THREE:With Lord Eldon, however, he held different language, complaining bitterly of the difficulties in which the Ministers had involved him. He is represented as struggling desperately in meshes from which he found it impossible to extricate himself; and, as usual with weak minds, he threw all the blame of his misery on others. In reference to an interview, Lord Eldon remarks: "I was not sent for afterwards, but went on Thursday, the 9th of April, with more addresses. In the second interview, which began a little before two o'clock, the king repeatedlyand with some minutes intervening between his repeated declarations, musing in silence in the interimexpressed his anguish, pain, and misery that the measure had ever been thought of, and as often declared that he had been most harshly and cruelly treatedthat he had been treated as a man whose consent had been asked with a pistol pointed to his breast, or as obliged, if he did not give it, to leap down from a five-pair-of-stairs window. What could he do? What had he to fall back upon?" After relating much more in the same strain, Lord Eldon adds: "Little more passed, except occasional bursts of expression, 'What can I do? What can I now fall back upon? What can I fall back upon? I am miserable, wretched. My situation is dreadful; nobody about me to advise with. If I do give my consent, I will go to the baths after all, and from thence to Hanover. I'll return no more to England. I'll make no Roman Catholic peers; I will not do what this Bill will enable me to do. I'll return no more. Let them get a Catholic king in Clarence! [I think he also mentioned Sussex.] The people will see that I did not wish this.' There were the strongest appearances, certainly, of misery. He more than once stopped my leaving him. When the time came that I was to go, he threw his arms around my neck, and expressed great misery. I left him at about twenty minutes or a quarter before five. I certainly thought when I left him that he would express great difficulty, when the Bill was prepared for the Royal Assent, about giving it." The writer adds, sarcastically:"I fear that it seemed to be given as a matter of course." Next day, Lord Eldon wrote to his daughter: "The fatal Bill received the Royal Assent yesterday afternoon. After all I had heard in my visits, not a day's delay. God bless us and His Church." At Windsor, on the 13th of April, the king pronounced over the Bill that he so hated the words"Le Roy le veult."Lord Howe now prepared to attack New York, where Washington had about thirty thousand men. But the latter's troops were ill-equipped, and deficient in discipline. Washington expected that Howe would attack New York by the way of Long Island, and so he had posted nine thousand men at Brooklyn, nearly opposite to it, behind entrenchments thrown up by General Greene. Greene had been attacked by fever; and General Putnam, who had taken his post, was but indifferently acquainted with the position of the forces and the nature of the ground they would have to defend with a rabble of most insubordinate troops. In these circumstances General Howe, on the morning of the 22nd of August, threw over from Staten Island into Long Island four thousand men, under the command of General Clinton. They landed in Gravesend Bay, under cover of the artillery of three frigates and two bombs. The rest of the army followed with the artillery. Washington hastened over from New York to strengthen General Sullivan, who was in command on the island. He posted no less than fifteen thousand men along a peninsula at that end of the island facing New York.
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THREE:The Duke earnestly recommended the utmost[89] promptness and liberality as the only means to settle the matter effectually and at once. He said that to give only moderate assistance was sure to enable Buonaparte to protract the contest, and would cost Britain more in the end; that, on the contrary, if Britain found the means of maintaining a great army, he was confident that "the contest would be a very short one, and decidedly successful." And this, in the circumstances, was clearly the best advice. Great Britain, having been no party to the silly arrangement for setting up Buonaparte as a burlesque emperor at the very doors of France, might very well have said to the Allied sovereigns"This is your work; we have no further concern in it; you may finish it as you please." But Britain was sure not to do this; as both the Government and nation had set their mind on hunting down the slippery and mischievous adventurer, they were sure to follow up the pursuit.In such very discouraging circumstances the American campaign began. Whilst insurrection was in their camp, Sir Henry Clinton dispatched General Arnold to make a descent upon the coast of Virginia. That general had been dispatched into that quarter, at the close of the year, with one thousand six hundred men, in ships so bad, that they were obliged to fling overboard some of their horses. Arnold, however, first sailed up the river James, and landed at Westover, only twenty-five miles from Richmond, the capital of Virginia. Jefferson, who was Governor of Virginia, was seized with great alarm; for, though the militia of the State were nominally fifty thousand, he could muster only a few hundreds. He therefore hastily collected what property he could, and fled up the country, dreading to fall into the hands of a man so embittered against the Americans as Arnold was, who was himself well aware that they had determined to hang him without mercy if they caught him. Arnold did not allow much time to elapse without action. The next day he was in Richmond, and sent word to Jefferson that, provided British vessels might come up the river to take away the tobacco, he would spare the town. Jefferson rejected the proposal, and Arnold burnt all the tobacco stores and the public buildings, both there and at Westham. After committing other ravages, he returned to Portsmouth, on Elizabeth River, where he entrenched himself. On the 26th of March, General Phillips, having assumed the command, in company with Arnold ascended James River with two thousand five hundred men, took and destroyed much property in Williamsburg and York Town, ravaged the country around, and then sailed to the mouth of the Appomattox, and burnt all the shipping and tobacco in Petersburg. After other depredations, and forcing the Americans to destroy their own flotilla between Warwick and Richmond, Phillips and Arnold descended the James River to Manchester, and proposed to cross over to Richmond. But Lafayette having just reached that place before them with upwards of two thousand men, they re-embarked, and, after destroying much other property, especially shipping and stores, at Warwick and other places, they fell down to Hog Island, where they awaited further orders.
