The will of Napoleon seemed now the only law, from which the conquered country, that so late stood forth as the rival of France, was to expect her destiny; and circumstances indicated, that, with more than the fortune of CÆsar or Alexander, the Conqueror would not emulate their generosity or clemency.

The treatment of the ill-fated Duke of Brunswick did little honour to the victor. After receiving a mortal wound on the field of battle, he was transported from thence to Altona. Upon his way to his native dominions, in the government of which his conduct had been always patriotic and praiseworthy, he wrote to Napoleon, representing that, although he had fought against him as a general in the Prussian service, he nevertheless, as a Prince of the Empire, recommended his hereditary principality to the moderation and clemency of the victor. This attempt to separate his two characters, or to appeal to the immunities of a league which Napoleon had dissolved, although natural in the duke's forlorn situation, formed a plea not likely to be attended to by the conqueror. But, on other and broader grounds, Buonaparte, if not influenced by personal animosity against the duke, or desirous to degrade, in his person, the father-in-law of the heir of the British crown, might have found reasons for treating the defeated general with the respect due to his rank and his misfortunes. The Duke of Brunswick was one of the oldest soldiers in Europe, and his unquestioned bravery ought to have recommended him to his junior in arms. He was a reigning prince, and Buonaparte's own aspirations towards confirmation of aristocratical rank should have led him to treat the vanquished with decency. Above all, the duke was defenceless, wounded, dying; a situation to command the sympathy of every military man, who knows on what casual circumstances the fate of battle depends. The answer of Napoleon was, nevertheless, harsh and insulting in the last degree. He reproached the departing general with his celebrated proclamation against France in 1792, with the result of his unhappy campaign in that country, with the recent summons by which the French had been required to retreat beyond the Rhine. He charged him as having been the instigator of a war which his counsels ought to have prevented. He announced the right which he had acquired, to leave not one stone standing upon another in the town of Brunswick; and summed up his ungenerous reply by intimating, that though he might treat the subjects of the duke like a generous victor, it was his purpose to deprive the dying prince and his family of their hereditary sovereignty.[245]

As if to fulfil these menaces, the French troops approached the city of Brunswick; and the wounded veteran, dreading the further resentment of his ungenerous victor, was compelled to cause himself to be removed to the neutral town of Altona, where he expired.[246] An application from his son, requesting permission to lay his father's body in the tomb of his ancestors, was rejected with the same sternness which had characterised Buonaparte's answer to the attempt of the duke, when living, to soften his enmity. The successor of the duke vowed, it is believed, to requite these insults with mortal hatred—did much to express it during his life—and bequeathed to his followers the legacy of revenge,[247] which the Black Brunswickers had the means of amply discharging upon the 18th of June, 1815.

Some have imputed this illiberal conduct of Buonaparte to an ebullition of spleen against the object of his personal dislike; others have supposed that his resentment was, in whole or in part, affected in order to ground upon it his resolution of confiscating the state of Brunswick, and uniting it with the kingdom of Westphalia, which, as we shall presently see, he proposed to erect as an appanage for his brother Jerome. Whether arising from a burst of temperament, or a cold calculation of interested selfishness, his conduct was equally unworthy of a monarch and a soldier.

At Potsdam and at Berlin, Napoleon showed himself equally as the sworn and implacable enemy, rather than as the generous conqueror. At Potsdam he seized on the sword, belt, and hat of the Great Frederick, and at Berlin he appropriated and removed to Paris the monument of Victory, erected by the same monarch, in consequence of the defeat of the French at Rosbach.[248] The finest paintings and works of art in Prussia were seized upon for the benefit of the French National Museum.

The language of the victor corresponded with his actions. His bulletins and proclamations abounded with the same bitter sarcasms against the King, the Queen, and those whom he called the war faction of Prussia. Ascribing the war to the unrepressed audacity of the young nobility, he said, in one of those proclamations, he would permit no more rioting in Berlin, no more breaking of windows; and, in addressing the Count Neale, he threatened, in plain terms, to reduce the nobles of Prussia to beg their bread.[249] These, and similar expressions of irritated spleen, used in the hour of conquest, level the character of the great victor with that of the vulgar Englishman in the farce, who cannot be satisfied with beating his enemy, but must scold him also. Napoleon's constant study of the poetry ascribed to Ossian, might have taught him that wrath should fly on eagles' wings from a conquered foe. The soldiers, and even the officers, caught the example of their Emperor, and conceived they met his wishes by behaving more imperiously in quarters, and producing more distress to their hosts, than had been their custom in the Austrian campaigns. Great aggressions, perhaps, were rarely perpetrated, and would have been punished, as contrary to military discipline; but a grinding, constant, and unremitting system of vexation and requisition, was bitterly felt by the Prussians at the time, and afterwards sternly revenged.

