First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [60]
Not a peerage but appointment as Knight Commander of the Bath was all that was forthcoming, which, considering that George III was always complaining of passive commanders and seeking bold men of action, was rather meager. Reports of Rodney’s dubious methods may have been the reason. He hopes that “if His Majesty is graciously pleased to bestow any part of it between the navy and the army, that he will dictate in what manner his gracious bounty may be bestowed, that all altercations may be prevented.”
The furor aroused by Rodney’s confiscation of British-owned property from the merchants found to have been trading with the enemy naturally reached the government’s critics at home and brought the most forceful voice of the Opposition, Edmund Burke, to his feet in the House to demand an inquiry. In denunciation, the power and passion and overflowing torrent of Burke’s rhetoric could make a man believe his own mother was an arm of Satan. His theme was “the cruelty and oppression” of Rodney’s treatment of the inhabitants of St. Eustatius which could provoke, he said, reprisals by their nations while “we were engaged in a most calamitous war in which we had many enemies and no friends.” Pursuing the happy notion that gentler methods toward the enemy instead of “pushing war to its extremes” would, Burke claimed, “soften resentment” and bring their minds to a “favourable inclination towards peace,” while neutrals “might be brought to applaud the dignity of our sentiments as a people and assist us in the conflict. But a contrary behaviour on our part was likely to provoke them to unite against us and make the protection of human nature from plunder and robbery a common cause.” For so keen a political mind and so well-informed an observer as Burke of the real behavior of states at war, this was moonshine in which it is hard to suppose that Burke believed or that it changed a single vote not already determined by party loyalty. Burke could indulge and hold the attention of the House in this kind of rhapsodizing by the force of his language and the hypnotizing magic of its flow. The terms used in declaring the Dutch war, he went on, “threatened no inhuman cruelty, no uncommon severity,” but “seemed rather to portend the short variance of old allies in which all their old friendship and affection would operate rather as the softener than the inflamer of the common calamities of war. It breathed expressions of kindness and long suffering” and its menaces “seemed to be torn by constraint from a heart bleeding under the affliction of unwilling strife.” Then the expedition against St. Eustatius was ordered close upon the “most melancholy and general disaster” of the recent hurricane, “which had involved all the islands in common suffering and common distress.” Here he had a point. “It might have been expected that the deadly serpents of war would for a time have been hushed into a calm in that quarter of the world … and would not have increased the stock of their distress.… Surely when human pride was levelled in the dust and we saw what worms we were beneath the hand of Omnipotence it became us to crawl from our holes with a feeling of brotherly love to each other; to abate a little of our rancour and not add the devastations of war to those of the hurricane. But it was not so with Great Britain.” He followed with a sobbing passage about the “unprepared, naked and defenceless” conditions of the islands, as if this were somehow Britain’s fault, adding to her guilt, and then moved to a peroration about the confiscations: “Without regard to friend or foe,” to neutrals or British subjects, “the wealth of the opulent, the goods of the merchant, the utensils of the artisan, the necessaries of the poor were seized on, and a sentence of general beggary pronounced in one moment upon a whole people. A cruelty unheard of in Europe for many years … a most unjustifiable, outrageous and unprincipled