impossible, and recommended the government to recall the expedition, leaving 15,000 men to defend the island of Walcheren. This advice was adopted, but the garrison left in Walcheren suffered most severely from fever in that swampy island. Eventually, on December 24, Walcheren was abandoned, the works and naval basins of Flushing having been previously destroyed. The destruction of Flushing was the sole result of this expedition.
The failure of the British to make any serious impression on the French either in the Low Countries or in Spain induced Austria to consent to peace with France. By the peace of Vienna, signed on October 14, she ceded Salzburg and a part of Upper Austria to Bavaria, West Galicia to the duchy of Warsaw, and a part of Carinthia with Trieste and the Illyrian provinces to France. A small strip of Galicia was ceded to the Russian tsar, who had rendered France some very half-hearted assistance and was further alienated by the extension of the duchy of Warsaw. Austria was enslaved to the will of Napoleon. She had abandoned the Tyrolese peasants whose loyal insurrection against the Bavarians was the most heroic incident in the war, and she now joined the other nations of the continent in excluding the commerce of Great Britain, which had made a powerful diversion in Spain and an imposing though futile diversion on the Scheldt to save her from national annihilation.
While the Walcheren expedition was preparing, two additions were made to the cabinet. Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, brother of the Marquis of Stafford, was admitted in June as secretary at war, and in July Harrowby, who was created an earl, became president of the board of control with a seat in the cabinet. After the fate of the expedition became known, though before its final withdrawal, a serious quarrel took place between Canning and Castlereagh. Personal jealousies had long existed between these two statesmen, both half-Irish, half-English, and of approximately the same age, yet widely different in character. Canning was the most brilliant orator of his day, and no less persuasive in private conversation than in public orations, gifted with an agile brain that leaped readily from one idea or one project to another, but cursed with a bitter wit which lightly aroused enduring enmities, and which, coupled with an excessive vanity, rendered him unpopular with his colleagues, and made it difficult for any one to take him seriously; while his rival, not less able, and much more steady and trustworthy, a skilful manager of men, was scarcely able to pronounce a coherent sentence. Early in April Canning pressed upon the Duke of Portland the transfer of Castlereagh to another office. Private communications followed between various members of the cabinet, and it was understood that Camden, as Castlereagh's friend, should apprise him of the prevailing view, which the king himself had approved under a threat of Canning's resignation. The duke, however, begged Camden to postpone the disclosure, and others of Castlereagh's friends urged Canning not to insist upon the change pending the completion of the Walcheren expedition.
DUEL BETWEEN CANNING AND CASTLEREAGH.
As the scheme took shape in July Camden was to resign, and thus make possible a shifting of offices, which was to result in the Marquis Wellesley succeeding Castlereagh as secretary for war. At last, on September 6, the duke informed Canning of his own intention to retire on the ground of ill-health, and at the same time disclosed the fact that no steps had been taken to prepare Castlereagh for the proposed change in his position. Thereupon Canning promptly sent in his own resignation, the duke resigned the same day, and Castlereagh, learning what had passed, followed his example two days later.39 Believing that Canning had been intriguing against him behind his back, under the guise of friendship, he demanded satisfaction on the 19th, and on the 21st40 the duel was fought, in which Canning received a slight wound. Such events provoked little censure in those days, and it is pleasant to know that Canning and Castlereagh afterwards acted cordially together as colleagues. Their enmity broke up the government. The Duke of Portland did not long survive his withdrawal from office, and died on October 29; Leveson-Gower insisted on following Canning into retirement.
Perceval was entrusted with the task of forming an administration, but the new ministry was not formed without considerable negotiation. Canning vainly endeavoured to impress first on his colleagues and then on the king his own pretensions to the highest office, while attempts, to which the king gave a reluctant assent, had been made to enlist the co-operation of Grenville and Howick, who succeeded his father as Earl Grey, in 1807, but they failed as all later attempts were destined to fail. The most influential motive governing their conduct was, doubtless, their feeling that they would not as ministers possess the king's confidence. Sidmouth's following had also been approached. Sidmouth himself was considered too obnoxious to some of Pitt's followers to be a safe member of the new cabinet, but Vansittart was offered the chancellorship of the exchequer and Bragge, who had taken the additional surname of Bathurst, the office of secretary at war. They refused, however, to enter the ministry, unless accompanied by Sidmouth himself.
Perceval eventually became prime minister, retaining his former offices; Lord Bathurst, while remaining at the board of trade, presided temporarily at the foreign office, which was offered to the Marquis Wellesley, then serving as British ambassador to the Spanish junta at Seville, and taken over by him in December. Hawkesbury, now Earl of Liverpool, succeeded Castlereagh as secretary for war and the colonies, and was followed at the home office by Richard Ryder, a brother of Harrowby. Harrowby himself gave up the board of control in November to Melville's son, Robert Dundas, who, however, was not made a member of the cabinet. Lord Palmerston, who had been a junior lord of the admiralty under Portland, declined the chancellorship of the exchequer, and though he accepted Leveson-Gower's post as secretary at war, he was by his own desire excluded from the cabinet.
NEW BRITISH CONQUESTS.
While the close of the year 1809 was darkened by national disappointment and political anxieties, the honour of British arms had been amply vindicated in the Spanish peninsula, and the brilliant exploit of Lord Cochrane in Basque Roads had recalled the glories of the Nile. Cochrane had already achieved marvels under Collingwood in the Mediterranean, and notably off the Spanish coast, when he was selected to conduct an attack by fireships on the French squadron blockaded under the shelter of the islands of Aix and Oléron. This he carried out on the night of April 11, with a dash and skill worthy of Nelson, and unless checked by Gambier, the admiral in command, who had been raised to the peerage after the seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807, he must have succeeded in destroying the whole of the enemy's ships. Gambier was afterwards acquitted by a court martial of negligence, but the verdict of the public was against him. In the autumn Collingwood reduced the seven Ionian islands, and gained an important advantage by cutting out a considerable detachment of the Toulon fleet in the Bay of Genoa. In the course of the year, too, all the remaining French territory in the West Indies, as well as the Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, was captured by the British navy. But this unchallenged supremacy on the high seas did not prevent the depredations of French gunboats on British merchantmen in the channel. Indeed after the battle of Trafalgar, the French "sea-wasps" infesting the Channel were more active and destructive than ever.
On October 25, being the forty-ninth anniversary of his accession, the jubilee of George III. was celebrated with hearty and sincere rejoicings. His popularity was not unmerited. He was politically shortsighted, but within his range of vision few saw facts so clearly; he was obstinate and prejudiced, but his obstinacy was redeemed by a moral intrepidity of the highest order, and his prejudices were shared by the mass of his people. Having lived through the seven years' war, the war of the American revolution, and the successive wars of Great Britain against the French monarchy and the French republic, he was now supporting, with indomitable firmness, a war against the all-conquering French empire – the most perilous in which this country was ever engaged. The colonial and Indian dominions of Great Britain, reduced by the loss of the North American colonies, had been greatly extended during his reign in other quarters of the globe. His subjects regarded him as an Englishman to the core; they knew him to be honest, religious, virtuous, and homely in his life; they justly believed him, in spite of his failings, to be a power for good in the land; and they rewarded him with a respect and affection granted to no other British sovereign of modern times before Queen Victoria. They had good cause to desire the continuance of his life and reason, knowing the character
The best account of the quarrel, especially in its relation to the composition of the cabinet, is to be found in Walpole's
This is the date commonly given. The
