The scheme of coast-defence which General Dundas had drawn up in 1796 was now again set in action.  It included, not only the disposition of the armed forces, but plans for the systematic removal of all provisions, stores, animals, and fodder from the districts threatened by the invader; and it is clear that the country was far better prepared than French writers have been willing to admit.  Indeed, so great was the expense of these defensive preparations that, when Nelson’s return from the West Indies disconcerted the enemy’s plans, Fox merged the statesman in the partisan by the curious assertion that the invasion scare had been got up by the Pitt Ministry for party purposes.[275] Few persons shared that opinion.  The nation was animated by a patriotism such as had never yet stirred the sluggish veins of Georgian England.  The Jacobinism, which Dundas in 1796 had lamented as paralyzing the nation’s energy, had wholly vanished; and the fatality which dogged the steps of Napoleon was already discernible.  The mingled hatred and fear which he inspired outside France was beginning to solidify the national resistance:  after uniting rich and poor, English and Scots in a firm phalanx in the United Kingdom, the national principle was in turn to vivify Spain, Russia, and Germany, and thus to assure his overthrow.

Reserving for consideration in another chapter the later developments of the naval war, it will be convenient now to turn to important events in the history of the Bonaparte family.

The loves and intrigues of the Bonapartes have furnished material enough to fill several volumes devoted to light gossip, and naturally so.  Given an ambitious family, styled parvenus by the ungenerous, shooting aloft swiftly as the flames of Vesuvius, ardent as its inner fires, and stubborn as its hardened lava—­given also an imperious brother determined to marry his younger brothers and sisters, not as they willed, but as he willed—­and it is clear that materials are at hand sufficient to make the fortunes of a dozen comediettas.

To the marriage of Pauline Bonaparte only the briefest reference need here be made.  The wild humour of her blood showed itself before her first marriage; and after the death of her husband, General Leclerc, in San Domingo, she privately espoused Prince Borghese before the legal time of mourning had expired, an indiscretion which much annoyed Napoleon (August, 1803).  Ultimately this brilliant, frivolous creature resided in the splendid mansion which now forms the British embassy in Paris.  The case of Louis Bonaparte was somewhat different.  Nurtured as he had been in his early years by Napoleon, he had rewarded him by contracting a dutiful match with Hortense Beauharnais (January, 1802); but that union was to be marred by a grotesquely horrible jealousy which the young husband soon conceived for his powerful brother.