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In the last four chapters we have taken a survey of questions of great interest in British and colonial history, and have therefore interrupted the story of Pitt’s dealings with continental affairs. It is time now to recur to events of world-wide import, namely, the ambitious schemes of the Sovereigns of the East and the great popular upheaval in France.
CHAPTER XXI
THE SCHEMES OF CATHARINE II
I came to Russia poor; but I will not die in debt to the Empire; for I shall leave her the Crimea and Poland as my portion.—Catharine II.
In the spring of the year 1787 the ablest potentate in Europe set out on a State progress to the newly annexed provinces in the South of her Empire. It was carried out with an energy and splendour which illustrated the union of the forethought of the West with the barbaric splendour of the East. A great flotilla of galleys bore the Sovereign, her chief courtiers, the ambassadors of Great Britain, Austria, and France, and numerous attendants down the course of the Dnieper to the city of Kherson near its mouth. By day the banks were fringed with throngs of the peasants of Little Russia, brought up to order, while ever and anon the shouts of Cossacks, Calmucks, and Circassians impressed the beholders with a sense of the boundless resources of that realm. By night the welkin flared with illuminations; and the extent of the resting-places, which had arisen like exhalations at the bidding of her favourite, Prince Potemkin, promised the speedy inroad of civilization into the lands over which the Turk still held sway. In truth, far more impressive to the mind’s eye was the imperious will of which these marvels were the manifestation, the will of Catharine II.[782]
At her invitation there joined her near Potemkin’s creation, the city of Ekaterinoslav, another monarch of romantic and adventurous character. Joseph II of Austria, head of the Holy Roman Empire, now reluctantly turned towards the eastern conquests to which she had long beckoned him. Together they proceeded on the progress southwards to Kherson, which they entered under a triumphal arch bearing the inscription in Greek, “The way to Byzantium.” A still more impressive proof of the activity of her masterful favourite awaited them. Potemkin had pushed on the work of the new dockyard at Kherson; and as a result they witnessed the launch of three warships. The largest, of 80 guns, was christened by Catharine herself, “Joseph II.”[783]
Thence the imperial procession wended its way to the much-prized acquisition, the Crimea. In that Tartar Khanate the fertile brain and forceful personality of Potemkin had wrought wonders. It was but four years since the Empress, in her joy at the annexation of that vantage-ground, had pointed on the map to the little township of Akhtiar, re-named it Sevastopol, and ordered the construction of a dockyard and navy. Now, in June 1787, as the allied sovereigns topped the hills which command that port, the Hapsburg ruler uttered a cry of surprise and admiration. For there below lay a squadron of warships, ready, as it seemed, to set sail and plant the cross on the dome of St. Sophia at Constantinople.
Hitherto Joseph II had not shown the amount of zeal befitting an ally and an admirer. True, he had not openly belied the terms of the compact of the year 1781, which had been his sheet-anchor amid the storms of his reign. But that alliance had been the prelude to vast schemes productive at once of longing and distrust. They aimed at nothing less than the partition of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. The glorious days of Prince Eugène were to be recalled, and, on the expulsion of the Tartar horde over the Bosphorus, Austria was to acquire the Turkish lands which that warrior had gained for her by the Peace of Passarowitz (1718), namely, the Banat of Temesvar, the northern half of Servia, and the districts of Wallachia as far as the River Aluta. The only direct gain to Catharine was to be the Tartar territory north of the Black Sea as far as the Dniester. As for Moldavia and Wallachia, they were to form an independent kingdom under a Christian Prince (a plan finally realized in 1858); and the remainder of the Balkan Peninsula was to be ruled by the favourite grandson of the Empress, Prince Constantine.
Outwardly this partition seemed to offer a fair share to Austria. But it was soon clear that the grasping genius of Muscovy would transform the nominally independent kingdoms of Constantinople and Roumania into feudatories and bar to Austria the way to the Lower Danube, the Aegean, and the Lower Adriatic. Not yet were the lessons of the first partition of Poland forgotten at Vienna.[784] Then, too, the Austro-Russian compact had but slightly advanced the interests of Joseph II in Germany. Catharine had done little to further his pet scheme of the Belgic-Bavarian Exchange; and, apart from feminine fumings, she had not seriously counteracted the formation of the League of German Princes whereby Frederick the Great had thwarted that almost revolutionary proposal (1785). Probably this accounts for the reluctance of Joseph to give rein to the southward impulses of the Czarina in that year. At its close Sir Robert Murray Keith, British Ambassador at Vienna, reported that the Czarina’s tour to Kherson was postponed, and four days later he recorded a remarkable conversation in the course of which the Emperor revealed his dislike of the dangerous schemes then mooted for the partition of the Turkish Empire. “I can tell you for certain,” he said, “que si jamais tous les coquins se rompent avec l’Empire Ottoman, France is firmly determined to strike a bold stroke by making herself mistress of Egypt. This I know with certainty from more quarters than one; and M. Tott himself told me at Paris that he had travelled through all Egypt by order of his Court to explore that country in a military light and to lay down a plan for the conquest of it.”[785]
In these words we have probably the reason for the deferring of the Russian schemes against Turkey. They are also noteworthy, as they must have tended to deepen the distrust which Pitt and Carmarthen felt for France. Her chief Minister, Vergennes, figured as the protector of Turkey against Russia, recalling thereby the policy of Louis XV’s reign, which in 1739 availed to tear away from Austria the conquests of Prince Eugène and restore them to the Sublime Porte. But under this show of championship there seems to have lain an alternative policy, that of furthering the partition of Turkey, provided that France acquired Egypt, and some other vantage posts in the Levant. As we have already seen, France was busy in Egypt and the Orient with schemes which probably would have startled the world had she rivetted her hold on the Dutch Netherlands in the year 1787.