ONE:
TWO:Another attempt of the French to draw the attention of Wellington from Massena was made by Mortier, who marched from Badajoz, of which Soult had given him the command, entered Portugal, and invested Campo Mayor, a place of little strength, and with a very weak garrison. Marshal Beresford hastened to its relief at the head of twenty thousand men, and the Portuguese commandant did his best to hold out till he arrived; but he found this was not possible, and he surrendered on condition of marching out with all the honours of war. Scarcely, however, was this done when Beresford appeared, and Mortier abruptly quitted the town, and made all haste back again to Badajoz, pursued by the British cavalry. Mortier managed to get across the Guadiana, and Beresford found himself stopped there by a sudden rising of the water and want of boats. He had to construct a temporary bridge before he could cross, so that the French escaped into Badajoz. Mortier then resigned his command to Latour Maubourg, and the British employed themselves in reducing Oliven?a, and some other strong places on the Valverde river, in the month of April. Lord Wellington made a hasty visit to the headquarters of Marshal Beresford, to direct the operations against Badajoz, but he was quickly recalled by the news that Massena had received reinforcements, and was in full march again to relieve the garrison in Almeida. Wellington, on the other hand, had reduced his army by sending reinforcements to Beresford, so that while Massena entered Portugal with forty thousand foot and five thousand cavalry, Wellington had, of British and Portuguese, only thirty-two thousand foot and about one thousand two hundred horse. This force, too, he had been obliged to extend over a line of seven miles in length, so as to guard the avenues of access to Almeida. The country, too, about Almeida was particularly well adapted for cavalry, in which the French had greatly the superiority. Notwithstanding, Wellington determined to dispute his passage. He had no choice of ground; he must fight on a flat plain, and with the Coa flowing in his rear. His centre was opposite to Almeida, his right on the village of Fuentes d'Onoro, and his left on fort Concepcion.
ONE:There was no man in the colonies, nevertheless, who contributed so much to bring the open Declaration of Independence to a crisis as Thomas Paine, the celebrated author of "The Rights of Man" and of "The Age of Reason." Paine was originally a Quaker and staymaker at Thetford, in Norfolk. He renounced his Quakerism and his staymaking, became an exciseman, and then an usher in a school, reverting again to the gauging of ale firkins. In 1772 he wrote a pamphlet on the mischiefs arising from the inadequate payment of the excise officers, laying them open to bribes, etc. This pamphlet having been sent to Franklin, induced him to recommend the poor author to emigrate to America. Paine adopted the advice, and settled at Philadelphia in 1774. He there devoted himself to political literature, wrote for the papers and journals, finally edited the Philadelphia Magazine, and, imbibing all the ardour of revolution, wrote, in January of the year 1776, a pamphlet called "Common Sense." This pamphlet was the spark that was needed to fire the train of independence. It at once seized on the imagination of the public, cast other writers into the shade, and flew, in thousands and tens of thousands of copies, throughout the colonies. It ridiculed the idea of a small island, three thousand miles off, ruling that immense continent, and threatening, by its insolent assumption, the expanding energies of three millions of men, more vigorous, virtuous, and free, than those who sought to enslave them.The disabilities under which the Roman Catholics laboured were a constant source of irritation in Ireland; the agitation upon the subject was becoming every day more formidable. Mr. Plunket was anxious to bring forward the question in the House of Commons, but he was urged by his colleagues to postpone it, from an apprehension that the time was not yet come to give it a fair consideration: the Cabinet was divided, the Chancellor was obstinate, and the king vacillating, if not double-minded. "As to the conduct of the king," writes Mr. Freemantle, a member of the Government, "it is inexplicable. He is praising Lord Liverpool on all occasions, and sending invitations to nobody but the Opposition. With regard to Ireland, I am quite satisfied the great man is holding the most conciliatory language to both partiesholding out success to the Catholics, and a determination to resist them to the Protestants."
