came the anonymous Journal of a Soldier of the 71st or Glasgow Regiment, Highland Light Infantry from 1806 to 1815. This went into a second edition in 1819 and was reprinted in 1822, 1828 and 1835. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s these narratives continued to appear, obviously satisfying a demand for first-hand accounts. Old soldiers must have told their stories, again and again: in the graveyard at Tynemouth Priory there is a headstone to Corporal Rollo of the Royal Artillery, with the description: ‘He held the lantern at the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.’ Like Goldsmith’s broken soldier or Scott’s Sergeant More M’Alpin, one pictures him retelling the story of his minor role in a great moment. Popular reminiscences of 197

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the war included the Recollections of Rifleman Harris (Old 95th) with anecdotes of his Officers and his Comrades, and John Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands, from 1809 to 1815. Pride in their achievements, however, contrasted with the anxiety about what had actually been achieved. Indeed, Elie Halévy described the mood after Waterloo as ‘the disillusionment of victory’. 2 There were many reasons for this: the continuation of income tax, and a bad harvest of 1816, which was followed by a fall in wages, unemployment and strikes of agricultural labourers. Disturbances of the peace were frequent, and the soldiers often had to be brought in to aid the magistrates in keeping order. The worst example of many such confrontations between the people and the army was ‘the Manchester massacre’ of 16 August 1819, ironically called Peterloo, which caused Shelley to write The Mask of Anarchy, with its fury at the British government and at the dragoons who had killed eleven people, including two women, and wounded many more. Suddenly the soldiery, who had been heroes four years before at Waterloo, had become cruel villains: in Mary Shelley’s words, the news of Peterloo ‘roused in [Percy Shelley] violent emotions of indignation and compassion.’ Although Percy Shelley’s poem was not published until 1832, its sentiments must have been shared by many British radicals of the time. A standing army, which Coleridge (and the opposition) had so distrusted in 1795, had once again become the instrument of tyranny. In the same disillusioned mood, Byron’s attack on Wellington in Don Juan, tedious though it was, had some force because it was not just personal abuse but a voicing of the concern – common after a long and arduous war – about what it had all been for: ‘who/ Save you and yours, have gain’d by Waterloo?’ (IX.iv). The years of economic hardship which followed the end of the war are reflected in Byron’s angry instruction to Wellington to hear his fame resounding through a ruined country: Go! hear it in your famished country’s cries! Behold the world! and curse your victories! (IX.ix) But in spite of such events as the Peterloo massacre, a curiosity about what actually happened, and the vicarious enjoyment of adventure, ensured that the accounts of the war continued to be a lively part of the literary scene of the 1820s. It was under these circumstances that William Napier wrote his magisterial History of the War in the Peninsula,

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published between 1828 and 1840. This is not only a great piece of historical writing, called by Brian Connell a ‘majestic saga, worthy of Gibbon or Carlyle’,3 but a work which places war and the military life very specifically in the context of honour and decency. For six volumes, Napier traces the history of the war, battle by battle and campaign by campaign; but the importance of his book is not just that it gives an accurate (and frequently first-hand) account of what went on, so much as its assessment of human character as it responds to situations of stress and emergency. According to Connell, ‘what Napier’s work did was to establish Wellington for all time as a national hero of superhuman stature.’4 This is certainly true, from the dedication comparing Wellington to Caesar onwards; but Wellington emerges as a hero through a complex process of comparison and analysis. He stands out from a cast of thousands, including senior and junior officers, ordinary soldiers, guerilla leaders, diplomats, bishops, counsellors, placemen, politicians, writers and the English people themselves, ‘a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions’ (I.10). Connell has described Napier’s stance as follows: He was that unlikely combination, a political radical in a highly conservative profession. He was vehemently critical of the politicians in power in London and had a considerable ideological admiration for Napoleon. His military hero was Sir John Moore, a general of liberal outlook, although he transferred his affections to Wellington, who was not. He is severe beyond reason with the British officers, such as Beresford, who trained the Portuguese divisions, and fails to give others of high competence, like Hill, their due. He does scant justice to the Spanish guerillas, none to the governing Junta, and much injustice to the beset Portuguese. He developed an almost absurd cult of Marshal Soult, able general though he was. All this adds to, rather than detracts from the force of his narrative.5 Connell concentrates here upon Napier’s political and military biasses: what is more important, I think, is the underlying predilections which produce those views. Napier’s admiration was reserved for those who, at times of crisis or difficulty, behaved with courage, integrity and honour. It may sound far-fetched, but the most proper comparison would be with Conrad’s portrayal of the heroes of his novels, and the ways in which they reveal strength, or weakness, or integrity, under pressure. In the final page of his six volumes, Napier states his philosophy, the

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system of values that has underpinned every sentence, and the description of every action: War is the condition of this world. From man to the smallest insect all are at strife, and the glory of arms which cannot be obtained without the exercise of honour, fortitude, courage, obedience, modesty and temperance, excites the brave man’s patriotism and is a chastening corrective for the rich man’s pride. (VI.688) Brave man is opposed to rich man; patriotism to pride. This system of values may be seen in his putting-down of Lord Melville, the type of selfish and stupid parliamentarian: ‘a British statesman was not ashamed to declare in parliament that the worst men make the best soldiers; and this odious, narrow-minded, unworthy maxim, had its admirers’ (I.72–3). Napier’s contempt was reserved for those who made such sweeping declarations, especially non-combatants, or for those who propped up rotten governments, such as those of the Spanish Juntas: ‘Manifestoes, decrees, and lofty boasts, like a cloud of canvas covering a rotten hull, made a gallant appearance, but real strength and firmness were nowhere to be found’ (I.xi). In marked contrast to Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for Spain in On the Convention of Cintra, Napier described the Spanish insurrection of 1808 as ‘a strange spectacle’: patriotism was seen supporting a vile system of government; a popular assembly working for the restoration of a despotic monarch; the higher classes seeking a foreign master; the lower armed in the cause of bigotry and misrule . . . (I.xi) He thought that the Spanish revolutionaries had an ‘absurd confidence’ in their ability to beat the French, but that it was not supported ‘by wisdom, activity, or valour’ (I.135).6 He also thought the Spanish generals incompetent and boastful. To the charge of braggadocio was added that of cruel and dishonourable conduct: a Spanish nobleman, Don Thomas Morla, defended the ill-treatment of French troops after the battle of Baylen in 1808, which Napier described as follows: ‘his reasoning was worthy of the man who so soon afterwards betrayed his own country with the same indifference to honour that he displayed on this occasion’ (I.125). Similarly Hookham Frere, the British envoy to the Spanish junta whose over-confident reports led to Moore’s advance into Spain in 1808, was ‘although a person of some scholastic attainments’, one who ‘greatly overrated his own talent for public affairs’ (I.438).

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By the side of such people, soldiers were straightforward and courageous, doing their best in spite of the politicians. Wellington, in Napier’s introductory remarks to the first volume, not only ‘resisted the fierceness of France’ but ‘sustained the weakness of three inefficient cabinets’ (I.xii). When he comes to a discussion of the plans of the politicians in 1808, before Cintra and the retreat of Moore to Corunna, Napier writes: I judged it necessary . . . to make an exposition of the previous preparations and plans of the cabinet, lest the reader’s attention not being fully awakened to the difficulties cast in the way of the English generals by the incapacity of the government, should, with hasty censure, or niggard praise, do the former injustice; for, as a noble forest hides many noisome swamps and evil things, so the duke of Wellington’s laurels have covered the innumerable errors of the ministers. (I.186) This is cartoon-like, in the manner of Gillray, likening the politicians to swampy creatures. Sometimes he condemns them outright, as in his severe portrayal of Spencer Perceval in Volume IV, which Wellington thought too damning: ‘Narrow, harsh, factious, and illiberal, in every thing relating to public matters, this man’s career was one of unmixed evil’ (IV.142). At other times, Napier is just dismissive: ‘Charles IV . . . a weak and inefficient old man’ (I.12); ‘Godoy. . .a mild, good-natured man, although a sensual and corrupt one’ (I.12); ‘The bishop of Oporto, a meddling ambitious priest’ (I.237). In contrast, the death of Sir John Moore is celebrated in one soldier’s magnificent tribute to another: Thus ended the career of Sir John Moore, a man whose uncommon capacity was sustained by the purest virtue, and governed by a disinterested patriotism more in keeping with the primitive than the luxurious age of a great nation. . . . A soldier from his earliest youth, he thirsted for the honours of his profession, and feeling that he was worthy to lead a British army, hailed the fortune that placed him at the head of the troops destined for Spain. The stream of time passed rapidly, and the inspiring hopes of triumph disappeared, but the austerer glory of suffering remained; with a firm heart he accepted that gift of a severe fate, and confiding in the strength of his genius, disregarded the clamours of presumptuous ignorance; opposing sound military views to the foolish projects so insolently thrust upon him by the ambassador, he conducted a long and arduous retreat with sagacity, intelligence, and fortitude. No insult could disturb, no falsehood deceive him, no remonstrance shake his determination;

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fortune frowned without subduing his constancy; death struck, and the spirit of the man remained unbroken when his shattered body scarcely afforded it a habitation. (I.501) The language is measured, balanced and rhetorical: Napier has made Moore into a tragic hero, one who was the victim of ‘a severe fate’, and for whom ‘the austerer glory of suffering remained.’ He is contrasted with the politicians at home: ‘the ill success of the British arms was a topic, upon which many orators in both houses of parliament expatiated with great eloquence, but the discussions were chiefly remarkable, as examples of acute debating without any knowledge of facts’ (II.2). As the narrative continues, Moore’s stature rises in contrast to the ‘indefatigable folly’ of Frere (II.131) and the incompetence of the Spanish general Cuesta. Napier’s condemnation of these people is based upon Frere’s unwarranted interference (‘he had found leisure to meddle in all the intrigues of the day’, II.376) and Cuesta’s unfitness for command (‘who had shown himself alike devoid of talent and real patriotism, whose indolence and ignorance of his profession had banished all order and discipline from his army, and whose stupid pride had all but caused its destruction’, II.411). Order and discipline were two of the qualities which Napier admired. ‘Discipline’, he wrote in his final volume, ‘has its root in patriotism’ (VI.215). He was horrified by the violence of French soldiers at the siege of Oporto, which Soult tried to prevent (II.207), and warm in his admiration of Soult’s conduct on a later occasion, after the surrender of Valencia in 1812: He arrested all dangerous persons, especially the friars, and sent them to France, and he rigorously deprived the people of their military resources; but he proportioned his demands to their real ability, kept his troops in perfect discipline, was careful not to offend the citizens by violating their customs, or shocking their religious prejudices, and endeavoured, as much as possible, to govern through the native authorities. (IV.303) Unlike some poets, Napier knew that the British often fell short of such behaviour. After the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, ‘The excesses committed by the allied troops were very disgraceful’ (IV.389). After the fall of San Sebastian in 1813, which was followed by wholesale destruction, he reflected on the character of the soldier, unusually preferring the modern to the ancient:

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It is a common but shallow and mischievous notion, that a villain makes never the worse soldier for an assault, because the appetite for plunder supplies the place of honour; as if the compatibility of vice and bravery rendered the union of virtue and courage unnecessary in warlike matters. . . . The modern soldier is not necessarily the stern bloody-handed man the ancient soldier was, there is as much difference between them as between the sportsman and the butcher; the ancient warrior, fighting with the sword and reaping the harvest of death when the enemy was in flight, became habituated to the act of slaying. The modern soldier seldom uses his bayonet, sees not his peculiar victim fall, and exults not over mangled limbs as proofs of personal prowess. (VI.216) Napier wanted the plundering of a town to be made a criminal offence, arguing that soldiers ought to be paid extra instead. He was revolted by indiscipline, and by cruelty from any source, such as that practised by the Portuguese Raymundo, ‘a turbulent and cruel fellow’ (II.147); he recoiled from the Spanish behaviour after Talavera, when they refused food to the starving British army, and beat out the brains of the wounded French on the battlefield, until the British soldiers fired upon them (II.411). He hated lying, as well as incompetence: the Spanish Junta maintained in 1810 that ‘provision and forage, in vast quantities’ were being delivered, ‘when, in fact, there was not even an effort making to collect any.’ Wellington therefore prudently took his soldiers back into Portugal. The Junta’s reaction was predictable: ‘with the malevolence of anger engendered by fear’, they ‘calumniated the man to whom, only ten days before, they had addressed the most fulsome compliments, and to whose courage and skill they owed their own existence’ (II.441). Napier’s prejudices are never disguised. This is a soldier’s history, in which soldierly qualities are admired, ‘having enough of the soldier in me’, as he writes in the preface to Volume IV, ‘to like a brave enemy’ (IV.xv). After the description of the taking of Badajoz, in 1812, which is an almost Homeric set piece, he seems to echo Shakespeare’s soldiers in Henry V, thinking of the dead, ‘some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left’: Let any man picture to himself this frightful carnage taking place in a space of less than a hundred square yards. Let him consider that the slain died not all suddenly, nor by one manner of death; that some perished by steel, some by shot, some by water, that some were crushed

