Britain could reasonably expect to count on Portugal and
Naples, but neither were powerful states in military terms. Portugal could in
theory field twenty-eight battalions of infantry, forty-eight squadrons of
cavalry and thirty-two batteries of artillery, but in 1803 these numbered only
30,000 men, instead of the 50,000 they should have amounted to at full
strength. As for Naples, details of the organization of the Bourbon army have
not been located, but of its 24,000 men, only 10,000 could actually be mustered
for service, while nothing had been done to prepare for a resumption of
hostilities. To quote Damas, ‘Not a man was employed, not a redoubt was built,
not a fortress was repaired.’ In military terms, the only possible counter to
French preponderance were the large professional armies of Austria, Prussia and
Russia. At full strength they were impressive indeed. Thus, assuming that all
her formations were complete, Austria could supposedly field over 300,000 men
-255 infantry battalions, 322 cavalry squadrons, and 125 artillery batteries.
For Russia the figures were even greater, amounting to perhaps 400,000 men,
including her swarms of Cossacks – irregular horsemen recruited from the
settler communities of the southern and eastern frontiers who paid for their
land and personal freedom by means of military service. First-line regular
units numbered 359 infantry battalions, 341 cavalry squadrons and 229 artillery
batteries. Alone amongst the eastern powers, Russia was also a major naval power
with fleets in the Baltic and the Black Sea that in 1805 amounted to forty-four
ships-of-the-line, allowing her to overcome some of the limitations of her
geographical isolation (needless to say, they also made a Russian alliance
particularly attractive to Napoleon). As for Prussia, its 175 battalions, 156
squadrons and fifty batteries amounted to some 254,000 men. If Prussia came
into the fray, moreover, there was a strong possibility that she would be
assisted by the forces of a number of minor states such as Brunswick and Saxony
whom geography placed in her sphere of influence rather than that of France. Of
these, Brunswick had four battalions of infantry and four squadrons of cavalry,
and Saxony thirty-two battalions of infantry, forty squadrons of cavalry and
twelve batteries of artillery.
Of course, mere numbers were not everything: for a variety
of reasons, the armies of the eastern powers were militarily inferior to the
forces of Napoleon. In most textbooks, it is argued that this stemmed from the
simple fact that France had gone through a political revolution that
transformed her capacity to make war and, by extension, that in military terms
the ancien régime remained just that – ancien. But this is an
over-simplification. The tactical system used by the French army was certainly
both flexible and highly effective, but the forces which had resisted the
troops of the French Revolution had proved far more capable of dealing with it
than they have generally been given credit for. Indeed, the Old Order was not
at all the pushover of legend. To take the example of the reformed British army
of 1803-15: in almost every respect – organization, tactics, recruitment – this
was a classic army of the eighteenth century, and yet it never lost a battle
against the French. Nor is it really possible to argue that revolutionary ideology
was of much account in the equation: France’s men may have been citizens, but
that did not make them fight harder on the battlefield. What mattered was the
introduction of universal conscription: French generals could risk battle more
easily than their opponents and employ tactics that other armies would have
found suicidal, and only on a few occasions did they fail to outnumber the
enemy. On top of this, French armies were better articulated than their
opponents in that their system of higher formations – brigades and divisions
and, under Napoleon, corps – was more highly developed and could in consequence
deliver a heavier punch on the battlefield.
