The Cavaliers of Fortune

Marshal Macdonald

Stephen James Joseph Macdonald, Marshal of France and Duke of Tarentum, was the son of Neil MacEachin Macdonald (a gentleman sprung from the branch of the Clanranald in Uist), who served in France as a lieutenant in the Scottish Regiment of Ogilvie, to which he had been appointed by the recommendation of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, whom he had served bravely and loyally even after the close of his disastrous campaign in Scotland, and whom he had followed into exile after materially contributing to that deliverance which was effected by the celebrated Flora Macdonald. He was one of the hundred and thirty Highlanders who gathered on the shore of Loch nan Uamh after the horrors of Culloden, and embarked with Prince Charles for France.

Neil MacEachin (i.e., the son of Hugh) had been a preceptor in the family of his chief, Clanranald, and being originally designed for the Catholic Church, had been educated at the Scottish College in Paris. He spoke French with great fluency, and to the exiled prince proved a faithful adherent, friend, and solace, in all his wanderings; and when Charles was so ungenerously committed to a dungeon at Vincennes by order of the French government, his captivity was shared alone by the brave islesman from Uist. According to Mr. Chambers, there is every reason to believe that he was the author of a little work entitled Alexis, in which he preserved a minute record of the prince’s wanderings and dangers in the Western Isles of Scotland.

His son, the future Marshal of the Empire, was born on the 17th of November, 1765, in the old fortified town of Sedan, in the departement of the Ardennes.

Destining him for the profession of arms, he had him educated with the greatest care, and in his nineteenth year enrolled him as a cadet in the Legion of Maillebois, which was to enter Holland, and second a revolution there—a movement neutralized by the influence of Prussia.

In 1784 young Macdonald was appointed a Sub-lieutenant in Dillon’s Regiment, a battalion of the Irish Brigade, which now included in its rank many Scottish emigrants and their descendants; and in this corps he remained a subaltern until the Revolution in 1792, when his colonel, the brave, loyal, and unfortunate Dillon, was murdered at Lisle, where his body was literally torn to pieces by the revolted soldiers and infuriated mob.

Although, like the 4th Hussars and the Regiment of Berwick, Dillon’s battalion emigrated entire and joined the fugitive French princes, Macdonald remained in France; not because he did not share the loyal sentiments of his comrades, but because he loved the beautiful Mademoiselle Jacob, whose father had joined the popular party against the monarchy. This lady he afterwards married; and the influence of her family led him to embrace, or at least to adopt, the principles of the revolutionists, while he avoided their crimes and excesses.

The new government soon discovered that Macdonald was a bold, active, and intelligent officer, and at once gave him employment. He made the first campaign of the revolutionary war as Staff-major, under de Bournonville, and served afterwards in the same capacity with General Dumourier, acquitting himself so much to the satisfaction of these distinguished leaders, that, on the 1st of March, 1793, he was appointed Colonel of the Regiment de Picardie, the second regiment of the old French line, which was then in garrison at Thionville; and this ancient corps (which was originally raised by Charles IX. in 1562) he commanded in the first campaign in Belgium.

He was sincerely attached to Dumourier; but, on the defection of that general from the Republic, after his fruitless attempts on behalf of the king, his retreat to the camp at Maulde, and the attempt to assassinate him on the 5th April, Macdonald did not accompany him in his flight to the Austrians, but remained with the army, in which he was soon after named a General of Brigade. Under the celebrated Pichegreu he served with this rank in the Army of the North against the combined forces of Britain and Austria, and particularly signalized himself at Werwick and Comines.

The column of Pichegreu consisted of fifty thousand men. It penetrated to Courtrai, which was surrendered by a garrison that found it indefensible. Macdonald was next at the investment of Menin on the Lys, where a formidable resistance was made. The battle before this place lasted from eight a.m., until four in the afternoon, when the Germans, who had advanced to the relief, retired, and left Menin to its fate. A few months after saw all the Austrian Netherlands overrun by the victorious French, and the allies who had come to protect the province retiring in disorder beyond the Meuse. On this retreat the British and Hanoverians were particularly pressed by Macdonald, who followed them into Holland.

At the passage of the Meuse a Scottish officer named Macdonald came to Pichegreu’s army with a flag of truce, and during the parley—

“You have,” said he, “among you a general of my name; we wish much to take him prisoner.”

“Have a care, monsieur,” replied a French officer, “that he does not take you.”

And next day this officer, with a party, was nearly captured by the column of Macdonald.25

The passage of the Waal on the ice, under the heavy batteries of Nimeguen, when leading the right wing of the Army of the North, was one of Macdonald’s most brilliant achievements.

After many desultory movements, the discomfited allies had taken up a position beyond this river, which is a branch of the Rhine, and contested the passage with the French during the severe winter of 1794. The stream was a mass of ice, as the frost was unusually intense; thus the sufferings of the soldiers were great.

Resolved to avail themselves of the advantage which these sufferings gave them, the French had made repeated attempts to force the passage of the river. On the night of the 26th December, when an unusual gloom had settled over the frozen stream and snow-clad scenery, Pichegreu, with all his forces, advanced towards the boundary with such rapidity that he lost several cannon and soldiers. Next day he ventured on the ice and the swamps that bordered it, making a general assault upon the posts of the allies. Macdonald, with the right wing, pushed boldly between Fort St. Andre and the walls and batteries of the ancient town of Nimeguen, in which there lay a strong garrison. His orders were “to act as an army of observation, and prevent the British and Germans from supporting the Dutch, as the main attacks were to be made by the left and centre.”

The latter, numbering 16,000 bayonets, crossed the Meuse in three columns, near the village of Driel, and invested Fort St. Andre and the fortifications in the Isle of Bommel; while Macdonald achieved with signal success the passage elsewhere, and formed his battalions in position beyond the frozen stream. Taken by surprise, the inert Dutch soldiers in the Bommeler-waard made but a show of resistance. They were driven out by the charged bayonet, and 600 of them were captured.

The French left wing advanced towards Breda with equal success, and stormed the lines between that city and Gertrudenberg in Northern Brabant; forced the entrenchments at Capellan in Gueldreland, and stormed Waspick. In this series of reverses the allied British, Dutch, and Austrians lost one hundred pieces of cannon, and had more than a thousand prisoners taken; while the French securely established themselves far beyond the contested river. Ere long all resistance to their progress ceased; every fortress, city, and castle submitted to them in succession, till the desperation of his affairs compelled the Stadtholder to seek refuge in Britain, while his allies retreated by the way of Amersfort to cross the Issel, abandoning Holland to its fate, and to the armies of Pichegreu and Macdonald.

For his services in this campaign the latter was now made a General of Division. Every officer under whom he served mentioned him with honour in their reports to the Directory; but while, with that openness which is characteristic of soldiers, his comrades thus rendered every justice and tribute to his worth and bravery, the suspicious representatives of the people, who followed the Army of the North, and thrust their officious counsels upon its generals, occasioned him constant anxiety. Their dislike of his Scottish name was never concealed, and his natural frankness unfortunately laid him but too open to their insidious attacks; till ultimately their animosity was gratified by the Directory depriving him of his command. Of this injustice Pichegreu complained bitterly, and said, “My army will soon become disorganized, if thus wantonly deprived of its best officer.”

“We have dismissed Macdonald,” was the coarse reply of the Deputy St. Just, “because neither his face nor his name are republican; but we will restore him, Pichegreu, to thee, and with thy head shalt thou answer for him.”

This opinion of the Committee of Public Safety so far influenced the Directory, that, until he replaced Championnet in Italy, Macdonald was never entrusted with an independent command. Soon after this mortification in Holland, the convention for a peace between France and Austria was held at Leoben, and on its conclusion he repaired to Cologne, and, quitting the army of the Rhine, joined that of Italy, where the bright star of Napoleon was now in the ascendant. By the nature of his frontier service Macdonald had hitherto little or no correspondence with the future Emperor, who having also imbibed the suspicions of the Directory, was long in discovering the worth or relying on the fidelity of the only Scottish soldier in his service. Macdonald appeared in Italy too late to bear any part in the first events of the campaign of 1797, when the armies of the aggressive republic marched to spread their new political principles throughout the Italian peninsula; but in the following year he was at the invasion of the Papal States, with the terrible Massena and with Berthier, who proclaimed the republic at Rome, on which the Pope fled to Florence. One of the early measures of the French generals was the suppression of the English, Scottish, and Irish colleges, all the effects in which were seized and the students dispersed.

To the Pope they sent a tricoloured cockade and the offer of a pension, to which he made the following reply:—

“I acknowledge no uniform save that with which the Church has adorned me. My life is at your disposal, but my soul is beyond your power. I cannot be ignorant of the hand whence the scourge proceeds which chastises the sheep and afflicts the pastor for the errors of his flock; but I submit to the Divine will. Your pension I need not. A staff and scrip are sufficient for an old man who must pass the remainder of his days in sackcloth and ashes. Rob, pillage, burn as you please, and destroy the monuments of antiquity, but religion you cannot destroy: it will, in defiance of your efforts, exist to the end of time!”

Macdonald’s Scottish surname was a puzzle to the Italians, who styled him Maldonaldo, Mardona, and every possible variety of the original. After occupying the States of the Church, and leaving Macdonald with his corps to overawe them, the French armies, whose line of march was everywhere marked by flames, plunder, and barbarity, advanced into Naples to expel the old Bourbon king, and erect an affiliated republic on the ruins of his throne. On this service our hero commanded under Championnet. Prior to this he had been charged with the duty of repressing the insurrections which broke out among the Romans, who massacred or assassinated the French soldiers whenever an opportunity of doing so occurred. The most serious of these risings was at Froisinone, a village in the valley of the Apennines. This he suppressed with great severity, and, to strike terror into the peasantry, shot all prisoners taken in arms. The barbarities of the French, during their brief ascendency, are still remembered with horror in Italy. They and their partisans hunted and destroyed the Neapolitan royalists like wild beasts, and made a desert of all Apulia. It was in this province that Ettore Caraffa, Conti di Ruvo, and heir of the Duke of Andria, joined the invaders of his native country, and, after storming and reducing to ashes Andria, a prosperous and populous city in the province of Bari, he was so extolled by the Directory for his generous republicanism, that “when General Broussier carried the town of Trani by storm, Caraffa recommended that it should be burned also—and burned it was, with nearly all that were in it—the wounded and the dead, with those that were living and unhurt. They made, in fact, a hell of all that smiling Adriatic coast long before Cardinal Ruffo had passed the first defile in the Calabrias.”

