At the end of May he left for a tour in the French provinces. His ineptitudes continue. He has left notes of his opinions for us to enjoy. He judges the army, and condemns it—all except the pipe-clay and white facings of the Artois Regiment. That pleased him. He saw nothing of the cannon which were to break Austria and capture a woman of his house for Napoleon. He judges the navy after a minute attention, and finds it—on the eve of the American War!—thoroughly bad. One thing he does note clearly, that Provence, the King’s brother, has been seen going through France in state, as though sure of the succession. After what had passed at Versailles, such expectations on the part of Louis XVI.’s brother must have bred in Joseph a mixture of anxiety and amusement.
He returned to Vienna, and began to address himself to his next failure in policy and judgment—he coveted Bavaria. The death of the Elector of Bavaria would raise the issue of his succession. That death was approaching, and Joseph began to intrigue through Mercy, through his mother, and as best he could through his sister, for the succession to the Duchy and for the support of France against Prussia in his outworn, out-dated ambition. While he still played with such toys, much larger forces were ready to enter the scene, and changes that would make the little balances of German States forgotten; for as that summer of 1777 heightened, dry, intensely hot, and as all the air of the life around Versailles was cleared by the new intimate relations of the Queen and her husband; as the chief domestic problem of the reign was resolved, as it became increasingly certain that the royal marriage would soon be a true marriage and the way to the succession secure, there had come also the certitude of war with England in the matter of the American colonies.
It is upon this latter certitude that attention must now be fixed, before one can turn to the tardy accomplishment of the Queen’s hopes for an heir. The foreign policy of that moment is essential to a comprehension of her fate, for upon the unexpected turn of that unexpected conflict with Great Britain was to depend the fatal respite which destiny granted to the French Monarchy: a respite of years, during whose short progress the financial tangle became hopeless, the Queen’s ill-repute fixed, and the Crown’s last cover of ceremony destroyed.
I say there had come a certitude of war with England.
Of three things one: either England would reduce the rebels; or, having failed so to reduce them, she would compromise with them for the maintenance of at least a nominal sovereignty; or, she would wholly fail and would be compelled wholly to retire. In the first case it must be her immediate business to attack the French Government whose secret aid had alone made the prolongation of rebellion possible; in the second case, with still more security and a still more confident power, she could attack an enemy which, because it had not dared openly to help her foes, had earned their contempt and lost its own self-confidence. In the third case she would find herself free from all embarrassment and at liberty to destroy a rival marine, whose inferiority was incontestable but whose presence had been sufficient to embarrass her complete control of the North Atlantic and to sustain—however disingenuously—her rebellious subjects.
In any one of these three issues a war with England must come. But these three issues had not an equal chance of achievement. A complete victory of the British troops, probable as it was, could hardly result in a permanent military occupation of a vast district, English in blood and speaking the English tongue. A complete defeat of British regulars at the hands of the varied and uncertain minority of colonists, and the acknowledgment of American independence by a Britain unembarrassed in Europe, was an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys as was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly unpractical minds as that of Turgot, or to popular journalists of the type which then, as to-day, are uninstructed whether in historical or in military affairs.
The middle issue was so much the more probable as to appear a calculable thing: the troops of George III. would determine the campaign, but the settlement following the expensive success of the British army would be a compromise whereby the colonies should be free to administer their own affairs, should be bound in some loose way to Great Britain, and should stand benevolently neutral towards, if not in part supporters of, her position in Europe.
The formula which guides a commercial State such as Britain in its colonial wars has long been familiar to its rivals; it is as simple as it is wise. Though we give it the epithet of “generous” and speak of the “granting of self-government,” while enemies will call it, with equal inaccuracy, “a capitulation” followed by “an alliance,” the nature and purpose of such compromises are those of a fixed policy and one upon whose unalterable data the British Empire has been built up.
It was in the nature of things that the British Government in this summer of ’77 should first seek to master the Americans in the field, next compromise with the defeated colonials, set them up as a nation nominally dependent, really allied, and so find itself free in Europe for the great duel with France. At Versailles Vergennes prepared not attack but resistance, and pulled with an accurate proportion of effort all the strings that should delay Great Britain, on the one hand, and, on the other, unite into one body of resistance against her the Atlantic seaboard of Europe and the principal navies of the Continent—that is, the Powers of France and the Peninsula; the admiralties of Versailles, Lisbon and Madrid.
As the Emperor Joseph’s carriage rolled westward along the main road of Brittany, approaching the gates of Brest, Vergennes was signing for despatch to the Spanish Court that note of his which inaugurated the active part of his plan of defence against England. Precisely a week later, Burgoyne and his forces started southward from Canada upon what should have been the decisive march of the British campaign in America.