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and mangled by heavy weights, some trampled upon, some dashed to atoms by the fiery explosions; that for hours this destruction was endured without shrinking, and that the town was won at last; let any man consider this and he must admit that a British army bears with it an awful power. And false would it be to say that the French were feeble men, for the garrison stood and fought manfully and with good discipline behaving worthily. Shame there was none on any side. (IV.432) Although the rhetoric is similar, Napier’s purpose is different from Shakespeare’s: he wants to bring forward the horrors that we may admire those who took part, who faced the awfulness without flinching. He has a respect, even a kind of awe, when faced with the demands of a siege, with its artillery, its scaling ladders, and its forlorn hope; his respect makes Byron’s chirpy description of the siege of Ismail seem too ironic. Napier praises good generalship, on both sides, and the brave execution of orders. He also has an appreciation of the great movement of the war, the uncertainty of it, the desperate early campaigns of Moore and Wellington followed by the gradual coming to terms with the enemy. In Volume IV he sums up the war to 1811, ‘when, after many changes of fortune, the chances had become more equal’ (IV.362). He reminds the reader of campaign after campaign, battle after battle: These things I would have the reader reflect upon, because they are the proofs of what it is the main object of this history to inculcate, namely that English steel, English gold, English genius, English influence, fought and won the battle of Spanish independence; and this not as a matter of boast, although it was very glorious! but as a useful lesson of experience. On the other hand also we must wonder at the prodigious strength of France under Napoleon, that strength which could at once fight England and Austria, aim at the conquest of the Peninsula, and the reduction of Russia at the same moment of time, and all with good hope of success. (IV.363–4) Napier was not uncritical of British soldiers. His description of Beresford’s handling of the battle of Albuera led to a prolonged and acrimonious controversy in which Beresford published three pamphlets, two anonymously and one under his own name. Napier responded in a long ‘Letter to General Lord Viscount Beresford’ at the beginning of his final volume: ‘the object of your literary labours is to convince the world that at

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Campo Mayor you proved yourself an excellent general, and that at Albuera you were superlatively great! Greater even than Caesar!’ (VI.xx). His admiration was reserved for those on either side who acted honourably and bravely, such as Edward Freer and Thomas Lloyd, both soldiers in Napier’s own regiment, the forty-third, who were killed at the battle of the Nivelle in November 1813. Having eulogised Freer, Napier turns to Lloyd: In him also were combined mental and bodily powers of no ordinary kind. . . . though gentle he was valiant, ambitious, and conscious of his fitness for great exploits . . . It was thus at the age of thirty, that the good the brave the generous Lloyd died. (VI.361–2) In the final volume, in which Wellington’s army crosses the Pyrenees into France, Napier begins to reflect on the changes and chances of war: those who died when the campaigns were almost over, the problems of strategy, the wider political implications of the campaign, and the ungratefulness of a civilian population. ‘Thus the war terminated’, he writes at the end of the narrative section, ‘and with it all remembrance of the veteran’s services’ (VI.656). Its continuance into 1814 had been necessary because in spite of the victory of Leipsig, the 1813 coalition of Austria, Russia and Prussia could not (on past experience) be trusted to hold: Wellington held cheap both the military and political proceedings of the coalesced powers. “I would not move a corporal’s guard in reliance upon such a system,” was the significant phrase he employed to express his contempt. (VI.167) The final stages, in France itself, naturally brought to Napier’s mind Caesar’s De Bello Gallico: ‘Had Caesar halted because his soldiers were fatigued, Pharsalia would have been but a common battle’ (VI.178). It also reminded his readers that ‘A general’s capacity is sometimes more taxed to profit from a victory than to gain one’ (VI.169). He also paralleled Clausewitz in introducing the term ‘genius’ to describe generalship of the highest order: Lord Wellington with a vastness of conception and a capacity for arrangement and combination equal to his opponent, possessed in a high degree that daring promptness of action, that faculty of inspiration for suddenly deciding the fate of whole campaigns with which

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Napoleon was endowed beyond all mankind. It is this which especially constitutes military genius. (VI.574) That genius, in Wellington’s case, was allied to hard work and caution: ‘Sometimes he was indebted to fortune, sometimes to his natural genius, but always to his untiring industry, for he was emphatically a pains-taking man’ (VI.683). Always, of course, he had to contend with the politicians, especially British ones: The duke of Wellington’s campaigns furnish lessons for generals of all nations, but they must always be peculiarly models for British commanders in future continental wars, because he modified and reconciled the great principles of art with the peculiar difficulties which attend generals controlled by politicians who depending upon private intrigue prefer parliamentary to national interests. (VI.682) Napier’s history deserves attention, not only because of its detailed description of the action, but because it helped shape a national perception of the noble soldier, either as a young man killed in his prime, or as a strategist, whose command of an army called forth all the powers of a master, amounting to a genius for war. Both of these models are set against other less worthy human attributes, those of self-seeking, greed, stupidity, pride, cowardice and self-justification. Finally, however, Napier introduces another element into the equation: fortune. As if in a Greek or Shakespearian tragedy, a small mistake can turn the fate of nations: Fortune however always asserts her supremacy in war, and often from a slight mistake such disastrous consequences flow that in every age and every nation the uncertainty of arms has been proverbial. (VI.687) The example he gives is of Napoleon’s march on Madrid in 1808, before he knew the position of the British army. Under Moore, that army had marched into Spain, and Napoleon was forced to march north to chase it to Corunna. Napier saw it as a pivotal point of the war in the Peninsula, and used it as a belated justification for Moore’s strategy: If he had not been forced to turn against Moore, Lisbon would have fallen, Portugal could not have been organized for resistance, and the jealousy of the Spaniards would never have suffered Wellington

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to establish a solid base at Cadiz: that general’s after-successes would then have been with the things that are unborn. It was not so ordained. Wellington was victorious, the great conqueror was overthrown. (VI.687) His final word is reserved for Napoleon, who is treated to a soldier’s farewell, quite unlike the hatred found in the work of Wordsworth or Southey. Napoleon is the great man brought down by a combination of circumstances which he could not have foreseen and which lay in what Napier calls, anticipating Hardy, ‘the unknown combinations of infinite power’: Napoleon the greatest man of whom history makes mention, Napoleon the most wonderful commander, the most sagacious politician, the most profound statesman, lost by arms, Poland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and France. Fortune, that name for the unknown combinations of infinite power, was wanting to him, and without her aid the designs of man are as bubbles on a troubled ocean. (VI.688) The last simile, Johnsonian in its resonance, comes at the end of six volumes of great detail and precision, as though Napier, writing twenty years after the events, can see them as a part of a great pattern, in which there are powers greater than human endeavour: but that endeavour brings out the best and the worst in human beings, so that the war in the Peninsula becomes a great moral journey, in which we pass figures of great nobility and grace, together with a cast of charlatans, cowards and braggarts, all subject to the swings of fortune, in which their great plans and counter-plans are like bubbles on the ocean.

10.2

Carl von Clausewitz: On War

Carl von Clausewitz’s On War was published in the years 1832–34, following his untimely death in 1831. The publication dates (like Napier’s of 1828–40) obscure the fact that he belonged to the same period as the major European Romantic writers, and that his ideas were the result of extraordinary experience gained between 1792 and 1815. He saw the war from beginning to end: he was a boy soldier in the Prussian army fighting against the French from 1793 to 1795; he fought in the battle of Auerstadt in 1806, and was taken prisoner; and he was at Wavre and Ligny, on the left of the allied army, during the Waterloo campaign. Between the last two campaigns, he had resigned from the Prussian army in 1812, when

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Frederick William III concluded a peace with France: he joined the army of the Emperor Alexander I of Russia, and was present at the battle of Borodino. He died prematurely of cholera in 1831, leaving behind what he described as ‘a rather formless mass’ and ‘a shapeless mass of ideas’. 7 It bears something of the same relationship to its subject as Coleridge’s writings do to the theory of poetry: one of the reasons why they are so interesting is precisely because they are not finished, formed and distilled, but are rather the accumulated awarenesses of an ever-changing mind. He is the greatest of writers on war for two reasons: the first is that he had accumulated, through twenty-two years of war, a wide variety of experiences on the battlefield; the second is that he had time to reflect upon them, first as a student at the newly founded War College in Berlin (he graduated first in the class of 1803), and later as a prisoner of war after 1806. He also had a fine sense of the heroic and dramatic elements of war, as in his description of Napoleon’s throwing in the reserves at Waterloo: In that most famous of all battles, Belle-Alliance [the Prussian name for Waterloo] Bonaparte staked his last remaining strength on an effort to retrieve a battle that was beyond retrieving; he spent every last penny, and then fled like a beggar from the battlefield and the Empire. (252) The uncertainties of war, like those of a game of chance, were never far from Clausewitz’s mind. He knew that a great commander needed luck as well as skill, and that ‘guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war’ (85). Commanders have ‘an imperfect knowledge of the situation’, and ‘no other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance’ (84, 85). Into this uncertainty Clausewitz placed his soldiers and their commanders, with an instinctive awareness of the grandeur and the misère of war. More dramatically than elsewhere, there were winners and losers, tragic heroes and selfish cowards. Like Napier, he had seen armies in action. His work commands respect because of his long service. He knew, for example, that emotions became a part of the tactical scene: ‘if war is an act of force, the emotions cannot fail to be involved’ (76). War does not set armies against armies: it puts individuals against individuals, either in the combat of bayonet and sword, or through the opposition of great generals. The sense of war as pitting one individual against another is present on the first page: ‘War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale’ (75). This is accompanied by an acute awareness of what war involves:

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Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine that is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed. (75) War is not only brutal, but it involves passion. Clausewitz sees wishful thinkers as imagining war as ‘resulting merely from a rational act on the part of their governments and to conceive of war as gradually ridding itself of passion’ (76). This, which he describes scornfully as ‘a kind of war by algebra’ (76) was disproved by the war of 1792 to 1815: ‘theorists were already beginning to think along such lines when the recent wars taught them a lesson’ (76). He therefore begins by emphasising three things: struggle, experience and passion. In this analysis, the measurement of a nation is to be seen in terms of personal effort: the power of resistance is expressed as ‘the product of two inseparable factors, viz. the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will’ (77). War becomes, at least in part, the expression of a national effort, an assertion of a difference which seeks to assert itself, often in competition with, or in opposition to, another national identity or spirit. War, as Clausewitz said ‘is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means’ (69). The simplicity of that statement conceals a spectrum of ideas, involving self-hood, desire and hope. A policymaker proposes a situation (either of peace or of conquest) which would be desirable, and engineers the means to bring about that situation. The doctrine sounds more threatening than in fact it is: Clausewitz was here wanting to emphasise that war should not just be a matter of armies fighting one another, and that it should not be left to the military alone: ‘war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy ’ (88). The insistence on the close relationship between war and national policy was a safeguard against an irresponsible conflict. It also registers another of the lessons which Clausewitz had learned from the campaigns of 1792 to 1815, in which the national politics and character affected the outcome. The ability of the French revolutionary government to assemble a patriot army to repel a Prussian invasion at Valmy, and then to use a levée en masse to provide the soldiers for Napoleon’s armies, was a remarkable example of the national will. If governments and the social structure were important to Clausewitz, so were individuals. Individuals require motives to make them act (strong ones in the case of war); some are bolder than others; and war is something

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which, by its very essence, has what Clausewitz calls ‘a subjective nature’ (p. 85). In war, chance and courage go together: If we now consider briefly the subjective nature of war – the means by which war has to be fought – it will look more than ever like a gamble. The element in which war exists is danger. The highest of all moral qualities in time of danger is certainly courage. Now courage is perfectly compatible with prudent calculation but the two differ nonetheless, and pertain to different psychological forces. Daring, on the other hand, boldness, rashness, trusting in luck are the only variants of courage, and all these traits of character seek their proper element – chance. In short, absolute, so-called mathematical, factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. (85–6) The most obvious feature of these initial descriptions is the way in which they stress the human side of war and its unpredictable nature. Its complexity is shown by the various forces which go to make up its dominant tendencies – what Clausewitz called ‘a remarkable trinity’ composed of violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone. (89) The trinity is thus instinctive, creative, and yet also subject to reason: instinctive and creative within that subordination. Creativity is discussed in the third chapter of Part I of On War, entitled ‘On military genius’. Clausewitz defined genius as ‘a very highly developed mental aptitude for a particular occupation’ (100). He was drawing on his experience of the Napoleonic Wars in assessing these gifts of mind and temperament: they involve courage, powers of intellect, and determination. And because war so often consists of the unforeseen, a military genius needs two primary qualities above all: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the