Command, too, was important. The generals of the ancien
régime were for the most part neither superannuated dodderers nor the products
of gilded aristocratic youth, but rather tough professionals who often had
substantial records of success. Many, indeed, were commanders of talent, and a
few men of genius: one thinks here of Wellington, the Archduke Charles and, for
all his oddities, Suvorov. But all too often they were operating with one hand
tied behind their back thanks to the imposition of a variety of political
controls. For example, in the summer of 1799 allied operations in Italy,
Switzerland and southern Germany were disrupted disastrously by interference
from both London and Vienna. Political control was often asserted from Paris,
but generals were as often spurred on as they were held back, while they were
more likely to defy their political masters. Nor should this last surprise us,
for the French Revolution gave the French army access to new leadership cadres
driven by a very different set of priorities than those that were the norm
among their opponents. Few of the men concerned were the complete nobodies of
legend: far from having sprung from poverty, they were for the most part the
scions of solid professional or commercial families, or men who might well
always have become officers in the French army but whose patents of nobility
were not accompanied by the connections with the court that were necessary to
achieve high rank. Many had already been soldiers in 1789: senior
non-commissioned officers, junior officers from the provincial nobility (like
Napoleon) and officiers de fortune who had come up from the ranks were all
common. What all these men shared was the knowledge that under Louis XVI they
would have been unlikely to make their name – that they would in the vast
majority of cases have been condemned to a lifetime of obscurity, boredom and
low pay. With the coming of the Revolution everything was transformed. All of a
sudden anything was possible, and this bred a hunger for victory, an aggression
and a vigour that was far less likely to be found in the ranks of their
opponents. Thus, at Valmy the Duke of Brunswick chose not to fight in order to
preserve his army, whereas for a Napoleon, a Hoche or a Moreau, there was far
less need to worry about preserving the lives of soldiers who could always be
replaced with fresh conscripts, and little sense in adopting a strategy whose
goal was anything other than total victory (in the days of Robespierre and the
Terror, indeed, their lives had literally depended on it). Equally, to the Duke
of Brunswick, it mattered not a whit in personal terms whether he conquered
northern France – come victory or defeat, he would still be the owner of great
estates and a prominent position in society – whereas to Napoleon, his whole
future lay in conquering northern Italy. And, of course, with Napoleon at the
helm, all these advantages were multiplied a thousandfold: the same
ruthlessness, the same ambition and the same drive headed not an army of 30,000
men, but a nation of 30 million.
Against Austria, Russia or Prussia alone then, France had a
very good chance of victory. Indeed, even fighting together, any two of them
were probably not up to defeating France. Thus Austria and Prussia had failed
to worst the Republic in 1792 just as Austria and Russia had failed to do so in
1799. That said, there were scenarios that even France could not risk. In 1803
she was the most populous state in Europe, but the fact remained that France
hardly dominated the Continent in demographic terms. Austria’s population has been
estimated at 27 million, Prussia’s at .8 7million and European Russia’s at 37.5
million. If the diplomatic divisions that had so undermined the allied war
effort were overcome – in other words, if Austria, Russia, Prussia all joined
with Britain in making war on France – and if they agreed to subordinate
everything else to the need to break the latter’s power, not least embracing
French methods of mobilization and introducing measures of military reform to
emulate the efficiency of the French army on campaign and on the battlefield,
then Napoleon faced a grim prospect, the avoidance of which had to lie at the
very heart of his strategy.
In 1803, ‘a grand coalition’ seemed a most remote prospect.
‘I do not venture,’ wrote Lord Hobart, ‘after all the disappointments that this
country has met with, to hazard a speculation on foreign politics. The power
and intrigue of France have so baffled all calculations that, although we must
always look to a combination of the great powers . . . as calculated to be productive
of the most salutary consequences, my mind is not sufficiently sanguine to
reckon upon such an event until I see it absolutely accomplished.’ The detailed
reasons for this we shall examine shortly, but one general issue that should be
highlighted is that both Austria and Russia could easily be sidetracked into wars
with other opponents. We come here to the Ottoman Empire: weak enough to
present a tempting target, it was yet strong enough to put up a good fight if
attacked. Under the reformist rule of Sultan Selim III (1789-1807), it had
greatly improved its fighting power. In possession of a powerful and up-to-date
Western-style battle fleet of twenty-two ships-of-the-line, with the aid of
French experts Selim modernized his artillery and built up a new regular army.
Organized and trained on Western lines, by 1806 this Nizam-i-Cedid had reached
a strength of 24,000 men. However, effective though this force was, it was but
a small component of an Ottoman array that was as enormous as it was ineffective.
The heart of the regular army still consisted of the 196 2,000-to 3,000-strong
regiments of janissaries, a force notoriously ill trained, undisciplined and
unfit for war. Backing up these regular infantrymen were hordes of noble light
cavalry, mercenary irregulars, and poorly trained peasant levies, but these
troops were of even less use than the janissaries as well as being under the
control of local satraps who might or might not be prepared to rally to
Constantinople’s call. Ottoman armies were therefore no match for Western-style
forces in open battle. In the words of a Polish exile who had fled to
Constantinople, ‘The Turkish artillery received some improvement, but . . .
nothing could be done with the cavalry.’ Nevertheless, the empire’s amorphous
political organization and sprawling nature made it a difficult foe to defeat
and it remained an important factor in diplomatic calculations.