At Froisinone the Roman insurgents murdered the son of the Consul Mathei merely because his father was at the head of the new government. Macdonald offered from fifty to five hundred piastres for the chiefs of the insurrection, dead or alive. He issued a proclamation to the Romans inviting them to obedience and respect for the new authorities put over them, as being the only means of raising the Roman Republic to the rank she should occupy; and he concludes thus: “The great nation wills it so, and its will must be executed.—Macdonald.”

Towards the end of 1798, as Commander-in-chief of the Roman territory, he ordained the Consulate to raise two regiments of horse and a battalion of infantry in each department.

The Court of Naples had now been subverted; under the protection of a British fleet and army, the king retired to Sicily, and a republic was supposed to be quietly established at the extremity of the peninsula, when the brave Calabrese, a race of hardy mountaineers, who were living in wild places in all the simple civilization of three centuries ago, rose in arms, and, uniting with the Apulians from the plains, poured against the French in tumultuary hordes—half robbers and wholly patriots. Then began a war of torture and extermination. These new insurgents demanded a general from their foolish and feeble king; but, instead of a soldier, he sent them a priest—a man of peace to oppose armies led by such men as Championnet, Macdonald, Berthier, and Massena!

This was the celebrated Cardinal Ruffo, a descendant of the ancient princes of Ruffo-Scilla, whose now ruined castle crowns that rock so famed in ancient story, and opposite to the fabled whirlpool upon the Sicilian shore. In a remote corner of Calabria he unfurled the banner of Bourbon, with the cry of “Viva Ferdinand and our Holy Faith!”

This brought to the muster-place thousands, who swore upon their knives, daggers, crosses, and relics, to clear their native land of those lawless Jacobins and infidel republicans who were violating and desecrating everything, whether sacred or profane. The mountain robbers, who knew well the secret passes of that romantic and beautiful country—men who under their own government had subsisted by rapine and slaughter, led the van of the new movement. The cardinal cared little for the morals of his followers. Provided they were stanch, brave, good marksmen, and well armed, he received them all with an apostolical benediction, and left the rest to Providence and gunpowder. He marched at their head direct for Naples, where the French army under Championnet was cantoned; and, as he advanced, his wild and tumultuary army was increased, in every town and valley through which he marched, by sturdy peasants armed with muskets, daggers, and weapons of every description.

The fury with which these irregular hordes, clad in their picturesque costume, their Italian hats, and shaggy zammaras, assailed Championnet at Naples, with the advance of another column under General Mack from another point, forced Macdonald to march with his division, four thousand strong, from Rome, and retire to Ottricoli, a small town on a hill near the Tiber, about thirty-six miles distant. He left a garrison in the Castle of St. Angelo, which was summoned by Mack to surrender. He sent a copy of this document, which was imperious in its tenor, to General Championnet, who empowered Macdonald to reply, which he did in the following terms:—

Head-quarters, Monterozi, 29th November, 1798.

“The Commander-in-chief, sir, has sufficient confidence in me to recognise as his own the reply which I make to your letter of the 28th November. I well know that he has not given any answer to your letters concerning the evacuation of the forts and strong places; and one of these, we consider the Castle of St. Angelo. The silence of contempt alone was due to your insolent menaces on this subject, and this was the only answer that could be expected consistently with the dignity of the French name. You mention a regard for treaties, and yet you invade the territory of a Republic in alliance with France, and do so without provocation, and without its having given you the least reason for such conduct.

“You have attacked the French troops, who trusted in the most sacred defences—the law of nations and the security of treaties.

“You have shot at our flags of truce which were proceeding from Tivoli to Vicavero, and you have made the French garrison at Rieti prisoners of war.

“You have attacked our troops on the heights of Terni, and yet you do not call that a declaration of war!

“Force alone, sir, constrained us to retire from Rome (and you, sir, know better than any one the truth of what I say), that the conquerors of Europe will avenge such proceedings! At present, I confine myself merely to stating our injuries; the French army will do the rest. I declare to you, sir, that I place our sick, Valville the commissary of war, and the other Frenchmen who have remained at Rome, under the care of all the soldiers whom you command. If a hair of their heads be touched, it shall be a signal for the death of the whole Neapolitan army! The French Republican soldiers are not assassins; but the Neapolitan generals, the officers and soldiers who were taken prisoners of war, on the day before yesterday, on the heights of Terni, shall answer with their heads for the safety of my wounded. Your summons to the commander of Fort St. Angelo is of such a nature, that I have made it public, in order to add to the indignation and to the horror which your threats inspire, and which we despise as much as we think there is little to be dreaded from them.

“Macdonald.”

In his position at Civita Castellana, near Ottricoli, he was attacked by Mack with great determination. Championnet, in his despatch, states that the enemy were forty thousand strong, and advanced in five columns. “General Macdonald, surrounded on all sides, gave proof of his great talents. He received the attack with that courage which distinguishes the man of firm character, and by his able dispositions entirely disconcerted the enemy.” His advanced guard, under Kellerman, consisted only of three squadrons of the 19th chasseurs à cheval, the first battalion of the 11th regiment, and two pieces of flying artillery. This handful of brave fellows routed Mack’s first column, slew four hundred, and took fifteen pieces of cannon, fifty caissons, and two thousand prisoners, while they had but thirty killed.

The Italians of De Mert retired to the heights of Calvi, a steep mountain range, where, after a midnight march, during a severe December storm, Macdonald surrounded and attacked them a few days after, and by a flag of truce summoned them to capitulate. To this they made some ridiculous propositions, but he sent the following ultimatum:—

“The column shall surrender prisoners at discretion, or be put to the sword!”

On this they surrendered at once to the number of five thousand, with all their arms, fifteen standards, eight guns, and three hundred horses. Among the prisoners were the Marshal De Mert and Don Carello. After this, he returned to Rome, re-established the Republic, and then taking the route to Capua, followed Mack’s Neapolitans, who fled before him. Mack was an Austrian general who had entered the service of Ferdinand of Naples to organize the patriots. For this purpose he had brought with him from Vienna fourteen experienced officers.

On the march to Capua Macdonald’s soldiers suffered greatly from the constant rain and storms of snow, by the overflow of the mountain torrents, the destruction of all the bridges, and by the rifles of the armed peasantry, who mercilessly slew every straggler. The bravest men in the Neapolitan army were the mountain banditti; and many of these romantic desperadoes, who led armed bands, received the commission of colonel, and were decorated with knightly orders.

Fra Diavolo, a brigand by profession, was a colonel in the infantry, and cavaliere of San Constantino; the Abate Proni, a ferocious monk of the Abruzzi; Gaetano Mammone, a miller from Sora; and Benedetto Mangone—three outlaws and brigands, covered themselves with distinction in this horrible war against the French; but Benedetto was a veritable monster. “He never spared the life of a Frenchman who fell into his power; and it is said that he butchered with his own hand four hundred Frenchmen and Neapolitan republicans; and that it was his custom to have a human head placed upon the table when he dined, as other people would have a vase of flowers.”

In March, 1799, a picquet of sixty Polish soldiers was captured between Capua and Fondi by the Calabrese, who put every one of them to death. In the Campagna Frenchmen were roasted alive by the peasantry, or tied naked to trees and left to be devoured by dogs and wolves. Stragglers were destroyed by every means barbarity could devise.

The King of Naples, who had come from Sicily, fled again; and General Mack, before he was blocked up in Capua, wrote in these terms:—

“Sire, of forty thousand men with whom I entered the Roman territory, only twelve thousand remain; and, of these, many are going over daily to the French.”

Macdonald, with Championnet, laid siege to Capua, where Mack made a vigorous resistance and repulsed them; but the attack was renewed with fresh fury; the city was won by assault, and the remains of the Neapolitan army, who had gathered courage from despair, and whom shame for past defeats inspired with a glow of double vengeance, perished under the bayonets of the French. Their bodies choked the bed of the Volturno; and for six leagues from thence the road to Naples was strewed with their dead and dying, till even the conquerors grew tired of slaughter. When Mack yielded himself a prisoner of war to the General of Division, he proffered his sword, a handsome weapon, which had been presented to him by the King of Great Britain in 1795.

Championnet laughed, and returned it to him, saying—

“Keep your sword, M. le General, the laws of the Republic prohibit the use of British manufactures.”

At this time the rage of the French army against their peculating commissaries was great, for they had suffered severely by the scarcity of provisions; but Championnet and Macdonald skilfully turned this discontent against the enemy.

“Soldiers,” they exclaimed, after the fall of Capua, “your magazines are at Naples!”

“Let us march, then—to Naples lead us!” was the reply, and to the capital the fugitives of Mack’s army were pursued. A dreadful slaughter was made among the Lazzaroni, for a fresh struggle ensued at Naples, and every house from which the troops were fired on was burned to the ground, and its inmates bayoneted.

Macdonald had distinguished himself in every engagement with the unfortunate Mack; but now a series of disputes ensued between him and Championnet, who had many troubles to contend with. Irritated by the devastations committed by the Sieur Faitpoult, Commissary of the Directory, the general commanding ordered him to quit Naples, with his horde of plunderers, within twenty-four hours. Faitpoult, instead of obeying, raised the standard of mutiny against Championnet, but was forced to retire.

The coarse reproaches of the Deputy St. Just still rankled in the memory of Macdonald, who left nothing undone to gain the confidence of the Directory, and persuade the members of it that he respected their authority, while it is but too probable that he despised them in his heart. The Sieur Faitpoult had friends in the Directory; thus the firmness of Championnet in expelling him from Naples was styled mutiny to the Republic, and he was ordered to quit the peninsula, and resign his command to General Macdonald. Poor Championnet was placed under arrest; and, relinquishing his bâton to his more fortunate second in command, had to appear before a court-martial at Turin.