It is but justice, however, to record an act of clemency of Napoleon amid these severities. He had intercepted a letter containing some private intelligence respecting the motions of the French, sent by Prince Hatzfeld, late the Prussian governor of Berlin, to Prince Hohenloe, then still at the head of an army. Napoleon appointed a military commission for the trial of Hatzfeld; and his doom, for continuing to serve his native prince after his capital had been occupied by the enemy, would have been not less certain than severe. His wife, however, threw herself at Napoleon's feet, who put into her hands the fatal document which contained evidence of what was called her husband's guilt, with permission to throw it into the fire.[250] The French Emperor is entitled to credit for the degree of mercy he showed on this occasion; but it must be granted at the same time, that to have proceeded to sentence and execution upon such a charge, would have been an act of great severity, if not of actual atrocity. If, as has been alleged, the correspondence of Prince Hatzfeld was dated before, not after the capitulation of Berlin, his death would have been an unqualified murder.[251]

The victor, who had all at his disposal, was now to express his pleasure concerning those satellites of Prussia, which, till her fall, had looked up to her as their natural protector and ally. Of these, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel were the principal; and, in his proceedings towards them, Buonaparte regarded the train of his own policy much more than the merits which the two electors might have respectively pleaded towards France.

Saxony had joined her arms to those of Prussia—forced, as she said, by the arguments which a powerful neighbour can always apply to a weaker—still she had joined her, and fought on her side at the battle of Jena. The apology of compulsion was admitted by Buonaparte; the Saxon troops were dismissed upon their parole, and their prince raised to the rank of a King, shortly afterwards admitted as a member of the Confederacy of the Rhine, and treated by Buonaparte with much personal consideration. The Dukes of Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Gotha also were permitted to retain their dominions, on acknowledging a similar vassalage to the French empire.

The Landgrave, or Elector, of Hesse-Cassel, might have expected a still more favourable acceptance in the eyes of the victor; for he had refused to join Prussia, and, in spite of threats and persuasions, had observed neutrality during the brief contest. But Napoleon remembered, to the prejudice of the landgrave, that he had resisted all previous temptations to enter into the Confederation of the Rhine. He imputed his neutrality to fear, not choice. He alleged, that it had not been strictly observed; and, treating the inaction of Hesse, whose inclinations were with Prussia, as a greater crime than the actual hostilities of Saxony, whose will was with France, he declared, according to his usual form of dethronement, that the House of Hesse-Cassel had ceased to reign. The doom was executed even before it was pronounced. Louis Buonaparte, with Marshal Mortier, had possessed himself of Hesse-Cassel by the 1st of November.[252] The army of the landgrave made no resistance—a part of them passed under the banners of France, the rest were disbanded.

The real cause of seizing the territories of an unoffending prince, who was totally helpless, unless in so far as right or justice could afford him protection, was Buonaparte's previous resolution, already hinted at, to incorporate Hesse-Cassel with the adjacent territories, for the purpose of forming a kingdom to be conferred on his youngest brother Jerome. This young person bore a gay and dissipated character; and, though such men may at times make considerable sacrifices for the indulgence of transient passion, they are seldom capable of retaining for a length of time a steady affection for an object, however amiable. Jerome Buonaparte, as before stated, had married an American young lady, distinguished for her beauty and her talents, and had thus lost the countenance of Napoleon, who maintained the principle, that segregated as his kindred were from the nation at large, by their connexion with him, his rank, and his fortunes, they were not entitled to enter into alliances according to the dictates of their own feelings, but were bound to form such as were most suitable to his policy. Jerome was tempted by ambition finally to acquiesce in this reasoning, and sacrificed the connexion which his heart had chosen, to become the tool of his brother's ever-extending schemes of ambition. The reward was the kingdom of Westphalia, to which was united Hesse-Cassel, with the various provinces which Prussia had possessed in Franconia, Westphalia Proper, and Lower Saxony; as also the territories of the unfortunate Duke of Brunswick. Security could be scarcely supposed to attend upon a sovereignty, where the materials were acquired by public rapine, and the crown purchased by domestic infidelity.