And it was not just the Ottomans who might distract
Alexander I. At the other extreme of the Continent, there were Russia’s
traditional enemies, the Swedes. With between seventy and eighty infantry
battalions, sixty-six cavalry squadrons and seventy artillery batteries, Gustav
IV could put a significant force into the field. Sweden’s geographical
remoteness was countered by her powerful navy – twelve ships-of-the-line
together with a large number of heavily armed galleys specially designed for
amphibious operations in the shallow waters of the Baltic – and her possession
of the important bridgehead of Swedish Pomerania. At best, of course, Sweden
might be brought into a coalition against France: less of a maritime nation
than Denmark, she was also relatively safe from French coercion. And, according
to Addington, at least she was ‘most anti-French and coming towards us’. At the
current moment, however, this seemed a forlorn hope, as Russia and Sweden had
fallen out over a small island that stood in a river on the Finnish frontier
and appeared to be on the brink of war. Alexander and a number of his senior
advisers visited the site in person, while the language used by the Russians in
particular was extremely severe, in part perhaps because the Russian government
needed a foreign policy success in the wake of the German disaster of 1802.
‘Not being able to overcome the strong,’ wrote Czartoryski, ‘the chancellor
attacked the weak.’
Even if Sweden could be persuaded to join the British, the
latter’s task was magnified by the fact that to strike at Napoleon and defend
her own interests, London would have to adopt a series of measures that played
straight into the First Consul’s hands. In the long term, the goal was a
continental coalition, but in the short term this seemed quite unattainable, so
much so that it could almost be set aside altogether. As Lord Castlereagh stated,
‘I think it unwise to risk what may continentally be called the last stake
where there is neither vigour nor concert to oppose to the power of an enemy
impregnable at home, and, in opinion, irresistible abroad.’
Indeed, Addington at least believed that, even if a
coalition could be formed, pressing for such a goal would be
counter-productive: with matters in the state they were, the only result would
be to hand Napoleon easy victories and delay the moment when success might be
attained. This is not to say that coalition diplomacy was neglected altogether.
On the contrary, Denmark and Sweden were contacted with hints of commercial
concessions in return for a defensive alliance, while in July 1803 a
simultaneous approach was made to both Austria and Russia, in which the former
was wooed by concessions on the repayment of earlier British loans and the
latter by the promise of a subsidy, not to mention a blatant attempt to appeal
to Alexander’s well-known vanity:
The Emperor of Russia is placed in a situation which may
enable him to render the most important services to Europe. It is in
consequence of his interposition that Europe can alone expect that the cabinets
of Vienna and Berlin should suspend their ancient jealousies . . . His Majesty
trusts that the Emperor of Russia . . . will perceive that the only hopes of tranquillity
for Europe must be derived from a combination of the great powers of the
continent with His Imperial Majesty at their head.
But nothing came of any of this, and all Britain could do in
Europe was to adopt a waiting game. Impelled by sheer frustration and his
desire for military glory, Napoleon would inevitably embark on a cross-Channel
invasion. Yet this was something that Addington believed Britain could repel.
She would, of course, have to strengthen her defences, rebuild the navy and greatly
expand her land forces, but, provided these steps were taken, there was no
reason to believe that a French invasion would be successful. As the First Lord
of the Admiralty, Lord St Vincent, put it in a speech to the House of Lords, ‘I
do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I only say that they will
not come by sea.’ Were Napoleon to fail in the invasion, then his prestige
would suffer such a blow that the powers of Europe might be encouraged to roll
back the frontiers of French power. Of course, there was always the chance that
Napoleon might baulk at the prospect of an invasion, but then his prestige
would also be damaged, and he might even be overthrown. To quote Lord Hobart,
‘I am inclined to credit the reports we receive from France of Bonaparte’s
situation being rather precarious . . . Symptoms of dissatisfaction have shown
themselves in the only quarter where they can be of importance, the army. The
invasion of England is not so popular as might have been expected from the hope
of pillage and plunder . . . and it is said that . . . they do not anticipate
the probability of being drowned without sensations that are not quite
comfortable.’
