1781.] WAR WITH HOLLAND-FRENCH ATTACK UPON JERSEY.

419

of eight or nine thousand pounds. Pitt sat for the close borough of Appleby, having unsuccessfully contested the University of Cambridge. Sheridan was elected for Stafford.

The ministry, as might be expected from the result of the elections, had acquired a firmer position. On the 25th of January a royal message announced a rupture with Holland, the reasons of which were set forth in a manifesto. An amendment to the Address in support of the war was rejected by large majorities in both houses. Burke, having been returned for the borough of Malton, brought forward his motion for the regulation of the Civil List, which had been rejected in the previous Session. It again met with the same fate. Pitt made his first speech on this occasion, in support of the Bill. Two more efforts put the young orator upon a level with the most influential members of the party that advocated retrenchment and reform, and were opposed to the American war-a war described by the son of Chatham as "a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war!" Of these displays of his friend, Wilberforce thus prophesied : "He comes out, as his father did, a ready-made orator; and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other see him the first man in the country."+

At the beginning of 1781, the French made a desperate effort to secure the most important of the Channel Islands-the last possession of the duchy of Normandy which remained to the English crown. During the American war two previous attacks had been made upon Jersey, without success. The baron de Rullecourt had sailed from Granville, in Normandy, in a season of tempest, with a fleet of small vessels carrying two thousand troops. About half his force was driven back to the coast of France. But on the night of the 5th of January he landed eight hundred men at the Violet Bank, about three miles from St. Helier; and before daybreak was in possession of that town. The lieutenant-governor and the magistrates being seized, Rullecourt terrified them into signing a capitulation. The officers in Elizabeth Castle declared that they were not bound by such an act, and refused to surrender the fortress. Meanwhile a spirited young officer, major Pierson, of the 99th regiment, had collected the militia of the island, with some other troops; and, in answer to a demand from Rullecourt to capitulate, replied that if the French commander did not himself surrender in twenty minutes he should be attacked. Pierson led his columns into the town; drove the enemy from street to street; and finally compelled the whole body to surrender in the market-place. The gallant Englishman was shot through the heart at the moment of his triumph; and the French invader was mortally wounded.

Great Britain had now to encounter the hazards of a maritime war with France, Spain, and Holland. For two years this somewhat unequal battle was most vigorously fought, wherever there was a hostile flag to be encountered. The ancient supremacy of the seas was again maintained, single-handed, against four allied powers. Whatever were the misfortunes of the British army that terminated the conflict in America, the close of the war was marked by maritime successes, which had an important influence upon the conclusion of a peace; and whose example stimulated that heroic spirit in

"Life of Wilberforce," by his sons, vol. i. p. 15.

+ Ibid. p. 22.

420

CAPTURE OF ST. EUSTATIUS BY RODNEY,

[1781.

our naval commanders which was the chief safety of our country in another war of even greater peril.

The first signal event of the war with Holland was the capture of St. Eustatius, one of the Leeward Islands. This small possession, which had been colonized by the Dutch for a hundred and eighty years, was especially valuable to them as the seat of a great commerce-" as the grand free port of the West Indies and America, and as a general market, and magazine, to all nations." * This rock was in itself a natural fortification. Its one landingplace is now so fortified as to be considered impregnable. On the 3rd of February, 1781, when admiral Rodney, having been apprised of the declaration of war, appeared before St. Eustatius with a large fleet, and demanded an immediate surrender, the governor deemed all resistance unavailing. The riches in merchandise obtained by this success were beyond all previous conception. The whole island was one vast emporium of sugar and tobacco, and all the richer products of the West Indies. In the bay two hundred and fifty trading vessels were captured. All the valuable property belonging, not only to the Dutch West India Company and the traders of Amsterdam, but to the merchants of Great Britain and the residents of our West Indian Islands, was indiscriminately seized. Rodney, who had the command of the West India station, was beset with remonstrances and applications for redress. The merchants of St. Christopher's had been great sufferers, and the legislature of that island supported their claims to compensation, on the ground that they had lodged their property at St. Eustatius under the guarantee of several Acts of Parliament. They were told that the island was Dutch, everything in it was Dutch, was under the protection of the Dutch flag, and as Dutch it should be treated. Jews, Americans, French, and native Dutch, were successively transported from the island. Their property was sold by public auction; and merchandise, to the amount of three millions, was disposed of at a terrible depreciation, and found its way chiefly to the French and Danish islands. May we not hope that such a barbarous mode of conducting warfare has passed away; and that, although merchants cannot expect to be wholly exempted from loss and suffering, it will cease to be an object with a great naval power such as Britain, so to time its declaration of hostilities, as to rush upon unprepared and unsuspecting commercial communities "like thieves who break through and steal." Rodney, in his official despatch, disclaimed any hope of private advantage. Lord North, in a debate in the House of Commons upon the question of the confiscation of the property at St. Eustatius, stated that he had received a letter from the admiral in which he had said he did not consider the property as belonging to himself but to the Crown; and Rodney, in his place as a member, declared he had no other idea at the time when he seized all the property in the island than that it belonged of right to his country. "He had not received intelligence, till long after the confiscation, of his majesty's gracious intentions of relinquishing his rights in favour of the fleet and army to whom the island was surrendered." Litigation in the courts of law left little to the captors of what had been saved from recapture by the French in its conveyance home. The nation had to endure a great amount of opprobrium in Europe; and the English flag

"Annual Register," 1781, p. 101,

1781.]

PRIVATEERING-ACTION OFF THE DOGGER-BANK.

