The Return of the Gypsy

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I BELIEVE THAT VERY few people who lived through that summer and early autumn of the year 1805 will ever forget it. Throughout the entire country was a feeling of dread of what might be our fate, which was only surpassed by a determination to prevent it. We were a nation preparing for invasion from the most formidable foe any country had ever had to face since the days of Attila the Hun. The Corsican adventurer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had shown the world that he was determined on conquest, and, having subdued the greater part of Europe, was now turning his attention to our island.

His name was on everybody’s lips; any little rumour about him was magnified and passed around; he was generally known as Boney, for nothing is such an antidote to fear as contempt—even if it is assumed—and he was slightingly referred to as The Little Corporal; but the most ominous warning a mother could give to a naughty child was: “If you are not good, Boney will get you”—as though Boney was the devil himself. Boney was the bogey-man and there could have been few in England at that time who did not contemplate his coming to our land with considerable apprehension.

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