448 DEATH OF NELSON. [1805. which inspired ideas superior to the common race of men, I was bound by the strongest ties of affection; a grief to which even the glorious occasion in which he fell does not bring that consolation which perhaps it ought." The moving circumstances of the death of Nelson have been told by Southey with a touching fulness which has found its way to many a heart of the past and the present generations. He was shot from the mizen-top of the Redoubtable, which he supposed had struck. He fell where his secretary had previously fallen. "They have done for me at last," he said to captain Hardy, "my back bone is shot through." He was carried below, covering his face and his stars with his handkerchief, that his crew might not see who had fallen. His wound was soon perceived to be mortal. Every now and then a ship struck, and the crew of the Victory huzzaed. Then his eyes lighted up for a moment. He lingered in great agony for a little more than three hours. The last guns which were fired at the flying enemy were heard a minute or two before he expired. Twenty of the French and Spanish ships had struck. But a gale came on; some of the prizes went down; others were wrecked on shore; one escaped into Cadiz; four only were saved. Four of the ships that made off during the action were captured on the 4th of November, by sir Richard Strachan. The French and Spanish navies never recovered, during the war, this tremendous blow. Napoleon's projects of invasion were at an end. It was the 7th of November when Collingwood's despatches reached London. Pitt was roused in the night to read them. He said, a day or two after, that he had been called up at various times by the arrival of news," but that whether good or bad he could always lay his head on his pillow and sink into sound sleep again. On this occasion, however, the great event announced brought with it so much to weep over, as well as to rejoice at, that he could not calm his thoughts, but at length got up, though it was three in the morning.' ""* The feelings of the prime minister were shared by the humblest in the land. Malmesbury writes, "I never saw so little public joy. The illumination seemed dim, and, as it were, half clouded by the desire of expressing the mixture of contending feelings; every common person in the streets speaking first of their sorrow for him, and then of the victory.”+ The same feeling pervaded all, when the body of the hero was borne to St. Paul's, on the 9th of January : * : To thy country thou cam'st back Thou, conqueror, to triumphal Albion cam'st Thrill'd on the soul. Awe and mute anguish fell Note of lord Fitzharris-"Malmesbury," vol. iv. p. 349. 1805.] HIS FUNERAL-FRENCH ENTER VIENNA. 449 The pageant lives in the ineffaceable remembrance of our boyhood. Six and forty years afterwards, the remembrance crowded upon our thoughts, when we beheld the car of another warrior moving through the same streets to the same place of rest. Mute veneration for him who died, full of years, whilst every year he lived added to a nation's love, marked the funeral pomp of Wellington. Impassioned grief, audible sighs, tears coursing down rugged cheeks, marked the funeral pomp of Nelson. They sleep together in the same crypt beneath the dome of St. Paul's-the two who in the agony of England's fate best fought the fight and achieved the victory. Ulm surrendered to the French the day before the victory of Trafalgar had annihilated the French and Spanish fleets. When Napoleon heard of the event he was advancing upon Vienna. He manifested his sense of its importance, by sending to Paris his orders that the French journals should say as little as possible about it-merely say that it was an imprudent encounter, in which the combined fleet had suffered more from a tempest than from the enemy. On the 13th of November, Vienna was entered by French dragoons and grenadiers. They marched through the city without a halt, to reach the great wooden bridge over the Danube. The Austrians had received orders to destroy this bridge, which was the only passage from the capital to the northern provinces. For several days there had been a partial suspension of hostilities, whilst negotiations for an armistice were proceeding. The French generals advanced to the Austrian troops who kept the bridge, and called out that the armistice was concluded. The unsuspecting Germans let the troops pass, and the French soon held both sides of the Danube. 450 AUSTERLITZ-PEACE OF PRESBURG. [1805. The magistracy of Vienna came to Napoleon at the palace of Schönbrunn, to implore him to spare their city. There was no national enthusiasm to stimulate resistance. The German people had not yet been roused to fight for their independence. Their governments were despotic. It was a quarrel of crowned heads, to be decided either way by armed masses, with little harm or little benefit to the commonalty. Napoleon soon quitted Vienna in the confidence that he should finish the war by a decisive victory over the Austrians and Russians. With the allied army were the emperor of Germany and the emperor of Russia. On the 2nd of December Napoleon encountered about a hundred thousand Russians and Austrians with a somewhat smaller number of highly disciplined Frenchmen at Austerlitz, in the neighbourhood of Brunn, in Moravia. The battle began at sunrise and lasted till sunset. The defeat of the allies was complete. On the 3rd of December Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph that he had taken 40,000 prisoners, and that the enemy had left from 12,000 to 15,000 men on the field. "A whole column threw itself into a lake, and the greater part of them were drowned. I fancy that I still hear the cries of these wretches, whom it was impossible to save."* There is another version of this horrible story. The flying Russians crowded on the frozen lakes. Napoleon, from the tableland of Pratzen, on the side of these lakes, saw the disaster which he had so well prepared. He ordered the battery of his guard to fire round shot on the ice that was unbroken, to complete the destruction of those who had taken refuge upon the frozen waters.† Another account says that the French, having fired first upon the ice nearest the shore, the Russians were then upon an island of ice. They went on their knees, and then the batteries fired upon them till six thousand were killed or drowned.