Alone of the European States Great Britain could not be balanced but could balance. Great Britain was secure among them and their insecurity. Great Britain alone in her growing monopoly of industry and in her impregnable self-sufficiency, economic and military, could not be pinned down into a diplomatic system; she alone could afford to scorn alliance and could in a moment change from friend to foe and strike at any exposed and vulnerable part of the European group—especially at a maritime neighbour. The British army maintained a proved excellence of a hundred years; it was particularly famous for its endurance; its records of capitulation were rarer than those of any other; it could afford to be small; its infantry stood fire brutally and could charge after losses that would have been fatal to its rivals; it had for framework the squires and the yeomen of solid country-sides, for material the still manly remains of a peasantry in the English shires, the Highlands, whose native language, diet, and race were at that time corrupted by nothing more alien than a little garrison. Finally, there was then available to the full for purposes of war the vigour of an as yet unruined and not yet wholly alienated Ireland.
A navy, adequate in numbers, but no drain upon the productive power of the nation, gave mobility to this force, the soil of these Islands fed the people upon it, and meanwhile an industry, textile and metallic, such as no other country dreamed of, supplied an increasing and overflowing resource for war. It is but a hundred and thirty years since things were thus. A vast change has passed, and it is difficult for the modern student, perplexed and anxious for the future of his country, to enter into the international policy of his fathers; yet must he grasp it if he is to understand what a revolution was effected by the issue of the American War; for it is probable that when the first complete survey of modern Europe is taken, the separation of the American colonies will establish a fixed date which marks not only the division between the monarchical and the bureaucratic, the old and the new Europe, but also, in our province, the division between what had been England and what later came to be called “the Empire”—with the destinies befitting such a title and the colonies to which it is attached.
Vergennes saw that this England, free upon the flank of his embarrassed country, was now suddenly engaged in the most entangling of nets, an unpopular and distant civil war. He knew that with a Protestant population of her own blood (at that time the States were in philosophy wholly Protestant, in tradition entirely English) would only be attacked by the governing families with the utmost reluctance. There was no fear of extreme rigours, or of sharp, cruel, and decisive depression; there was sympathy and relationship on both sides. Therefore the war would drag.
Vergennes had seen, two years before, the little English garrison permitting the inhabitants to arm and drill without interference; he knew that opinion in England was divided upon the rebellion. His whole attention was concentrated upon the prolongation of that struggle and upon postponing to the last the intervention of France. His attention, so given, was successful, and he secured his object.
At first and for as long as might be he would support, unseen, the weaker of the combatants. He received Franklin, though privately; he refused ships or a declaration of war. Arms and ammunition he liberally supplied—but he did so through a private and civilian person, whom he vigorously denounced in public, who had to go through the form of payment from the United States, as might any other dealer, and who was very nearly compelled to go through the form of receiving heavy punishment as well. The private firm so chosen was “Roderigo Hortalez et Cie”; the modern cheat of anonymity in commerce had begun, and Roderigo Hortalez was, in reality, that same shifty, witty, courageous, and unsatisfied man who had already played upon Versailles and Vienna and whose pen was later to deliver so deep a thrust at the Monarchy. Caron, or, to call him by the title of nobility he had purchased, “De Beaumarchais.”
While Vergennes was acting thus, every effort was being made at Vienna to advance the journey of the Emperor: postponed from January to February, from February to March, that journey was at last undertaken, and with the first days of April 1777 Joseph was present upon French soil, and driving down the Brussels road towards Paris.
THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE
AND RECENTLY RESTORED TO VERSAILLES
But all that while, in spite of his advent, the rush of the Court had increased, and to the twenty other fashions and excitements of the moment one more had been added—enlistment for America. The youngster, who was typical of all that wealthy youth, not yet sobered or falsified by fame, La Fayette, was determined to go; and almost as a pastime, though it was a generous and an enthusiastic one, the American Revolution was the theme of the Court in general. It became the theme of the Polignac clique in particular, a theme sometimes rivalling the high interest of the cards, or lending an added splendour to fantastic head-dress and to incongruous jewels.