Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Lord Grenville said, that the circumstance of so eminent a service
having been performed with so inconsiderable a force, was with him an
additional reason for affording this testimony of public gratitude,
and the highest honour which the House had it in its power to confer.
His Lordship then adverted to his imprisonment in the Temple. "In
defiance of every principle of humanity, and of all the acknowledged
rules of war, Sir Sidney Smith had been, with the most cold and cruel
inflexibility, confined in a dungeon of the Temple; but the French, by
making him an exception to the general usages of war, had only
manifested their sense of his value, and how much they were afraid of
him." In the House of Commons, Mr Dundas, the Secretary of State,
after alluding to the apprehensions of the country, the expedition to
Egypt, and the memorable victory of Aboukir, said, "that the conduct
of Sir Sidney Smith was so surprising to him, that he hardly knew how
to speak of it. He had not recovered from the astonishment which the
account of the action had thrown him into. However, so it was; and the
merit of Sir Sidney Smith was now the object of consideration, and to
praise or to esteem which sufficiently, was quite impossible."
The thanks of both Lords and Commons were voted unanimously; the
thanks of the Corporation of London and the thanks of the Levant
Company were voted, with a piece of plate. The king gave him a pension
of £1000 a-year for life; and the Sultaun sent him a rich pelisse and
diamond aigrette, both of the same quality as those which had been
sent to Nelson.
We now hasten over a great deal of anxious and complicated
correspondence, explanatory of a convention entered into with the
French for the evacuation of Egypt. Kleber, indignant at Buonaparte's
flight, and his army disgusted with defeat, proposed a capitulation,
by which they were to be sent to France. The distinction which Sir
Sidney had now attained even with the French army, had made him the
negotiator, and all was preparation to embark, when Lord Keith
informed him, by orders from home, that the French must surrender as
prisoners of war.
The armistice was instantly at an end. The Turks, who with their usual
indolence had remained loitering in sight of Cairo, were attacked in
force and broken, and all was war again. Sir Sidney's letters
deprecate the measure in the strongest terms. And nothing can be
clearer than that, though our expedition under Abercrombie was
glorious, Sir Sidney's treaty would have saved us the expenditure of a
couple of millions of money, and, what was more valuable, have spared
the lives of many brave men on both sides; while the result would have
been the same, as it was not our purpose to retain Egypt. Eventually,
the French army capitulated in Egypt to Lord Hutchinson, on nearly the
terms of the convention of the year before; and to the amount of about
twenty thousand men were sent home in British vessels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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