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courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead. The first of these qualities is described by the French term coup d’oeil; the second is determination. (102) For the coup d’oeil of a military genius, Clausewitz uses the same term that Wordsworth uses for his imagination, ‘the inward eye’, although in this case ‘the concept merely refers to the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection’ (102). This suggests a further comparison with the instinctual poetic imagination, grasping what the mind would ordinarily miss. However, the use of the French term is perhaps indicative of Clausewitz’s preoccupation with the Napoleonic genius, and so is his further definition of determination as ‘courage d’esprit’. To these (Clausewitz often thinks in threes) are added ‘steadiness of nerve’ (104). Steadiness of nerve in battle becomes something that is close to inspiration: It is the impact of the ebbing of moral and physical strength, of the heart-rending spectacle of the dead and wounded, that the commander has to withstand – first in himself, and then in all those who, directly or indirectly, have entrusted him with their thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears. As each man’s strength gives out, as it no longer responds to his will, the inertia of the whole gradually comes to rest on the commander’s will alone. The ardour of his spirit must rekindle the flame of purpose in all others; his inward fire must revive their hope. (104–5) The inward fire and the ability to inspire soldiers (which are two sides of the same thing, inner and outer) are elements of the study of character which forms an important part of Clausewitz’s analysis. His discussion of inspiration in battle, at the same time, sees the double-sided nature of warlike energy: Of all the passions that inspire men in battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honour and renown. . . . The abuse of these noble ambitions has certainly inflicted the most disgusting outrages on the human race; nevertheless their origins entitle them to be ranked among the most elevated in human nature. In war they act as the essential breath of life that animates the inert mass. (105)

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The idea of a quality that ‘animates’ is one that has affinities with other elements of Romantic period psychodrama, here given added significance by its life-and-death context. It concentrates attention on the qualities of an individual that make him a good leader of men: ‘we may well ask whether history has ever known a great general who was not ambitious’ (105), a sentence which points back to honour and renown. Allied to these qualities are strength of mind, which Clausewitz associates with self-control and with human dignity, ‘the urge to act rationally at all times’ (106). The result is a striking emphasis on the importance of ‘character’. Clausewitz divides men into four kinds: 1. the stolid or phlegmatic. ‘They are seldom strongly motivated, lack initiative and consequently are not particularly active; on the other hand they seldom make a serious mistake.’ 2. those who are sensitive but calm. ‘Trifles can suddenly stir them to act, whereas great issues are likely to overwhelm them.’ 3. men whose passions are easily inflamed. ‘Inflammable emotions, feelings that are easily roused, are in general of little value in practical life, and therefore of little value in war. Their impulses are strong but brief.’ 4. men whose passions are strong, deep, and concealed. These ‘do not react to minor matters, who will be moved only very gradually, not suddenly, but whose emotions attain great strength and durability . . . these are the men who are best able to summon the titanic strength it takes to clear away the enormous burdens that obstruct activity in war.’ (106, 107) The ‘enormous burdens that obstruct activity’ include the important idea of ‘friction’. ‘Friction’ includes all the things which intervene between the giving of an order and its successful execution – danger, physical effort and accumulated difficulties. ‘Everything in war is very simple: but the simplest thing is difficult’ (119). Strength of character thus involves perseverance and firmness; but firmness must not degenerate into obstinacy, or a reluctance to admit that one is wrong (108). Allied to this sense of strength, Clausewitz proposes the most surprising quality of all for his good commander: imagination. It occurs during a discussion of the relationship between warfare and terrain, for a good general will have ‘a quick, unerring sense of locality’ together with ‘a vivid picture of the road-network, the river-lines and the mountain ranges, without ever losing a sense of his immediate surroundings’ (110). This gift for ‘quickly and accurately grasping the topography of any area’ can only be achieved by ‘the mental gift that we call imagination’:

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A poet or painter may be shocked to find that his Muse dominates these activities as well: . . . But however remote the connection, his skill must still derive from this natural gift, for if imagination is lacking it would be difficult to combine details into a clear, coherent image. We also admit that a good memory can be a great help; but are we then to think of memory as a separate gift of the mind, or does imagination, after all, imprint those pictures on the memory more clearly? (109–10) Clausewitz does not answer the question; but it is clear that he is interested in the kind of speculations about memory and imagination that interested the German philosophers of the time, and through them Coleridge: the imagination as a unifying power, and the production, from various sources, of ‘a clear, coherent image’. His reference to the poet or painter suggests his awareness of such theories, although he hastens to inject a note of high seriousness into what might easily be mis-read: We attribute this ability [the sense of ‘locality’] to the imagination; but that is about the only service that war can demand from this frivolous goddess, who in most military affairs is liable to do more harm than good (110). In spite of this, the almost instinctive awareness of a situation – of the terrain itself, of the possibilities of manoeuvre – is Clausewitz’s hallmark of a great general. He believes that there is a process which involves memory and something else – a sense of wholeness, vividness and creativity. It is this which marks out the truly great commander, and Clausewitz has no hesitation in using the word ‘genius’ to describe him. ‘Appropriate talent is needed at all levels’, he writes, ‘but history and posterity reserve the name of “genius” for those who have excelled in the highest positions – as commanders-in-chief – since here the demands for intellectual and moral powers are vastly greater’ (111). He distinguishes between ‘talent’ and ‘genius’: the latter is a different order of mental and emotional activity, requiring ‘a sense of unity and a power of judgment raised to a marvellous pitch of vision’ (112). Genius can make its own rules, and the soldier who serves under an indifferent commander has a poor time of it: Pity the soldier who is supposed to crawl among these scraps of rules, not good enough for genius, which genius can ignore, or laugh at. No; what genius does is the best rule, and theory can do no better than show how and why this is the case. (136)

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Clausewitz’s sense of genius is connected with an intensity which is associated with battle. He portrays the novice soldier as facing ‘layers of increasing intensity of danger’ (112), as the epic of a battle takes its course. Battles are confusing: ‘all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are’ (140). Yet battles depend, not on luck, but on ‘the skill of the commander, the experience and courage of the troops, and their patriotic spirit’ (186). These military virtues are a careful balance of contending forces: the tendency to violence in a soldier must be countered by obedience, order, rule and method (187). Boldness in a commander must be accompanied by a reflective mind (190), although ‘a distinguished commander without boldness is unthinkable’ (192). The ultimate testing ground for commanders is the battlefield itself, and Clausewitz devotes a whole book (IV) to it. Significantly, for he had been present at many battles, he likens a battle not to something spectacular but to slowly smouldering gunpowder: The troops move calmly into position in great masses deployed in line and depth. Only a relatively small proportion is involved, and is left to conduct a firefight for several hours, interrupted now and then by minor blows – charges, bayonet assaults and cavalry attacks – which cause the fighting to sway to some extent to and fro. Gradually the units engaged are burned out, and when nothing is left but cinders, they are withdrawn and others take their place. So the battle slowly smolders away, like damp gunpowder . . . (226) This is a battlefield as seen by a chief-of-staff (which Clausewitz became) rather than by a lieutenant: it seems almost detached from the suffering, bravery and slaughter, although at other times he showed himself well able to appreciate such things. And his sense of victory or defeat underlines again his insight into the psychological effects of warfare: once the outcome has been determined, the loss continues to increase, and reaches its peak only at the end of the action. This becomes the means of achieving the margin of profit in the destruction of the enemy’s physical forces which is the real purpose of the engagement. Loss of order and cohesion often makes even the resistance of individual units fatal for them. The spirit of the whole is broken; nothing is left of the original obsession with triumph or disaster that made

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men ignore all risks; for most of them danger is no longer a challenge to their courage, but harsh punishment to be endured. (231) Thus when an army suffers a bad defeat, ‘everything collapses together’ (232). There is always a moment, a critical phase, during which the action turns. The action itself usually lasts half a day when a division of eight to ten thousand men are involved, twice as long for three or four divisions, and a large army even longer. The struggle is seen as a definable period, as in a drama with a beginning, a middle and an end. It is a period in which the aims of war – the destruction of the enemy – become ‘concentrated war’, the centre of a whole campaign (258). It is ‘the bloodiest solution’ to the conflict, and ‘as a human being the commander will recoil from it’ (259). Nevertheless, Clausewitz argues, battle is necessary: ‘We are not interested in generals who win victories without bloodshed’: The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms. (260) Battles have to be undertaken, horrible though they are; war has to be undertaken too, although it produces misery and hardship on a scale never found in peace-time. But Clausewitz’s point is that of Captain Pasley and of all soldiers: without adequate preparation for war, nations are at the mercy of the people with the sharp swords. And because of its importance, the art of war has to be taken seriously: so that the thoroughness of his treatise is justified by the subject. That subject is politics, and its continuation by other means; strategy, and the practical matters of warfare; and the relationship between war and the individual self, the psychology of fear and courage, of winning and losing. It is easy to be a commander when things are going well, but when they are going badly he needs strength of will and command of inner resources. In what is aptly called ‘the theatre of war’, in an action which has its own unity and time span, he has to play his crucial part. Clausewitz is among the great writers of the period. He understands human motives, trust and hope, physical exhaustion and tragic despair, victory and exultation; and he is a master at describing the psychodrama of the great conflict of the age. He understood the relationship of war to its aims, never ceasing to emphasise that war must not determine

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policy, but that it was ‘an instrument of policy’ (610); he understood the importance of imagination, and recognised genius; and above all, he sought to provide a disciplined understanding of an art which was itself a necessary discipline: We wished to gain a clear understanding of what we want and should do in such a war. We would emphasize the essential and general; leave scope for the individual and accidental; but remove everything arbitrary, unsubstantiated, trivial, far-fetched, or supersubtle. (632–3) The result is a book, which, as Clausewitz himself suggests (with perhaps a hint of a smile) draws attention to war as an art, as worthy of a rigorous theory, based on his own extraordinary experience, and on the immense wars of his own time. His interest in the psychology of war, from the morale of an army to the genius of its general, makes him a writer whose work is a central expression of the romanticism of conflict, and of all that is implied in that concept.

11 Afterwords: De Quincey, Ruskin and Hardy

Napier and Clausewitz were two of many writers whose work compelled visions and revisions of the Napoleonic Wars during the nineteenth century. The immensity of those wars, and their spectacular progress, from the early years of defending the Revolution to the final years of resistance to French domination of Europe, meant that they appeared in novels by writers as various as Stendhal, Hugo, Thackeray and Tolstoy; while writing about war itself continued to exercise strategists, historians and moralists. This final chapter selects three writers as evidencing this interest. They have one thing in common: writing in the nineteenth century, as they did, they accepted the idea of war as that of the war of 1793 to 1815. It was this idea that had to change in the twentieth century, but which still underlies the value systems of much of modern warfare.