With confidence Macdonald accepted this new position, which was one of great difficulty; for the revolted state of Naples, and, above all, the turbulence and ferocity of the Lazzaroni, were sources of incessant alarm. To travel, or pass from town to town, without an armed escort, was at that time impossible; fighting, skirmishing, solitary assassinations, and wholesale massacres, were of daily occurrence, particularly in the province of Otranto, where the embers of revolt were still fanned by the presence of the brave old Cardinal Ruffo, who appeared at the head of his followers, clad in full pontificals, wearing his scarlet hat, and carrying his pastoral staff surmounted by a cross; and thus attired, in a sacred costume so well calculated to rouse the enthusiasm of Italians to frenzy, he led them to battle. Thus he gave them his benediction before it, and thus he said mass for the souls of those dead braves who died for “Ferdinand and the Holy Faith;” thus attired, at many a siege, he sprinkled the battering guns, like his drums and banners, with holy water, mingling, as it were, the smoke of the censer with the smoke of battle. Though the fiery spirit thus roused was restless and abroad, Macdonald ultimately forced the whole kingdom to submit, and completely mastered the capital, which he governed with firmness and moderation.

His order of the day, issued on the 4th March, 1799, amply details the many dangers which surrounded him, and the wise measures he took to guard against them. He threatened to make the clergy responsible for the violence of the populace; but concluded by declaring his reverence for, and attachment to, religion, and his determination to protect all pastors and magistrates who conformed to the laws of the new republic. Five days after this, being informed that King Ferdinand had an intention of landing again, he published a proclamation, in which he somewhat oddly invited the people of Naples to rise against their native prince, and unite with France. Acting in concert with the Commissioner Abrial, he lowered the taxes levied on the people; and, filled by a just admiration for the memory of Tasso, he saved from destruction the poet’s native town, Sorrento, on the southern side of the Gulf of Naples, where an insurrection had taken place. After this, the provisional government made him a rash and pompous offer of forty thousand auxiliaries.

In April, he generously released and sent to Captain Trowbridge, a British officer and eleven seamen, who had been cast ashore at Castellamare, during a tempest. He had treated them with every kindness as his countrymen. They were the crew of a prize, the Championnet, privateer.

The entire command of the army in Italy was now bestowed upon General Sherer; and when that officer was defeated between the Lake of Garda and the Adige, on the 26th of March, he sent a despatch to Macdonald, desiring him to form a junction with his troops in northern Italy by forced marches. On hearing of the battle near the Adige, the Neapolitans again rose in arms; and the massacres of the French by wandering bands were again of daily occurrence; but, in spite of every natural and human obstacle, Macdonald effected the junction according to his orders. As his retreat from Naples would have been dangerous without an attempt to overawe the armed masses who hovered on the mountains, he attacked and took Lacava, Castella, and the gloomy little town of Avellino, before his departure. On the 26th May, he was in Tuscany, and united with the divisions detached by General Moreau. There were not wanting those who blamed him for losing time in combining his force with that of Moreau; but those who did so were ignorant of the nature of the country he had to traverse with his trains of artillery and baggage.

“General Macdonald has been here since the 5th instant,” says a French letter from Florence. “We deem him the saviour of the French in Italy, and our confidence in him will not be disappointed. His army, which has advanced by forced marches, assembled here yesterday. It is full of ardour, and its zeal, which a few reverses have only fired anew, is a happy presage in our favour.”

On the 13th June, he attacked Modena, and in less than two hours dispersed the Austrian division of Count Hohenzollern, which was in position upon the glacis of the place; and two thousand prisoners were taken by his French grenadiers. In an account of this affair, General Sarrazen, who led these grenadiers, mentions that when Macdonald was pressing on with the infantry of the line against the cavalry, he said to him—

“Macdonald, I shall remain with my grenadiers, and think you had better do the same.”

“Do you not see, M. Sarrazen, that I have them all, as if caught in a mousetrap,” replied the commander, joyously; and, when within a hundred paces of the Austrian horse, he required them to surrender.

“We yield,” replied an officer, sheathing his sabre and riding confidently forward. Macdonald continued to approach until within pistol-shot of their line, when the treacherous German suddenly exclaimed, while unsheathing his weapon,—

“Draw sabres—charge!”

He threw himself at full speed upon Macdonald, who was far from anticipating a movement so sudden, and, after receiving three sword-cuts on the head, was thrown from his horse covered with blood. This was all done in a moment, and the German officer mingled with his squadron, which instantly took to flight. They were, however, overtaken and captured, and their leader, a youth of eighteen, was slain. Macdonald was at first supposed to be dead, for he lay stunned on the ground, having three deep wounds, with a contusion by the fall from his horse; yet he was in his saddle, and at the head of his column on the 17th, when the advanced guard of the Russians, under Suwarrow, forced the French into position on the right bank of the Trebia, so celebrated for the victory of Hannibal over the forces of the consul Sempronius; and there, on this classic ground, ensued one of the bloodiest battles of the Italian campaign.

Macdonald had advanced by Reggio and Modena, to effect a junction with the army of Moreau, or to relieve Mantua; but being without pontoons, he found the passage of the Po impossible, as that river was swollen by recent rains, and, moreover, was defended by General Kray, with 10,000 irregulars, and twice that number of armed peasantry. On the 17th, his advanced guard was at Placentia; next day, he attacked and repulsed General Ott, near San Giovanni; but the advance of the Russians, under Suwarrow, changed the fortune of the field.

General Sarrazen states Macdonald’s force at 40,000 strong; M. de Segur gives it at 28,000. On the bank of that stream, the most rapid and impetuous in Cisalpine Gaul, the contest was fierce and desperate; but the daring attempts of Macdonald to cross, at the head of his troops, were repulsed.

“On the 18th and 19th,” says a journal of the time, “the battles were very murderous. The French formed a square four men deep and fought desperately, till a column of Russians passed the river up to their necks in the water, broke through with the bayonet, and made a dreadful carnage among them. On the whole, the French are supposed to have lost, since the 11th instant, 15,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners. Macdonald himself has received two sabre-wounds from a Hungarian hussar. Among the prisoners taken are 4 generals and 700 officers. Our loss consists of 4000 men killed and wounded, and 400 prisoners; but the latter were rescued in the pursuit, and 40 waggons with French wounded were taken at the same time.”

The fury of the Russian advance threw Macdonald’s centre into confusion. Sabre in hand, he strove to enforce order under a heavy fire of cannon and musketry; but was swept away with the panic-stricken mass of the 5th regiment of light infantry, among whom he became entangled, and who were flying in disorder, abandoning their muskets, knapsacks, canteens, and blankets in their eagerness to escape. By them he was hurried into the current of the Trebia, and narrowly escaped being drowned. This confusion was caused by a brilliant charge of 500 Cossacks, who rushed with their lances in the rest through a cloud of dust. A terrified French chasseur exclaimed,—

“The whole Russian cavalry are upon us—fly!”

Then it was that the 5th gave way, and the centre was broken, but still the flanks fought desperately; and had the division of Moreau been in the field, it must have been won for France; but on that day he was attempting to raise the siege of Tortosa. Three standards were laid at the feet of Suwarrow.

At Trebia, according to M. de Segur, who once served on Macdonald’s staff, “during three days of a battle, the most desperate in our annals, twenty-eight thousand French withstood fifty thousand Russians, held the fortunes of the day in balance, and gave vainly to Moreau the time to strike a blow for France. The victory remained finally with Suwarrow; but, in his astonishment, the rude Muscovite exclaimed,—

“One more such success, and we shall lose the Peninsula!”

Meanwhile, Macdonald had been deceived in his expectations; his army was exhausted; he was severely wounded, and when it was necessary that he should retire, a torrent of foes behind opposed his retreat. Beyond this torrent, other foes awaited him. The courage of his soldiers failed; but he, calm and serene, encouraged them, saying,—

“Be of good cheer, for nothing is impossible to the brave!”

With the remains of his shattered army he retired towards Tuscany and Bologna; and at Piacenza a great quantity of his ammunition and baggage fell into the hands of his pursuers. In the Directory there were men who now reproached him with having wished to gain a battle alone, or at least without the participation of Moreau; but it was by the express command of that general, on whose part he fully expected assistance, that he attempted to force the passage of the Trebia, and break the left wing of the Austro-Russian army. Notwithstanding the desperation of his circumstances, he was not without hopes of making another stand; but, on being deserted by General Lahoz, a Cisalpiner, and his corps, which united with twenty thousand insurgents to gall his flight, Macdonald relinquished all idea of again giving battle, and continued his retreat towards the mountains of Genoa, followed by the troops of Generals Ott, Klenau, Lahoz, and Count Hohenzollern, and by hordes of brigands and guerillas, who murdered his men on all hands, and massacred them in the mountain passes.

With a flag of truce, he sent an officer to the Austrian general Melas, praying that he would treat with mercy the wounded Frenchmen whom he had been compelled to abandon in Piacenza.

“The request is needless,” replied Melas; “Austrian soldiers know too well the duties of humanity to require such advice.”

Wounds and fatigue had so severely impaired Macdonald’s health, that he was fain to ask Suwarrow’s permission to visit the baths of Pisa. This, the Russian with chivalry and courtesy granted at once; but, instead of visiting the celebrated Bagni di Pisa, the general returned to France, relinquishing the command of his column, after uniting it to the army of Moreau; and immediately on his arrival in Paris he was entrusted by Napoleon with the command at Versailles.

By this time the French had abandoned the whole coast of the Adriatic, and lost their conquests in Naples, where nothing remained of them but the graves of the slain.

During the past hostilities the domestic relations of the Republic had not improved in character or in spirit; and the feeble condition of the Directory afforded an admirable path by which the ambition of Napoleon might lead to a newer and firmer form of government. Returning hastily from his unsuccessful Egyptian campaign, he had reached Paris; and entering at once into the schemes of Talleyrand and his friend Sieyes, a military conspiracy was formed to remodel the Republic as a Consulate, of which he should be the head. Whatever may have been the motives, or secret ambitions, which led the military chiefs to revolutionize France again, it cannot be denied that she benefited thereby; and the energy with which the essay was made, and the success it had, were a sure guarantee for the decision of future affairs.

