Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [554]
There was nothing he could say.
It was after he had taken his leave of Frances and his wife that he had a last brief word with Barnikel.
“My wife will be much alone, doctor,” he said. “And I may be gone two years. She will need a friend. May I place her in your care?”
Thaddeus Barnikel swallowed but gave him his hand.
“You may.”
In the year 1804, great events were stirring: events that were critical for Britain.
In January Napoleon changed his plans and decided that the fleet of armed transports he had been preparing would not be strong enough, and that he would need the French navy to accompany them as a protective escort.
It was a powerful fleet, for it contained not only the French navy, but the ships of France’s allies the Spanish as well: a total greater than England’s fleet.
“He will have to engage our navy and smash us first,” Forest explained to Porteus; “That’s his object now. Then he’ll ship his army across, and it will be huge.”
“Our army is still small.”
“It is.”
“So all now rests upon a single naval engagement.”
“When it comes, yes.”
From February to April, King George III suffered another of his bouts of madness.
Then, in May, the feeble ministry led by the well-meaning Addington collapsed and – “by the grace of God” said Porteus – William Pitt returned to power. Ironically, on the same day, May 18, Napoleon Bonaparte in his final departure from the supposed democracy of the French Revolution, crowned himself Emperor.
In the history of England, no man, not even Churchill in the twentieth century, ever assumed for himself during a period in office the heroic status of William Pitt the younger. His thin, meagre form with its long, upward-turning nose, and its nearly impossible angularities (his almost total lack of a posterior caused cartoonists to dub him ‘the bottomless Pitt’) was driven by such concentrated passion, such acute nervous energy, and such a driving and selfless zeal for the cause of his country in its desperate years of crisis, that the House of Commons was not only dominated by him, but awed.
“I think the man lives on his passion and upon air,” Barnikel said to Canon Porteus. He had heard that Pitt’s personal life had been one of great disappointment; but whether his political passion was an outlet for his frustration, or whether it would have been there anyway, he had no means of judging. Of his greatness, and of his firmness of purpose in resisting Napoleon, there was no doubt.
“He has the strength of the prophets, sir,” Porteus answered, “because he serves a noble cause. He is pure.” And it was clear that the canon considered himself cast in the same mould.
The plan by which Pitt saved his country from destruction in the years 1804 to 1806 was twofold. The first object was to form an alliance with the unwilling European powers that would force Napoleon to remove his gathering army from the northern coast of France. His second was to blockade the French navy in port so that they could not get out and destroy England’s own.
At first the alliance seemed harder to achieve. The Europeans had no wish to fight Napoleon again. He had already proved that on the field of battle he was their master. As long as France remained within her natural frontiers on the continent, they would do nothing.
But fortunately there was one hope. Czar Alexander of Russia wanted to expand, north into the Baltic and south to Constantinople. Here Pitt found an ally against the threatening power of France. But he needed more. Austria held back; Prussia, cynically, seemed ready to sell her services, and the right to cross her territory, to the highest bidder.
Napoleon had ninety thousand men at Boulogne, and two thousand transports. Like Emperor Claudius, eighteen hundred years before, he seemed about to sweep all before him on the northern island.
And then, as so often in his meteoric career, Napoleon overreached himself. Not only did he parcel out Germany as casually as if he were cutting up a cake, but in the spring of 1805 he had himself crowned King of Italy. It was too much. The message was