About the middle of November, Mortier formally re-occupied Hanover in the name of the Emperor, and, marching upon Hamburgh, took possession of that ancient free town, so long the emporium of commerce for the north of Europe. Here, as formerly at Leipsic, the strictest search was made for British commodities and property, which were declared the lawful subject of confiscation. The Moniteur trumpeted forth, that these rigorous measures were accompanied with losses to British commerce which would shake the credit of the nation. This was not true. The citizens of Hamburgh had long foreseen that their neutrality would be no protection, and, in spite of the fraudful assurances of the French envoy, designed to lull them into security, the merchants had availed themselves of the last two years to dispose of their stock, call in their capital, and wind up their trade; so that the rapacity of the French was in a great measure disappointed. The strict search after British property, and the confiscation which was denounced against it at Hamburgh and elsewhere, were no isolated acts of plunder and spoliation, but made parts of one great system for destroying the commerce of England, which was shortly after laid before the world by the celebrated decrees of Berlin.[253]

It was frequently remarked of Buonaparte, that he studied a sort of theatrical effect in the mode of issuing his decrees and proclamations, the subject matter of which formed often a strange contrast with the date; the latter, perhaps, being at the capital of some subdued monarch, while the matter promulgated respected some minute regulation affecting the municipality of Paris. But there was no such discrepancy in the date and substance of the Berlin decrees against British enterprise. It was when Buonaparte had destroyed the natural bulwark which protected the independence of the north of Germany, and had necessarily obtained a corresponding power on the shores of the Baltic, that he seriously undertook to promulgate his sweeping plan of destroying the commerce of his Island foe.[254]

When slight inconveniences, according to Buonaparte's expression, put an end to his hopes of invading Britain, or when, as at other times he more candidly admitted, the defeat at Trafalgar induced him "to throw helve after hatchet," and resign all hope of attaining any success by means of his navy, he became desirous of sapping and undermining the bulwark, which he found it impossible to storm; and, by directing his efforts to the destruction of British commerce, he trusted gradually to impair the foundations of her national wealth and prosperity. He erred, perhaps, in thinking that, even if his object could have been fully attained, the full consequences would have followed which his animosity anticipated. Great Britain's prosperity mainly rests on her commerce, but her existence as a nation is not absolutely dependent upon it; as those foreigners are apt to imagine, who have only seen the numerous vessels with which she covers the ocean and fills foreign ports, but have never witnessed the extent of her agricultural and domestic resources. But, entertaining the belief which Napoleon did, in regard to the indispensable connexion betwixt British commerce and British power, the policy of his war upon the former cannot be denied. It was that of the Abyssynian hunter, who, dreading to front the elephant in his fury, draws his sabre along the animal's heel-joint, and waits until the exertions of the powerful brute burst the injured sinews, and he sinks prostrate under his own weight.

The celebrated Decrees of Berlin appeared on the 21st November, 1806, interdicting all commerce betwixt Great Britain and the continent; which interdiction was declared a fundamental law of the French empire, until the English should consent to certain alterations in the mode of conducting hostilities by sea, which should render her naval superiority less useful to herself, and less detrimental to the enemy. This measure was justified upon the following grounds:—That England had either introduced new customs into her maritime code, or revived those of a barbarous age—that she seized on merchant vessels, and made their crews prisoners, just as if they had been found on board ships of war—declared harbours blockaded which were not so in reality—and extended the evils of war to the peaceful and unarmed citizen.

This induction to the celebrated project, afterwards called the Continental System of the Emperor, was false in the original proposition, and sophistical in those by which it was supported. It was positively false that Great Britain had introduced into her maritime law, either by new enactment, or by the revival of obsolete and barbarous customs, any alteration by which the rights of neutrals were infringed, or the unarmed citizen prejudiced, more than necessarily arose out of the usual customs of war. The law respecting the blockade of ports, and the capture of vessels at sea, was the same on which every nation had acted for three centuries past, France herself not excepted. It is true, that the maritime code seemed at this period to be peculiarly that of England, because no nation save herself had the means of enforcing them; but she did not in this respect possess any greater advantage by sea than Napoleon enjoyed by land.

