William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

He who gains nothing, loses.—Catharine II.

We cannot be considered as in any degree bound to support a system of an offensive nature, the great end of which appears to be aggrandisement rather than security.—Pitt and the Duke of Leeds, 24th June 1789.

The excess of an evil tends to produce its own cure. The resources of two great Empires were being used for a partition of the Turkish dominions, in a way which must have led to a succession of wars without benefiting the Christians of the East. But the prospect of the aggrandisement of Russia speedily led the hardy Gustavus to strike a blow at her northern capital; and when Catharine incited the Danes to deal a counterstroke at his unguarded rear, Great Britain and Prussia intervened to prevent the overthrow of Sweden and of the balance of power in the Baltic. Thus, forces which pressed on towards Constantinople produced a sharp reaction in widening circles and prompted States to attack or arm against their neighbours—Sweden against Russia, Denmark against Sweden, and England and Prussia against Denmark. Consequently Gustavus III might claim to have saved the Turkish Empire; for his action brought into the arena England and, to some extent, the Dutch Republic.

Less obvious but more potent was the influence of Prussia. Her forces, cantoned along the Austrian and Russian borders, halved the efforts of those Empires against the Turks and encouraged the Polish nationalists to resist Russian predominance at Warsaw. Thus, by the year 1789, instead of moving the forces of two Empires and of Poland against the Turks, Catharine found her energies clogged, her resources strained, and only one important conquest achieved, that of Oczakoff. Over against this triumph she had to set the menacing attitude of the Triple Alliance lately framed by Great Britain, Prussia, and the Dutch Republic.

For a time the Czarina cherished the hope that the insanity of George III, and the accession of the Regent, would lead to the downfall of Pitt and the reversal of British policy. On 8/19 December 1788 she wrote to her ambassador at London, Count Vorontzoff (Woronzow), charging him to make overtures to Fox and the Dukes of Portland and Devonshire for the renewal of the Anglo-Russian alliance, which for the last five years she had spurned. With a vehemence of style, in which feelings figured as facts, she inveighed against Pitt for slighting her many offers of friendship, for allowing Ainslie and Elliot to incite Turkey and Sweden to attack her, and for entangling himself in the dangerous and visionary schemes of Hertzberg. All this, however, would be changed when the Prince of Wales and Fox came to power.

On 19/30 January Vorontzoff replied that he had seen Fox, who accorded him a hearty welcome, and said that in a fortnight the Regency would be established. He (Fox) would then be Foreign Secretary, and would be able to speak of England’s treaty obligations to Prussia. The language of Fox showed some measure of caution, and partly palliated the gross imprudence of according an interview at all. A little later (perhaps before receiving Vorontzoff’s answer) the Empress expressed her admiration of the reply sent by the Prince of Wales (it was really Burke’s and Sheridan’s) to Pitt, as it argued distinguished talents. The Prince and Fox, she said, would certainly prevent their people being dragged at the heel of Prussia. As for herself, she declared her wish to grant them a commercial treaty, which she had refused two years before. The correspondence throws a curious light on the feline diplomacy of Catharine and on the singular folly of Fox.[825] It also prepares us for the unpatriotic part which he played in the Anglo-Russian dispute of the year 1791. The recovery of George III, about the time when Catharine indited the latter epistle, pricked the bubble, and left Pitt in a position of greater power than ever.

Thus, in the spring of 1789, the general position was somewhat as follows. England, Prussia, and Holland, acting in close concert, were resolved to prevent any revolutionary changes in the Baltic. This implied that Denmark could not attack Sweden, and that Gustavus might war against Catharine until she chose to accept the mediation of the Allies for the re-establishment of the status quo ante bellum. As for the other Powers, France was almost a nullity owing to the internal troubles which were leading up to the Revolution. Spain was friendly to the Allies and favoured the cause of Sweden and Turkey.[826] Moreover the Poles, acting on hints from Berlin, were beginning to shake off Russian tutelage and to feel their way towards a drastic reform of their chaotic polity. Early in 1789 the Prussian Court sought for a close political and commercial union with Poland. The ensuing compact freed the Poles from the obligations contracted by King Stanislaus with his former mistress, Catharine II; it further promised to bind their realm to England and Holland; above all, it opened up vast possibilities for the regeneration of that hapless people.

As for the concert of the two Empires, discords were already heard. Joseph II, alarmed at the turmoil in Hungary and Belgium, as well as disgusted at the results of his first Turkish campaign, talked of waging merely a defensive war, and of offering easy terms to the Ottomans. Potemkin, puffed up by the capture of Oczakoff, announced his resolve that Moldavia and Wallachia should never fall to the Hapsburgs—an aim that had been distinctly formulated at Vienna. Russia herself, a prey to the greedy gang who fawned on the Empress and drained her treasury, seemed unable to bear for long the strain of war on two frontiers, and of precautionary measures against Prussia. The Court of Berlin, as Mirabeau had pointed out, was honeycombed by intrigues and favouritism; but it was sound at the core compared with Russia. The French author of the “Secret Memoirs of the Court of St. Petersburg” states that in the declining years of Catharine the Russian finances were exploited in a way more disgraceful than even France had seen; that none were so little as the great; and that officers notoriously lived on the funds of their regiments. Catharine herself once jauntily remarked about a colonel—“Well! If he be poor, it is his own fault; for he has long had a regiment.” It speaks volumes for the patriotism and stupidity of the troops that they still had enough of the old Muscovite staunchness to carry them to victory over the Turks. But such was the case. In the campaigns of 1789 the army of Suvóroff gained several successes, and the troops of Joseph II, once more urged onwards by that ruler, also had their meed of triumph.

This was partly due to the death of Abdul Hamid I, which brought to the Ottoman throne a feebler successor, Selim III (April 1789). The Grand Vizier, the soul of the war party, was soon overthrown, and the next commander-in-chief, the Pacha of Widdin, impaired by his slothfulness the fighting power of the Ottomans.[827] Belgrade and Semendria were lost. But even more serious, perhaps, than these reverses was the emergence of plans at Berlin which portended gain to Prussia at the expense of Turkey. We are concerned here with European affairs only so far as they affected British policy, and must therefore concentrate our attention on the statecraft of the years 1789 and 1790, which threatened sweeping changes on the Continent and brought into play the cautious conservatism of Pitt. The French Revolution and its immense consequences will engage our attention later.

As we saw in Chapter XVI, the Prussian statesman, Hertzberg, had long been maturing an ingenious scheme for the aggrandisement of Prussia, by a general shuffling together of boundaries in the East of Europe.[828] On 13th May 1789 he presented it in its complete form to Frederick William, who, after long balancings on this question, now accorded his consent. The Prussian monarch thereby pledged himself, at a favourable occasion, to offer his armed mediation to Russia, Austria, and Turkey. If the two Empires overcame the Sultan, as seemed probable, Prussia was to threaten their frontiers with masses of troops and, under threat of war, compel them to accept her terms. If, however, victory inclined to the crescent, Dietz, the Prussian envoy at Constantinople, was to remind the Sublime Porte that the triumph was largely due to Prussia’s action in enabling Sweden to continue the war against Russia, and in thwarting Catharine’s plan of an invasion of Turkey by the Poles. Dietz was also to hint “in a delicate and not threatening manner,” that if Prussia threw her weight into the scales against the Turks, the new Coalition must speedily overwhelm her. “Therefore the Porte will do well not to balance on that point,” but will accept Prussia’s terms.[829] There was a third alternative, that the war would drag on indecisively, in which case the exhaustion of the belligerents must enable Prussia to work her will the more readily.