In the circumstances, Britain’s strategy was not a bad one.
But if a coalition was ruled out – and with it offensive operations on the
Continent – the only targets available were economic, colonial or maritime
ones, precisely the goals that had made Britain so unpopular in the Revolutionary
War. France’s ports were therefore blockaded – a move that was soon extended to
foreign harbours that fell under French control – and the navy hastily put back
on a war footing (so hastily, in fact, that many of the ships that were
dispatched to the Mediterranean under Lord Nelson had to have their proper
rigging fitted while they were already at sea). Within six months, seventy-five
ships-of-the-line and 114 frigates were in commission. At the same time, there
was also a renewed offensive in the wider world. By the end of the year Santa
Lucia, Tobago, Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo had all been captured, the
remnants of General Leclerc’s army driven from St Domingue, and the Maratha
Confederacy – France’s last source of native allies in India – shattered beyond
repair by an offensive in the Deccan that produced victories for the future
Duke of Wellington at Assaye and Argaum as well as other successes at Delhi and
Laswari. All this was perfectly understandable: the captured colonies had been
useful bases for both French commerce raiders and attacks on British islands;
the colonial trade continued to be central to the British economy; and the
Marathas were potentially a serious danger to British influence in India. But
the fact remains, there was nothing to suggest a direct commitment to Europe:
to all intents and purposes, Britain still seemed to be fighting the wars of
the eighteenth century.
Yet even in distant India Britain was fighting Napoleon. In
1803 the Maratha Confederacy was in theory the most powerful polity on the
Indian subcontinent, occupying, as it did, a huge expanse of territory
stretching from the Punjab to the frontiers of Britain’s key ally, Hyderabad.
But in practice the Confederacy was weaker than it appeared. The ruler of this
empire was the hereditary prince of the state of Satar, but he had almost no
authority, real power seemingly lying in the hands of a chief minister known as
the Peshwa. Yet the Peshwa in turn was also all but impotent, for power was
actually exercised by a large number of local rulers who paid lip service (and
not much else) to his suzerainty. While some of these rulers were little more
than petty robber-barons, others – Jeswunt Rao Holkar, Maharajah of Indore;
Daulat Rao Scindia, Maharajah of Gwalior; the Rajah of Berah; the Gaikwar of
Baroda – were immensely powerful. Holkar and Scindia, in particular, possessed
not just the swarms of irregular cavalry that typified most Indian armies, but
also large forces of modern artillery and European-trained infantry. Scindia,
for example, could put into the field seventeen battalions of ‘Western’
infantry, nicknamed the ‘Immortals of the Deccan’. In consequence, the Maratha
Confederacy was hardly a unified state. Great and small, all of the Maratha
rajahs and maharajahs were engaged constantly in raiding and warfare between
themselves, which meant that there was nothing that resembled a common foreign
policy. Eager to advance their own interests, many of the minor rulers were
actually signing so-called ‘subsidiary treaties’ with Britain (see below).
Enthusiastically fostered by Wellesley, British penetration of the subcontinent
seemed set to continue indefinitely.
In 1803, however, the picture was transformed as the Peshwa
was deposed by Holkar and replaced by a puppet ruler. An imposing figure noted
as a bold and courageous military commander, the new strong man threatened to
bring all the Maratha Confederacy under his sway. To Britain’s alarm, in the
summer of 1803 three French agents were captured at Poona with documents
calling on both Holkar and Scindia to rise against the British and granting
Scindia’s chief European adviser, a French mercenary named Perron, the rank of
general in the French army. Meanwhile, having set out from Europe prior to the
outbreak of hostilities with Britain, a small French fleet suddenly appeared
off Pondicherry with a fresh garrison for this old French colonial possession.