Macdonald was in command at Versailles while these plans were maturing, and when Napoleon arrived at the Palace of St. Cloud. Though not actually in the conspiracy, he was in the secret, and knew that opposition to Napoleon would neither be for the interests of France, the army, or himself; thus he took the lead in the matter, and by suddenly closing or dispersing the political club at Versailles, made the inhabitants aware that he, at least, deemed the time had come, “when a just administration should obliterate the horrors of the last few years, and the fatal vacillation of the weak Directory.”

On the 18th Brumaire, the attempt was to be made; and Napoleon, accompanied by Macdonald, De Bournouville, and Moreau, inspected in the gardens of the Tuileries ten thousand chosen soldiers on whose faith they could depend, and there Augereau, the future Duke of Castiglione, joined them.

“M. le Général,” said he, embracing Napoleon, “you have not called for me, but I have come to join you.”

“You are welcome,” replied Napoleon.

It was a perilous task they had undertaken, to overthrow the political incubus that had pressed so long upon France; and while the startled Directory, who had already discovered the designs of those without, were debating about their own safety, and while Moulins urged that a battalion should be sent to seize Napoleon, the latter suddenly appeared, sword in hand, at the door of the hall, and entered with his grenadiers, three deep, at a time when the projected Consulate was being discussed by some of the Directory with very little chance of success. He decided the matter at once, by ordering his drummers to beat a pas de charge, and by dismissing the judges with a promptitude worthy of Cromwell, and with a courage which evinced that, on his part, nothing would be wanting to retain the power he had won.

When an army was formed for the re-conquest of Naples, in 1800, Napoleon offered Macdonald the command of the corps de reserve. He did this to testify his pleasure for his adherence to the revolution of the 18th Brumaire; but the general, who felt piqued by the offer of a command so subordinate, in a country where he had before led an army, urged illness and wounds as a reason for remaining in France. The penetration of Napoleon, was too keen for the true sentiments of Macdonald to escape him; thus on the 24th of August, in the same year, he was appointed to command the army of Switzerland, which was destined to penetrate into the Tyrol, to second the operations of the army of Italy and favour the columns of Moreau (who was then warring in Germany) by compelling the Austrians to employ at least thirty thousand of their best men among the Tyrolean mountains—the bulwark of the German empire.

Macdonald marched from Bearn in September, with forty thousand men,26 towards Helvetia, accompanied by General Matthew Dumas, chief of the staff, a soldier who used his pen better than his sword. His first desire was that a corps of Helvetians should be formed to co-operate with the French against the Austrians; but this request the Swiss government declined; and he soon found his campaign to consist of a series of arduous marches among the mountains, where, as the season advanced and the winter drew on, his soldiers endured every misery that, toil, hunger, and cold could inflict.

In the passage of the Alps, when one of his columns, composed of the 80th Regiment, with some cavalry, artillery, sappers, and guides, under Laboissière, attempted to cross the Splugen, in the country of the Grisons, a dreadful avalanche suddenly came thundering down from the mountains to bar their march, and swept forty-two of the 10th Dragoons, with their horses, over a precipice. His other columns met with equal difficulties. A letter in the Paris papers, dated “Head-quarters, Chicavenna, 7th December, 1800,” relates:—

“It was necessary to traverse the Splugen and Mount Carduiet. These mountains, even in July, present all the horrors of winter; judge what they are in December! Threatening and inaccessible rocks, seas of snow on all sides, torrents of avalanches falling with a noise equally terrible. Since our first march, two hundred men, with their horses, have been swallowed up. After unheard-of labour, we succeeded in disengaging all of them except three. There was not the least trace of a road; but by labour and constancy we opened a narrow path, bordered by precipices which the eye could not fathom nor the foot always avoid.”

Two-thirds of the pass, which leads towards Como had been traversed, the troops in front, with muskets slung, digging a path for their comrades in the rear, till the column, exhausted by cold and fatigue, began to retire without orders, though the dangers behind—snow, hunger, and avalanches—were the same as those in front. Macdonald galloped towards his sinking soldiers, and his presence had an immediate effect on them. They halted; he entreated and threatened; but they listened in sullen silence.

Then he dismounted, seized a shovel, and proceeded to dig the snow, exclaiming—

“My comrades, I would rather perish in the abyss than stoop to turn my steps on perils such as these!”

“Vive M. le Général!” cried the soldiers of the 80th. Confidence was inspired anew; again the muskets were slung, the shovels resumed, and after three days of labour, danger, and toil, the passage was achieved, and the troops of Macdonald debouched from that terrible gorge, where the frozen precipices seemed to hang from heaven, and where whirlwinds of hail, tempests of snow, with death in its most frightful form, had been encountered.

The resistance he experienced from the Austrian troops was trivial; and on the 7th of January, 1801, he made himself master of the circle and city of Trent; but the armistice concluded at Treviso on the 16th of the same month put an end to the war. After this he remained for some time at Isola, suffering from an illness caused by the fatigues he had undergone at Splugen, and Delmas commanded in the interim.

At the close of the campaign he returned to Paris, where his opposition to some of the arbitrary measures of the First Consul made that haughty personage resolve on politely getting rid of a troublesome mentor, by sending him on a distant mission. He was accordingly dispatched to Denmark, as Minister Plenipotentiary from France to the Court of Christian VII. There he resided for three years, and there he encountered so many disagreeables, as his presence was unwelcome in Copenhagen, that he frequently solicited his recall; but Napoleon was jealous of Moreau, who was Macdonald’s chief friend: thus he was only recalled when the First Consul was about to exchange the consular staff for an imperial sceptre.

It was about this time that the famous conspiracy of General Pichegreu and Georges Cadoudal, and their correspondence with the Prince of Condé, were discovered. In that correspondence Moreau was compromised to a dangerous extent; thus his friend Macdonald was received with greater coldness at the Tuileries.

The high indignation which he had the temerity to express after the mock trial and banishment of his brother soldier Moreau, who fled to America, completed the displeasure of the new Emperor, who withdrew all countenance from Macdonald, and, notwithstanding his past services, bravery, and endurance, his name was omitted from the list of marshals of the Empire who were then created.

He retired to the country, inspired by a mortification which he could not repress; and remained in seclusion, unnoticed, during the early part of the new war against Spain and Austria, and until 1809 would seem to have been forgotten; but he had perhaps the consolation of remembering “that he must not fear who thirsts for glory; and although we often find that true merit is eclipsed for a time, we have never known it to be entirely lost; it bursts at last through the clouds which environ it, and appears resplendent in its bright and genuine colours.”

These were the words of Fabius Maximus to Emilius when, with Varro, he went to lead the Roman army; and thus the “true merit,” the coolness and intrepidity of Macdonald, were destined to shine again, for he was remembered by Napoleon when that monarch became entangled with the Italian and Peninsula wars—when the great armies of Austria pressed him on one hand and the distant hordes of Russia were gathering on the other; then, but not till then, did he seem to remember the brave soldier whom petty quarrels and court intrigues had compelled him to overlook. This was in that year when the perfidy of Napoleon to the royal family of Spain and to the whole Spanish nation excited such indignation, not only at the Court of Vienna, but throughout the whole of Germany and Europe generally.

Macdonald was now offered the command of a division in that corps of the army of Italy led by Prince Eugene Beauharnois, who was then evincing his usual intrepidity, but was experiencing severe checks from the Archduke John of Austria. This offer he at once accepted, for he had grown weary alike of peace and of retirement. He joined Prince Eugene; and from that period was deemed his mentor rather than his second in command.

At the head of the right wing he crossed the Isola on the 14th and 15th of April, 1809, and drove the Austrians from their strong positions at Goritz, capturing eleven of their guns and much munition of war.

These successes led to those at Raab and at Laybach, both of which were the result of Macdonald’s combinations and manœuvres; and pushing on vigorously, without leisure or delay, with his division, he joined the grand army of the Emperor before the gates of Vienna.

On the 5th and 6th of July he was at the famous battle of Wagram, where he led two divisions of infantry, some of which were battalions of the Garde Impériale. With these he advanced under a fire, when two hundred pieces of cannon were engaged on both sides, and when the roar of the conflict was the greatest ever heard even by the oldest veteran of these warlike armies. Three-fourths of his column perished under the storm of shot by which it was assailed as he advanced to break the Austrian centre, the task assigned to him by the Emperor.

The fury with which his troops came on was irresistible. He drove back the brigades of the archduke with immense loss, and a total rout of the Austrians ensued, thus terminating a two days’ conflict which will ever be remembered in the annals of carnage—for few prisoners were taken on either side, which proved the resolution of both—to conquer or die!

Thirty-six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three officers and soldiers of both armies lay killed or wounded on the field and round the walls of Vienna; while, as related in the memoir of Count O’Reilly, corpses in every variety of uniform, gashed and bloody, floated in hundreds down the dark waters of the Danube, or were daily thrown upon its shores to feed the wolves or to fester and decay. Such was the field of Wagram, and it was the culminating point in the fortunes of Stephen Macdonald.

Napoleon, though little disposed to view him with favour, when the field was won, sprang from his horse, and embraced him with ardour, exclaiming,—

“Now, Macdonald, we are together for life and death!”

He complimented him before his staff, extolled him in the bulletin, and on the field of battle made him at last a Marshal of the Empire.

Of all the French marshals he was the only one who thus received a bâton in the field, and soon after he was created Duke of Tarentum, from a town of that name in Naples.

“Among all the marshals of France,” says the editor of Bourienne’s Memoirs, “there is not one so pure from every stain on the soldier’s character—so daringly honest with Napoleon in his prosperity—so lastingly true to him in his adversity, as this, his only Scottish officer.”

Napoleon thus bore honourable testimony to the value of his service at Wagram, the glory of which another marshal sought to appropriate to himself.