11.1

De Quincey on war

De Quincey’s essay ‘On War’ was published in 1854, although it may have appeared earlier in a periodical that has not been traced. It begins whimsically, taking serious matters lightly (as in the essay on murder); but the levity intensifies the seriousness, and the conclusion is both grander and more unexpected than might have been expected from the opening. ‘War’, he writes at the end, ‘has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered’ (392).1 De Quincey’s reasons for supporting war, setting aside a superficial ‘Of all romances, this seems to me the most romantic’, are two-fold: 1st, a physical necessity arising out of man’s nature when combined with man’s situation; 2dly, a moral necessity connected with benefits of compensation, such as continually lurk in evils acknowledged to 217

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be such – a necessity under which it becomes lawful to say that war ought to exist, as a balance to opposite tendencies of a still more evil character. War is the mother of wrong and spoliation: granted; but, like other scourges in the divine economy, war purifies and redeems itself when viewed as a counterforce to greater evils that could not otherwise be intercepted or addressed. (373) If war were abolished, De Quincey goes on to argue, ‘it will revolve upon us in a worse shape’ (381), in unofficial and lawless conflict. He regards war, as Clausewitz does, as a continuation of policy by other means, with diplomacy as an accompaniment. Just as war has become less barbaric during the last two thousand years, ‘systematically improving in temper’, so too it has become less frequent (391), and if it were abolished, De Quincey argues, it would lead to something very much worse. The final part of the essay takes the reader beyond this into what might be called ‘a high view of war’, in which it becomes associated with religion. De Quincey’s cue here is from Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Odes and the verse about ‘Carnage’ which so offended Byron and Shelley. De Quincey calls it ‘a great truth’, both here and in a postscript: Most heartily, and with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful: viz. that among God’s holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is “mutual slaughter” amongst men, – yes, that “Carnage is God’s daughter.” (394) This does not seem to be about justice only, although De Quincey cites ‘Judas and Simon Maccabaeus in days of old, Gustavus Adolphus in modern days’ who were ‘fighting for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and murdering oppressors’ (394). War is often justified by such a purpose: To execute judgments of retribution upon outrages offered to human rights or to human dignity, to vindicate the sanctities of the altar and the sanctities of the hearth: these are the functions of human greatness which war has many times assumed, and many times faithfully discharged. (392) War is good when it is a just war, but it is more than this. It is about the sublime, about something imperfectly grasped and understood, about what De Quincey calls ‘a transcendent atmosphere’:

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The great phenomenon of war it is, this and this only, which keeps open in man a spiracle – an organ of respiration – for breathing a transcendent atmosphere, and dealing with an idea that else would perish: viz. the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realisation in a battle such as that of Waterloo – viz. a battle fought for interests of the human race, felt even where they are not understood; (392) In the postscript, De Quincey returns to the idea of a battle as grand, although it can also be fought for the wrong reasons. He thought of Waterloo as being fought by the British and Prussians for the right reasons, and by the French for the wrong ones, which seems too simple: but it was the greatest example in living memory of war as sublime. ‘A battle’, he writes, is by possibility the grandest, and also the meanest, of human exploits. It is the grandest when it is fought for godlike truth, for human dignity, or for human rights; it is the meanest when it is fought for petty advantages (as, by way of example, for accession of territory which adds nothing to the security of a frontier), and still more when it is fought simply as a gladiator’s trial of national prowess. (396) De Quincey was struggling here towards a view of war that will accommodate not just the horrors of war, but the nobility of it, the ‘doing and suffering’ that is involved. In the case of Waterloo, he argued that it saved Europe from endless further problems with Napoleon: it was, as Wordsworth had believed it to be, an agent of the divine will. De Quincey described it not only as ‘the overthrow of a frightful tyranny’, but as a blow against evil: ‘A great sepulchral shadow rolled away from the face of Christendom as that day’s sun went down to his rest’ (396). Here the alignment with Wordsworth, who regarded right as being on the side of the allies, is complete. But there is also an intellectual gymnastics which Wordsworth would not have contemplated in the face of such a serious matter. De Quincey argues that those who fail to understand Peace Societies do so for the wrong reason. Some people say that the Societies are ‘merely deaf to the lessons of experience and . . . too “romantic” in their expectations’ (393): The very opposite is to my thinking their criminal reproach. He that is romantic errs usually by too much elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation by drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the contrary, the Peace Societies

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would, if their power kept pace with their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. (393) It is the practisers of war who are romantic. It is in battle and in the fight for justice that human beings become great. In this reasoning, peace makes human beings not only less heroic, but also less noble; and in words such as the surprising ‘degradation’ De Quincey implies a view of war that suggests its potential for raising humanity above the selfish. In this he anticipates Ruskin.

11.2

Ruskin on war

Ruskin’s lecture entitled War was delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1865. It was published in the following year, with a cover depicting a drawn sword, a flag and a shield: the sword for attack, the flag for the country and the shield for defence. The lecture was then incorporated into The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), together with ‘Work’ and ‘Traffic’. ‘War’, the third lecture in the book, begins with the phrase ‘Young soldiers’, and with a certain healthy awareness on Ruskin’s part that young men in the army do not attend lectures very willingly. What would a writer on painting have to say to them? His answer was not only that war was a ‘great art’, but that ‘all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war’: no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers . . . There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.2 Ruskin’s reading of military history was intimately connected with his preferences in art. He argued, perversely, that while the Egyptians and Greeks were warlike, the Romans were actually more farmers than soldiers, so that art declined under their rule. It was revived in the Gothic age: there comes back into the mind of Europe a passionate desire for war itself, for the sake of war. And then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble employment, – under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain; and under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which

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there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or Appenines, that did not once run dark red from battle;3 When peace is established, argues Ruskin, art declines. What flourishes in peacetime are not the virtues of civil life but its vices. His analysis has something in common with Tennyson’s Maud (1855): Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made them a curse, Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own; Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword. (Part I.21–2, 27–8) Their anger against contemporary society has affected both Ruskin’s and Tennyson’s views about war as preferable, in many ways, to the cunning of mercantile strife. Ruskin, however, was careful to distinguish between different types of war. He condemned what he called ‘the rage of a barbarian wolf-flock’, by which he presumably meant wars based just on anger or aggression, and wars waged to gain power. He placed the Napoleonic Wars in this category, and the American Civil War, which had just ended. The kind of war that he approved of was what he called ‘creative, or foundational, war’: in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful – though it may be fatal – play: in which the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the institutions, and purity of the households which they are appointed to defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and out of such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. 4 War becomes, in Ruskin’s summation, akin to a religious activity, in which sanctities and virtues are employed to defend purity. Because of this, he anxiously insists that it must be kept as noble as possible. He

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instructs the young gentlemen of the Woolwich Academy that they are not to stand by and ‘urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war’. Nor are the women, ‘you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose command, all true battle has been, and must ever be’, to watch such a contest. Quoting from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, he describes harmless villagers being made to kill one another, and recoils from the idea. War is for knights rather than for peasants. Without it, a soldierly knight becomes idle, so that Ruskin thinks it much better ‘that he should ride war horses, than back race horses.’5 Ruskin’s view of war is chivalric and medieval: he speaks with horror of modern warfare, ‘scientific war, – chemical and mechanic war’, waged with ‘destructive machines’.6 He clings to the idea of what he calls ‘noble war’: Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. 7 War becomes an expression of national nobility, provided that it is fought in the right way and for the right cause. Indeed, the British refusal to intervene in support of the Polish insurrection of 1863 was an example of bad conduct: this was a war that should have been fought, and was not. So the lecture on war becomes a lecture on community itself: a soldier should be ready to defend the good society: ‘You are not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop-door, to protect shopboys who are cheating inside’. Indeed, the soldier ought to be responsible for the health of that society: a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a military despotism – never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the health of any state consists simply in this; that in it, those who are wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should also be its soldiers; or rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers also its rulers.8 Ruskin’s astonishing essay is therefore an attack on what he sees as a lazy and corrupt society, one which is formed by thinkers without nobility and honour. He employs war not so much to defend it unconditionally (indeed, he describes himself as one who would ‘fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into ploughshares’) but to use it to show that there is a way of life that is more straightforward and

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noble than the devious manipulations of politicians, merchants and clergymen. The final paragraph is a magnificent denunciation of ‘the women of England’ for their failure in morality and true religion, and a reminder that they should encourage their children to be just men who wage just wars: ‘teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool’s boast and their deeds but a firebrand’s tossing, unless they are indeed Just men, and Perfect in the Fear of God.’9 War becomes justified when it is a moral action, and only then. When it is waged properly, for a right cause, it is infinitely preferable to the selfishness, cheating and laziness of peace.

11.3

Thomas Hardy and The Dynasts

Hardy had tried the Napoleonic theme before, in The Trumpet-Major (1880), set in a Wessex in 1804–05 under the threat of invasion. It contains scenes that vividly recall the events of the time, such as the last sight of Nelson’s Victory as she sails off to the rendezvous before Trafalgar, and characters such as John Loveday, who is the trumpet-major ‘till silenced for ever upon one of the bloody battle-fields of Spain.’ Hardy described himself as being ‘in the tantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast international tragedy without being able through limits of plan, knowledge, and opportunity, to enter further into its events.’10 The Dynasts, in three parts (1903, 1906, 1908) was his attempt to do justice to the ‘vast international tragedy’. It suggests, first, the fascination of war as history. For Hardy, there was, as Walter F. Wright has written, ‘a natural boyish attraction towards an age filled with adventure and heroism’, but that enthusiasm matured into something deeper, the awareness that ‘the era represented a vast area of human experience, mainly tragic, which seemed to epitomise the history of the human race.’11 As a boy he had read a periodical, The History of the Wars, which belonged to his grandfather. In 1875 he visited a Waterloo veteran at the Chelsea Hospital, and in 1876 he went to the battlefield itself. Two years later, he went to Chelsea again to meet a deaf old soldier who had been on the retreat to Corunna almost seventy years previously. He continued to read widely the history of the wars, and to collect anecdotes, accumulating detail after detail towards what he called ‘A Bird’s Eye View of Europe at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.’12 The result was what he called ‘a panoramic show’ in the Preface, a work which moves from small details to great events, from intimate scenes such as those between Napoleon and Josephine to the ‘dumb-shows’ of vast battles. The attraction of war as a subject, in

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spite of its horrors, has been one of the recurrent themes of this book, and Hardy’s drama is a striking example. Secondly, The Dynasts was conceived and written on a vast scale, commensurate with the ‘vast international tragedy’, with scenes set in all the major countries of Europe, and the figures of statesmen and generals, kings and commoners, crossing the stage in quick succession. The whole work was described as ‘An Epic-Drama’, with an action that takes place ‘in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes’. It was as far removed as conceivably possible from the neo-classical unities: Hardy thought that ‘foreknowledge is assumed to fill in the junctions required to combine the scenes into an artistic unity.’13 He justified this by reference to Aeschylus, ‘whose plays are . . . scenes from stories taken as known, and would be unintelligible without supplementary scenes of the imagination.’ 14 The technique was that of short scenes, each illustrative of a particular moment, but spread across Europe. ‘Let Europe be the stage + have scenes continually shifting’, he wrote in a notebook in 1874, later wondering if he had been thinking of The Dynasts at the time.15 ‘The nether sky opens’, he wrote, as in the ‘Fore Scene’ the ‘The Overworld’ gives way to a view of the ‘Netherworld’, ‘and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaped like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head’: Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean. This vastness is awesome in its imaginative conceptualising, but it is also connected with ideas of war as vast and sublime. The scale of Hardy’s work is an attempt to produce a work of literature which will somehow do justice to the immense events of the Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, he allows these events to be seen through the eyes of ordinary people – the travellers in the coach on the Ridgeway near Weymouth, the beacon-keepers on Egdon Heath, the London citizens. These scenes contrast with the panoramic views of the battles, usually represented in ‘dumb-show’ interspersed with individual dialogue. The third element of the Epic-Drama is its interest in humanity under pressure, and in establishing the values of chivalry and nobility in contrast to those of selfishness and wickedness. Part II of The Dynasts opens with a scene in Charles James Fox’s house, in which Fox’s generosity of

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spirit and open-door policy is imposed upon by a visitor who wants approval to carry out an assassination of Napoleon. Fox is horrified, and has the man arrested. A similar straightforwardness is shown by Pitt, who is shown throughout Part I as the heroic, determined, but exhausted statesman, appealing to George III to be allowed to invite Fox into his Cabinet and being refused, receiving a death-blow with the news of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. To Fox and Pitt, the statesmen, must be added the figures of the three heroes, Nelson in Part I, Moore in Part II and Wellington in Part III. These and their soldiers are contrasted with the worthless ones: the lecherous and deceitful Godoy, the ‘Prince of Peace’ who was instrumental in handing Spain over to Napoleon in 1808; the members of the London clubs, commenting vacuously on politics and getting stupidly drunk; deserters on the retreat to Corunna; and others who demonstrate a failure of bravery and determination. The weak and effete Prince Regent is one of these, preoccupied with the problems of his marriage; and the conceited Duke of Richmond, riding out with his two sons to view the battle of Waterloo, is another: ‘We’d better perhaps return or we shall be caught in the stream of retreat, and they will be uneasy at home . . . A ghastly finish to your mother’s ball, by Gad if it isn’t!’ (Part III.VII.vi). The Prince’s childish bad temper and Richmond’s calm selfishness are characteristic targets of Hardy’s irony, as they would have been for Napier: they are contrasted throughout with the strenuous efforts of others, the soldiers and sailors, the wives who are camp-followers, the dying heroes such as Nelson, Moore and Pitt, the stoics like De Lancey, Wellington’s Quartermaster at Waterloo, who forbade ‘the surgeons waste their time/On him, who well can wait till worse are eased’ (Part III.VII.viii), and who receives Wellington’s finest terse compliment – ‘A noble fellow.’ So scenes such as ‘The Field of Talavera’ are given an ironic juxtaposition to ‘Brighton. The Royal Pavilion’. War was important to Hardy not just because it was spectacular and exciting, but because it was a visible index of human character. War produced tragic failure: perhaps the best example in The Dynasts is that of Villeneuve, the French Admiral at Trafalgar – ‘unfortunate Villeneuve’ – who committed suicide. War also showed up the lazy, the stupid and the cowardly for what they were, and it celebrated integrity and true nobility. It also interested him because of its ironic possibilities. The historical perspective which Hardy could bring to bear on the action enabled him to demonstrate the failure of hopes, the confounding of expectations, the over-confidence of theorists such as the Austrian General Weirother before Austerlitz, full of his elaborate battle plan.