The reasoning of the Emperor Napoleon upon the inequality and injustice of the maritime mode of exercising war, compared with the law of hostilities by land, was not more accurate than his allegation that Britain had innovated upon the former for the purpose of introducing new, or reviving old severities. This will appear plain from the following considerations:—

At an early period of society, the practice of war was doubtless the same by land or sea; and the savage slaughtered or enslaved his enemy whether he found him in his hut or in his canoe. But when centuries of civilisation began to mitigate the horrors of barbarous warfare, the restrictive rules introduced into naval hostilities were different from those adopted in the case of wars by land, as the difference of the services obviously dictated. A land army has a precise object, which it can always attain if victorious. If a general conquer a town, he can garrison it; he can levy contributions; nay, he may declare that he will appropriate it to himself in right of sovereignty. He can afford to spare the property of private individuals, when he is at liberty to seize, if he is so minded, upon all their public rights, and new-mould them at his pleasure. The seaman, on the other hand, seizes on the merchant vessel and its cargo, by the same right of superior force, in virtue of which the victor by land has seized upon castles, provinces, and on the very haven, it may be, which the vessel belongs to. If the maritime conqueror had no right to do this, he would gain nothing by his superiority except blows, when he met with vessels of force, and would be cut off from any share of the spoils of war, which form the reward of victory. The innocent and unarmed citizen, perhaps the neutral stranger, suffers in both cases; but a state of war is of course a state of violence, and its evils, unhappily, cannot be limited to those who are actually engaged in hostilities. If the spirit of philanthropy affected in the peroration to Buonaparte's decrees had been real, he might have attained his pretended purpose of softening the woes of war, by proposing some relaxation of the rights of a conqueror by land, in exchange for restrictions to be introduced into the practice of hostilities by sea. Instead of doing so, he, under the pretext of exercising the right of reprisals, introduced the following Decrees, unheard of hitherto among belligerent powers, and tending greatly to augment the general distress, which must, under all circumstances, attend a state of war.

I. The British isles were declared in a state of blockade. II. All commerce and correspondence with England was forbidden. All English letters were to be seized in the post-houses. III. Every Englishman, of whatever rank or quality, found in France, or the countries allied with her, was declared a prisoner of war. IV. All merchandise, or property of any kind, belonging to English subjects, was declared lawful prize. V. All articles of English manufacture, and articles produced in her colonies, were in like manner declared contraband and lawful prize. VI. Half of the produce of the above confiscations was to be employed in the relief of those merchants whose vessels had been captured by the English cruizers. VII. All vessels coming from England, or the English colonies, were to be refused admission into any harbour. Four additional articles provided the mode of promulgating and enforcing the decree, and directed that it should be communicated to the allies of France.

This was the first link of a long chain of arbitrary decrees and ordinances, by which Napoleon, aiming at the destruction of British finance, interrupted the whole commerce of Europe, and destroyed for a season, and as far as lay in his power, that connexion between distant nations which unites them to each other by the most natural and advantageous means, the supply of the wants of the one country by the superfluous produce of the other. The extent of public inconvenience and distress, which was occasioned by the sudden suppression of commercial communication with England, may be judged of by reflecting, how many of the most ordinary articles of consumption are brought from foreign countries—in how many instances the use of these articles have brought them into the list of necessaries—and how, before an ordinary mechanic or peasant sits down to breakfast, distant climes must be taxed to raise the coffee and sugar which he consumes.[255]

The painful embarrassment of those deprived of their habitual comforts, was yet exceeded by the clamour and despair of the whole commercial world on the continent, who were thus, under pretext of relieving them from the vexation of the English cruizers, threatened with a total abrogation of their profession. Hamburgh, Bourdeaux, Nantes, and other continental towns, solicited, by petitions and deputations, some relaxation of decrees which inferred their general ruin. They pleaded the prospect of universal bankruptcy, which this prohibitory system must occasion. "Let it be so," answered the Emperor; "the more insolvency on the continent, the greater will be the distress of the merchants in London. The fewer traders in Hamburgh, the less will be the temptation to carry on commerce with England. Britain must be humbled, were it at the expense of throwing civilisation back for centuries, and returning to the original mode of trading by barter."

