TWO:Whilst these events had been taking place in Spain and Portugal, Great Britain had been sending money and troops to oppose Buonaparte in other quarters. Early in the spring Austria was in the field; in July a powerful fleet, carrying an army, sailed from the Downs, to create a diversion on the coast of the Netherlands, and other operations were commenced in the south of Italy. The army destined for the Netherlands amounted to forty thousand men, attended by a fleet of thirty-five sail of the line and twenty frigates, to assist where they might be needed. Buonaparte had contemplated making a great port of Antwerp, and had expended much money and labour in docks and fortifications there; but finding that the port of Antwerp was not deep enough for first-rate ships of war, he undertook to render Flushing capable of receiving and protecting a large fleet. He still contemplated, by the co-operation of Denmark and Russia, the sending forth a fleet, some day, which might cope with the British navy, or enable him to invade England. For this purpose he was building ships at Antwerp and Flushing; and it was, no doubt, these circumstances which determined the British to direct their attack on Flushing and Antwerp. Captain, afterwards Sir George Cockburn, was of opinion that these preparations of Napoleon could never affect England; that no possession of Zealand, or any part of it, could be kept by England, from its extreme unhealthiness to foreigners, and even to Dutchmen; and that it was much better for Britain to let Buonaparte build ships, and take them whenever they came out to sea, than to sacrifice the lives of our troops for no permanent benefit in this region of bogs, stagnant water, and malaria. Had these forty thousand troops been sent to support Wellington, and half the money that this fatal expedition cost, they would have enabled him to drive the French triumphantly out of Spain, and create the most magnificent diversion for Austria, as well as the most honourable to England.In Massachusetts the colonists were more exasperated against Governor Bernard, on account of his letters reflecting on the Bostonians in the matter of the late riots, these letters having been laid before Parliament, and copies of them by some means procured and sent on by their agents. They declared that it was beneath their dignity to deliberate in the midst of an armed force, and requested Bernard to withdraw the troops, but he refused; and they, on their part, declined to vote supplies, on which he adjourned them to Cambridge. There, however, as Cambridge was only separated from Boston by an arm of the sea, they continued to protest against an armed force, as an invasion of the national rights of the colonists, and highly dangerous. Bernard soon announced to them his intention to sail for England, to lay the state of the colony before the king, and the house immediately voted a petition to his Majesty, praying him to keep him from coming back again. Bernard then called upon them to refund the money expended for the quartering of the troops; but that they pronounced quite as unreasonable as the Stamp Act, and finding them utterly intractable, Bernard prorogued the Assembly, and quitted the colony, leaving the administration in the hands of Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson.
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