Dennis Wheatley - The Rape Of Venice

'You spoke, too, of the Christian Faith,' Mr. Pitt went on, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. 'It has recently suffered as serious a decline as loyalty to the Crown. John Wesley's teachings detached a great part of the masses from the Established Church. Methodism is a revolt from religious discipline and on doctrinal matters near synonymous with Freethinking. What more fertile breeding ground could you have for complete disbelief? Those who preach anarchy also preach atheism and, alas, thousands, many thousands, of the proletariat have now accepted both.

'With regard to money: in the present war I have had to find vast sums to subsidise our allies. Without British gold they could never have kept their armies in the field so long, and the drain has near ruined us.

'As for myself, 'tis true that I have the backing of a large majority in the House; but I no longer possess the confidence of the people. If ever I now drive abroad I am greeted with shouts of “Peace! Peace! Stop the War! Stop killing our friends! Murderer! Stop sending our money to the foreign tyrants! Give us bread! Give us peace!” '

'Tell me, Sir,' Roger asked, 'what is the cause of this extraordinary change in the people's attitude?'

'The Whig aristocracy is fundamentally to blame. Unlike us Tories, they have never lifted a finger to protect the common people. Democracy means for them equality among themselves and striving to bring the Monarch down to their own level. They prate of Liberalism and the Rights of Man, yet did not scruple to take advantage of the Enclosures Act and increase their own properties by grabbing the land that for centuries had been held in common by the peasantry of each village. Robbed of free tillage, pasture and firewood, the peasants migrated to the towns. There they were sweated, brutalised from being forced to live in slums, and at bad times turned off to starve. Then came the French Revolution, and from it there emerged this Wave of agitators who promise that the dethronement of Kings and the murder of the rich will bring about a Utopia. Yet can it be wondered at that any prospect of bettering their appalling lot should light a flame among the slum dwellers? I do not blame them. On the contrary, it fills me with despair that we should have to spend on war the millions that I might otherwise use in wise measures to ameliorate their lot.'

After a moment the Prime Minister went on: 'That is the root cause; but the positive factor that has turned widespread discontent into smouldering revolution is the failure of last year's harvest. Early this year the best wheat was fetching six guineas a quarter-​a positively phenomenal price; and bread now costs far more than the ordinary worker can afford to pay.'

Roger nodded. 'I was aware of that, Sir; and that you had taken measures to counteract it. Prohibiting the manufacture of whisky, putting a tax on flour used for powdering the hair, urging the bakers to use one-​third barley when making loaves, and having the members of the House set an example by voluntarily denying themselves pastry until the crisis is over, should have gone a great way to restoring the situation.'

'Nevertheless, considerable numbers of His Majesty's poorest subjects have actually died from starvation. Should the harvest fail again this year, I'll not answer for it that events here will not follow the pattern they took in France, and a guillotine be set up in Whitehall as a means of terminating the activities of people such as you and I.'

'Plague on it!' Roger protested.' Twould be prodigious hard if having lived through the Terror in Paris I were called upon to spit in the basket no more than a quarter of a mile from my own Club.' Then he added in a more sober tone, 'I no longer wonder now at your anxiety to secure a peace. Yet I see no way to it short of betraying our Austrian allies and submitting to ignominious terms.'

'That I would never do,' replied the Prime Minister haughtily. 'Nor, did I make such proposals, would His Majesty consent to them.'

'Do you believe, Sir, that the Austrians will stand equally loyally by us?'

'I believe the Emperor has the will to do so, but whether he has the means is another question. Only this week I received from him a request for a further one million two hundred thousand pounds. He asserts that without it he will be unable to pay his troops through to the end of this year's campaign.'

'Is it your intention to let him have it?'

'Legally, I cannot do so without the consent of Parliament, and the House does not reassemble until October.'

'By then he would receive it too late for the purpose he requires it.'

'I had thought to shelve the matter, hoping that by the late summer the French would find themselves compelled to enter into negotiations for a general pacification.'

Roger turned away to gaze out across the battlements. Far below some children were paddling in the gently creaming surf. The blue-​green sea was calm, the sun glinting on its wavelets. A few miles out a brigantine with all sail set was heading down Channel. Otherwise the sea stretched unbroken to disappear in a heat-​haze on the horizon. Without looking at Mr. Pitt, he said:

'Should it be not France, but Austria, that has to give in through lack of funds, the whole power of the Republic will be turned against us. You must face it, Sir, that before this time next year we would then be at death-​grips with General Buonaparte's troops upon these very beaches.'

The Prime Minister sighed. 'Your having brought to my attention this new source of wealth which will keep the French fighting, I dare not ignore that possibility. It is clear, too, that in the Austrian armies lies our only hope of checking Buonaparte's advance, and with it this flow of gold; so it has become more necessary than ever to keep them in the field. Let us go down to my room and from a map endeavour to judge the way in which the campaign is likely to develop.'

Picking up the decanter and his glass, he led the way down a flight of stone steps, through a low nail-​studded oak door, and so back to the room in which he had received Roger that morning. It had no great map of Europe-​such as one might have expected to find pinned up on the wall of the study of the leader of a nation at war but Mr. Pitt took from a shelf a well-​thumbed atlas and flicked over its leaves until he came to the map of Italy.

It was a patchwork of different colours. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, embracing all southern Italy and the great island of Sicily, was the largest. Next in size came the Kingdom of Sardinia, consisting of that island, together with Savoy and Piedmont in the north-​west, which, in the previous month, had been conquered by General Buonaparte. The whole middle of the peninsula was occupied by the States of the Church and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Above them lay a mosaic of smaller states: the Republics of Genoa and Lucia, the Dukedoms of Parma, Modena, Mantua and Milan, and, spreading over all of the north-​east, from near Milan to the Adriatic, a territory as large as Switzerland that was still ruled by the Serene Republic of Venice.

Roger laid a finger-​tip on Nice, drew it eastward some way along the Ligurian coast, then twenty miles inland, and remarked:

'That is the route Buonaparte took, and it was up there in the mountains that he carried out the first part of his plan by driving a wedge between the Piedmontese and General Beaulieu's Austrians. Alone the Piedmontese had no chance against him, and one most unfortunate result of their surrender is that it has enabled Buonaparte to open direct communications through Turin with France.'

The Prime Minister nodded. 'Yes, Lord Cornwall's pointed that out to me at a recent meeting of the Cabinet. 'Tis a sad blow, as previously all his supplies had to be brought from Nice along the coast to bases on the Italian Riviera, and were then exposed to constant harassing from Commodore Nelson's squadron working out of Leghorn. Now we are no longer able to aid the Austrians even to that extent.'