‡ Napoleon slept comfortably after this feat. He had been sleeping for a week in the open air. To-night I sleep in a bed in the fine country house of M. de Kaunitz, near Austerlitz, and I have put on a clean shirt, which I had not done for a week." § On the 4th of December he had an interview with the emperor Francis. On the 6th was signed the peace of Presburg, by which the emperor Francis gave up to the new kingdom of Italy those parts of the Venetian territory which he had acquired by the peace of Campo Formio. Napoleon made two kings out of two electors his allies-the Elector of Bavaria, and the Elector of Würtemberg. The emperor Alexander refused to retreat according to the time and route furnished by Napoleon. He retired unmolested, to try his fortune once more in conjunction with the king of Prussia, with whom he had formed a treaty of alliance. Prussia had been temporising, as usual. The king decided too late to render assistance to Austria and Russia; too soon for his own eventual safety. 66 The great triumph of Napoleon gave the final blow to the shattered health of the English minister who had organized the Coalition. He scarcely bore up against the disaster of Ulm; he revived at the news of Trafalgar; he sank when the calamity of Austerlitz became known to him. He went to Bath on the 8th of December. The waters produced a fit of the gout, * "Correspondence of Napoleon with his Brother," vol. i. p. 64 (1855). Thiers, tome vi. p. 326. "Correspondence with Joseph," p. 65. [Translator's note] § Ibid. 1806.] PITT'S FAILING HEALTH. 451 which was succeeded by a total debility of digestion. At the end of the month lord Castlereagh went to Bath to tell him the fatal end of all his great plans. "It struck Pitt so deeply, and found him in such an enfeebled state, that he certainly never recovered it."* By slow journeys, attended by his physician, sir Walter Farquhar, he arrived at his villa at Putney, so emaciated as not to be known. On the 13th he saw lord Castlereagh and lord Hawkesbury for the last time. Malmesbury says that after this interview he said to the Bishop of Lincoln, putting his hand on his stomach, "I feel something here that reminds me I shall never recover." On the 13th he saw lord Wellesley, who had just returned from India; and he fainted, according to Malmesbury, before Wellesley left the room. Lord Brougham gives an interesting account of this interview, but with a material variation: "This, their last interview, was in the villa on Putney Heath, where he died a few days after. Lord Wellesley called upon me there many years after; it was then occupied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Eden, whom I was visiting. His lordship showed me the place where these illustrious friends sat. Mr. Pitt was, he said, much emaciated and enfeebled, but retained his gaiety and his constitutionally sanguine disposition; he expressed his confident hopes of recovery. In the adjoining room he lay a corpse the ensuing week; and it is a singular and a melancholy circumstance, resembling the stories told of William the Conqueror's deserted state at his decease, that some one in the neighbourhood having sent a message to inquire after Mr. Pitt's state, he found the wicket open, then the door of the house, and, nobody answering the bell, he walked through the rooms till he reached the bed on which the minister's body lay lifeless, the sole tenant of the mansion of which the doors a few hours before were darkened by crowds of suitors alike obsequious and importunate, the vultures whose instinct haunts the carcasses only of living ministers"+ The doors darkened by crowds of suitors, only a few hours before his death, appears to be a flight of imagination. George Rose came to Putney on the 15th, and there learnt that lord Castlereagh and lord Hawkesbury had insisted on seeing Mr. Pitt on points of public business, of the most serious importance, which interview visibly affected him. He saw Mr. Rose for five minutes on the 15th. From that time, Rose says, "no one had access to him but the Bishop (of Lincoln) and the physicians." On the 23rd, Rose enters in his Diary, that about seven in the morning he received a note " to tell me that my most inestimable friend quitted the world about four o'clock. He saw no one after the Bishop had taken notes of his last desires, but lady Hester (his niece), who went to his bedside in the evening. not know her; but afterwards he did, and blessed her: another word, except that about half-an-hour before he breathed his last, the servant heard him say, ' My country! oh, my country!'" The bishop went away from Putney Heath, as soon as the dreaded event of this winter morning was over, before the busy world was stirring. We ourselves, long ago, heard the story of the deserted house, with a sufficient explanation. Nothing more He at first did nor did he utter 452 DEATH OF PITT. [1806. natural than that the few servants should have gone from Putney Heath upon the necessary duties of such mournful occasions, and have left the doors of the solitary house unfastened. William Pitt died on the 23rd of January. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first entered Parliament. And this was the end of his struggle for thirteen years against the power of revolutionary France, against the Directory, against the Consulate, against the Empire. He “died of a broken heart," says his devoted friend, Wilberforce. "The accounts from the armies struck a death-blow within." On the 26th of January the leader of these armies entered Paris, after a victorious campaign of three months, to receive the homage of a nation which saw in the glory of one man a recompense for all the miseries of the Republic; a nation which believed that to make France mistress of the world was to make Frenchmen prosperous and happy. The great parliamentary career of William Pitt commences in 1781.* His supreme command of the political action of his country commences in 1783. In 1784, Gibbon wrote from Lausanne, "A youth of five-andtwenty, who raises himself to the government of an empire by the power of genius and the reputation of virtue, is a circumstance unparalleled in history, and, in a general view, is not less glorious to the country than to himself.” ‡ We have traced the history of this great orator and statesman from the brilliancy of his life's day-spring to the clouds and darkness of its evening; and, we trust, in no unfriendly spirit-rather with a profound admiration of intellectual and moral qualities such as the sons of men are rarely endowed with. Nevertheless, we have not repressed a conviction that, if his peaceadministration was as eminently sagacious as it was safe and prosperous, his war-administration and his domestic policy from 1793 gave few occasions in which to display the ascendancy of his genius in high and blameless deeds, however surpassing his power of justifying his measures by majestic and all-prevailing words. He was indeed "the top of eloquence." We cannot deny that he was also the most ardent amongst "lovers of their country;" the farthest elevated above all mercenary objects. Those who affected to be of his school were really, with one or two exceptions, not his pupils. Had Pitt lived to behold the war triumph, he might again have vindicated his claim to be a great peace minister and a sincere social reformer. * Ante, vol. vi. P. 433. |