“As his majesty commands his army in person,” says Napoleon, in a private order, dated Camp of Schœnbrunn, 9th of July, 1809, “to him belongs the exclusive right of assigning the degree of glory which each merits. His majesty owes the success of his arms to the French troops, and not to strangers. Prince Ponte Corvo’s order of the day, tending to give false pretensions to troops, at best not above mediocrity, is contrary to truth, to discipline, and to national honour. The corps of the Prince of Ponte Corvo did not remain immovable as iron. It was the first to retreat. His majesty was obliged to cover it by the corps of the Guard and the division commanded by Marshal Macdonald, by the division of heavy cavalry commanded by General Nautsonby, and by a part of the cavalry of the Guard. To Marshal Macdonald belongs the praise which the Prince of Ponte Corvo arrogates to himself. His majesty desires that this testimony of his displeasure may serve as an example to every marshal not to attribute to himself the glory which belongs to others.”27

After Wagram he commanded in the duchy of Gratz, and maintained in his army a discipline so severe in repressing plunder and outrage, that on his departure at the peace with Austria, before his division began its homeward march for France, the States prayed him to accept an offering of two hundred thousand francs, but he resolutely declined them.

“Messieurs,” said he, “I am a soldier—I have done but my duty.”

Then the deputies offered him a jewel-box of great value, as a bridal gift for one of his daughters; and to the bearers he made the following reply:—

“Gentlemen, if you believe that you owe me anything, you shall have the means of repaying me amply, by the care you will take of three hundred poor invalid soldiers, whom I shall leave in your city.”

Napoleon was now in the zenith of his power; his marriage with Maria Louisa—an espousal more politic than honourable—had been celebrated at the close of the year of Wagram; and in the year following, Holland, the Valais, and the Hanse Towns were annexed to France; territories which, with those of Rome, gave to the new empire an augmentation of nearly 5,000,000 of subjects.

The war was now raging in the Peninsula, and there the feeble measures of Augereau in Catalonia made Napoleon resolve to supersede him. The Duke of Tarentum was named his successor, and, as such, he soon restored order among the Catalans. In their mountainous province, more than in any other part of Spain, military talent and energy were required; as the entire population—a brave, resolute, and hardy race—were in arms against the invaders. Augereau’s losses in the desultory warfare maintained by the Guerillas were so severe that they more than counterbalanced his success in the sieges he undertook; and these losses were so indicative of mismanagement that they ensured his recal to France. He marched for the frontier laden with the plunder of Barcelona, and of all the officers who formed its escort, General Chabran was the only one—as the Catalan journals remarked—who did not pillage the house in which he had been quartered; but returned to the Patron de Caza the silver spoons he had used at table.

At this time rapine was the order of the day in the French army; a hammer and a small saw invariably formed a portion of a soldier’s accoutrements, that he might have tools at hand to break open every lock-fast place, when the work of pillage began.

In Catalonia, Macdonald found himself at the head of 17,000 men; in the adjoining province of Aragon, Suchet led 16,000; and the Spanish corps of O’Donnel were the only regular troops opposed to them both.

On Suchet laying siege to Tortosa, a fortified city on the left bank of the Ebro, Macdonald marched with 12,000 men to secure the entrance of a convoy of provisions into Barcelona; and this he achieved in triumph, defeating a vigorous attempt of the Spaniards to intercept it.

O’Donnel, general of the Spaniards, now directed his main efforts to relieve Tortosa, where the Conde de Alacha Miguel Lili, with 7800 brave fellows, who had survived or escaped from the battle of Tudela, made a stout resistance. O’Donnel left nothing undone to impede the operations of the besiegers and raise the blockade; till Macdonald, to distract his attention and favour the operations of Suchet, marched upon Tarragona, a seaport near the mouth of the Francoli. It is picturesquely situated upon a hill, and is surrounded by old Moorish walls, having turrets at intervals. As it is a place of importance, the Spaniards were anxious to preserve it, and pressed Macdonald so severely that he was forced to take up a position in sight of the town, in a plain so near the sea that one of his flanks was exposed to a cannonade from a British frigate. Finding this position untenable, after a sharp encounter, and reaping no other advantage from his march than the plunder of Reus, a wealthy little manufacturing town, he retreated across the plains of Tarragona, harassed on both flanks by the troops of Sarsfield and Ibarrola, who slew 300 of his soldiers, captured 130, and retook most of the pillage found in Reus and elsewhere.

As a central point, from whence he could cover Suchet’s operations against Tortosa, and command a space of country capable of supplying the troops with food and forage, Macdonald chose a strong position near Cervera, in sight of the Mediterranean. Finding him secure here, O’Donnel, instead of attacking him, turned the attention of his own troops against the French elsewhere, and cut off several of their small garrisons, until he received a wound which disabled him.

On the 13th December, Macdonald received a welcome reinforcement of ten thousand men; but, notwithstanding, Eroles, Sarsfield, and Campoverde, at the head of the Spanish regiments of the line and Guerillas of Catalonia, fought him successfully in almost every instance. Yet his movements so completely covered the siege of Tortosa that, after five months’ delay, Suchet was able to break ground before it, and the Conde Lili surrendered at discretion; for which sentence of death was pronounced against him by the Spanish authorities; and with great solemnity, in the market-place of Tarragona, the head was struck from his effigy by the public executioner.

In 1811, Macdonald possessed himself of Figueras, a small Catalonian town situated in a fertile plain, not far from the frontier of France. On an eminence it has a magnificent castle, with bomb-proof towers and undermined approaches. This important strength had been taken by the French three years before; but on the night of the 10th April, 1811, some Catalonians who had been forced into the ranks of a French regiment, finding themselves, by a lucky coincidence, all on guard together, resolved to have their revenge. They opened a sally-port to their countrymen, who entering the castle sword in hand, made the garrison, to the number of four thousand men, prisoners, without a shot being exchanged. On the 19th of the following August, Macdonald, after meeting with a determined resistance from these Catalonians, retook the castle of Figueras, by capitulation, and garrisoned it again for Joseph Bonaparte.

After this recapture, Catalonia seemed to be subjugated to the yoke of France; yet, for some reason unknown, Macdonald was withdrawn from the command of the army there, and it was bestowed upon General Decaen. It is supposed that Napoleon, who disliked that any one should assume the part of monitor or judge of his soldiers, was piqued at the tenor of an obscure passage in Macdonald’s report, in which he detailed to Marshal Berthier the recapture of Figueras. It ran thus:—

“I please myself in rendering justice to the army, in the hope that the Emperor will view with an eye of favour these brave fellows, entreating your excellency to cause it to be remarked to his Majesty that his army in Catalonia is a stranger to the event which has re-united it in this place.”

“How happens it,” said General Sarrazen, “that Macdonald, who does not want for good sense, should have permitted himself to use such awkward observations?”

In the disastrous invasion of Russia he had command of the 10th Corps, of which the Prussians formed a part. The details of that terrible winter campaign are too well known to all the world to require recapitulation in these memoirs.

The Emperor led his army to Smolensko, on the great road to Moscow, and crossed the Niemann on the 27th of June.

Macdonald crossed the same river, on the same day, at Tilsit, by a bridge of boats, and at the head of his French and Prussians (the Corps d’Yorck) seized Dunabourg, while Kowno, in Lithuania, fell without a struggle, and the great army of the Empire marched through it in splendid order, with all its bands playing and colours flying. How different was the aspect of the few surviving fugitives of that army when they repassed Kowno in December following!

With orders to occupy the line of Riga, and if it was captured, to threaten St. Petersburg, Macdonald marched towards the capital of Livonia, which was occupied by a numerous garrison, whose defensive measures were ably seconded by a British naval force. Napoleon conceived that if the main body of the Russians fell back on St. Petersburg, he would, when following them, be able to effect a junction with the 10th Corps under Macdonald, after which they could push on together; but though the latter burned the suburbs of Riga, his operations against the place were long retarded by the bravery of the besieged. Though not regularly fortified, the town has considerable means of defence, being encircled by an earthen rampart, and having a citadel, while a fortress guards the entrance of the Duna or Dwina.

The project of Napoleon became a failure, when the route pursued by the retreating Russians proved different from the one he anticipated. Thus he was obliged to advance after them to Moscow, while Macdonald remained for a time before Riga, on which he could make no impression, though he fought under its walls a series of bloody conflicts, in futile assaults and repulsing desperate sorties. Suspicion of the faith of his Prussian regiments was not his least source of anxiety. When St. Cyr was alarmed that his flanks might be turned by the Russians from Finland, he wrote an urgent letter to Macdonald requesting him to oppose the march of those troops who were led by Wittgenstien and Steinheil, and whose line of march lay in front of the position before Riga; adding that if he (Macdonald) objected to detach any part of his forces from the blockade, to come and assume command of St. Cyr’s division in person, and meet this army from Finland. “But Macdonald,” adds Count Segur, “did not conceive himself justified in making so important a movement without express orders. He distrusted Yorck, the Prussian general, whom he suspected of intending to deliver up to the Russians his park of siege artillery. He replied, that to defend it was his first and most indispensable duty, and he declined to quit his station.”

Macdonald’s suspicions soon proved correct; for on the 13th December, 1812, when in presence of the enemy, he was abandoned by the whole of the Prussians under General Yorck; and was thus compelled to retire, though resisting with indomitable energy the attack of the Russians, who followed him closely, when sword in hand he sought to hew a passage to the rear. By this time all was lost elsewhere.

He survived the perils of that frightful campaign, in which out of 300,000 soldiers, who, in June, passed the Niemann in all the pomp of war and pride of former victories, scarcely 50,000 escaped out of Russia; and of these the greater number had suffered so dreadfully from wounds, hunger and frost, as to be quite unfit for future service.

With 1131 pieces of cannon, there were taken by the Russians 41 generals, 1298 officers. 167,410 sergeants and rank and file. The rest were accounted for by the frost and snow, the Cossack lances, the bullet and the sabre, rendering the paths across the whitened wastes of Russia impassable with the bodies of the dying and the dead. Never in all the annals of war were greater sufferings detailed than those endured by the miserable French on their retreat from flaming Moscow.

In 1813, Macdonald commanded a corps in Saxony, where, on the 29th April, he had the satisfaction of routing at Mercebourg the division of General Yorck, composed of the same Prussians who had abandoned him at Riga during the previous year; and at Lutzen, where, on the 2nd May, the combined forces of Russia and Prussia met the French in battle, led by the Emperor in person, he attacked the Prussian reserve, and after a long and severe engagement cut it to pieces.

