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involved conscription as the militia only served at home and was often embodied only on a part-time basis). But none of this increased the regular army: it was hoped that men recruited to the militia would get a taste for life with the colours and volunteer for service with a line unit, but it was several years before this system began to produce significant results. In general, then, the army had to rely on civilian volunteers, and in this it was singularly unsuccessful: between June and December 1803 the 360 recruiting parties sent out into the country raised the grand total of 3,481 men, or fewer than ten apiece. This was unsurprising: while the army paid a bounty for all recruits, far more money was available to anyone who would take up arms in the navy or sell themselves as a substitute for men called up to the militia. Thus the regular army remained very small: indeed, so miserable was the trickle of recruits that it actually declined by 13,000 men during the first nine months of the war. Yet without a strong regular army that could dispatch substantial forces of troops to the Continent, there was little chance of persuading potential foreign allies that they should take up arms alongside Britain.

The British were in a quandary. No means of raising a powerful army existed, nor was there any chance of securing a change in public perception of the armed forces. With the Volunteers as ubiquitous as they were full of bombast and self-confidence, even the threat of invasion was not sufficient to persuade the populace that more men were needed for the regulars, while the inflated tone of the propaganda that swamped the country hardly lessened ‘little Englander’ convictions that John Bull could thrash the French without the assistance of a troop of benighted continentals. So necessary was foreign aid, however, that increasingly it was Britain that was benighted. It helped a little that on 7 May 1804 Addington was replaced as prime minister by William Pitt: not only was the latter known as a man of action, but Addington was an unimpressive figure who was regularly jeered at in the House of Commons as a coward and caricatured as a small boy playing at soldiers. But in the end the return of Pitt made no difference, for the reality was that, despite his immense qualities as a war leader, he had no more to offer than Addington. To quote William Cobbett, ‘Mr Pitt’s system . . . is worn out . . . as well as with regard to military glory as with regard to domestic liberty.’31

In the end what saved Britain was that she was fighting an opponent who could be all but guaranteed sooner or later to antagonize the powers of Europe. Once again, then, we come to the personal influence of the First Consul, for in 1803 none but a Napoleon could have driven them to war. Let us begin with Austria. Here the chances of an alliance were zero. As the Austrian ambassador, Starhemberg, had told Addington, ‘We are a giant, but a giant exhausted, and we require time to regain our strength.’32 In part, the trouble was financial. Thanks in particular to the inability of the Habsburgs to draw with any degree of adequacy on Hungary, Austria’s resources were simply not sufficient to meet the demands of war against France. Meanwhile, Francis was unwilling to increase taxes for fear of internal unrest. The Turkish war of 1787-9 had already seen the introduction of paper currency in the form of bonds known as bankozettel - and in the course of the 1790s the total sum involved had steadily increased: indeed, between January 1799 and January1801 the amount in circulation actually doubled. From 1795 onwards depreciation therefore set in while prices began to rise alarmingly. Also on the rise was the national debt, which soared from 390 million gulden to 613 million gulden between 1792 and 1801. And finally, thanks to Lunéville, the central government had lost a considerable amount of tax revenue. Money, then, was short - so short, indeed, that the Ministry of Finance wanted greatly to cut the military budget - but this was not the only issue. In the campaigns