The War of Wars (18 page)

Catherine and Potemkin argued for days on end. Catherine wept. Potemkin raged. He bit his nails while the tumult hit Catherine in the bowels. By 22 March, Catherine was ill in bed with ‘spasms and strong colic’. Even when they rowed, they still behaved like an old husband and wife: Potemkin suggested she take medicine for her bowels but she insisted on relying ‘on nature’. The Prince kept up the pressure.

‘How can our recruits fight Englishmen?’ Potemkin asked theatrically. Then news came of the British climbdown, which intensely angered their Prussian allies. A bust of Fox was given a special place of honour in Catherine’s gallery. This diplomatic crisis had nearly caused Pitt’s fall after six years in office. It had been disastrously mishandled from the start.

Why had Pitt undertaken such a risk? The answer was not pressure from the Prussians, but the perception in Whitehall that Russia had become the dangerous man of Europe. Under the dazzling Potemkin and the devious Catherine, it had become a serious danger to European
peace both in its own right and as an example, if its expansion went unchecked.

Russia had secured at Ochakov a presence in the Black Sea which would permit it to trade valuable timber and naval supplies, hitherto the prerogative of the British and north Europeans, with France and Spain. Russia was now constructing a port at Kherson and one at Akhtiar, now renamed Sebastopol. Potemkin established Ekaterinoslav (‘Catherine’s Glory’) in the empty steppe which by 1792 consisted of some 550 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants, and expanded Odessa.

It seemed that Potemkin’s next ambition was to partition Poland, or even turn it into a satellite to quash its ‘revolution’ – actually the installation of a hereditary monarchy. The possibility of a war between Russia and Prussia never seemed far distant. The Russians had also recently given King Gustavus of Sweden a bloody nose during his abortive war against them.

Catherine detested the French Revolution, which she regarded as a ‘poison’ and ‘a sickness of the mind’ – although there were at this stage no thoughts of intervention against it. But with Potemkin’s huge and lethal Cossack forces in the south and the substantial and militarized Russian army in the north – partly in imitation of the Prussian example – Russia was a force to be reckoned with.

The Russian army, uniquely in Europe, was made up not of mercenaries and impressed men, but of peasants recruited in huge conscription drives, often chained when they were taken away. They lived a spartan, wretched existence under sadistic aristocratic Russian officers or German and French mercenaries, but they were extremely tough, brave and devoted to their homeland. As the Comte de Langeron, a French officer who detested the beatings and forced marches from which around half the soldiers routinely died, wrote of the Russian soldier: ‘He combines all the qualities which go to make a good soldier and hero. He is as abstemious as the Spaniard, as enduring as a Bohemian, as full of national pride as an Englishman and as susceptible to impulse and inspiration as French, Walloons, or Hungarians.’

Catherine herself presided over one of the most glittering, wealthy, intellectually stimulating courts in Europe and was a captivating,
benevolent ruler. She was no liberal: she drew up 500 articles or ‘Great Instructions’ which codified the laws of Russia according to some of the principles of Montesquieu. But she refused to abolish serfdom, for fear this would turn the aristocracy against her and upset the established order – although she convened a 500-delegate assembly to have an advisory role. It was this vibrant, aggressive country that Pitt perceived as the greater danger to European peace, not France. Napoleon much later was to conclude the same.

The second major diplomatic flurry before 1793 was to be the direct cause of the war with France. It concerned, of all countries, Holland, and two of the major continental players, pushy young Prussia and and Austria. Dominated by the latter, Holland in 1784 had come under pressure from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Joseph II, to open up the estuary of the Scheldt, which it controlled, and give sea access to Antwerp in the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians had backed off, but the British had guaranteed Dutch control of the key waterway, considered essential to British continental trade, as well as engaging in a Triple Alliance with the Prussians, Austria’s rival, to prevent this happening again.

Yet the Emperor had not abandoned his hopes: a tall, prepossessing man, he had levied considerable taxes from his far-flung possessions for the war with Turkey, in which he was allied with Russia, and now issued extensive liberal reforms which infuriated the conservative rulers of his many fiefdoms. There were revolts in Bohemia, Lombardy and Hungary early in 1789 and, of much more concern to the neighbouring British, in the Austrian Netherlands, when the Emperor removed the privileges of the noble estates in Brabant (most of modern Belgium).

His actions caused demonstrations by radicals who looked to France, at an early stage in its Revolution, for support, and incensed conservatives who set up a Belgic Republic looking to the Triple Alliance for protection. The Prussians were delighted by the chance to foment disorder in the Austrian empire. The problem was briefly settled with a
Triple Alliance guarantee to the Austrian Netherlands and a partial Austrian climbdown. This apparently minor nation, however, now rose dramatically to European attention with the French army’s advance into Belgium and defiance of the Austrians.

With the fall of Mas, Brussels, Louvain, Liège and Antwerp in late 1792, the French threatened to pursue the Austrians into Holland and curtail freedom of navigation in the Scheldt. To add insult to injury, the French said on 3 December that they would put Louis XVI on trial. Pitt, in spite of his confident public pronouncements, was deeply anxious. Grenville had instructed Auckland, the ambassador in the Hague, to tell the Dutch government that there would be ‘no hesitation’ in supporting it if Holland was invaded. Dumouriez, the victorious French general, was however prepared to guarantee the neutrality of an independent Belgium so as not to offend the British, whom he rightly regarded as France’s potentially most dangerous foe: but he was not in charge in France.

