ly devoted
to private interests; and when Napoleon threatened Charles IV. and
Godoy with an inroad of 80,000 French troops unless the Spanish
militia were dissolved and 72,000,000 francs were paid every year into
the French exchequer, the Court of Madrid speedily gave way. Its
surrender was further assured by the thinly veiled threat that further
resistance would lead to the exposure of the _liaison_ between Godoy
and the Queen. Spain therefore engaged to pay the required sum--more
than double the amount stipulated in 1796--to further the interests of
French commerce and to bring pressure to bear on Portugal. At
the close of the year the Court of Lisbon, yielding to the threats
of France and Spain, consented to purchase its neutrality by
the payment of a million francs a month to the master of the
Continent.[272]

Meanwhile the First Consul was throwing his untiring energies into the
enterprise of crushing his redoubtable foe. He pushed on the naval
preparations at all the dockyards of France, Holland, and North Italy;
the great mole that was to shelter the roadstead at Cherbourg was
hurried forward, and the coast from the Seine to the Rhine became "a
coast of iron and bronze"--to use Marmont's picturesque phrase--while
every harbour swarmed with small craft destined for an invasion.
Troops were withdrawn from the Rhenish frontiers and encamped along
the shores of Picardy; others were stationed in reserve at St. Omer,
Montreuil, Bruges, and Utrecht; while smaller camps were formed at
Ghent, Compiegne, and St. Malo. The banks of the Elbe, Weser, Scheldt,
Somme, and Seine--even as far up as Paris itself--rang with the blows
of shipwrights labouring to strengthen the flotilla of flat-bottomed
vessels designed for the invasion of England. Troops, to the number of
50,000 at Boulogne under Soult, 30,000 at Etaples, and as many at
Bruges, commanded by Ney and Davoust respectively, were organized
anew, and by constant drill and exposure to the elements formed the
tough nucleus of the future Grand Army, before which the choicest
troops of Czar and Kaiser were to be scattered in headlong rout. To
all these many-sided exertions of organization and drill, of improving
harbours and coast fortifications, of ship-building, testing,
embarking, and disembarking, the First Consul now and again applied
the spur of his personal supervision; for while the warlike enthusiasm
which he had aroused against perfidious Albion of itself achieved