down on the king’s refusal to admit Fox, became head of a
government constructed on a narrow Tory basis. Of the
members of the late government Lord Eldon, the duke
Pitt returns to office.
of Portland, Lord Westmorland, Lord Castlereagh and
Lord Hawkesbury retained office, the latter surrendering
the foreign office to Lord Harrowby and going to
the home office. Dundas, now Lord Melville, became first lord
of the admiralty, and the cabinet further included Lord Camden,
Lord Mulgrave and the duke of Montrose. Canning, Huskisson
and Perceval were given subordinate offices.
Save for the commanding personality of Pitt, the new government was scarcely stronger than that which it had replaced. It had to face the same Whig opposition, led by Fox, who scoffed at the French peril, and reinforced by Addington and his friends; and the whole burden of meeting this opposition fell upon Pitt; for Castlereagh, the only other member of the cabinet in the House of Commons, was of little use in debate. Nevertheless, fresh vigour was infused into the conduct of the war. The Additional Forces Act, passed in the teeth of a strenuous opposition, introduced the principle of a modified system of compulsion to supplement the deficiencies of the army and reserve, while the navy was largely increased. Abroad, Pitt’s whole energies were directed to forming a fresh coalition against Bonaparte, who, on the 14th of May 1804, had proclaimed himself emperor of the French; but it was a year before Russia signed with Great Britain the treaty of St Petersburg (April 11, 1805), and the accession to the coalition of Austria, Sweden and Battle of Trafalgar. Naples was not obtained till the following September. In the following month (October 21) Nelson’s crowning victory at Trafalgar over the allied fleets of France and Spain relieved England of the dread of invasion. It served, however, to precipitate the crisis on the continent of Europe; the great army assembled at Boulogne was turned eastwards; by the capitulation of Ulm (October 19) Austria lost a large part of her forces; and the last news that reached Pitt on his Austerlitz. death-bed was that of the ruin of all his hopes by the crushing victory of Napoleon over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz (December 2).
Pitt died on the 23rd of January, and the refusal of Lord
Hawkesbury to assume the premiership forced the king to
summon Lord Grenville, and to agree to the inclusion
of Fox in the cabinet as secretary for foreign affairs.
Several members of Pitt’s administration were admitted
Death of Pitt. “Ministry of all the Talents.”
Abolition of the slave-trade.
to this “Ministry of all the Talents,” including
Addington (now Lord Sidmouth), who had rejoined
the ministry in December 1804 and again resigned, owing to
a disagreement with Pitt as to the charges against Lord Melville
(q.v.) in July 1805. The new ministry remained in office for a
year, a disastrous year which saw the culmination of Napoleon’s
power: the crushing of Prussia in the campaign of Jena, the
formation of the Confederation of the Rhine and the end of the
Holy Roman Empire. In the conduct of the war the British
government had displayed little skill, frittering away its forces
on distant expeditions, instead of concentrating them
in support of Prussia or Russia, and the chief title
to fame of the Ministry of all the Talents is that it
secured the passing of the bill for the abolition of the
slave-trade (March 25, 1807).
The death of Fox (September 13, 1806) deprived the ministry of its strongest member, and in the following March it fell on the old question of concessions to the Roman Catholics. True to his principles, Fox had done his best to negotiate terms of peace with Napoleon; but the breakdown Catholic question. of the attempt had persuaded even the Whigs that an arrangement was impossible, and in view of this fact Grenville thought it his duty to advise the king that the disabilities of Roman Catholics and dissenters in the matter of serving in the army and navy should be removed, in order that all sections of the nation might be united in face of the enemy. The situation, moreover, was in the highest degree anomalous; for by an act passed in 1793 Roman Catholics might hold commissions in the army in Ireland up to the rank of colonel, and this right had not been extended to England, though by the Act of Union the armies had become one. The king, however, was not to be moved from his position; and he was supported in this attitude not only by public opinion, but by a section of the ministry itself, of which Sidmouth made himself the mouthpiece. The demand of George III. that ministers should undertake never again to approach him on the subject of concessions to the Catholics was rejected by Grenville, rightly, as unconstitutional, and on the 18th of March 1807 he resigned.
The new ministry, under the nominal headship of the valetudinarian
duke of Portland, included Perceval as chancellor
of the exchequer, Canning as foreign secretary and
Castlereagh as secretary for war and the colonies.
It had given the undertaking demanded by the king;
Portland ministry.
those of its members who, like Canning, were in favour of
Catholic emancipation, arguing that, in view of greater and more
pressing questions, it was useless to insist in a matter which
could never be settled so long as the old king lived. Of more
importance to Great Britain, for the time being, than any
constitutional issues, was the life-and-death struggle with
Napoleon, which had now entered on a new phase. Defeated
at sea, but master now of the greater part of the continent of
Europe, the French emperor planned to bring Great Britain
The continental system.
The Orders in Council.
to terms by ruining her commerce with the vast
territories under his influence. In November 1806
he issued from Berlin the famous decree prohibiting
the importation of British goods and excluding from
the harbours under his control even neutral ships that had
touched at British ports. The British government replied by
the famous Orders in Council of 1807, which declared
all vessels trading with France liable to seizure, and
that all such vessels clearing from France must touch
at a British port to pay customs duties. To this
Napoleon responded with the Milan decree (December 17), forbidding
neutrals to trade in any articles imported from the
British dominions. The effects of these measures were destined
to be far-reaching. The Revolution had made war on princes
and privilege, and the common people had in general gained
wherever the Napoleonic régime had been substituted for their
effete despotisms; but the “Continental System” was felt
as an oppression in every humble household, suddenly deprived
of the little imported luxuries, such as sugar and coffee, which
custom had made necessaries; and from this time date the
beginnings of that popular revolt against Napoleon that was
to culminate in the War of Liberation. Great Britain, too,
was to suffer from her own retaliatory policy. The Americans
War with America.
had taken advantage of the war to draw into their own
hands a large part of the British carrying trade, a
process greatly encouraged by the establishment of
the Continental System. This brought them into conflict
with the British acting under the Orders in Council, and the
consequent ill-feeling culminated in the war of 1812.
It was not only the completion of the Continental System, however, that made the year 1807 a fateful one for Great Britain. On the 7th of July the young emperor Alexander I. of Russia, fascinated by Napoleon’s genius and bribed by the offer of a partition of the world, concluded the Treaty of Tilsit. treaty of Tilsit, which not only brought Russia into the Continental System, but substituted for a coalition against France a formidable coalition against England. A scheme for wresting from the British the command of the sea was only defeated by Canning’s action in ordering the English fleet to capture the Danish navy, though Denmark was still nominally a friendly power (see Canning, George). Meanwhile, in order to complete the ring fence round Europe against British commerce, Napoleon had ordered Junot to invade Portugal; French Invasion of Spain and Portugal. Lisbon was occupied by the French, and the Portuguese royal family migrated to Brazil. In the following year Napoleon seized the royal family of Spain, and gave the crown, which Charles VI. resigned on behalf of himself and his heir, to his brother Joseph, king of Naples. The revolt of the Spanish people that followed was the first of