421

came to be regarded in the West Indies as an ensign almost as much to be dreaded as the black flag of the pirate. The piratical flag was really raised by a squadron of privateers from Bristol, who set sail upon hearing of the rupture with Holland, without waiting for those letters of marque and reprisal under which their acts would have been legalised. The Dutch settlements in Guiana offered tempting prizes to these adventures. To plunder the rich Hollanders appeared to be an object worthy of British enterprize, whether lawful or unlawful. The present age has grown ashamed of the system of privateering, however regularly conducted under the recognized forms. Enlightened men were always averse to this mode of private plunder under the pretence of national advantage. Franklin, in the negociations for the peace of 1783, proposed that Great Britain and America, as well as the other belligerent powers, should agree not to grant any commissions to private armed vessels, empowering them to take or destroy trading ships. In 1856, after the close of the war with Russia, the Conference at Paris recommended the entire abolition of the system of privateering, and the acknowledgment of the rights of neutrals, as desirable and necessary changes for bringing the system of war into harmony with the ideas and principles of modern civilization. There was one dissentient power whose ministers thought it politic to forget the recommendation of their illustrious countryman.

It was made a charge against sir George Rodney that he lingered at St. Eustatius from February to May, for the purpose of looking after his own interests, when he might during that time have carried on offensive operations at Martinique, where the French had an inferior force to oppose him. He was busy, it was said, about the captured merchandise, while the French fleet was reinforced, and Tobago was taken. Rodney defended himself by alleging that he had sent sir Samuel Hood, as he believed with an adequate force, to oppose the armament under De Grasse that had sailed from France. The force was not adequate; for five ships came out of Port Royal harbour to join the French admiral; and although there was a partial action, the English operations were wholly inefficient. The next year Rodney nobly vindicated himself from any imputation of want of zeal and daring. It was, indeed, then time that some great effort should be made to assert the maritime eminence of England; for lord Mulgrave, according to a report of his speech in November, 1781, maintained an opinion very strangely opposed to the prevailing belief: "We are not, nor ever were, equal to France in a naval contest, where France applied all her resources and strength to the raising of a navy. "* An engagement off the Dogger Bank between a squadron under admiral Hyde Parker and a Dutch squadron, recalled the memory of "those dreadful sea-fights between England and Holland which the last century witnessed." Like many of those sea-fights, there was no result but mutual destruction and prolonged animosity. The bravery and endurance of a British garrison were never more signally displayed than in the defence of Gibraltar during this year. Of that memorable siege we shall have to relate the continuous story in a subsequent chapter.

At no period of the contest between Great Britain and the United States

* "Parliamentary History," vol. 22, col. 711.

"Annual Register," 1782, p. 120,

422

DIFFICULTIES OF WASHINGTON'S ARMY-MUTÍNÍĖS.

[1781. were the two principals in the war in a condition in which peace was more necessary to each than at the beginning of the year 1781. Washington, looking at the extensive confederacy against England, thought, towards the end of the campaign of 1780, that it would not be in her power to continue the contest. But he was soon convinced that, however menaced on every side, England was entering upon another campaign without manifesting any sign of exhaustion. The American commander looked at his own resources, and saw little to inspire him with the hope of any decisive success. At this period he writes, "I see nothing before us but accumulating distress. We have been half our time without provisions, and are likely to continue so. We have no magazines, nor money to form them. We have lived upon expedients until we can live no longer."* The Congress, at the end of 1780, transmitted a letter to Franklin, addressed to the king of France, urgently requesting arms, ammunition, clothing, and a loan of money. Franklin writes to the French minister of foreign affairs, to express his opinion "that the present conjuncture is critical; that there is some danger lest the Congress should lose its influence over the people, if it is found unable to procure the aids that are wanted; and that the whole system of the new government in America may therefore be shaken."+ Franklin at this crisis, when the immediate prospect was so obscure, predicted of a more remote future, if America should fail in asserting its independence, and "if the English were suffered once to recover that country." He prophesied "that the possession of those fertile and extensive regions, and that vast sea-coast, will afford them so broad a basis for future greatness, by the rapid growth of their commerce and breed of seamen and soldiers, as will enable them to become the terror of Europe, and to exercise with impunity that insolence which is so natural to their nation." Franklin, amidst the blandishments of Paris, had become half a Frenchman. John Adams, who at this period was the American envoy at Amsterdam, reports how some of the Dutch prophesied after another fashion-"that America has the interest of all Europe against her; that she will become the greatest manufacturing country, and thus ruin Europe; that she will become a great and an ambitious military and naval power, and consequently terrible to. Europe." Without regarding the possible effect of the establishment of American independence upon the future stability of the monarchy of France, the government of Louis XVI. resolved to make one more effort in this strange alliance between liberty and despotism. Six millions of livres were granted to America as a free gift. The king of France wanted to borrow money himself to support the war, and could not injure his own credit by being associated with an American loan, for the depreciation of the paper of Congress had closed the pockets of European capitalists. To add to the gloom of the republican leaders, on new year's day thirteen hundred of the troops raised by Pennsylvania mutinied for redress of grievances to which Congress had given no heed. They would serve no longer without pay, without food, without clothing. They marched away from their encampment at Morristown, and were reduced to obedience with great difficulty, but without severities.

Ramsay. "Life of Washington," p. 162.
Ibid.

"Works," vol. viii. p. 534. Ibid., vol. ix. p. 2.

§ Ibid., p. 494, Letter to Franklin, August, 1780.