‘In fine, I really don’t see how we can go on for much longer.’
The words cut through the drone of talk at the table like a knife. ‘You may leave us,’ one of the diners told the steward of the exclusive London club. The man bowed and retired, drawing the double doors of the private dining room firmly closed.
‘Charles, you choose the most awkward times to make your opinions known.’ Cuthbert Hertford, a portly man in blue and buff, drew appreciatively on his Havana and, with a droll glance at the speaker, added, ‘Even if we’d no doubt be entertained to hear it.’
‘I mean it, sir.’
The others paid wary attention to Charles Brougham, the elegantly dressed individual whose features held the ruthless austerity to be expected of the head of one of the oldest and largest trading firms on the floor of the London Stock Exchange.
‘How so?’
‘Do I need to spell it out? Here we have the Continental System, Boney’s answer to Trafalgar. And it’s working, God help us.’ He lifted his port glass and peered into it as though it were a crystal ball. Bonaparte’s sweeping declaration of a state of blockade against Great Britain had included savage penalty for any nation trading with her, and after his recent crushing successes on the Continent, few dared.
‘Now the French have taken Lisbon we have to accept that the entire shore of Europe, from Cadiz to Konigsberg is shut in our faces. Near all our natural market denied us – we can’t import what we need and, worse, our undoubted leadership in manufacturing and industry is as dross if we can’t place our goods in the marketplace.’
‘We’ve suffered worse, dear fellow. The League of Armed Neutrality not so long ago? A direct threat to our freedom of the seas, and all it needed was for us to send in our glorious Admiral Nelson to knock heads together and they saw reason directly.’
‘Hmmph. It seems to have escaped your notice that things are much different now. The old ways are not open to us and-’
‘You said we can’t go on, Charles,’ a dry, intense individual interrupted. With a sharp, legal mind, John Newton was principal director in a sizeable canal enterprise and had every reason to fear these words.
‘Too much has turned against us recently. Boney’s system was a near dead letter while we could ship in and out of Denmark. A neutral, all our exports went into Husum or Tonningen as a paper trade, for re-export under the Danish flag a few miles overland to the Continent at large. A sovereign highway into Europe as served us well.’
‘And now we’ve laid waste to Copenhagen …’
‘It’s closed to us.’
‘There’s still one who defies Boney.’
‘Sweden? Our ally, yes, but with a deranged autocrat on the throne and the country having no convenient border with the Continent, a lost cause, a liability. And besides which …’ He paused significantly. ‘Do I need to remind you? Russia has declared war on us and must now be accounted the enemy.’
A brutal, conservative and backward nation of unknown millions and with a large navy, it was about to turn the Baltic into a Russian lake.
‘So the Baltic is lost to us. Why on earth can’t you merchantry open up somewhere else?’ Newton asked. ‘The Spanish-American colonies spring to mind.’
‘Let me answer that,’ Richard Egremont, a precise and quiet man in curiously plain attire, intervened. ‘I know I’m a guest here tonight, but pray give me leave perhaps to enlighten some.
‘You are all captains of industry or bankers with concerns of your own. I am at a Treasury desk and see figures in the aggregate. And I’m grieved to say that, in my opinion, Charles is in no wise guilty of exaggeration. The situation is dire, gentlemen, and I cannot readily conceive how we might recover from it.’
‘What is it that you see, Richard?’
‘This Baltic trade is our tenderest point and he who severs it brings us to our knees, to nothing less than capitulation to Bonaparte’s will, I fear.’
‘Oh, come, sir, that is a trifle rich!’
‘Nothing less, Cuthbert. Let me throw you a few figures. The navy demands twenty miles or some such extraordinary amount of rope to set a ship swimming and several times that for wear in its lifetime. Where does this rope hemp come from? Ninety-five per centum by poundage from the inner Baltic. The same can be said of spars, decking timber and so forth, and therefore before long we look to having our sure shield floating about quite helpless for lack of repair.’
He smiled thinly. ‘And there’s worse. Before the late unpleasantness with Denmark, do you know the value of goods carried by our near seven thousand ships a year going through the Sound?’
‘A pretty penny, you’ll be telling us, Richard.’
‘You may believe it. If we take all other trade we conduct, wherever in the world, then our commerce with the Baltic is more than twice this entirely added together.’
‘Good God – I’d no idea!’
‘And a last figure, and one I ask you refrain from repeating lest it cause undue dismay.’
‘Say away, I beg.’
‘Very well. It is that after our lamentable harvest of the past year there is a shortage of grain in these islands in the calamitous amount of some twenty per centum. A fifth of our people therefore will have no bread and must starve, are we not to take steps? In the past it’s been our practice to mount a grain convoy or two to obtain the deficiency from beyond our shores. But …’
‘From the Baltic.’
‘Just so. Prussian wheat and Russian corn. Both now denied us.’
‘And time is running out.’
‘Quite, Cuthbert. But my immediate concern is that the Baltic ice is, as we speak, giving way and a host of merchants find the season for sailing is now open to them. They must have answer – dare they sail into the pit?’