“Now,” said he, “I have fully avenged the desertion of General Yorck.”

After this Napoleon retired and established his head-quarters at Dresden, while Leipzig and Breslau were also occupied by his troops. On being reinforced by the Saxons, whose king he held as a species of hostage for his people, he resolved on attacking the northern allies near Bautzen; and Macdonald hastened with his division across the Spree, to share in the battle which ensued in June. The French triumphed, and their foes had to retreat, but in fine order, into Silesia. Macdonald was despatched by the Emperor in pursuit; but was compelled to fall back, as the roads by which he must have marched were almost inundated.

Nowhere did he attain more distinction than during the horrors of the three days of Leipzig.

This Saxon city, which is situated in a fertile plain, has suffered in many wars, but by none so much as the campaign of 1813. In that year Napoleon made it the general hospital for the sick and wounded of his army; thus its beautiful environs soon became the sad scene of many important events. In several battles and skirmishes the allies had defeated the French during the months of August and September; but Napoleon, who, with his characteristic obstinacy, adhered to Dresden as the centre of his position, found himself out-manœuvred, when eighty miles in his rear he heard of Marshal Blucher passing the Black Elster, and that Bernadotte, a prince of his own making, but now in arms against him, had arrived, after a long and circuitous march, near the suburbs of Leipzig, while Schwartzenbourg drew near that city from the south-east.

This was in the month of October.

The French numbered 160,000 bayonets and sabres; the allies 240,000. The outposts were soon engaged on the 16th; the following day was spent in skirmishes and manœuvres till the three allied armies formed a junction, and the stern conflict of the 18th began with all its terrors over an extent of line that covered seven miles. A little village on the French right, where Napoleon had posted himself, was lost and retaken again and again at the bayonet’s point under a storm of round and grape shot. Noon arrived, but the battle was still undecided, when all breathless with speed, an officer, with his uniform torn and bloody, rushed towards the Emperor.

“Sire,” he exclaimed, “the left wing has given way; the Saxon cavalry and artillery have gone over to the enemy!”

“Silence!” replied Napoleon, sternly; “silence!”

The intelligence was kept secret from the right and centre, and still the strife went on.

By three p.m. came the still more alarming tidings that the Saxon infantry had deserted en masse to the allies. This also was kept a secret from the French troops, though the Imperial Guard was ordered to take their place; but the power thus attained by the allies was no longer to be withstood, and a precipitate retreat towards the Rhine became the first thought of the vanquished Emperor.

At nightfall he gave the order to fall back, leaving the environs of Leipzig strewed with dead and dying; but his order was tardily executed, as all the French fugitives with their baggage, cannon, and wounded, on horseback, on foot, or in waggons, were compelled to take one road, every other being occupied by the cavalry and horse artillery of the victors; consequently, the sufferings and slaughter of the French, even after the field was lost, became dreadful. Napoleon, before retiring, had ordered that the bridge of the White Elster should be undermined, and directed Macdonald and Prince Joseph Poniatowski, with their divisions, to defend a portion of the suburbs that lay between the advancing enemy and the Borna road; and to leave nothing undone to maintain their post to the last, that the retreat of the army and baggage might be fully covered.

Poniatowski was brave as a lion. He was nephew of Stanislaus Augustus, the last King of Poland, and was animated alike by the purest patriotism and hatred of the Russians; hence he served France against them as the oppressors of his house and native country. He had 2000 Polish infantry and a few horse with him; and seeing the desperation of affairs, as the waggons of wounded, dripping with blood, the heavy artillery with their tumbrils, and the masses of fugitive soldiery exhausted by three days of fighting and excitement, pressed in close ranks across the bridge of the Elster, he drew his sabre and turning to his countrymen—

“Gentlemen,” said he, “here we must win or lose our honour!—Forward!” and at the head of a few Polish cuirassiers he made a rush towards the enemy. At that moment the bridge of the Elster was blown up, and his retreat cut off for ever!

Macdonald was similarly circumstanced, as his troops had manned and enfiladed the suburbs, where they were firing briskly to keep the foe in check from walls, houses, and hedgerows.

According to the Moniteur, it was the intention of Napoleon to have the bridge blown up only at the last moment, and when all his troops had passed the stream. General Dussaussoy had remitted this duty to Colonel Montfort, who, in turn, had remitted it to a corporal and four sappers. On the first appearance of the enemy upon the road, and when the cuirassiers of Poniatowski charged, the startled corporal fired the train, and a dark cloud of dust and stones ascending into the air with a mighty roar, announced the destruction of the bridge; while Macdonald and his whole corps, with eighty pieces of cannon, all their eagles, and several hundred carriages laden with powder, baggage, and wounded men, were on the wrong side of the river. A shout of astonishment and dismay arose from those who had crossed; and many an anxious eye was turned back to Leipzig, where the roar of musketry was yet heard in the rear.

The attention of Napoleon, who had left the city by the road which led by the bridge to Lindenau (the direct route for France) was arrested by the explosion, and one of his aides-de-camp exclaimed,

“Sire—sire—they have blown up the bridge of the Elster, and Macdonald’s corps is yet in Leipzig!”

“At that time,” to quote Bourienne, “Napoleon was accused of having given orders for the destruction of the bridge, immediately after his own passage, to secure his retreat from the active pursuit of the enemy. The English journals were unanimous on this point, and there were few of the inhabitants of Leipzig who doubted the fact.”

If this be true, it was a baseness only equalled by the strangulation of Pichegreu, the torture of Captain Wright in the Temple, and the lonely butchery of the hapless Duc d’Enghien.

Finding all lost, and that his retreat was cut off, Macdonald sheathed his sword, and calling on his soldiers to escape as they best could, threw himself into the river, the waters of which were darkening as the night drew on. He swam across, and reached the other side in safety. Poor Poniatowski, though bleeding and severely wounded, imitated his example; but he was pierced by a bullet, from one of the enemy’s skirmishers, who had now lined the steep bank of the Elster, and opened a murderous fire upon the mass of unfortunate fugitives, the wreck of Macdonald’s corps, who were struggling in the stream. In the dark, the unfortunate prince was swept away with his charger and drowned. Five days after, his corpse was found by a fisherman, and interred on the bank of the stream. A granite sarcophagus, surrounded by acacias and weeping-willows, marks the place where he lies.

Colonel Montfort, the corporal, and the four sappers, were delivered over to a court-martial.

Such was the closing episode of that terrible day at Leipzig, the anniversary of the more glorious events of Ulm and of Jena—a day that cost France nearly forty thousand men.

Napoleon continued his retreat to Mayence, with an army exhausted by toil, crushed by defeat, and savage in spirit, but lacking the stamina to make one more vigorous stand for France, save at Hanau; for French soldiers, more than any other, are the worst to retrieve a disaster.

“The defensive system,” to quote the Memoirs of Marshal Ney, “accords ill with the disposition of the French soldier, at least if it is not to be maintained by successive diversions and excursions; in a word, if you are not constantly occupied in that little warfare, inactivity destroys the force of troops who rest continually on the defensive. They are obliged to be constantly on the alert night and day; while, on the other hand, offensive expeditions wisely combined raise the spirit of the soldier, and prevent him from having time to ponder on the real cause of his dangerous situation. It is in the offensive that you find the French soldier inexhaustible in resources. His active disposition and valour in assaults double his power. A general should never hesitate to march with the bayonet against an enemy, if the ground is favourable for the use of that weapon. It is in the attack, in fine, that you accustom the French soldier to every species of warfare—alike to brave the enemy’s fire, and to leave the field open to the development of his intelligence and courage.”

But now the spirit of the French soldiers was almost dead for a time; and so ill was this retreat conducted, that the rear-guard, with 20,000 sick and wounded, fell into the hands of the enemy.

Macdonald was at the battle of Hanau, the last stand made by this discomfited host in Hesse Cassel. There the French were attacked by the Austrians and Bavarians, whom they routed, and then continued retreating, the whole of their cavalry hewing a passage, sword in hand, through the lines of the enemy.

He was now despatched by the Emperor to Cologne, with orders to organize a new army. These instructions he found the impossibility of fulfilling, so he abandoned the Rhine, along the banks of which the bayonets of the allies were glittering everywhere, and falling back into the interior of ancient France, with the war-worn veterans of his shattered column, he formed the left wing of the retreating army; and at its head, during the campaign of 1814, he gave more than one severe repulse to the Prussians, who were pressing towards Paris under Marshal Blucher. These encounters were chiefly on the banks of the Marne, and especially at Nangis, in the north of France, where he fought a severe action with the allies on the 17th of February; but these struggles and all the valour of the French Imperialists were vain, for ere long the capital was taken; then Germany found itself freed from oppression; Holland rang with acclamations on the downfall of Napoleon; and Wellington had halted in his long career of victory, on the banks of the Garonne, and by the hill of Toulouse.

Macdonald adhered to the fallen Emperor—the child of Destiny—and was with him in the old palace of Fontainebleau at the time of his abdication from the most splendid of European thrones. Hope had fled. His army was dispersed and crumbling to pieces; its great officers and leaders had abandoned him; and such is the instability of human affairs, that the people of whose blood he had been so lavish—the people to whom he had been a demi-god—were turning with ardour to another monarch, and welcomed the foemen against whom they had struggled for more than twenty years of war and carnage that were without parallel.

“The wreck of the army assembled at Fontainebleau,” says General Bourienne, “the remains of a million of men levied in fifteen months—comprising the corps of Marshals Oudinot, Ney, Macdonald, and General Gerard—did not exceed twenty-five thousand.”

Various interviews that took place between Napoleon and the Duke of Tarentum about this time are carefully detailed by this gossiping old soldier, in the supplement to the Biographie Universelle, and other memoirs.

Macdonald with his corps had marched in with all speed from Montereau, on receipt of an order from the Emperor, that he meant to march on Paris—a resolution that filled his officers with consternation. On the marshal’s arrival at the palace, the generals waited on him in a body, to request that he would place before the Emperor, the rashness and desperation of attempting to recapture Paris from the allies.

“Messieurs,” said he, “in the present juncture, such advice might displease his Majesty—leave the matter to me.”

