e season promised well, and in
Royston the religious bodies held special meetings in July and August
for prayer and thanksgiving for the encouraging signs of a bountiful
harvest, which was shortly afterwards gathered. Then to add to the
sense of relief their came the joyful tidings "Peace with France," on
printed bills pasted on the sides of stage coaches passing through our
old town, by which means the glad tidings passed through the country
like a gleam of sunlight into many a home, and brought about a sudden
and extraordinary reaction from despair to hope! In a very short time
corn went down to a comparatively low rate, and the poor rate for
Royston, Herts., went down to L355 18s. 3d., or little more than
one-third of the previous year!

Though, as we shall see, the shadow of Napoleon was shortly to settle
again over even the local life of England with a new terror, yet that
short-lived burst of joy, if it did not quite close, gave a brighter
turn to a bitter crisis in which the people of this country were
pressed down by want and war, and may be said to have subsisted upon
barley bread and glory!

The memorable re-action from the scarcity and suffering already
described, in the peace rejoicing of 1802, had scarcely died away in
our streets before, in 1803, the action of Napoleon aroused suspicion,
and {62} our old Volunteers (to be referred to presently) found
themselves called upon in earnest, for "the magnanimous First Consul,"
suddenly changed into the "Corsican Ogre" with a vengeance!

The firmament breaks up. In black eclipse
Light after light goes out. One evil star
Luridly glaring through the smoke of War,
As in the dream of the Apocalypse,
Drags others down!

War broke out and Napoleon formed a great camp at Boulogne for invading
England. This aroused a remarkable outburst of patriotism, and led to
the enrolment of an army of three hundred thousand Volunteers. We, who
sometimes discuss, merely as a theory, the possibility of an invasion
of England, can form a very inadequate idea of how terribly real was
the Napoleonic bogie to our great-grandfathers! They knew that "Boney"
was a character who would stop at nothing in carrying out his designs,
and so it came about that the shadow of that collossal stride of the
Corsican adventurer, darkened the homes in every town, village, and
hamlet in this land, and you cannot even to this day turn over the
pages of old parish records, or stir the