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By Root 2736 0

Bedlamite that ever was allowed to be at large. I never saw anything so stark mad and, as it appears to me, so contemptible in every respect. To give you some little notion of his manners, I went by appointment to pay my first visit . . . After waiting a good while in an ante-chamber with some aides de camp, a door opened and a little old shrivelled creature in a pair of red breeches and his shirt for all clothing, bustled up to me, took me in his arms, and . . . made me a string of high-flown flummery compliments which he concluded by kissing me on both cheeks, and I am told that I was in luck that my mouth escaped. His shirt . . . was made of materials, and of a fashion, and was about as clean and white, as you may have seen on some labourers at home.10

And, to cite a second instance, we have a private letter written on 16 November of the same year by William Windham:

The aspect of affairs is not good . . . one emperor mad, another weak and pusillanimous; the King of Prussia governed by narrow, selfish and shortsighted counsels; no vigour, no energy, no greatness of plan but in the French, and they accordingly govern everything. Nothing is so clear to me as that a small portion of the soul of Mr Burke . . . would have rescued the world from this fate long ago.11

Britain’s representatives abroad were men of culture and breeding who were not generally in the habit of behaving with overt discourtesy (though if the admittedly hostile Lord Holland is to be believed, William Windham opened his career as British envoy to Tuscany ‘by horse-whipping in the public drive . . . M. Carletti, the chamberlain and favourite of the Grand Duke’).12 None the less it is clear that their prejudice towards the products of the ‘decayed’ absolutism of the eighteenth century could not be hidden. With the British throne currently in the hands of the increasingly erratic George III and all too soon set to pass into the hands of his drunken eldest son, however, such arrogance was hard to accept. As Charles James Fox remarked of the constant abuse of Bonaparte, ‘They should not throw stones whose houses are made of glass. The “crazy king, old mad George” would be just as polite, and, as wicked persons would say, rather better founded.’13 The British officer who wrote of ‘the sovereigns of Russia, Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and a host of petty German powers’ becoming ‘wonderfully courageous and enthusiastically devoted to England a few hours after the battle of Waterloo’ was exaggerating.14 Yet it is clear that forging a great international coalition was always going to be an uphill struggle for the British. And if Britain frequently had as much to complain of in the conduct of Austria and her other allies as they did in the actions of the court of St James, it can only be observed that this misses the point: as matters stood in 1803, it really seemed that Britain needed Austria, Russia and Prussia far more than they needed her. In addition, when war broke out again it is important to remember that it was the British who had in the end provoked the crisis and Napoleon who could present himself as the injured party. Reinforced by the immediate publication by Paris of copious documentation which stressed the importance of Malta as Britain’s casus belli to the exclusion of everything else, there was therefore a belief that the mainspring of everything was British imperialism. Typical enough are the views of the Neapolitan commander, Roger de Damas:

England’s one desire . . . is to drag the whole continent into the fray. It is her great hope that the French conquests may rouse all the chief powers, and the temporary ruin of Naples is nothing to her if a general conflagration be the result of it. In war and politics, moreover, everything is a matter of compensation. If the French invade the kingdom of Naples, the English compensate themselves with Sicily, which their superior navy enables them to occupy more easily. Consequently, though the English may prefer Naples to be an independent monarchy when the war is over, it does