As soon as he presented himself before Napoleon—

“Well, marshal,” said he, “how do things go?”

“Very ill, sire.”

“What! Very ill? How is your division disposed?”

“It is completely discouraged, sire; recent events at Paris have spread consternation through its ranks.”

“Think you,” asked the Emperor, “it will join with me in a movement upon Paris?”

“Trust not to that, sire,” was the desponding answer; “should I give such an order, I should hazard being disobeyed.”

“But what are we to do?” said the Emperor, passionately. “I cannot remain as I am! I shall march against Paris; I will punish these inconstant Parisians, and the folly of the senate! Woe to the government they have plastered up waiting the return of their Bourbons. To-morrow I shall place myself at the head of my Old Guard, and to-morrow we shall be in the Tuileries!”

“Sire,” urged Macdonald, “are you ignorant that a provisional government has been established?”

“I know it.”

“Then, sire, read this—a letter from Marshal Bournonville, announcing the sentence of forfeiture pronounced by the senate, and the resolution of the allied generals not to treat with you.”

The countenance of Napoleon became violently contracted. After a pause, he exclaimed, furiously,

“I shall march upon Paris!”

“March upon Paris, sire,” reiterated Macdonald; “that design must be renounced, for not a sword will leave its scabbard to follow you.”

Finding all indeed over, the bitter subject of his abdication came to be gravely considered, and he handed to the marshal a document, on the 4th April, stating that he was ready to quit the throne of France.

The tender and honourable part acted by Macdonald at this humiliating but memorable time was duly appreciated by the Emperor, who has done him ample justice. With Marshal Ney and the Duke of Vicenza, he was named one of the commissioners sent by Napoleon to the Emperor Alexander.

“Well, Duke of Tarentum,” said the former, before the marshal left Fontainebleau, “do you think a regency is the only thing possible?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Well,” continued Napoleon, who had now recovered his composure; “I charge you with my message to the Emperor Alexander; you will go with Ney instead of Marmont. I rely on you, and I hope you have entirely forgotten the circumstances which separated us so long?”

“Oh, sire, I have never once thought of them since 1809.”

“I rejoice to hear it,” replied Napoleon with emotion; “but marshal—I must now make the acknowledgment—I was wrong.”

“Sire!” exclaimed Macdonald; the Emperor pressed his hand and faltered out but one word,

“Go.”28

Macdonald vehemently urged that a regency should be established in France, in the person of Maria Louisa, in favour of her son, the young King of Rome, and violent altercations took place at the conference.

“Speak not to me, sir,” said he to Bournonville, who opposed him; “your conduct has made me forget the friendship of thirty years!” “As for you, sir,” he added, turning to Dupont, “your behaviour towards the Emperor is not generous. I acknowledge that he may have been unjust to you in the affair of Baylen; but how long has it been the fashion to avenge a personal wrong at the expense of the country?”

“Gentlemen,” exclaimed the Duke of Vicenza, “do not forget that you are in the presence of the Emperor of Russia.”

The energy with which Macdonald urged the cause of Napoleon embarrassed the Emperor of Russia; but neither the eloquence with which he spoke of the military glory of France, and the resolution of himself and his comrades never to abandon the family of one who had led them so often to victory, and with whom they had shared so many perils in war, nor the arguments with which he sought to enforce the regency, were successful; and at midnight on the 6th, he returned in dejection to Fontainebleau, to render, with Ney and Caulaincourt, an account of his mission. Napoleon again exhibited much emotion, and said, with a sigh,

“I know, marshal, all you have done for me—with what warmth you have pleaded the cause of my son. They desire my simple and unconditional abdication? Well—act on my behalf. Go, and again defend my interests and those of my family.”

Bourienne and others thus relate their last interview.

“Alas!” said Napoleon, “I am no longer rich enough to recompense your last service, Macdonald; but I can perceive how unwisely I was formerly prejudiced against you. I can also see the designs of those who inspired me with that prejudice.”

“Sire,” replied the marshal, “I have already had the honour to assure you, that since 1809 I have been yours in life and death!”

“Since I can no longer recompense you as I would wish, I pray you to remember that I shall NEVER forget the faithful service you have rendered me!”

Napoleon then turned to Caulaincourt, saying,

“Duke of Vicenza, bring my sabre.”

Caulaincourt brought the weapon, which was one of exquisite workmanship, and placed it in the hands of the Emperor.

“Behold,” said he, “a recompence, Macdonald, which, I believe, will give you pleasure. This sabre, which was given to me by Murad Bey, in Egypt, after we had won the battle of Mount Tabor, accept, my friend—a gift which, I believe, will gratify you.”

“Sire,” replied the marshal, whose voice trembled as he received the sabre from the Emperor; “if ever I have a son, this weapon shall be his noblest heritage; and as such I will guard it with my life.”

“Give me your hand, and embrace me!” exclaimed Napoleon; and throwing themselves into each others arms, they parted in tears—parted never to meet again as friends.29

In obedience to the commands of the fallen Emperor, the marshal, on the day succeeding this impressive farewell, sent in his adhesion to the new government.

“Now,” he wrote, “that I am freed from my allegiance to the Emperor Napoleon, I have the honour to announce to you—the provisional government—that I accord with the national wish which recalls the dynasty of Bourbon to the throne of France.”

On the 6th May, he was named member of the Council of War, and Chevalier of St. Louis. This was an order instituted by Louis XIV. in 1693, and, until the revolution, it remained entirely in possession of the French army. The badge was a gold cross of eight points, hung from a broad crimson ribbon. On the 6th June, he was created a peer of the realm by the surviving descendant of the Capet family, Louis XVIII., who seemed now firmly seated on the throne of France. But this monarch, as soon as order was duly established, was sufficiently rash and unwise to raise doubts about the validity of that law by which, during the stormy days of the republic, the property of the emigrant noblesse had been confiscated and sold. This was an unpleasant topic to broach at a time when Napoleon, like a caged lion, in Elba was watching for the moment to break forth; and Macdonald foresaw that misfortunes might ensue from its discussion; thus, on the 3rd December, 1814, he made an oration which succeeded in tranquillizing the fears of those who had made fortunes amid the anarchy of the republic, or with the growth of the late military empire. He had, moreover, the amiable intention of succouring the aged nobles and chevaliers of St. Louis, who were returning home after twenty-two years of exile, and the families of those whose fidelity to the ancient monarchy had involved them in penury, expatriation, and ruin.

His proposition was to raise twelve millions of annual rents, to be divided in proportions according to the rank and necessities of the claimants. His motion was received by all honourable men with favour, and with lively gratitude by those whose cause he had undertaken. He also advocated the hard case of his old comrades, the veteran soldiers of the Empire, who had lost their pay and pensions by the success of the restoration.

Macdonald won the hearts of all by these proposed measures; but they were brought forward too late in the year to have any practical or beneficial result; for now the eyes of all men were turned towards the little isle of Elba, from whence the Violet, as his soldiers named Napoleon, was confidently expected to come with the spring.

About this time, learning that Madame Moreau, the widow of his old friend and brother soldier, had secretly applied in his favour to an influential friend at Naples, to the effect that the revenues of the dukedom of Tarentum, which had been long withheld, should be continued to him, he wrote to the French plenipotentiary at the court of Ferdinand, praying that, with all gratitude to Madame Moreau, there might be no interference in the matter.

“Ferdinand of Naples,” said he, with noble spirit, “owes me nothing, for having routed his armies, revolutionized his kingdom, and forced him to seek refuge in Sicily.”

“Had I not laid it down as a principle,” replied Ferdinand, “not to maintain one of the French endowments, I would assuredly have made an exception in favour of Marshal Macdonald.”

On the 1st of March, 1815, the Emperor landed from Elba, and again Europe vibrated with war. The followers of the Bourbons were struck with consternation, and the soldiers to whom Louis XVIII. looked for protection and defence, were naturally enough flocking to the standard of their old leader; and he could turn to none, in his desertion and dismay, save a few officers of high rank, whose spirit of honour made them adhere to their oath of allegiance. The first to whom he addressed himself was Marshal Macdonald. He sent that officer to Lyons, where he arrived on the 8th of March, and found the Comte d’Artois in despair at the sullen and mutinous spirit exhibited by the troops he commanded.

Macdonald, of course, could not be surprised at this conduct in the soldiers, while his own heart led him towards the Emperor, and an oath tied him to the throne of the Bourbons; but he ordered a general parade of all the troops, and reviewed them before the prince. Still the same sullenness and the same silence, so unusual in French soldiers during a time of excitement, were apparent in the officers and men. So strong did this feeling become, that the Comte d’Artois (according to the Voice from St. Helena) had to withdraw in haste from Lyons, accompanied by one solitary dragoon, while Macdonald marched with a regiment of cavalry and two battalions of infantry of the line towards the bridge of the Rhone, which Napoleon was approaching at the head of a few soldiers of the Old Guard and a force increasing every hour by the regiments which deserted as they were despatched against him.

The marshal seized and barricaded the bridge, his soldiers still obeying in silence, till the brass drums of the Emperor were heard ringing on the highway; again the old tri-colour was seen, and the eagles that had spread their gilded wings over so many fatal fields were glittering in the sun. The marshal ordered his troops to fix bayonets and load with ball-cartridge.

Where was then the memory of that farewell at Fontainebleau? and where the sword of Murad Bey—the souvenir of Mount Tabor? The marshal was deeply moved at that moment, but he remembered the oath he had sworn to Louis XVIII.

The 4th Hussars, who formed the imperial advanced guard, dashed boldly up to the bridge at full speed, and, brandishing their sabres, shouted their old battle-cry, “Vive l’Empereur!”

The effect was electric. The soldiers of Macdonald could no longer restrain their long-smothered enthusiasm. They, at least, had sworn no fealty to King Louis. With a shout they responded, and, waving their caps and muskets in welcome, tore aside the barricade, and rushed to meet the Emperor, leaving the marshal on horseback, and by the roadside alone.

The 4th Hussars wished to seize and deliver him to the Emperor, but, animated by a high sense of chivalry, his own dragoons, who had come with him from Lyons, would by no means permit this, and drew their ranks across the road until he escaped. He returned immediately to Paris, and was desired by Louis XVIII. to command in the army formed under the Duc de Berri. This army proved, however, but a phantom, as the soldiers composing it almost to a man joined the banner of the Emperor.