226 Romanticism and War

The greatest example of Hardy’s observation of character is Napoleon, a complex study of genius, courage, callousness and pride. At Austerlitz (Part I.VI) he is a master, though cruel: he ‘watches the scene with a vulpine smile’ before bringing artillery fire to bear on the ice where the Russians were flying, drowning two thousand of them. His treatment of Josephine (Part II.II.vi and V.ii) is unfeeling, and his response to the loss of the Grand Armée in Russia is cynically to gild the dome of the Invalides to make the French people forget the woes of Moscow (Part III.I.xii). He is the primary example of the hubris of Greek tragedy, the man who says, in the middle of the battle of Waterloo, ‘To-night we sleep in Brussels!’ (Part III.VI.ii). Hardy switches the perspective on Napoleon with bewildering rapidity at the end of The Dynasts. He is the one who answers the ‘Spirit Ironic’ when it asks ‘Has all this been worth while?’ with self-questioning and self-assessment: So, as it is, a miss-mark they will dub me; And yet – I found the crown of France in the mire, And with the point of my prevailing sword I picked it up! But for all this and this I shall be nothing. . . . Great men are meteors that consume themselves To light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour. (Part III.VII.ix) Such a close-up suggests the tragic awareness of a Sophoclean hero. And yet ‘The Spirit of the Years’ provides another message, in which that meteoric career becomes a small speck in the unfolding pattern of geological time: Such men as thou, who wade across the world To make an epoch, bless, confuse, appal, Are in the elemental ages’ chart Like meanest insects on obscurest leaves But incidents and grooves of Earth’s unfolding; Or as the brazen rod that stirs the fire Because it must. (Part III.VII.ix) Napoleon shrinks to an insect, his immense campaigns no more than a casual poking of the fire. And yet those campaigns, and the steadfast

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opposition to them by the British, have been the stuff of Hardy’s epic-drama: if the whole thing, in the final estimate of time, is no more than ‘incidents and grooves’, it nevertheless has allowed the study of ten years of war not only to reveal character in action, but also to show the wonder of it. This is found at its greatest in the poems, such as the one which concludes Act V (the Trafalgar act) of Part I, in which the people on land hear the storm while ‘snug at home slept we’, oblivious – And we heard the drub of Dead-man’s Bay, where bones of thousands are, We knew not what the day had done for us at Trafalgar. Had done, Had done, For us at Trafalgar! or the tiny creatures described by the ‘Chorus of the Years’ which live on the battlefield of Waterloo: The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim; The worm asks what can be overhead, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe; for he does not know What a foul red flood will be soaking him! Hardy catches here not just the brutality and horror of war, but the unnaturalness of it, the blood seeping through the earth instead of rain. It is part of his remarkably comprehensive vision of the Napoleonic Wars: he sees its political sweep, its pitting of human beings and armies against one another, its triumphs and disasters, its revelation of the characters of men and women, its demands, the great effort of it all; even, at times, its humour. The song ‘Budmouth Dears’, sung by Sergeant Young of the Hussars on the eve of the battle of Vittoria, combines the awareness of his own danger with the memories of love, when ‘the girls were fresh as peaches’: They distracted and delayed us By the pleasant pranks they played us, And what marvel, then, if troopers, even of regiments of renown, On whom flashed those eyes divine, O,

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Should forget the countersign, O, As we tore Clink! Clink! back to camp above the town. The ‘clink! clink!’ is the sound of the spurs as the soldiers run back to camp after a night out. Now they are somewhere else: Do they miss us much, I wonder, Now that war has swept us sunder, As we roam from where the faces smile to where the faces frown? ‘Where the faces frown’ is a vivid image for all those battles which Hardy was concerned to remember, battles in which soldiers had to confront one another with faces designed to intimidate. His ‘Epic-Drama’ was aptly so named, because the war which he was describing was, as in Homer, ten years of war (1805–15); and, as in Homer, the subject was heroism, and folly, and pride, all set out in dramatic form. The great problem of writing about war is to make sense of the detail of it. Hardy struggled with this problem, creating a tiresome system of Spirits, Choruses and Shades in the ‘Overworld’, but his Epic-Drama is much better thought of as a great demonstration of the action itself. In it may be seen the end of a process which this book has attempted to observe: a writing about war which brought out from it a morality. That morality could be a pacifist morality, as it was in the case of Blake and the Quakers; it could be a profound questioning, as it was with Coleridge and Wordsworth; it could be a distaste for the horror, as it was with Byron, or a dislike of force, as it was with Shelley. It could also recognise, as other writers have done, that war itself has its own powerful interest: not just because it is violent, cruel and uncontrollable, but also because it is also an opportunity for courage, integrity and nobility. War may indeed have been a subject which was important because of the human qualities which it revealed. It is this which makes The Dynasts the last example of the kind of literature that I have been studying: the war which broke out some six years after its completion brought these kinds of response to an end. The Great War of 1914–18 was so terrible that it has seemed impermissible since then to write of it in the same way that Hardy and his predecessors were able to write about the Napoleonic Wars. That is not to say that there were not great acts of heroism and sacrifice among the suffering; it is just that the idea of war as involving the testing of human character, the skill of generalship, or the effectiveness of strategy, seems a luxury of

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thinking that we ought not to afford (although something of these was recovered in the Second World War). But for the writers of the Romantic period and after, war was a subject that was fascinating, if only because it was never simple; because, for good or ill, it showed the extraordinary possibilities of human character, proved or found wanting in the ultimate test of battle and death; and because, on the stage of Europe, there was a cast of geniuses, martyrs and heroes, whose lives and deaths were shaped by accident, discipline and conflict.

Notes Introduction 1 Jane Austen’s Letters, Third Edition, Deirdre Le Faye (ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 198. 2 Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. By C.W. Pasley, Captain in the Corps of Royal Engineers. London, 1810, 2. 3 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge III, 1807–1814. Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, 235. For the meeting in Malta, see Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: HarperCollins, 1998, 39. 4 Ibid., 41. 5 Ibid., 319. 6 Ibid., 319. 7 Jane Austen, Persuasion (The Novels of Jane Austen, R.W. Chapman (ed.)), 252. 8 ‘On History Again’. The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, London, 1895, XXVIII.167. 9 Paul Veyne, Writing History, translated by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1984, 42. I owe the reference to James Chandler’s England in 1819. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 42. 10 Quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963, 33. See also Joan Grundy, ‘Keats and the Elizabethans’, in John Keats, A Reassessment, Kenneth Muir (ed.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969, 1–19. 11 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe (ed.). London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930, V.38. 12 To Tom Keats, 29 June, 1, 2 July 1818. 13 Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff, 1777; reprinted in Shakespeare, The Critical Heritage, 6, 1774–1801, Brian Vickers (ed.). London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 164–80. 14 Ibid., 165, 167. 15 ‘An Essay on the Character of Hamlet’, in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ii (1788); printed in Vickers, op. cit., 480–90. 16 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe (ed.). London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930, IV.216–17. 17 Michael Gelven, War and Existence. A Philosophical Inquiry. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 9. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Ibid., 27. 20 Wellington to Beresford, 2 July 1815: quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington. The Years of the Sword. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 488. 21 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1798 edition, Book II, Appendix II, ‘Of Duelling’. Penguin Edition, Isaac Kramnick (ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, 179. 230

Notes 231 22 ‘Story of a Libel, with Thoughts on Duelling’, Tait’s Magazine (1841). The title is David Masson’s, but duelling is discussed at some length. See The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey, David Masson (ed.). London: A and C. Black, 1897, III.160. 23 Steven Blakemore, Intertextual War. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997, 15. 24 See Walter F. Wright, The Shaping of the Dynasts. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1967, 101. 25 Preface to The Dynasts, Complete Edition, London: Macmillan, 1910, vii. 26 The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, Philip S. Foner (ed.). New York: Citadel Press, 1945, 120. 27 Ibid., 172. 28 Ibid., 266–7. 29 Ibid., 245. 30 Ibid., 247. 31 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Book V Chapter 16. Penguin Edition, Isaac Kramnick (ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1985, 506. This uses the 1798 text. 32 Ibid., Book I Chapter 2. Penguin Edition, 83–4. 33 Ibid., Book V Chapter 18. Penguin Edition, 521, 517. 34 Ibid., Book V Chapter 18, 517; Chapter 16, 507. 35 Betty T. Bennett, British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793–1815. New York and London: Garland Press, 1976; Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and the English Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Philip Shaw (ed.). Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822. Aldershot, Burlington USA, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate Press, 2000. 36 René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963, 160–1. 37 Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837. New Haven and London: Yale Universiy Press, 1992. 38 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. Aids and its Metaphors. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, 3.

1

Ways of Seeing War

1 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Watchman. Lewis Patton (ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 179–80. 2 Ibid., xxxix. 3 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (eds). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, 12. 4 David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire, Revised Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, 275. 5 Ibid., 279. 6 Geoff Quilley, ‘Duty and mutiny: the aesthetics of loyalty and the representation of the British sailor c.1789–1800’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars. Aldershot, Burlington, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate Press, 2000, 80–109.

232 Notes 7 The phrase ‘a thing in a red coat’ is taken from Mrs Morel’s speech about her son Arthur in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Chapter VIII. It is interesting, but not surprising, to see the idea persisting in this way. 8 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Book V Chapter 18. Penguin Edition, 521. 9 Homer, The Iliad, translated by E.V. Rieu. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950, 229. 10 Ibid., 129. The reference to the father, standing for family pride and honour, is important: Moore’s minstrel boy, in the same spirit, takes his father’s sword. Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ (1826), which is about the Battle of the Nile of 1798, also deals with the father–son relationship in war: the son refuses to leave the burning deck ‘without his father’s word’. 11 Ibid., 450–1. 12 Ibid., 452–3. 13 Ibid., 450. 14 Kevin Crotty, The Poetics of Supplication. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, 69, 79–80. 15 Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, Part I, Act II scene v. Complete Edition, London: Macmillan, 1910, 54. 16 Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order. The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, 17ff. 17 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Eighth Edition. London: Dodsley, 1791, 113. 18 Shelley, The Esdaile Notebook, Kenneth Neill Cameron (ed.). London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 185, makes this identification. 19 Ibid., 186. 20 The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hutchinson (ed.). London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1948, 362–3.

2

1793

1 Annual Register, 1793, 264. 2 Ibid., 199. 3 James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802, John Beresford (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1949, 431. 4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Eighth Edition, 1791, 113. 5 Printed in Bennett, British War Poetry, 74. 6 See P. Woodfine, ‘“Unjustifiable and Illiberal”: Military Patriotism and Civilian Values in the 1790s’ in Bernard Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict, 1300–2000. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, 73–94 (p. 77). 7 From The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1793; Bennett, British War Poetry, 71–3. A note to the first of these verses says ‘Louis, when this was written, was still living.’ 8 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. London: J.M. Dent, 1969, 22, 18. 9 Woodfine, ‘Unjustifiable and Illiberal’, War, 80. 10 M.J. Sydenham, The French Revolution. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1965, 99. 11 Louis Madelin, The French Revolution. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1933, 262. 12 Quoted in J.M. Thompson, The French Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1943, 317.

Notes 233 13 Thomas Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France. London, 1797. Quoted in Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 119. 14 James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae. London: G. and J. Robinson, 1791, Introduction, xiii. 15 Memoir of Thomas Hardy, 1832; quoted in Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, 18. 16 John Keane, Tom Paine: a Political Life. Boston, New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown & Co, 1995, 501. 17 This poem, ‘The Drum’, had been written in 1782, and was often reprinted. See Bennett, British War Poetry, 80. 18 From the Preface to ‘Guilt and Sorrow’, 1842: The Salisbury Plain Poems, Stephen Gill (ed.), Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 215, 217. 19 Gill (ed.), The Salisbury Plain Poems, Introduction, 3. 20 See Anthea Morrison, ‘Coleridge’s Greek Prize Ode on the Slave Trade’, in J.R. Watson (ed.), An Infinite Complexity, Essays in Romanticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983, 145–60; and Richard Holmes, Coleridge. Early Visions. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989, 47–8. 21 Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, 35. 22 Godwin, for instance, appended a note to the 1798 text of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, explaining that the chapters on war in Book V ‘were written during the month of September 1792, before the intelligence of Dumouriez’s success [at Valmy], and while the heart of every lover of liberty ached for the event of the campaign.’ Penguin Edition, 518–19. 23 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (eds). Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, 54, 59. 24 Ibid., 59–60. 25 Ibid., 65. 26 Ibid., 72–3. 27 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, I.33–4. 28 Ibid., III.164. This comes from the Address to the Freeholders of Westmorland of 1818, in which Wordsworth gave them a history lesson, having completely revised his own views. By 1818 he had come to think that Pitt and his cabinet had been right to stand up to the French, ‘throwing themselves upon the honour and wisdom of the Country, and trusting for the issue to the decrees of a just Providence: – and for this determination everlasting gratitude will attend them!’.