But, great as was Buonaparte's power, he had overrated it in supposing, that, by a mere expression of his will, he could put an end to an intercourse, in the existence of which the whole world possessed an interest. The attempt to annihilate commerce, resembled that of a child who tries to stop with his hand the stream of an artificial fountain, which escapes in a hundred partial jets from under his palm and between his fingers. The Genius of Commerce, like a second Proteus, assumed every variety of shape, in order to elude the imperial interdiction, and all manner of evasions was practised for that purpose. False papers, false certificates, false bills of lading, were devised, and these frauds were overlooked in the seaports, by the very agents of the police, and customhouse officers, to whom the execution of the decrees was committed. Douaniers, magistrates, generals, and prefects, nay, some of the kindred princes of the House of Napoleon, were well pleased to listen to the small still voice of their interest, rather than to his authoritative commands; and the British commerce, though charged with heavy expenses, continued to flourish in spite of the Continental System.[256] The new, and still more violent measures, which Napoleon had recourse to for enforcing his prohibitions, will require our notice hereafter. Meantime, it is enough to say, that such acts of increasing severity had the natural consequence of rendering his person and power more and more unpopular; so that, while he was sacrificing the interests and the comforts of the nations under his authority to his hope of destroying England, he was, in fact, digging a mine under his own feet, which exploded to his destruction long before the security of England was materially affected.

Napoleon had foreseen, that, in order to enforce the decrees by which, without possession of any naval power, he proposed to annihilate the naval supremacy of England, it would be necessary to augment to a great extent the immense superiority of land forces which France already possessed. It was necessary, he was aware, that to enable him to maintain the prohibitions which he had imposed upon general commerce, as well as to prosecute the struggle in which he was about to be engaged with Russia, a large draught should be made on the population of France. He had, accordingly, by a requisition addressed to the Senate, dated from Bamberg, 7th of October, required a second anticipation of the conscription of 1807, amounting to a levy of eighty thousand men.

The measure was supported in the Senate by the oratory of Regnault de St. Jean d'Angely, an ancient Republican. This friend of freedom saw nothing inconsistent in advocating a measure, which the absolute monarch recommended as the necessary step to a general peace. The conscripts who had first marched had secured victory; those who were now to be put in motion were to realize the prospect of peace, the principal object of their brethren's success. The obsequious Senate readily admitted these arguments, as they would have done any which had been urged in support of a request which they dared not deny. The sole purpose of Regnault's eloquence, was to express in decent amplification the simple phrase, "Napoleon so wills it."

A deputation of the Senate,[257] carrying to Napoleon in person their warm acquiescence in the proposed measure, received in guerdon the honourable task of conveying to Paris the spoils of Potsdam and Berlin, with three hundred and forty-six stand of colours, the trophies of the war against Prussia—with the task of announcing the celebrated Decrees, by which the general commerce of Europe and of France itself was annihilated, to secure it from the aggressions of the British naval force. The military trophies were received—the Decrees were recorded; and no one dared undertake the delicate task of balancing the victories of the Emperor against the advantage which his dominions were likely to derive from them.

In the meanwhile, the unfortunate Frederick William, whose possession of his late flourishing kingdom was reduced to such territories as Prussia held beyond the Vistula, and a few fortresses on the Oder, which still held out, sent an embassy to Berlin, for the purpose of learning upon what terms he might be yet admitted to treat for peace with the victor, who had hold of his capital and the greater part of his dominions. The Marquis Lucchesini was employed on this mission, a subtle Italian, who, being employed in negotiations at Paris, had been accustomed to treat with France on a footing of equality. But these times were passed since the battle of Jena; and the only terms to which Prussia could be now admitted, were to be so dearly purchased, that even a mere temporary armistice was to cost the surrender of Graudentz, Dantzick, Colberg,—in short, all the fortresses yet remaining to Prussia, and still in a state of defence. As this would have been placing himself entirely at the mercy of Buonaparte, and in as bad circumstances as he could be reduced to even by the most unsuccessful military operations, the King refused to acquiesce in such severe terms, and determined to repose his fate in the chance of war, and in the support of the auxiliary army of Russia, which was now hastily advancing to his assistance.