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New Light on Malta During the Peace of Amiens, 1801-1803

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New Light on Malta During the Peace of Amiens, 1801-1803 NEW LIGHT ON MALTA DURING THE PEACE OF AMIENS, 1801-1803 D. F. ALLEN SIR Charles William Pasley (1780-1861) is remembered today as a general in the British Army who earned distinction as a military engineer, writing manuals about field fortification, telegraphy, sapping, mining, pontooning, and how best to explode gunpowder under water for the salvage of wrecks. Pasley's distinction was recognized beyond the army by his election in 1816 as a Fellow of the Royal Society, by his appointment in 1841 as Inspector General of Railways and by the award in 1844 of an honorary D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. Less well known are the sympathetic impressions of Malta which he had formed between 1801 and 1804, when he was far from being a pillar of the Establishment but merely a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant from Minorca, recently posted to the Malta garrison. Lieutenant Pasley's unpublished journal and letters from Malta are buried in his personal papers which were bequeathed to the British Museum in the 1930s by his descendants. Pasley's comments on Malta now merit rehearsal for two reasons above all. First because they relate to that uneasy period of the Peace of Amiens, by which Britain had promised to hand back the Maltese islands to the Order of St John, expelled by Bonaparte in 1798. Young Pasley's journal and letters from Malta are interesting secondly because at that stage in his career he enjoyed few social advantages and was correspondingly open to the customs of the Maltese. Pasley had been born a bastard in Scotland, from where the Dumfries schoolmaster and his own energy and ability as well as the patronage of his better born Malcolm cousins had propelled him into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In short, Pasley was a philosophical and literary Scottish soldier, curious about the distinctive history and folklore of Malta. And his professional interest in mihtary fortification took renewed inspiration from the bastions of Valletta. Pasley arrived at Malta in November 1801, one month after Lord Hawkesbury in Downing Street had signed the preliminary treaty of peace between Great Britain and France, which was to be signed definitively at Amiens the following March. The fourth article of this preliminary treaty promised the evacuation of British troops from Malta and the island's restoration to the Order of St John of Jerusalem. This same article proposed that Malta should be rendered completely independent of either France or Great Britain by being placed under the protection of a 'third Power to be agreed upon in the definitive treaty'.^ The hostility of Maltese public opinion to these preliminary 174 Fig. I. C. W. Pasley in 1810. Add. MS. 41766, f. 135 (detail) proposals soon impressed Pasley, as he was coming to terms with his new billet at Malta. His first thoughts were selfish ones of relief at leaving Minorca behind, where he had been 'a body without a soul', but he was still afraid of meeting his old critic. General Fox, who had transferred his H.Q, from Minorca to Malta, in preparation for Minorca's 175 reversion to Spain by the definitive Treaty of Amiens in 1802.^ In the event Fox received Pasley kindly at the former Grand Master's palace in Valletta. Pasley's confidence grew amidst the local consensus that Malta was a better Mediterranean base for Britain than Minorca and could not possibly be handed back to the Order of St John, a French puppet which the native Maltese were begging the British to keep away. Pasley preferred the Maltese to the Minorcans, the former being 'a better informed, more sociable and spirited people than the Minorcans', though he did encounter some Maltese peasants near Dingli Cliffs (which reminded him of the Isle of Wight) who had never heard of Minorca but did recognize the name of its port. Port Mahdn. Minorcan women were more neatly dressed than their Maltese counterparts. The Maltese were dark like the Minorcans but were altogether unlike Europeans, except for their dress, since their guttural language, 'bawling and furious gestures', made them appear more like Arabs.^ Making such comparisons in favour of the Maltese, Pasley became indignant when he reflected how his Government in London had just undertaken to hand back his new acquaintances to the Order of St John, 'a phantom without a substance, represented by a set of men entirely devoted to French influence'. Pasley determined to live in the meantime 'as if we were today here for ever'.^ Because he could speak some Italian and tried to focus on the distinctive sounds of the Maltese language, Pasley was able to communicate with the many Maltese he encountered.