[412] B.M. Add. MSS., 27914. This letter and other documents of interest will appear in my volume “Pitt and Napoleon Miscellanies.”
[413] B.M. Add. MSS., 28060. “Lord C.” may be Lord Clarendon, who had previously given advice to Lord Carmarthen.
[414] Ibid.
[415] B.M. Add. MSS., 28060. It is endorsed, in Pitt’s hand: “Oct. 12, 1784, Memm for Instructions to Mr. Fitzherbert.” Carmarthen’s draft is almost certainly that which is printed by Mr. Oscar Browning in the “Leeds Memoranda,” p. 103 n.; but the evidence here given shows that that draft cannot be Pitt’s, as Mr. Browning at that time (1884) naturally inferred.
[416] This is well set forth in the despatches of Lord Dalrymple, British Ambassador at Berlin, to Carmarthen. The latter wrote to Harris on 24th February 1786, that Vorontzoff would try to persuade Catharine II to restore the “good system,” and to induce Joseph II to help in the work; but nothing came of it (B.M. Add. MSS., 28061).
[417] “Malmesbury Diaries,” ii, 104. Memorandum of 2nd February 1785.
[418] Even after the disasters of 1813 Napoleon wrote: “Holland is a French country and will remain so for ever” (“Lettres inédites,” 6th November 1813).
[419] See Colenbrander, “De Patriottentijd,” i, 415, for the Prince’s difficulty in forming (February 1784) a permanent force of 8,000 sailors subject to the Council of War and not to the provincial Estates; also “A View of the Policy ... of the United Provinces” (Dublin, 1787). As Grenville wrote to Pitt from The Hague on 31st July 1787, that the Dutch understood their Constitution very imperfectly (“Dropmore P.,” iii, 410), I may be pardoned for not seeking to unravel it here.
[420] “Malmesbury Diaries,” ii, 92–4, 222–4.
[421] B.M. Add. MSS., 28060, Letter of 23rd August 1785. These “private” letters are often more interesting and important than those printed in the “Malmesbury Diaries,” which form but a small portion of the whole.