TWO:Meanwhile Ministers, anxious to exonerate themselves from the odium so fully their due for fomenting insurrection, commenced Parliamentary inquiries which only the more clearly demonstrated their guilt. On the 2nd of February the celebrated green bag was sent down by the Prince Regent to the Lords, and another green bag on the following day to the Commons. These green bagsor rather, this green bag, for they were classed as one by the public, their contents being onemade a great figure in the newspaper comments of the time. They were stuffed with documents regarding the late extraordinary powers assumed by Ministers, and the occurrences in the midland counties which had been held to justify them. No doubt the papers had been carefully selected, and they were now submitted to a secret committee of each House, which, being named by Ministers, was pretty sure to bring in reports accordingly. On the 23rd the Lords' committee brought up their report, and on the 27th the Commons' produced theirs. As might have been expected from their parentage,[134] there was a striking likeness in the offspring of the committees; they were veritable twins. Both travelled over the same ground; the statements made by the secret committee of 1816 averring that schemes of conspiracy were in agitation, and the events of 1817, particularly in Derbyshire and Yorkshire, as fully confirming these averments. They were compelled, however, to confess that the insurrections, though clearly connected in different counties, in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, were not very formidable, and that the mass of the population in these counties did not at all sanction, much less second, such proceedings. Yet, notwithstanding this confession, the fact remained that under the arbitrary measures of Ministers a great number of persons had been thrown into prison, against whom no charge could be established; and that at Derby three had been executed, and twenty others transported or imprisoned for long terms, and these, every one of them, through the acts and incitements of the emissaries of Ministers themselves. On the motion for printing the report of the Commons, which, of course, justified Ministers, Mr. Tierney said it was scarcely worth while to oppose the printing of "a document so absurd, contemptible, and ludicrous."
ONE:
TWO:For the reasons here stated, early in the summer a powerful fleet was fitted out with the utmost dispatch and secrecy by the new Ministry, and sent to the Baltic. The fleet consisted of twenty-five sail of the line, more than forty frigates, sloops, bomb-vessels, and gun-brigs, with three hundred and seventy-seven transports to convey over twenty-seven thousand troops from Stralsund, a great part of which were Germans in British pay. Admiral Gambier commanded the fleet, and Lord Cathcart the army, having second in command Sir Arthur Wellesley. On the 1st of August the British fleet was off the entrance of Gothenburg, and Admiral Gambier sent Commodore Keats into the Great Belt to cut off any passage from Holstein for the defence of Copenhagen. Admiral Gambier himself entered the Sound, passed the castles without any attack from them, and anchored in Elsinore Roads. By the 9th of August the whole fleet and the transports were collected there, and Mr. Jackson, who had been many years British envoy in the north of Germany, and knew most of the Danish Ministers, was dispatched to Kiel, in Holstein, where the Crown Prince lay with an army of from twenty[541] thousand to thirty thousand men, to endeavour to induce him to enter into an alliance with Great Britain, and to deliver the fleet to its keeping till the peace, stating the necessity that the British commanders would otherwise be under of taking possession of it by force. The Crown Prince, though the British had made it impossible to cross over and defend the fleet, received the overture with the utmost indignation. Mr. Jackson returned to Admiral Gambier, and the Crown Prince sent a messenger to order Copenhagen to be put into a state of defence. But there was scarcely a gun upon the walls, and the population only numbered, excluding the sailors, some thirteen thousand men, inclusive of five thousand five hundred volunteers and militia. On the 17th several Danish gunboats came out of the harbour, fired at some of our transports coming from Stralsund, burnt an English vessel, and attacked the pickets of Lord Cathcart's army. These vessels were driven back again by bombshells, and that evening Admiral Gambier took up a nearer station north-east of the Crown battery, the Trekroner. He then proceeded to surround the whole of the island of Zealand, on which Copenhagen stands, with our vessels. The division of the army landed at Wedbeck having now marched up, was joined by other divisions, and proceeded to entrench themselves in the suburbs of Copenhagen. They were attacked by the gunboats, but, on the 27th, they had covered themselves by a good battery, and they then turned their cannon on the gunboats, and soon compelled them to draw off. On the 29th Sir Arthur Wellesley marched to Ki?ge, against a body of Danish troops that had strongly fortified themselves there in order to assail the besiegers, and he quickly routed them. The Danish troops then made several dashing sorties from Copenhagen, while their gunboats and floating batteries attacked our advanced vessels, and managed, by a ball from the Trekroner, to blow up one of our transports. The French had now arrived at Stralsund, and Keats was sent to blockade that port, to hinder them from crossing over into Zealand; nothing but the extreme rapidity of the movements of the British prevented a powerful army of French from being already in Copenhagen for its defence.