Finding the British in occupation of Pondicherry, the French withdrew to
Mauritius, but there was clearly a need for action. To put an end to the
growing threat, Wellesley immediately offered Holkar a subsidiary treaty, but
the Maharajah was simply too powerful to be interested in surrendering his
independence. Not surprisingly, then, Wellesley signed a treaty with the rightful
Peshwa that in effect promised to restore him to power in exchange for the
Maratha Confederacy becoming a satellite state. In acting in this fashion,
Wellesley was not working as an agent of the British government. Though the
Governor General was a political nominee – since the passage of the India Act
of 1784, the East India Company had accepted that the decision as to who should
hold the post should lie in the hands of the British government – Wellesley had
not been sent out with an imperialist agenda. What is more, in going to war
against Holkar and his allies, he was acting without the knowledge of London
and against the wishes of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, who
were only interested in commercial penetration rather than direct political
control. After the fact, his successes were initially approved by the British
government – ‘Nothing can have made a greater sensation than what they have
done’, wrote his brother, Gerald Wellesley – but in large part this was simply
because Wellesley was a Tory, because much of the fiercest denunciation of his
policies came from the Whigs and, finally, because in 1803-4 the priority had
to be preventing Napoleon from gaining a foothold in India. When the immediate
crisis passed, the government abandoned its support for the Governor General,
and made no attempt to sustain him against the revolt of the East India
Company’s directors that finally brought him down in 1805. If successive
administrations continued to be uninterested in expansion in India thereafter,
this can perhaps be put down to wartime conditions: thanks to the gradual
modernization of India’s armies, Wellesley’s wars had far outstripped in cost
and scale those of earlier eras. Thus, in the First Mysorean War, the British
had employed 10,000 men and been able to triumph over odds of some seven to one,
whereas in the fourth such conflict – the final struggle against Tippu Tib –
victory over a markedly weaker enemy had taken 50,000 men. Still worse,
meanwhile, the lion’s share of the fighting now had to be undertaken by British
regulars: at Assaye, Wellesley’s 13,500 men included just two regiments of
British infantry and one of cavalry – some 2,200 men – and yet they accounted
for 650 out of his 1,600 casualties. Given the situation in Europe, gaining
fresh territory in India was therefore simply not a British objective. When
Wellesley returned from India in 1805 he was given only the most grudging of
thanks by parliament, cold-shouldered by many of his erstwhile allies and
barely escaped impeachment at the hands of an old enemy who had secured a seat in
the Commons.
The ‘making of British India’ for which Wellesley stood was,
then, the work of one powerful and vigorous enthusiast, albeit one who had many
adherents (most notably, Lord William Bentinck, who became Governor of Madras
in 1803). The India Act of 1784 had stated unequivocally that wars of conquest
were ‘measures repugnant to the wish, the honour and the policy of this nation’
and expressly prohibited the Governor General from waging military campaigns
without the sanction of parliament except in self-defence (a very flimsy
justification in the case of the Marathas: setting aside their incipient state
of civil war, Holkar had initially shown a strong desire to keep the peace).
The basis of this opposition to wars of aggression was reasonable enough: it
was believed that the constant Indian warfare of the mid-eighteenth century had
been the fruit of foreign intervention, and that, now the French had been all
but ejected from the subcontinent, all the British had to do was to sit back
and let the profits of trade flow into their coffers. From the beginning,
however, Wellesley rejected this maxim. Indian rulers, he argued, were a
militaristic caste, bent on war, from which it followed, first, that foreign
intervention did not in itself encourage conflict, and, second, that the
stability envisaged by the India Act was a chimera that was unlikely ever to be
realized. What was needed instead was British control, for only British control
could genuinely deliver the riches of empire. To implement this policy he had a
wonderful excuse in the residual French presence, while the relatively easy
conquests of the Fourth Mysorean War of 1799 stimulated his ambition for glory,
which was, in its way, nearly as great as that exhibited by Napoleon
(notoriously vain and self-indulgent, Wellesley was furious when a distinctly
unenthusiastic government rewarded him not with an English peerage but with an
Irish one). Unlike Napoleon, war was not central to his policy: his favoured
device, the so-called ‘subsidiary treaty’ whereby Indian rulers accepted
British overlordship in return for a guarantee of British protection, was just
as acceptable when achieved by diplomacy as it was when it was achieved by
battle. But he would brook no opposition, and adopted a ‘take it or leave it’
approach that was very reminiscent of the First Consul. And he was all too
clearly a genuine imperialist and, in consequence, a great embarrassment in
Europe. With Wellesley at the helm in India, how could Addington deny that
Britain was in an expansionist mode? Nor was Wellesley the only colonial
administrator with a penchant for aggression. In Ceylon the Dutch had confined
themselves to a chain of ports around the coasts of the island, and left the
interior to its own devices under the rule of the Kingdom of Kandy. When the
British took over, however, the Governor, Frederick North, took exception to
the independent stance affected by the Kandians and in February 1803 embarked
on the conquest of the interior.
