But no one had ever been known to take offence at Daddy Hill. He arrived in Brussels looking more like a country squire than a distinguished general, and took the jealous young commander gently in hand. The anxious breathed again; the Prince of Orange might be in a little huff at the prospect of being soon relieved of his command, but he was no longer refractory, and was soon able to write to Lord Bathurst, in London, announcing the gratifying intelligence that although it would have been mortifying to him to give up his command to anyone else, to the Duke he could do it with pleasure; and could even engage to serve him with as great a zeal as when he had been his aide-de-camp.

"I shall never forget that period of my life," wrote the Prince, forgetting his injuries in a burst of enthusiasm. "I owe everything to it; and if I now may hope to be of use to my country it is to the experience I acquired under him that I have to attribute it."

Such a frame of mind augured well for the future; but the task of controlling the Prince's martial activities continued to be a difficult one. The British Ambassador to The Hague transferred his establishment to Brussels with the principal motive of assisting Lord Hill in his duty, and found it so arduous that he more than once wrote to the Duke to tell him how necessary was his presence in Brussels. "You will see that I have spared no efforts to keep the Prince quiet," wrote Sir Charles Stuart in his plain style… "Under these circumstances I leave you to judge of the extreme importance we all attach to your early arrival."

Meanwhile, though the Congress at Vienna might declare Napoleon to be hors la loi, every day saw French Royalists hurrying a little ignominiously over the frontier. Louis XVIII, yet another of Europe's uninspiring monarchs, removed his Court from Paris to Ghent, and placidly explained that he had been all the while impelled, in France, to employ untrustworthy persons because none whom he could trust were fit to be employed.



11 из 429