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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 649: AFFAIRS OF PORTUGAL. CONFEDERATION OF FRANCE AND RUSSIA.
By Edward Farr
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The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

AFFAIRS OF PORTUGAL. CONFEDERATION OF FRANCE AND RUSSIA.

Upon receiving the intelligence of these reverses, Napoleon assembled a far more powerful army, and resolved to crush the insurrection of Spain at least in person. Other dangers, however, awaited him. Alarmed at the treaty of Tilsit, and invigorated by its consequences, Austria had increased her regular force, and organized a militia; and the French reverses in Spain and Portugal gave a new impulse to her evident preparations for war. Napoleon saw this with alarm, and he resolved at once to menace and insult that country, by arranging the co-operation of Russia and the confederated states of the Rhine against the Emperor of Austria, should he attempt to take advantage of the Spanish war. A meeting between Napoleon and Alexander of Russia took place at Erfurt in September and October; and although the sovereigns of the confederation of the Rhine were permitted to pay their court there, Austria was excluded as a secondary power. Thus insulted afresh, the Emperor of Austria resolved in the course of the next year to renew the struggle with France, though he should find himself opposed to Russia likewise. A mysterious veil covered for a time the transactions of Erfurt; but what transpired in relation to them and what ensued justified the conjecture that they confirmed the conventions of the treaty of Tilsit; and that the new dynasty in Spain was acknowledged by Russia for permitting her to aggrandize herself in the north and the east. From Erfurt the two emperors directed a common proposal of peace to the King of England, accompanied by the declaration, that this step was the consequence of the most intimate connexion of the two greatest monarchs of the continent for war as well as for peace; but this proposal was without effect. They were answered that, however desirous both the government and the people might be to put an end to the miseries of war, they were prepared to endure any extremity before they sacrificed the interest of their allies by negociating a separate peace, and leaving Sicily, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain to the tender mercies of Napoleoa. “The hideous presence of the British leopards” was still to prove a terror to Frenchmen.