^ From them he heard horrid tales of pillage by the recent French occupiers and was welcomed as an English deliverer, though he was, of course, a Scot. He was told how plate had been seized from the Holy Infirmary at Valletta and everywhere 'golden and silver ornaments became a prey to their sacrilegious hands'. In the village church of Mqabba Pasley noted 'several armorial bearings defaced by the French, who must have had great industry in making enemies to descend to such minute details'. At Selmun Palace above St Paul's Bay, Pasley was shown round by a Maltese pilot, formerly employed in making signals, who had escaped being conscripted into the Maltese Legion which the French had taken with them to Egypt.^ Pasley had no doubt of Bonaparte's desire 'to make himself master of the whole Mediterranean. If we give up this island now, we may bid farewell to this sea for ever and we will not even have the satisfaction of saying we were deceived but we sign our downfall with our eyes open.'^ Living for the most part at his regimental mess in Valletta, Pasley made several sightseeing expeditions from the island's capital, often sleeping overnight in sheds or other humble accommodation provided by the parish priest (kapptllan) of the village he happened to be visiting. Pasley's companions on these tours of rural Malta sometimes included Mr Bonavia, a Maltese engineer formerly employed during the French occupation by Le Grange.^ Being an engineer himself, Pasley respected the French contribution to his science but considered that too much 'superstitious veneration' had been afforded Vauban at the expense of Newton. As for those works built at Malta by the French engineer Tigne in the early eighteenth century, he praised their ingenuity but thought they were 'good for a chest of drawers, not to resist gunpowder and canonballs'. Noting the scarcity of British writers on fortification, he was inspired by Malta's 176 Fig. 2. Valletta and the Grand Harbour, i8oo. Add. MS. 43833 (detail) fortifications to think of creating those manuals for which he later became famous.^ Pasley had some admiration for the Knights of St John who had commanded Malta's defensive fortifications during the Ottoman siege of 1565. After visiting the vault of St John's conventual church, he at first wrote in his journal, 'Enthusiasm seizes my soul as I kneel at the grave of La Valette' but his Protestant second thoughts led him to cross this out and to record instead 'a remembrance I shall ever cherish'. In the former Grand Master's palace at Valletta, Pasley was impressed by paintings of the knights' naval victories - 'Everything must have served to awaken an enthusiasm and emulation that the degenerate modern ones were incapable of feeling.' Prompted by the kappillan of Gudja, who criticized to him Grand Master de Rohan (1775-97) hut praised the earlier Grand Masters Pinto (1741-73) and Vilhena (1722-36), Pasley described the Order of St John's former rule in Malta as having been 'without meaning', which was 'the character of all arbitrary governments'.^^ Pasley could not understand how the 'poor Knights' could ever return to Malta 'without the income of France and, above all, deprived of the spirit of religious enthusiasm'.^^ Here he alluded to the Revolution's confiscation of the Order of St John's properties in France and to the liberal, sometimes Masonic, spirit which had affected several French Knights who had welcomed Bonaparte's invasion of Malta in 1798 and had worsened thereby the hesitant stance of Grand Master Hompesch. In exile at Trieste and Montpellier, Hompesch had been mocked further by the decision of his Order's Russian Grand Priory to elect the Tsar Paul I as Grand Master. Paul had promised to re-establish the Order at Malta, St Petersburg serving meanwhile as the Order's conventual residence. ^^ His murder in March 1802 and the reluctance of his successor Alexander I to continue as Grand Master of the Order made a little easier the wording 177 of the tenth and Maltese article of the definitive Treaty of Amiens in March 1802. Even so this Maltese article of the treaty was, in Bonaparte's words, 'a romance which could not be executed', a sentiment with which Pasley found himself in agreement.'^ Article X of the treaty stipulated that the Order of St John should be restored to Malta after its Chapter-General had met in the island to elect a new Grand Master. It was understood tacitly by the contracting parties at Amiens that this new head of the Order would be neither Hompesch nor Alexander I. The Grand Master eventually chosen in February 1803 by Pius VII (and not by the assembled Knights in Malta) disappointed Pasley because the seventy-two-year-old Sienese bailli Giovanni Battista Tommasi enjoyed no standing with the Maltese, who wished to remain under British rule.
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