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1793 and after

1 By 1792, the army had shrunk to 13,000 men. The navy had 113 ships of the line, of which three-quarters were ready for service. See J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, 363–4.

234 Notes 2 David Gates, ‘The Transformation of the Army 1783–1815’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army, David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 133. 3 George Spater, William Cobbett, The Poor Man’s Friend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 17. 4 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (eds). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1979, 148. 5 J.W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army. Vol. IV – Part I, 1789–1801. London: Macmillan, 1915, 83, 81. 6 Ibid., 83–4. 7 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963, 130. 8 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Book V Chapter 19. Penguin Edition, 525. 9 See Ian McIntyre, Dirt and Deity. A Life of Robert Burns. London: HarperCollins, 1996, 377–8. The uniform cost £8–7s, a large sum for the impoverished Burns to find. 10 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, Edwin W. Marrs, Jr (ed.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975, I.165. The epitaph is on p. 166. 11 Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (eds). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, 71. 12 Fortescue, op. cit., 214. 13 See Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy 1793–1815. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1960, 106. 14 Ibid., 115. 15 Geoff Quilley, ‘Duty and mutiny: the aesthetics of loyalty and the representation of the British sailor c.1789–1800’ in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars. Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822. Aldershot, Burlington USA, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate, 2000, 80–109. 16 His conduct in the field has been vigorously defended by Lieut-Colonel Alfred H. Burne in The Noble Duke of York, London and New York: Staples Press, 1949. Burne dismisses the nursery rhyme as ‘a cruel and senseless jingle’, pointing out also that there are no hills near Dunkirk; this is arguably all part of the fun of the lampoon. 17 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington. The Years of the Sword. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 37. 18 An Accurate and Impartial Narrative of the War, II.99–100, reprinted in The Watchman, 19 April 1796. See The Watchman, Lewis Patton (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 238–9. 19 An Accurate and Impartial Narrative, I.116; The Watchman, Patton (ed.), 284. 20 Gates, ‘The Transformation of the Army 1783–1815’, 145. The scandals of the promotion system are vividly described by Fortescue, op. cit., 212–13. 21 It continued: ‘And the Bird full of grief weeping sat; /This the Lion discern’d/ But seemed no more concern’d/ Than if worrying a Hanover rat!’ Reprinted in D.B. Horn, British Public Opinion and the First Partition of Poland. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1945, 87–9. Horn notes that the poem was signed ‘F’ and dated ‘Birmingham, 10th April 1773’, and that it appeared in a number of periodicals under the heading ‘On the State of Poland’.

Notes 235 22 Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 102; quoted in Horn, op. cit., 79. 23 From Betty T. Bennett, op. cit., 138–40. Bennett identifies the author as probably Thomas Starling Norgate (1772–1959). 24 In The Watchman of 2 April 1796, Coleridge scornfully quoted a letter from Catherine the Great to Stanislas, rich in its portrayal of a powerful monarch addressing a feeble one: ‘That the Empress approves of his design of proceeding to Carlsbadt in Bohemia, and to Baden near Vienna, to drink the waters at those places. – And that she does not oppose his future residence in Italy, that of Rome having been chosen in preference by the King, as the most conformable to his love of the arts.’ The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Watchman, Lewis Patton (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 181. 25 Lamb to Coleridge, 24 June 1797: The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, Edwin L. Marrs, Jr (ed.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975, I.112. 26 The Watchman, Patton (ed.), 114 (17 March 1796). 27 Helen Maria Williams, A Narrative of the Events which have taken place in France, from the Landing of Napoleon Bonaparte, on the 1st of March 1815, till the Restoration of Louis XVIII. With an Account of the Present State of Society and Public Opinion. London: John Murray, 1815, 148–50. 28 Ibid., 151. It should be noted that Helen Maria Williams was not a reliable narrator. According to the DNB, her books consisted of ‘impressions frequently formed on very imperfect, one-sided, and garbled information, travestied by the enthusiasm of a clever, badly educated woman, and uttered with the cocksureness of ignorance.’ However, it is not the truth of the story that is of interest here, so much as the persistence of the Cincinnatus legend and its association with Kosciusko.

4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

1795–1802 L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 161. Ibid., 140. The Farington Diary, James Grieg (ed.). London: Hutchinson, 1922, I.166. Ibid., I.223–4. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. I have used the fourth edition, London: J. Wright, 1801, 4–5. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 21–2. Richard Holmes, Coleridge. Early Visions. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989, 45. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 233–51. 9 August 1798. The poem contrasts the suffering, the killing of mothers and children, the ‘shocking sight’ of the many soldiers slain, and presents the peasant’s naive view with irony: ‘Things like that, you know, must be/ After a famous victory.’ Karl Dändliker, A Short History of Switzerland, translated by E. Salisbury. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1899, 206.

236 Notes 12 Ramsay Weston Phipps, The Armies of the First French Republic. London: Oxford University Press, 1926–39, V.67. 13 Dändliker, op. cit., 223. But compare this with Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland; or a View of the Present State of the Governments and Manners of those Cantons. Dublin, P. Wogan et al., 1798. Williams thought the Swiss ‘under the dominion of superstition’, and that Napoleon was ‘the benefactor of his race converting the destructive lightning of the conqueror’s sword into the benignant rays of freedom, and presenting to vanquished nations the emblems of liberty and independence entwined with the olive of peace.’ (I.146, II.37). 14 Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 18–19. 15 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years, Part I, 1821–1828, E. de Selincourt and rev. Alan G. Hill (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, 97. 16 J.C. Maxwell, ‘Wordsworth and the Subjugation of Switzerland’, Modern Language Review, 65 (January 1970), 16–18; quoted in Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 67. 17 Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 63. 18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, John Beer (ed.). London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1974, 211. 19 Both quoted in Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 23. 20 Ibid., 25. 21 William Beattie, Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell. London: Edward Moxon, 1849, I.49. 22 Ibid., I.76. 23 Ibid., I.272. 24 Ibid., I.285. 25 Ibid., I.283–4. 26 With the conjunction of sport and war, we are only one step away from Sir Henry Newbolt and ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight’, in which the first verse portrays cricket and the second a desperate battle in which ‘the voice of a subaltern rallies the ranks’. 27 Ibid., II.4–5. 28 Ibid., II.165. 29 Washington Irving, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Thomas Campbell’, Analectic Magazine, 1815, quoted in Mary Ruth Miller, Thomas Campbell. Boston, Mass: Twayne, 1978, 84–5. 30 Washington Irving, The Crayon Miscellany, Philadelphia, 1835, II.28; quoted in Miller, Thomas Campbell, 87.

5

The Peace of Amiens and after, 1802–05

1 See The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, David V. Erdman (ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, I.7–79. 2 Ibid., 223. 3 Jack Simmons, Southey. London: Collins, 1945, 103.

Notes 237 4 Lord Sidmouth, quoted in John W. Derry, Charles James Fox. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd,1972, 391. 5 Louis Madelin, The Consulate and the Empire, 1789–1909, translated by E.F. Buckley. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1934, 171. 6 Essays on His Times, I.371. 7 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, Edwin W. Marrs, Jr (ed.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976, II.54. 8 Ibid., II.60. 9 The suggestion that Frenchmen were monkeys had an odd currency at the time among the ignorant and prejudiced. There is a story that a monkey which was found on a ship at Hartlepool was hanged by the local inhabitants because it was thought to be a French spy. 10 The Farington Diary, James Greig (ed.). London: Hutchinson, 1923, II.7. 11 Ibid., II.54. 12 Ibid., II.11. 13 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe (ed.). London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1930–34, Vol. 8.15–16. 14 Complete Works, Howe (ed.), Vol. 13.212. 15 Ibid., 213. 16 Derry, Charles James Fox, 396. Derry suggests that this account (by John Bernard Trotter, Fox’s secretary) was ‘suitably and piously overdramatised’ (395), but there seems no reason to doubt its general drift. 17 Essays on His Times, I.393. 18 The Farington Diary, II.84. 19 See L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 20 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, The Early Years, 1770–1803. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 564. 21 The adjective ‘Corsican’, applied to Napoleon, appears in the later years of the war to have been used increasingly as a term of abuse by writers such as Wordsworth and Southey. 22 Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2. 23 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe (ed.). London: J.M. Dent, 1930–34, I.101. ‘Souse’ here means ‘with a heavy blow, or thump’. 24 I have again found Bainbridge’s discussion most helpful here, 79–84. 25 Carola Oman, Nelson. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947, 308. 26 James Stanier Clarke and John M’Arthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B. London: Cadell and Davies, 1809, I.xxxvii. 27 Ibid., I.359. 28 Ibid., II.1. 29 Ibid., II.256. In taking his final leave of Lady Nelson on 13 January 1801, he acted, however wrong, with that greatness and liberality of mind which nothing could subdue: ‘I call God to witness’, exclaimed he, ‘there is nothing in you or your conduct I wish otherwise.’ 30 Ibid., II.256. 31 Ibid., II.256. 32 Ibid., II.468. 33 Ibid., II.467–8.

238 Notes 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

6

Ibid., II.470. Ibid., II.459. Ibid., II.465. Quoted in Oliver Warner, Portrait of Lord Nelson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958, 169. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Friend, Barbara E. Rooke (ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, II.365. Ibid., II.364. Ibid., II.364. Ibid., II.365. Carola Oman, Nelson. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947, 677. Richard Cronin, ‘Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807 and the War against Napoleon’, Review of English Studies, NS XLVIII (1997), 33–50. H.C. Robbins Landon and David Wyn Jones, Haydn. His Life and Music. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, 348.

Poetry and the Army: The War, 1807–08

1 K. Watson, ‘Bonfires, Bells and Bayonets: British Popular Memory and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict 1300–2000. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, 103. 2 Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Scott, Poetical Works, J. Logie Robertson (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1913, 50. 3 J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott. London: Macmillan, 1900, I.319. 4 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1808–1811, H.J.C. Grierson (ed.). London: Constable, 1932, 3. 5 John O. Hayden (ed.), Scott, The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 42. 6 Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, The Great Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, 281. 7 Hayden, Scott, The Critical Heritage, 47. 8 Ibid., 37. 9 Some still do not: Edgar Johnson writes ‘No reader welcomes these interpolations to an exciting story’. Sir Walter Scott, The Great Unknown, 335. 10 Quoted in Sir Walter Scott, The Great Unknown, 280. 11 Ibid., 335. 12 Nothing is stranger to the modern mind, or marks the difference between the Napoleonic Wars and those of the twentieth century more, than the presence on the battlefields of spectators, such as Goethe at Valmy in 1792, or the Duke of Richmond and his sons at Waterloo. Tolstoy portrays another, Prince Bezuhov, at Borodino. 13 The rate of hits varied between 20% and 50%. The Prussian tactician, von Bülow, thought that ‘Sometimes the soldier fires too low . . . without attending sufficiently to the differences of the distances at which he stands from the enemy.’ A.H. von Bülow, The Spirit of the Modern System of War, quoted in Brent Nosworthy, Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies. London: Constable, 1995, 206–7.

Notes 239 14 Nosworthy, 216. 15 Ibid., 221 16 Hibbert, Christopher (ed.), A Soldier of the Seventy-First; the Journal of a Soldier of the Highland Light Infantry, 1806–1815, Warren, Mich, 1976; quoted in Nosworthy, 239. 17 Nosworthy, 240–1. 18 Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in W.H. Fitchett (ed.), Wellington’s Men. Some Soldier Autobiographies. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1900, 53. 19 Ibid., 53–4. 20 Basil Harvey, The Rifle Brigade. London: Leo Cooper, 1975, 21. 21 Ibid., 108. 22 William Tomkinson, The Diary of a Cavalry Officer in the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns, 1809–1815. James Tomkinson (ed.), London, 1894. Quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, The Years of the Sword, 272. 23 Kincaid, in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 93–4. 24 See Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, J.J. McGann (ed.). Vol. V, Don Juan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 738. 25 Letter of 19 December 1808. Felicia Hemans. Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Susan J. Wolfson (ed.). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, 475.