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THREE:The events on land were very different. Abercrombie, like General Braddock, advanced with all the careless presumption of a second-rate general. The grand object was to reduce Fort Ticonderoga, built on a neck of land between Lakes George and Champlain. At the landing, Lord Howe, one of the best officers, was killed, but they drove back the French, and advanced on the fort, which was of great strength, defended by a garrison of four thousand men, commanded by the Marquis de Montcalm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Canadians, himself. Montcalm had raised a breastwork eight feet high, and made in front of it a barricade of felled trees with their branches outwards. Abercrombie, with a foolish confidence, advanced right upon this barricade, without waiting for the coming up of his artillery, which was detained by the badness of the roads. With a reckless disregard of the lives of his men, he commanded them to attempt to storm these defences, and after fighting with the usual courage of Englishmen for several hours, and two thousand of them being slaughtered, it was found that their efforts were useless, and they were ordered to retire. Brigadier Forbes, who had been sent against Fort Dupuesne, an attempt so disastrous to both Washington and Braddock, executed his task with the utmost promptitude and success. Forbes took possession of it on the 25th of November, and, in compliment to the great Minister under whose auspices they fought, named it Fort Pitt, since grown from a solitary fort into Pittsburg.
THREE:James Bradley (b. 1692), who succeeded Halley as the third Astronomer Royal, held that post till 1762, when he died. He had in 1728 distinguished himself by his discovery of an unanswerable proof of the motion of the earth by his observations on the apparent alteration in the place of a fixed star. His second great discovery was that of the mutation of the earth's axis, showing that the pole of the equator moves round the pole of the elliptic, not in a straight but in a waving line. Bradley gave important assistance to the Ministry in their alteration of the calendar in 1751, and the vast mass of his[153] observations was published after his death, by the University of Oxford, in two volumes, in 1798.
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THREE:Nelson fell about the middle of the action, and for hours it continued with terrible fury. Whole masses of ships lay jammed together, pouring into one another the most tremendous broadsides. When all was over, the vessels on both sides appeared mere ruins. Nineteen ships of the line were taken, but some of them were so battered that they were useless, and incapable of moving. Six or seven of the enemy's ships immediately went down or were burnt. The Spanish admiral, Gravina, was mortally wounded; the rear-admiral, Cisneros, was taken, and the French admiral, Villeneuve. The French and Spaniards, in the few ships which had escaped into Cadiz, seeing the helpless condition of many of the British vessels, made a sortie, and re-captured two of the prizes, and carried them into port. The Algeciras, another of the captured ships, was also rescued, and carried into Cadiz by her crew, who rose the next morning on the English lieutenant and prize party in charge of her during a gale, the English having taken off the hatches to give the Spaniards a chance for their lives, should she drive on shore. In the end, the prizes were found so riddled by shot that they were burnt; so that, with some of them running on shore in the gale, only four of the wholethree Spanish and one Frenchwere saved, and brought to England as trophies. But the French and Spanish navies might be said to be annihilated; and, whatever might happen on the Continent, for the remainder of Napoleon's career England was for ever put beyond his reach. Nelson had indeed finished his mission. He had revived all the maritime glory of the days of Drake and Blake, and shown that, with a man like him at the head of her fleet, Britain might sit on her ocean throne, and smile at the hostile efforts of a world combined to crush her.The Home Secretary thus refers to a letter of Lord Eldon, written to his daughter soon after the event, as follows:"After observing, 'Nothing is talked of now which interests anybody the least in the world, except the election of Mr. O'Connell,' he makes these memorable remarks:'As Mr. O'Connell will not, though elected, be allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons unless he will take the oaths, etc. (and that he won't do unless he can get absolution), his rejection from the Commons may excite rebellion in Ireland. At all events, this business must bring the Roman Catholic question, which has been so often discussed, to a crisis and a conclusion. The nature of that conclusion I do not think likely to be favourable to Protestantism.' It is clear, therefore," continues Mr. Peel, "that Lord Eldon was fully alive to the real character and magnitude of the event."