Left thus alone, Macdonald repaired to the unfortunate king, and on the night of the 20th of March accompanied him on his retreat to Menin; but he again returned to Paris, where pleading his oath of fidelity, sworn by the Emperor’s desire to the Bourbons, he declined to serve the imperial cause or become one of the Chamber of Peers under it—a refusal, doubtless, most painful to one who knew that he owed all his rank and honours to Napoleon. Relinquishing all these, as it were, for a time, the marshal duke enrolled himself as a simple grenadier in the National Guard of Paris, and as such did military duty during the usurpation, as it was named; and in the plain uniform of this corps, divested of medals, crosses, and epaulettes, he appeared as a private sentinel before Louis XVIII. on his return to the Tuileries.

On the capitulation of Paris to the allies the remains of Napoleon’s army, then encamped beyond the Loire, were placed under the command of Macdonald, whose instructions were to remodel and re-organize the regiments, a difficult and arduous mission, which he accomplished with equal fidelity and address; but the soldiers, dispirited by the defeat at Waterloo, awed into submission by the flight of their idol Napoleon, and the presence of the overwhelming masses of the allies, obeyed him in silence and dejection. All was over now with the Bonapartists. The army of the Empire was broken and scattered, like the marshal dukes who had led it to those glories and conquests of which there remained but the memory now!

In the words of M. Fleury de Chabulon, “Marshal Ney was the first to give the alarm and despair of the safety of his country. Marshal Soult had abjured his command, Marshal Massena, exhausted by victory, had no longer the strength required by circumstances; Marshal Macdonald, deaf to the war-cry of his old companions, left his sword peacefully in its scabbard; Marshal Jourdan was on the Rhine; Marshal Mortier had the gout at Beaumont; Marshal Suchet evinced repugnance and irresolution; and finally, the Marshals Davoust and Grouchy no longer enjoyed the confidence of the army.”

Thus the throne that had been so long propped by bayonets and by the splendid chivalry of the Old Guard and of the whole imperial army, had crumbled into dust at last!

For his talent in organizing the army of the Loire Macdonald received the office of Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, succeeding the Abbé de Pradt on the 10th of January, 1816, and on the 3rd of May, in that year, he was appointed Knight Commander of St. Louis.

It is related that, when dining one day at the Tuileries, Charles X. said to him—

“How came it to pass, marshal, that when serving in our Irish regiment of Dillon, which emigrated with us entirely, you still remained in France?”

“Sire,” he replied, “because I was in love with Mademoiselle Jacob; and I applaud myself for it, since to that girl’s love I owe the honour of being this day at table with your Majesty.”

“How so?”

“Because, had I emigrated, I might have lived in penury and died of despair; but now, sire, I am a duke and marshal of France.”

This reply was so frank and politic, that the king questioned him no more on that subject. He was one of the four marshals who had command of the Royal Guard; and as one of a commission appointed to inquire into the recruiting of the army, on the 24th of February, 1818, he made an able report upon the oppressive law of conscription, urging upon the French ministry the British system of voluntary enlistment.

Four years after this, by a royal ordinance, he procured the reversion of his rank and titles to the Marquis de Rochedragon, his son-in-law; but this ordinance was useless, as there was no prospect of that noble having any family. Thus, the marshal being anxious to have a male heir—all his children being daughters—he married, in his fifty-eighth year, Mademoiselle de Bourgoing, and from that period led a quiet and retired life. Soon after his marriage he came to Scotland, the land of his forefathers.

Accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Colonel Count Couessin, a nobleman who was descended from an ancient family in Brittany, and was the husband of his niece, Macdonald arrived in Edinburgh about the middle of June, 1825. He remained at an hotel, where he received the cards of all persons of distinction in the vicinity, and was visited by every gentleman in the city who bore his name. He attended mass in the Catholic church of St. Mary, and viewed all the great “sights” of the Scottish metropolis. A Mr. Macdonald Buchanan invited him to a dinner at which Sir Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, and Henry Cockburn, were present, with several gentlemen who claimed the marshal as a clansman and relation. “From what I see of you, gentlemen,” said he, when returning thanks after his health had been proposed, “and from what I have remarked of this country, I feel more pride than ever in having Scottish blood in my veins.”

With great interest he visited the battle-field of Prestonpans, and viewed the ground from the Thorntree, where Colonel Gardiner was slain by the Highlanders. After being fêted at Hopeton House, he left Edinburgh for the Highlands, with the intention of visiting every part of the country in which his father had accompanied Prince Charles Edward, during their flight and concealment after Culloden.

On his way north, he visited the field of Bannockburn, on the 24th of June, the anniversary of the battle; and, after surveying the ground with a soldier’s eye, he praised the dispositions and the valour of Robert Bruce. Everywhere he expressed himself “enraptured with the beauty of the country; and above all, of the metropolis of Scotland.” He visited the “fair city” of Perth; and accompanied by Macdonald of Staffa, reached Inverness early in July, and went immediately to the field of Culloden, where his father’s sword had been drawn for the last of the Stuarts. There he gazed about him long and thoughtfully, surveying the desert moor, which is yet dotted by the green graves of the loyal and brave men who fell there.

He expressed astonishment that the prince, with his slender army of swordsmen, destitute alike of horse and artillery, should have fought twice the number of regular troops on such ground, instead of retiring into the mountains, and harassing the army of Cumberland by a guerilla warfare.

In the ill-fated Comet (a steamer which was wrecked a short time after, under distressing circumstances) he left the Highland capital for the wild mountain-shore of Arisaig; and to a large dinner-party on board he made an address expressive of his admiration for the Scottish clans, “than whom,” said he, “no people, I think, deserve to be more esteemed for their national character and uniform good conduct.” Everywhere he was fêted and welcomed with Highland ardour and hospitality, and in many instances by old Highland soldiers and retired officers, who had served against him in Holland, Germany, and Spain.

On his landing under the walls of Armidale Castle in Sleat, on the southern shore of Skye, he was saluted by fifteen pieces of cannon, and was received by a body of his clansmen in full Highland arms and array, under Lord Macdonald.

At the beautiful ruins of Castle Tiorm, in “the country of Clanranald,” there was presented to him an aged clansman, named Alaster Macdonald, then in his hundredth year, who had known his father, and remembered the melancholy embarkation of Prince Charles and his fugitive followers, seventy-nine years before. With this old namesake the marshal conversed long, and asked him many questions about the personal appearance, &c., of Prince Charles Edward.

He left the Scottish isles in a government ship, and reached Dublin on the 16th of July; and there he again met Sir Walter Scott, who had arrived in the same city on the previous day.

“Respecting his visit (to Scotland) a singular tradition is preserved in France,” says Dr. Memes; “namely, that, on being introduced to Sir Walter Scott, the marshal offered to place at the disposal of the historian authentic and unpublished intelligence on certain important and misrepresented events. Sir Walter declined the proffered aid, with the remark, ‘Thank you, marshal; but I prefer taking my materials from popular and current reports.’ We relegate this to the class of fables.”

After his return to France, he led a life of quiet and retirement, and for nearly twenty-five years his name was rarely heard. He grew rapidly feeble; for his long career of war in almost every country in Europe, and the numerous severe wounds he had received, brought age quickly upon him.

He died in his seventy-fifth year, on the 24th of September, 1840, at his country house near Courcelles. A noble and generous eulogy was pronounced upon him by General Count Philip de Segur, author of a history of Napoleon’s Russian expedition, and who in former days had been the aide-de-camp of Macdonald.

The latter was pure in spirit and generous in heart, faithful and benevolent in peace, as he was brave and true in battle. Sarrazen thus describes him:—

“The Duke of Tarentum is of a good size, of a slender make, but robust and pale-faced, with eyes full of fire; his smile is sardonic, his bearing military, and his manners polished. I believe him to be a sincere friend; and although he showed a weakness of character in the council of war which occasioned the loss of the battle of Trebia, we cannot but allow him to have all the firmness necessary to a good general.”

It has been already shown that the misfortune on the banks of the Trebia arose from circumstances over which the marshal had no control; but it was a battle that he fought long and gallantly.

He was thrice married; first to Mademoiselle Jacob, one of the most beautiful girls in France, by whom he had two daughters, one of whom married Sylvester Rene, Duke of Massa, in Italy; and the youngest to Alphonse Comte de Perregaux. He married secondly, Madame Joubert, formerly Mademoiselle de Montholon, widow of his comrade the brave General Joubert, who was slain in battle against Suwarrow at Novi, on the 16th of August, 1799. By her the marshal had an only daughter, afterwards the Marchioness de Rochedragon. He married thirdly, Madame de Bourgoing, daughter of the superintendent of the Royal Hospital at St. Denis, and widow of the Ambassador Baron de Bourgoing.30

They had two children: to the joy of the old marshal one of these was a son, whom he named Alexander, and who in October, 1824, was held at the baptismal font by his Majesty Charles X. and Madame the Dauphinesse, and who now inherits the dukedom of Tarentum, and the sabre of Mont Tabor.

Such was the career of Stephen Macdonald, the son of an obscure Scottish fugitive from the field of Culloden, who thus became a Marshal Duke of the Empire, and by his worth and bravery shed a glory on his father’s name and on the rank he won.

Notes

25 “General Macdonald, who has come forward with so much éclat as commander of a French column, is the descendant of a Mr. Macdonald of Argyleshire. His uncle is Mr. Macdonald of Kinlochmoidart. He preserves his clannish affections, and in the campaign of Pichegreu in Flanders and Holland, having command of a brigade which had to press on a British brigade, where he discovered a namesake, he supplied his countryman during the memorable retreat with every comfort which a camp could afford.”—Edinburgh Herald, 10th January, 1799.

26 General Sarrazen says fifteen thousand (?)

27 Bourienne.

28 Bourienne.

29 “The sabre I recognised at once; only since I had last seen it, the following words had been engraved on the blade:—Sabre worn by the Emperor on the day of the battle of Mount Tabor.”—Bourienne, vol. iv.

30 Biographie Universelle, &c.