7

Cintra and Corunna

1 Bennett, British War Poetry, 388–9. 2 Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 54. 3 Richard Cronin, ‘Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807 and the War against Napoleon’, Review of English Studies, NS XLVIII (1997), 33–50. 4 J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott. London: Macmillan, 1900, II.17. 5 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, The Years of the Sword. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 158. 6 Bennett, British War Poetry, 394. 7 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, E. de Selincourt (ed.). Second Edition, II, The Middle Years, Part I, 1806–1811, rev. Mary Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 267. 8 Ibid., 269. 9 Wellington wrote to the Duke of Richmond: ‘I have only to regret that I signed the agreement for the suspension of hostilities without having negotiated . . . I doubt whether good nature, and a deference to the opinion of an officer appointed Commander-in-Chief on the day of his taking command, and to his orders, and a desire to avoid being considered the head of a party against his authority, will be deemed sufficient excuses for an act which, on other grounds, I cannot justify.’ Quoted from Wellington at War, 1794–1815. A Selection of His Wartime Letters. Antony Brett-James (ed.). London: Macmillan, 1961, 144. 10 Quoted in Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, The Later Years, 1803–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 136.

240 Notes 11 Gordon Kent Thomas, Wordsworth’s Dirge and Promise. Napoleon, Wellington and the Convention of Cintra. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1971, 42–3. 12 Its full title was Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to each other and the common Enemy, at this Crisis; and specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra: the whole brought to the test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered. 13 See Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, Chapter 2, for a brilliant discussion of what she calls ‘Transmissions’ in relation to this text. 14 See C.P. Hawkes, ‘The Spanish Adventure of Walter Savage Landor’, Cornhill Magazine, NS 74 (1933), 556. 15 Lockhart, Life of Scott, II.68. 16 Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, 56. 17 Moorman, Later Years, 153. 18 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, I.224. 19 Ibid., 252–3. 20 Ibid., 253. 21 Ibid., 256. 22 Ibid., 256. 23 Ibid., 258. 24 Ibid., 276. 25 Ibid., 288. 26 Ibid., 292. 27 Ibid., 304. 28 Ibid., 305. 29 Ibid., 310, 311. 30 Ibid., 319. 31 Ibid., 328. 32 Ibid., 339. 33 Ibid., 272. 34 Ibid., 293. 35 Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, 63. 36 See Sir William H. Cope, Bart, The History of the Rifle Brigade. London: Chatto and Windus, 1877, and Basil Harvey, The Rifle Brigade, London: Leo Cooper, 1975. 37 John Kincaid, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, reprinted in W.H. Fitchett (ed.), Wellington’s Men. Some Soldier Autobiographies. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1900, 32. 38 Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Corunna. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1961, 26. 39 Ibid., 37. 40 Annual Register (1809), 7. 41 Ibid., 99. 42 Robert Blakeney, A Boy in the Peninsular War. London: John Murray, 1899, 50. 43 Ibid., 50. 44 Thomas Sadler (ed.), Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. London: Macmillan & Co, 1869, I.285–6. 45 Annual Register (1809), 24.

Notes 241 46 W.F.P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula. London: John Murray, 1828, I.529. 47 Annual Register (1809), 24. 48 Bennett, British War Poetry, 421–2. 49 Gentleman’s Magazine, 1809 (April), 352. 50 Annual Register (1809), 22.

8

The Last Years

1 W.F.P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula. London: John Murray, 1828, II.3. 2 Ibid., II.3. 3 ‘Hail Zaragoza’, 5–8. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, by William Wordsworth. Carl H. Ketcham (ed.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989, 53. 4 Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902, II.286. 5 Napier, History, II.303. 6 Ibid., II.306. 7 Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Jerome J. McGann (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, II.188. 8 ‘In My Hot Youth’: Byron’s Letters and Journals I, Leslie A. Marchand (ed.). London: John Murray, 1973, 221: ‘in England they will call it a victory, a pretty victory! two hundred officers and 5000 men killed all English, and the French in as great force as ever.’ 9 Ibid., II.275–6. 10 Note to Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, stanza 51 (line 539). McGann (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works, II.188. 11 J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, 488. 12 Scott to Morritt, 10 April 1811, quoted in Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott. The Great Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, I.368. 13 Ibid. 14 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington. The Years of the Sword. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 324. 15 Scott to Byron, 16 November 1813. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, I.433. 16 Longford, Wellington. The Years of the Sword, 348. 17 Scott to Hartstonge, 12 April 1814. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott. The Great Unknown, I.437. 18 See The Esdaile Notebook, Kenneth Neill Cameron (ed.). London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 186. 19 ‘Falshood and Vice. A Dialogue’. The Esdaile Notebook. Cameron dates this mid-December 1811, and identifies the bloated wretch as the Prince Regent, 185. 20 ‘At the start of the 1812 campaign, the strength with which the Russians opposed the French was even less adequate than Frederick’s at the outset of the Seven Years War. But the Russians could expect to grow much stronger in the course of the campaign. At heart, all Europe was opposed to Bonaparte; he had stretched his resources to the very limit; in Spain he was fighting

242 Notes

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

9

a war of attrition; and the vast expanse of Russia meant that an invader’s strength could be worn down to the bone in the course of five hundred miles’ retreat. Tremendous things were possible; not only was a massive counterstroke a certainty if the French offensive failed (and how could it succeed if the Czar would not make peace nor his subjects rise against him?) but the counterstroke could bring the French to utter ruin. The highest wisdom could never have devised a better strategy than the one the Russians followed unintentionally.’ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret (eds and trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, 615. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1815–1817. H.J.C. Grierson (ed.). London: Constable & Co, 1933, 70–71. Quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, The Years of the Sword. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 394. John Kincaid, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in W.H. Fitchett (ed.), Wellington’s Men. Some Soldier Autobiographies. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1900, 137. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 135. Turner painted this scene in ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818). Leslie A. Marchand, Byron, a Portrait. London: John Murray, 1971, 236. So Late into the Night. Byron’s Letters and Journals, Leslie A. Marchand (ed.). London: John Murray, 1976, 5.76. See Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, J.J. McGann (ed.). Vol. V, Don Juan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 732. Robert Southey, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo. London, 1816, 214–15. All references to the poem have been taken from this edition. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 1815–1817. H.J.C. Grierson (ed.). London: Constable & Co, 1933, 91. Ibid., 78–9. Ibid., 80. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1878, II.469. All page references are to this edition.

Ways of Seeing War: The Poets

1 ‘Occasioned by the Same Battle’ (a sonnet which followed ‘Inscription for A National Monument in Commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo’). See Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, Carl H. Ketcham (ed.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989, 172. All references in this section are to this edition. 2 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth E. de Selincourt (ed.), Second Edition, III, The Middle Years, Part II, 1812–1820, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 290. 3 Ibid., (18 April 1816). 4 Shorter Poems Ketcham (ed.), 175. 5 Ibid., 180. All quotations from the Advertisement are taken from this edition, 177–80. 6 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth. The Later Years, 1803–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 288.

Notes 243 7 Ibid., 288. 8 Walter Savage Landor, ‘A Satire on Satirists’, 238–43. The Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor, Stephen Wheeler (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937, III.386. 9 Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth. The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 688 and 498–9: ‘Byron displays pro-Bonapartist feelings; Wordsworth argues that Bonaparte cannot win if the Allies keep together.’ 10 Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, Jerome J. McGann (ed.). Vol. V, Don Juan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 718. 11 ‘In my hot youth’. Byron’s Letters and Journals, I. Leslie A. Marchand (ed.). London: John Murray, 1973, 221. 12 Ibid., 221. 13 Leslie Marchand, Byron, A Portrait. London: John Murray, 1971, 236. 14 Byron’s Letters and Journals, Leslie A. Marchand (ed.). London: John Murray, IX.191. 15 Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, McGann (ed.), V.717–8. 16 The Oxford edition gives a reference to Hudibras, III.ii.1107–8. See Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, McGann (ed.), V.725. 17 Castelnau’s chapter (Volume II, Chapter xxx) is reprinted in the Oxford edition, V.725–32. 18 Ibid., 728.

10

Ways of Seeing War: The Soldiers

1 Antony Brett-James, Life in Wellington’s Army. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, 150. 2 Elie Halévy, A History of the English People, 1815–1830, trans. E.I. Watkin. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926, opening section of Vol. II. 3 Brian Connell, Introduction to the one-volume Folio Society edition, London, 1973, 9. The full title is History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 1814. By W.F.P. Napier, C.B. Lt. Colonel H.P. Forty-Third Regiment. London: John Murray, 1828–40. 4 Connell, Introduction, 13–14. 5 Connell, Introduction, 10. 6 There was a distinct difference between the Spanish armies, commanded by generals such as Cuesta, and the irregular forces. Antoine Henri Jomini, who served in the French army in Spain and later became a distinguished theorist of war, remembered that guerilla warfare made things very difficult for the occupier: ‘while, like Don Quixote, he is attacking windmills, his adversary is on his line of communications, destroys the detachments left to guard it, surprises his convoys, his depots, and carries on a war so disastrous for the invader that he must inevitably yield after a time.’ Quoted in Archer Jones, The Art of Warfare in the Western World. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987, 365. 7 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret (eds and trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, 70, 71. All page references are to this edition.

244 Notes

11

Afterwords: De Quincey, Ruskin and Hardy

1 The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, David Masson (ed.). London: A & C Black, 1897, VIII. All page references refer to this volume. 2 The Works of John Ruskin, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds). London: George Allen, 1905, XVIII.459–60. 3 Ibid., 462–3. 4 Ibid., 464–5. 5 Ibid., 468–70. 6 Ibid., 472. 7 Ibid., 480. 8 Ibid., 484. 9 Ibid., 493. 10 Thomas Hardy, Preface to The Dynasts (Complete Edition, London: Macmillan, 1910, vii). 11 Walter F. Wright, The Shaping of the Dynasts. A Study in Thomas Hardy. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1967, 98. 12 Ibid., 114. 13 Preface, ix. 14 Preface, x. 15 Wright, The Shaping of the Dynasts, 101.

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Index Addington, Henry, Prime Minister, 84, 85, 92 Akenside, Mark, 33 Albuera, battle of, 147, 150, 183, 204 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 208 Almeida, siege of, 147 American War of Independence, 18, 23, 39, 44, 52 Amiens, Peace of, 5, 8, 51, 75, 77, 84–92, 113, 115 Anti-Jacobin, The, 22, 34, 68, 70–3, 77 Antoinette, Marie, Queen of France, 40, 43, 60 Anton, James, 117 Aquinas, St Thomas, 17 Auerstadt, battle of, 140, 207 Augustine, Saint, 17 Austen, Jane, 1–2, 4, 5, 116 Persuasion, 3–4, 116 Austerlitz, battle of, 32, 35–6, 113, 116, 139, 225–6 Badajoz, siege of, 148, 150, 203 Baird, Sir David, 132 Bastille, fall of, 39 Battle of Maldon, The, 31 Beattie, James, 9, 28 The Minstrel, 28 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3 Belcher, Jem, 14 Beowulf, 31 Beresford, General Sir William, 150, 204–5 Binyon, Laurence, 31 ‘For the Fallen’, 31 Blake, William, 7, 8, 21–2, 23–4, 26, 43, 47, 228 ‘Auguries of Innocence’, 7 Europe, a Prophecy, 43 ‘Glad Day’, 8 ‘London’, 26 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 21, 47

Boone, Daniel, 192 Borodino, 208 boxing, 14–15 Brunswick, Duke of, 42, 51, 118 Burke, Edmund, 15, 19, 33, 40, 42, 50, 60 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 60 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 15, 19, 33, 40 Burns, Robert, 5, 81–2 Bussaco, battle of, 147, 149, 150 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 9, 15, 36–7, 146, 161–4, 175, 180, 182–96, 197, 198 Age of Bronze, The, 65, 194–5 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 9, 74, 125, 146, 147, 161–2, 182, 183–7 ‘Devil’s Drive, The’, 183 Don Juan, 37, 61, 65, 151, 162–3, 182, 187–96, 197, 198 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 15 Vision of Judgment, The, 164 Campbell, Thomas, 5, 63–4, 77–83, 116, 135 ‘Battle of the Baltic, The’, 80–1 ‘Hohenlinden’, 78–9 Pleasures of Hope, The, 63–4 ‘Wounded Hussar, The’, 78 ‘Ye Mariners of England’, 79–80 Canning, George, 14, 134 Cape St Vincent, battle of, 97, 106 Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 222 Sartor Resartus, 222 Carrociolo, Francesco, 105 Cary, Henry Francis, 64 Castlenau, Gabriel de, 188–91 Castlereagh, Lord, 14, 133 Catherine, Tsarina of Russia (‘the Great’), 61, 64 Charles IV, King of Spain, 123, 201 250

