Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They had now gone beyond the country which Napoleon's victories had made famous, and the chief military interest of the country through which they passed, just eleven months before Waterloo, was derived from two very melancholy events for an Englishman to record the Walcheren Expedition and the storming of Bergen op Zoom. BERGEN OP ZOOM, July 31st.
Eventually, on December 24, Walcheren was abandoned, the works and naval basins of Flushing having been previously destroyed. The destruction of Flushing was the sole result of this expedition. The failure of the British to make any serious impression on the French either in the Low Countries or in Spain induced Austria to consent to peace with France.
When parliament was opened on January 23, 1810, it was natural that attention should chiefly be devoted to the Walcheren expedition, which the opposition illogically and unscrupulously contrived to use to disparage the operations of Sir Arthur Wellesley, now Viscount Wellington, in Spain.
Whether I had been intemperate in food or libation I know not, but I was attacked with the Walchèren fever, and was sent home in a line-of-battle ship; and, perhaps, as Pangloss says, it was all for the best; for I knew I could not have left off my inveterate habits, and it would have been very inconvenient to me, and distressing to my friends, to have ended my brilliant career, and stopped these memoirs, at the beginning of the second and most interesting volume, by hanging the Author up, like a scarecrow, under the superintendence of the rascally provost-marshal, merely for catering on the land of a Walcheren farmer.
At last, early in 1810, Napoleon sent troops to occupy Walcheren and neighbouring Dutch lands. It seemed for a time as though this was but a device to extort favourable terms of peace from England in return for an offer that France would not annex Holland.
Schill and the Duke of Brunswick Andreas Hofer The Armistice of Znaim The Northern Powers Adhere to France Wellesley's Successes in the Peninsula The Walcheren Expedition Negotiations for Peace Austria a Second-rate Power Attempt on Napoleon's Life His Great Uneasiness The Tyrol Subdued The Pope a Prisoner.
Every man must go to law before the Schepens. If any one being summoned and present in Walcheren does not appear, or refuses submission to sentence, he shall be banished with confiscation of property. An appeal lies from the Schepens to the Count. No one can testify but a householder. All alienation of real estate must take place before the Schepens.
Bonaparte visited Etaples, Ambleteuse, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Furnes, Niewport, Ostend, and the Isle of Walcheren. He collected at the different ports all the necessary information with that intelligence and tact for which he was so eminently distinguished. He questioned the sailors, smugglers, and fishermen, and listened attentively to the answers he received.
Castlereagh, indeed, had confessed to Wellesley that he could not spare the necessary reinforcements, after the reserves had been exhausted in Walcheren; but it is by no means certain that Wellesley could have collected provisions enough to feed a much larger force, or specie enough to pay for them.
It is remembered that he was the author of the Walcheren expedition; it is forgotten that he was the advocate of sending a powerful force to the Baltic coast at the critical moment between Jena and Eylau, that he was not altogether responsible for the delays which rendered the Walcheren expedition abortive or for the choice of its incompetent commander, that his prime object was to strike a crushing blow at Napoleon's naval power, and that, if his instructions had been obeyed, this would have been effected by a rapid advance upon Antwerp when nearly all the French troops had been withdrawn from the Netherlands.
Word Of The Day