Walter Scott - Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Volume III

The detention of civilians, unoffending and defenceless, was a breach of those courtesies which ought to be sacred, as mitigating the horrors of war. The occupation of Hanover was made in violation of the Germanic Constitution. This patrimony of our kings had in former wars been admitted to the benefit of neutrality; a reasonable distinction being taken betwixt the Elector of Hanover, as one of the grand feudatories of the empire, and the same person in his character of King of Great Britain; in which latter capacity only he was at war with France. But Buonaparte was not disposed to recognise these metaphysical distinctions; nor were any of the powers of Germany in a condition to incur his displeasure, by asserting the constitution and immunities of the empire. Austria had paid too deep a price for her former attempts to withstand the power of France, to permit her to extend her opposition beyond a feeble remonstrance; and Prussia had too long pursued a temporizing and truckling line of politics, to allow her to break short with Napoleon by endeavouring to merit the title her monarch once claimed, – of Protector of the North of Germany.

HANOVER SEIZED.

Every thing in Germany being thus favourable to the views of France, Mortier, who had already assembled an army in Holland, and on the frontiers of Germany, moved forward on Hanover. A considerable force was collected for resistance under his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge and General Walmoden. It soon appeared, however, that, left to their own resources, and absolutely unsupported either by England or the forces of the empire, the electorate was incapable of resistance; and that any attempt at an ineffectual defence would only serve to aggravate the distresses of the country, by subjecting the inhabitants to the extremities of war. In compassion, therefore, to the Hanoverians, the Duke of Cambridge was induced to leave the hereditary dominions of his father's house; and General Walmoden had the mortification to find himself obliged to enter into a convention, by which the capital of the electorate, and all its strongholds, were to be delivered up to the French, and the Hanoverian army were to retire behind the Elbe, on condition not to serve against France and her allies till previously exchanged. 38 38 Annual Register, vol. xlv., p. 283.

The British government having refused to ratify this convention of Suhlingen, as it was termed, the Hanoverian army were summoned to surrender as prisoners of war; – hard terms, which, upon the determined resistance of Walmoden, were only thus far softened, that these tried and faithful troops were to be disbanded, and deliver up their arms, artillery, horses, and military stores. In a letter to the first consul, Mortier declares that he granted these mitigated terms from respect to the misfortunes of a brave enemy; and mentions, in a tone of creditable feeling, the distress of General Walmoden, and the despair of the fine regiment of Hanoverian guards, when dismounting from their horses to surrender them up to the French.

At the same time that they occupied Hanover, the French failed not to make a further use of their invasion of Germany, by laying forced loans on the Hanseatic towns, and by other encroachments.

The Prince Royal of Denmark was the only sovereign who showed an honourable sense of these outrages, by assembling in Holstein an army of thirty thousand men; but being unsupported by any other power, he was soon glad to lay aside the attitude which he had assumed. Austria accepted, as current payment, the declaration of France, that by her occupation of Hanover she did not intend any act of conquest, or annexation of territory, but merely proposed to retain the electorate as a pledge for the isle of Malta, which the English, contrary, as was alleged, to the faith of treaties, refused to surrender. Prussia, naturally dissatisfied at seeing the aggressions of France extend to the neighbourhood of her own territories, was nevertheless obliged to rest contented with the same excuse.

The French ruler did not confine himself to the occupation of Hanover. Tarentum, and other seaports of the King of Naples's dominions, were seized upon, under the same pretext of their being a pledge for the restoration of Malta. In fact, by thus quartering his troops upon neutral territories, by whom he took care that they should be paid and clothed, Napoleon made the war support itself, and spared France the burden of maintaining a great proportion of his immense army; while large exactions, not only on the commercial towns, but on Spain, Portugal, and Naples, and other neutral countries, in the name of loans, filled his treasury, and enabled him to carry on the expensive plans which he meditated.

Any one of the separate manœuvres which we have mentioned, would, before this eventful war, have been considered as a sufficient object for a long campaign. But the whole united was regarded by Buonaparte only as side-blows, affecting Britain indirectly through the occupation of her monarch's family dominions, the embarrassment offered to her commerce, and the destruction of such independence as had been left to the continental powers. His great and decisive game remained to be played – that scheme of invasion to which he had so strongly pledged himself in his angry dialogue with Lord Whitworth. Here, perhaps, if ever in his life, Buonaparte, from considerations of prudence, suffered the period to elapse which would have afforded the best chance for execution of his venturous project.

It must be in the memory of most who recollect the period, that the kingdom of Great Britain was seldom less provided against invasion than at the commencement of this second war; and that an embarkation from the ports of Holland, if undertaken instantly after the war had broken out, might have escaped our blockading squadrons, and have at least shown what a French army could have done on British ground, at a moment when the alarm was general, and the country in an unprepared state. But it is probable that Buonaparte himself was as much unprovided as England for the sudden breach of the treaty of Amiens – an event brought about more by the influence of passion than of policy; so that its consequences were as unexpected in his calculations as in those of Great Britain. Besides, he had not diminished to himself the dangers of the undertaking, by which he must have staked his military renown, his power, which he held chiefly as the consequence of his reputation, perhaps his life, upon a desperate game, which, though he had already twice contemplated it, he had not yet found hardihood enough seriously to enter upon.

He now, however, at length bent himself, with the whole strength of his mind, and the whole force of his empire, to prepare for this final and decisive undertaking. The gun-boats in the bay of Gibraltar, where calms are frequent, had sometimes in the course of the former war been able to do considerable damage to the English vessels of war, when they could not use their sails. Such small craft, therefore, were supposed the proper force for covering the intended descent. They were built in different harbours, and brought together by crawling along the French shore, and keeping under the protection of the batteries, which were now established on every cape, almost as if the sea-coast of the Channel on the French side had been the lines of a besieged city, no one point of which could with prudence be left undefended by cannon. Boulogne was pitched upon as the centre port, from which the expedition was to sail. By incredible exertions, Buonaparte had rendered its harbour and roads capable of containing two thousand vessels of various descriptions. The smaller seaports of Vimereux, Ambleteuse, and Etaples, Dieppe, Havre, St. Valeri, Caen, Gravelines, and Dunkirk, were likewise filled with shipping. Flushing and Ostend were occupied by a separate flotilla. Brest, Toulon, and Rochefort, were each the station of as strong a naval squadron as France had still the means to send to sea.