Index Cintra, Convention of, 115, 123–32, 137, 141, 144, 146, 156 Ciudad Rodrigo, siege of, 118, 147, 148, 150, 202 Clare, John, 5 Village Minstrel, The, 9 Clarke, Mary Anne, 134, 144 Clausewitz, Carl von, 13, 16, 154–5, 205, 207–16, 217, 218 On War, 207–16 Cobbett, William, 5, 52–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 5, 25, 26, 34, 42, 50, 51, 56, 58–9, 62, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72–3, 75–6, 77, 84–5, 88, 90, 103, 121, 198, 228 Conciones ad Populum, 25, 56 ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’, 35 ‘France, an Ode’, 76 Friend, The, 103 Greek Ode on the Slave Trade, 47 ‘Koskiusko’, 62 Lyrical Ballads, 72–3 Moral and Political Lecture, A, 26 ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, 63 Collingwood, Admiral Cuthbert, 95, 106 Conrad, Joseph, 199 Constable, John, 179 Copenhagen, battle of, 80–1, 95, 98, 101 Corunna, retreat to, 16, 21, 115, 120, 122, 133–7, 141, 143, 144, 149, 206 Cowper, William, 192 Coxe, William, 74 Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland, 74 Cribb, Tom, 14 Crowe, William, 24–5, 49, 77, 188 Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Portland as Chancellor of Oxford University, 24–5, 49–50, 188 Cruikshank, Isaac, 88 Cuesta, General Don Gregorio de la, 146, 202 Dalrymple, Sir Hew, 124, 125, 127 De Quincey, Thomas, 15, 125, 127, 134, 217–20 ‘On War’, 217–20 Dundas, Henry, 54

251

Egyptian campaign, 75 Erskine, Thomas, 42, 50 Eylau, battle of, 140 Farington, Joseph, 68–9, 86, 87, 91 Fenwick, Isabella, 125 Ferdinand, King of Spain, 123 Fitzgerald, William Thomas, 155 Fox, Charles James, 17, 68, 88–9, 91, 113, 224 Frederick William, King of Prussia, 208 Freer, Edward, 205 Frend, William, 48, 69 Frere, Hookham, 134, 137, 144, 200 Friedland, battle of, 113 Fuentes d’Onoro, battle of, 118, 147 Gardner, Sir Alan, 69 Garrick, Edward, 11 George, Prince of Wales (Prince Regent), 35, 41, 96, 225 George III, King of England, 41, 225 Gillray, James, 57, 85, 86, 88, 92–3, 94, 106–7, 201 Godoy, Manuel de, 123, 201, 225 Godwin, William, 15, 19, 24, 26, 71 Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 19–20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 42 Goldsmith, Oliver, 23, 26–7, 197 The Deserted Village, 23, 26–7 Grant, Anne MacVicar, 157–8 Grose, Edward, 163 Hamilton, Emma, 100, 106, 107 Hamilton, Sir William, 95, 100, 106–7 Hardy, Thomas (Captain of the Victory), 106 Hardy, Thomas (London Corresponding Society), 42 Hardy, Thomas (novelist and poet), 14, 16, 32, 109, 139, 207, 223–9 ‘One we knew’, 109 The Dynasts, 16, 32, 139, 223–8 Harris, Rifleman, 118, 198 Haydn, Joseph, 106 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 176, 180 Hazlitt, William, 11–12, 22, 85, 87–8, 92, 182

252 Index Heber, Reginald, 138–43 Europe, 138–43 Hemans, Felicia, 102, 114, 121–2, 142–3 Henzi, Samuel, 74 Hill, General Rowland, 138, 199 Hogg, James, 36 Holcroft, Thomas, 42, 71 Homer, 23, 30–1, 77, 188–9, 228 The Iliad, 30–1, 33 Hondeschoote, battle of, 57, 69 Hugo, Victor, 217 Hunt, John, 16 Hunt, Leigh, 16, 65, 106 ‘Christ’s Hospital’, 106 ‘To Kosciusko’, 65 Hurd, Richard, 33 Ismail, siege of, 60, 150, 187–93 Jeffrey, Francis, 15, 22, 111, 112, 115 Jena, battle of, 32, 108, 113, 141, 142 Jones, Stephen, 64 History of Poland, The, 64 Junot, Androche, Marshal, 125 Just War, doctrine of, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 14 Kean, Edmund, 11 Keats, John, 8, 9, 65 ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 65 Kemble, John Philip, 11 Kincaid, John, 118, 119–20, 132, 160, 198 Knight, Cornelia, 106 Kosciuszko, Thaddeus, 61–7 Lamb, Charles, 55, 64, 71, 85–6 Landor, Walter Savage, 76, 126, 180 Gebir, 76 Leipsig, battle of, 157, 158 Liverpool, Lord, Prime Minister, 148 Lloyd, Charles, 71 Lloyd, Thomas, 205 Lodi, battle of, 78 London Corresponding Society, 42, 43, 54, 69 Losh, James, 75 Louis XVI, King of France, 39–40 Louis XVIII, King of France, 156

Mackintosh, James, 42 Vindiciae Gallicae, 42 Maclise, Daniel, 101 Malta, 1 Marathon, battle of, 74, 162 Marengo, battle of, 32, 78, 160 Martin, John, 54 Masséna, André, Marshal, 149 Milton, John, 9, 31, 130, 131, 155, 159, 165, 174 Paradise Lost, 31, 131, 155, 158, 159, 174 Moore, General Sir John, 1, 3, 16, 22, 132–7, 141, 143, 144, 145, 197, 199, 201–2, 204, 206, 225 Moore, Thomas, 15, 27–9, 32, 187 ‘The Minstrel Boy’, 27–9, 32 Morat, battle of, 74 Morgann, Maurice, 12 Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, 12 Napier, William, 13, 100, 120, 133, 136, 137, 144, 145, 151, 172, 197–207, 225 History of the War in the Peninsula, 197–207 Napoleon Bonaparte, 2, 3, 5, 6, 16, 21, 22, 32, 36, 65, 67, 69, 74, 75, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88–9, 91, 92–3, 94, 108, 133, 138, 147, 148, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159–73, 193–6, 197, 204, 206, 208, 225, 226 appearance, 86–7 as Emperor, 93, 108 as First Consul, 88–90 Italian Campaign, 21, 78 retreat from Moscow, 151, 226 in Spain, 123, 133 at Toulon, 6 Waterloo Campaign, 159–62 Nelson, Horatio, Admiral, 3, 16, 21, 22, 26, 82, 95–107, 113, 114, 128, 132, 135, 136, 137, 145, 225 Netherlands Campaign, 21, 42, 52, 53–4, 57–9, 115 Ney, Michel, Marshal, 16, 22 Nile, battle of, 21, 95, 101, 106

Index Ochs, Peter, 74 Orange, Prince of, 57 Ord, John Walker, 64 Paine, Thomas, 16, 18–19, 20, 24, 41–2, 43, 71 Crisis Extraordinary, 18 Rights of Man, 18–19, 41 Parker, Sir Hyde, 95 Pasley, Charles William, 1–3, 4, 5, 6, 115, 215 Peterloo massacre, 37, 198 Pitt, William, the younger, Prime Minister, 14, 48, 68, 84, 85, 88, 113, 140, 225 Poland, 19, 59–67, 73 Priestley, Joseph, 41 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 15 Pye, Henry James, 40–1, 49 Quiberon Bay, battle of, 69 Ramsay, Allan, 173 Ramsay, Norman, 118 Regent, Prince, see George, Prince of Wales Richmond, Duchess of, 160 Richmond, Duke of, 225 Riou, Edward, 106 Robespierre, Maximilien, 71, 93 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 133, 178 Rogers, Samuel, 86, 91, 182 Rollo, Corporal, 197 Ruskin, John, 220–3 ‘War’, 220–3 St Vincent, Cape, battle of, 95, 97, 106 Saragossa, siege of, 144 Scholfield, Dragoon, 7 Scott, John, of Amwell, 43 Scott, John, editor of The Champion, 15, 175 Scott, Walter, 5, 13, 27, 28, 33, 55, 109–15, 124–5, 126, 148–50, 151–2, 159, 168–73 Anne of Geierstein, 74 ‘Dance of Death, The’, 170–1 ‘Field of Waterloo, The’, 169–70 Guy Mannering, 119

253

Lady of the Lake, The, 114 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 28, 110 Legend of Montrose, A, 27 Marmion, 33, 110, 111–15 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The, 110 Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, 13, 171–3 Vision of Don Roderick, The, 148–50, 166 Shakespeare, William, 7, 10, 171–2, 203–4 Coriolanus, 10, 11–12, 157 Hamlet, 10, 11 Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, 10, 11 Henry V, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 203 Macbeth, 7, 171 Richard III, 11, 160 Shelley, Mary, 37, 198 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 8, 9, 32, 34–5, 36, 37, 153–5, 180, 198, 228 ‘Esdaile Notebook, The’, 34–5 ‘Falshood and Vice’, 35 ‘Mask of Anarchy, The’, 16 ‘Ozymandias’, 32 ‘Peter Bell the Third’, 37 Shrapnel, Henry, 118 Sidney, Sir Philip, 130 Skill, William, 57 Sobieski, John, 59 Sontag, Susan, 22, 95 The Volcano Lover, 95 Sotheby, William, 103, 158 Saul, 103 Soult, Marshal, Duc de Dalmatia, 145, 199, 202 Southey, Robert, 34, 68, 70, 71, 76, 85, 112, 126, 127, 152–3, 156–7, 159, 163, 164–8, 174, 182, 193 ‘Battle of Blenheim, The’, 72 Carmen Triomphale, 151 Joan of Arc, 48 Life of Nelson, 99–101, 102–3 ‘Ode, written during the Negotiations . . . 1814’, 152–3 ‘Soldier’s Wife, The’, 34 The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, 164–8 Vision of Judgement, A, 164

254 Index Spenser, Edmund, 8–9, 31, 97, 148, 158 Faerie Queene, The, 8–9, 31 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 14, 217 Stockdale, Percival, 102 Suvorov, Marshal, 60, 61, Switzerland, invasion of, 2, 3, 73–7 Talavera, battle of, 2, 146, 147, 149, 183, 203, 225 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de Périgord, 88 Tennyson, Alfred, 221 Maud, 221 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 14, 116, 162, 171, 217 Vanity Fair, 162, 171 Thelwall, John, 42, 69, 71 Thompson, E.P., 54 Thomson, James, 73 Liberty, 73 Tierney, George, 15 Tolstoy, Leo, 139 War and Peace, 139 Tomkinson, William, 120 Toulon, siege of, 6, 69 Toussaint l’Ouverture, 89, 91 Trafalgar, battle of, 16, 21, 26, 82–3, 95–6, 98, 101, 102, 103, 115, 187, 225, 227 Troubridge, Thomas, 106 Turner, Joseph William Mallord, 16, 86, 103 Ulm, battle of, 113 Vallon, Annette, 89 Valmy, battle of, 42, 118, 209 Verona, congress of, 65, 66, 194, 195 Vienna, congress of, 194 Villeneuve, Admiral P., 225 Vimiero, battle of, 2, 125, 141, 142, 149 Vittoria, battle of, 227 Virgil, P. Virgilius Maro, 23, 31, 77 Wagram, battle of, 32, 140, 142, 143, 146 Walcheren expedition, 1, 21, 146–7

Wallace, William, 113, 114 Washington, George, 128 Waterloo, battle of, 14, 16, 21, 111, 116, 159–73, 182, 207, 208, 219, 223, 225, 226, 227 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 3, 6, 22, 29, 58, 124, 125, 127, 132, 144–151, 153, 159–63, 193–6, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204, 205, 206 West, Benjamin, 86, 96 West Indies, 32, 53 Wheeler, Private, 117 Williams, Helen Maria, 66, 71 Wolfe, Charles, 136–7 Wolfe, James, General, 135 Woodforde, James, Parson, 40 Wordsworth, William, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 24, 37, 44–7, 49, 50, 51, 57, 68, 72, 83, 113, 123, 125–32, 134, 135, 156, 163, 193, 219, 228 ‘Character of the Happy Warrior, The’, 103–6 Convention of Cintra, on the, 125–32, 134, 174, 181, 200 Descriptive Sketches, 44, 74 Evening Walk, An, 34, 44, 54 Excursion, The, 9–10, 34 Guilt and Sorrow, 24 ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, 51 Lyrical Ballads, 72–3 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 130 ‘Ode to Duty’, 26 ‘Old Man Travelling’, 36 Prelude, The, 45, 47, 53–4, 94, 127 ‘Ruined Cottage, The’, 34 Salisbury Plain Poems, The, 44–6 ‘Solitary Reaper, The’, 29 Thanksgiving Odes, 36, 164, 174–82, 218 ‘Thoughts of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, 75 White Doe of Rylstone, The, 9 York, George Frederick, Duke of, 21, 57–9, 115, 134, 144, 177