If expansion in India is difficult to attribute to the
Addington government, it does have to bear full responsibility for another
aspect of the British war effort that was just as damaging. No sooner had war
begun than a French invasion threatened. Such warships as the French had in
their own ports were made ready for sea; the squadron that had been sent to
assist in the reduction of Toussaint L’Ouverture was summoned home; the
programme of naval construction was accelerated; 160,000 men were concentrated
on the Channel coast; a start was made on amassing a flotilla of invasion
craft; a programme of improvements was begun at Calais and Boulogne; and
finally Napoleon himself set out on an ostentatious tour of inspection of the
Channel coast. In consequence, home defence was obviously a high priority. Part
of the way forward here lay in the construction of coastal fortifications –
hence Kent’s Royal Military Canal and the Martello towers that still dot
Britain’s southern coasts – but Britain also required large numbers of fresh
troops. It is difficult to imagine any British politician ever committing
himself to the obvious course of conscription to the regular army. Traditional
hostility to standing armies, concern for civil liberty and the sheer
unpopularity of military service all rendered anything other than a few
meaningless gestures unthinkable, and in consequence the government revived the
Volunteer movement of the 1790s. As before, the result was that large numbers
of men rushed to enlist in extravagantly uniformed units of cavalry and
infantry that for the most part would have been of little use had the French
actually crossed the Channel and were in any case available for home defence
only. Of rather more use was the decision to expand the county militia by an
additional 76,000 men (a move that was politically acceptable despite the fact
that it 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.’
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.’ 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 of 1799-1800, the Austrian army
had suffered heavy losses, but replacing the missing men would not be easy,
especially as most of the Holy Roman Empire was now off limits to the Habsburg
recruiting parties that had traditionally operated there (and in the process
brought in large numbers of troops: prior to 1801 perhaps half the army’s
volunteers had come from its territories). There was a system of conscription
in existence, but this did not affect all of Francis’s domains – the Tyrol and
Hungary, for example, were both exempt – and was by no means universal even
where it was in operation. Yet increasing the number of men conscripted or
broadening the basis on which they were taken would be likely to exacerbate
social unrest: in the course of the War of the Second Coalition at least 27,000
men had fled their homes rather than face the draft, while desertion had
reached epic proportions. Equally, extending conscription to Hungary and the
Tyrol would only serve to cause a return of the troubles of 1789-90 (when both
these provinces had almost risen in revolt).
Logically enough, this financial and military weakness was
reflected in a change of atmosphere in Vienna. As we have seen, the Habsburg
regime had never been the most enthusiastic of France’s opponents. Neither
Francis nor his leading military commander, the Archduke Charles, were at all
enamoured of war, and both were inclined to gather round them figures who were
not inclined to challenge their perceptions: the emperor’s highly influential
‘Cabinet secretary’, Franz von Colloredo, for example, was notoriously timid
and indecisive. At the same time there was much dislike of the British alliance,
and especially of William Pitt, who was perceived as being unnecessarily
forceful and abrasive. And, finally, Francis was also increasingly mistrustful
of the Archduke Charles, who had in 1801 been appointed head of the new
Ministry of War and Marine and was currently pushing through a major programme
of military reform, the effect of this being to put the emperor in mind of the
Thirty Years War when the power of the throne had temporarily been eclipsed by
powerful commanders such as Wallenstein. Until now, Austria had been held to
her course by the forceful Thugut, but he was now gone, and his replacement,
Count Ludwig Cobenzl, was much more ambiguous in his attitude towards the
struggle. ‘I knew well’, wrote Lord Malmesbury, ‘that Cobenzl was in his heart
French, that he had been brought up to admire and fear them, and that, whether
a Bourbon or a Bonaparte, this sentiment in his mind would remain the same.’
This typical piece of British contempt for foreigners was far too sweeping: the
Austrian chancellor was determined to restore the Habsburgs’ fortunes by, first,
addressing the state’s internal problems, and, second, standing up to France.
