4 - More a Poet than a Statesman

Summary

Chapter 4 examines one of the most politically influential books to appear in Britain during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810). This was a book that many commentators at the time felt had an impact on the political life of the nation second only to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pasley calls upon Britain to wage an aggressive war of conquest to resist Napoleonic France. The nation must, he contends, build a universal empire as the only bulwark against French conquest of Europe. Although he insists that British conquests will form an empire of liberty, his calls for aggressive military action also seek to remodel Britain itself in relation to far-reaching demands of military security. Considering, in turn, why he was so widely praised as a writer, more a poet than a statesman in Wordsworth’s view, this chapter proposes that Pasley displaced the traditional patriotic functions of the national bard to establish a new kind of national wartime narrative, a sublime liberal epic founded on the nation’s traumatic confrontation with war.