Indeed, by 1804 he had fallen out with the Archduke Charles on account of the
latter’s endless pessimism. But it is perfectly true that Cobenzl was much
impressed both by France’s military power and Napoleon’s personal capacities –
he had, after all, headed the Austrian delegation at both Campo Formio and
Lunéville – and that he was unwilling to risk a war until Austria was ready for
action, something that in his eyes would not be the case for another ten years.
If he began to press for an alliance with Russia in 1803 , it was not because
he wanted to march on Paris but because he wanted to find a means of stopping Paris
from marching on him. Here and there the odd fiery spirit could be found who
favoured war, one such being the fanatically anti-French propagandist,
Friedrich von Gentz, and another Baron Karl von Mack, a vain and incompetent
officer who had suffered military humiliation in 1798 and was now thirsting for
an opportunity to restore his reputation. But even had he wanted to, the
chancellor could not have provided the leadership needed by a war party:
‘Although he shone in the salon,’ wrote Metternich, ‘Cobenzl was not the man to
lead a cabinet.’
Even in the wake of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien
(discussed below), Cobenzl would not move. As the British ambassador to Vienna,
Arthur Paget, wrote of an unsuccessful attempt to get Cobenzl to agree to an
alliance in April 1804:
The Vice-Chancellor contended that any such concert would
be a direct violation of their system of neutrality from which the emperor
would not easily be brought; that it was a wise system not to talk before the
means of supporting your language were proved to exist; that this country was
not in a situation to go to war; that, although their present situation was
unquestionably a bad one . . . it was not desperate, and that, by endeavouring
to improve it a worse might, and probably would, succeed; that the French had
100,000 men in Italy; that their whole force now upon the coast might at a
moment be equally turned on this country; that the Austrian army was at this
moment upon the peace establishment, etc., etc. . . . These and similar
arguments was I doomed to the pain of listening to . . . I never witnessed the
display of so much ignorance, weakness and pusillanimity on the part of any
individual calling himself a statesman.
This was, needless to say, grossly unkind to Cobenzl. But in
1803 the fact remains that all the British could hope for from Vienna was that
Austria might be prepared to enter another coalition with them when the
circumstances were right – but this did not seem likely for a very long time.
Francis II, the Archduke Charles, Cobenzl and Colloredo all agreed that war
could only be considered after a long process of internal reform. The most
obvious policy was simply to revive the bureaucratic absolutism of Joseph II to
eradicate provincial and noble privilege, and mobilize the resources of all
Francis’s dominions. But this was something that the emperor simply would not
do. Temperamentally averse to interfering with the rights of his subjects, he
also dared not risk a repeat of the turmoil of 1789-90. Reform, then, was
inclined to be both gradualist and piecemeal. Denied the empire-wide system of
conscription he wanted, for example, Charles had to content himself with
reducing the length of service owed by men who volunteered for the army in the
hope that this would produce more recruits. In the same way, a variety of
fiscal reforms were introduced – there was, for example, a considerable rise in
import duties – but the perquisites of the nobility were left untouched. Far
from provinces such as Hungary being stripped of their privileges, Francis was
forced to turn to them cap in hand. By means of its largely noble triennial
Diet, Hungary had the right to set its own levels of taxation and conscription.
In 1796 (the last occasion on which it had met) the Diet had rallied to the
Habsburg cause and voted a subsidy of 4.4 million gulden, the dispatch of large
quantities of supplies and an increase of 5,000 in the number of soldiers sent
by Hungary to the regular army. This last move brought her quota up to 52,000
men, but as all the recruits concerned were volunteers, in practice this total
was never met. In 1802, the Diet was summoned again after a break in 1799.
Asked for 2 million gulden, the deputies agreed to grant Vienna less than half
this figure, and would only make limited concessions on the issue of recruits
for the army. To say that no progress was made in these years towards a revived
Austria was unfair – the Archduke Charles did achieve a significant degree of
reform in the field of the empire’s administration – but so slow was the rate
of change that Britain was clearly going to have a long time to wait. Even as
late as 6 August 1805, Minto was writing in his diary, ‘I hear that Austria has
declared positively she will take no part in any confederacy against France,
and assigns her total want of means as the motive of this conduct. I am sorry
for it, thinking a continental war the only chance of terminating our
difficulties, though even that chance may not be good. But the longer it is
delayed, the worse prospect of success there will be as Bonaparte will increase
his strength every year, and resistance may come at last when it is too late.’