The mood in England was stiffening behind the uncertain Pitt. Fox launched a furious attack on the call-up of the militia. But he was roundly denounced, loyalist associations being set up in support of the government. Pitt meanwhile in December met an unofficial French envoy, Bernard Maret, and issued a virtual ultimatum: ‘I . . . mentioned to him distinctly that the resolution announced respecting the Scheldt was considered as proof of an intention to proceed to a rupture with Holland; that a rupture with Holland on this ground or any other injurious to their rights, must also lead to an immediate rupture with this country . . .’

Although the French now assured Pitt they had no intention of invading Holland, Belgium had been annexed, its social system was overturned and the Scheldt agreement violated, with French warships putting in there. The British issued a dignified further declaration: ‘England never will consent that France shall arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure, and under the pretence of a . . . natural right, of which she makes herself the only judge, the political system of Europe, established by solemn treaties, and guaranteed by the consent of all the powers’. She must ‘show herself disposed to renounce her views of aggression . . . and confine herself within her own territory’.

The King himself urged Pitt to take a tougher line. The French foreign minister, Pierre Lebrun, sent a letter via Maret through a British intermediary which sought to indicate a subtle French climbdown. Lebrun’s letter ‘authorized me to declare to Mr Pitt that the Scheldt would be as good as given up; that the Convention would do away by a revision of its law all the offensive matter contained in the decree of the 19 November [the ‘fraternal’ decree], and that the Executive Council had rejected the offers of Liège and some of the Belgic provinces to incorporate themselves with France.’

But Pitt was unimpressed with the offer. According to Maret: he ‘went into the Cabinet with it, and in half an hour came out furious, freighted with the whole of its bile, with the addition of Mr Burke, who attended tho’ not of the Cabinet; and returning me the paper, prohibited me from corresponding with the French executive council on the subject of peace or war.’ Maret continued: ‘[he] went into the cabinet. I went away chagrined.’ It seems that after all the bluster and inconsistency of the previous French approaches, the cabinet had stiffened up Pitt.

On 23 January news arrived of the execution of Louis XVI. Chauvelin was promptly ordered to leave the country. When he reached Paris on 29 January there was an outcry. An embargo was imposed on Dutch and British shipping and Dumouriez was ordered to invade Holland. On 1 February the Convention declared war on Holland and Britain and urged the British people to rise up against their masters. The news arrived in London on 7 February, and on 11 February the King declared war.

The following day Pitt announced the news to the House of Commons in what was obviously a state of inebriation. The
Morning Chronicle
compiled a verse on the prime minister at that solemn moment: ‘I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, can you?/What? cannot see the Speaker? I see two.’ Although Pitt was a chronic alcoholic addicted to port, he rarely lost his icy self-control: he had obviously been overcome by the enormity of the moment and the failure of his appeasement policy. The issue had been the somewhat peripheral one of Holland. To Pitt what was at stake was not just trade, but the violation of France’s treaty commitment. He did not expect the
conflict to last more than a year. In the event it was to be the longest in modern British history, to convulse a continent, and to drive him to an early grave.

It is hard to reach any conclusion other than that the British government was almost wilfully blind and isolationist in the years leading up to the war, preferring to avert its gaze from the growing tumult across the Channel. The trial and execution of Louis XVI were probably the real defining moments in forcing Pitt and the British into war. The Revolution had turned seriously sour the previous August: up to then fashionable opinion, and particularly Fox and the Whigs, were prone to view it with indulgence, as a constitutionalist movement embracing civil rights and an end to French absolutism, on a par with Britain’s own movement to constitutional monarchy.

The assaults on the Tuileries and the prison massacres had altered all that. The horror of what was going on across the Channel had changed the minds both of the government and the public: the cold-blooded execution of the King galvanized them, as it did George III. Navigation rights in the Scheldt and the principle of adherence to treaties were of great importance, no doubt, but not enough to propel a peace-loving nation to war. The reason was that France was seen to be a barbaric, as well as an expansionist, power.

It had, in fact, taken the British government a very long time to reach this conclusion, and if it had done so sooner – when France was at its weakest in 1791 – it might have dealt a death blow to a tottering revolution: neither the revolutionary excesses, nor Napoleon Bonaparte, nor the twenty-three-year war might ever have been. But foresight was not then – nor has it ever been – a distinguishing feature of British foreign policy. When Britain finally went to war it was with a country racked by strife, but already recovering from the first blow of attack and vigorously fighting back. Moreover, dragged reluctantly into conflict, Pitt now followed his policy of appeasement with a disastrous policy of half-hearted engagement and military blunders that were reminiscent of the initial war policy of Neville Chamberlain a century and a half later.

When Pitt had declared war on revolutionary France he had good reason to believe it would be a short one: the execution of the King had triggered off nearly a year and half of Terror, fratricide and bloodletting in France that did not augur well for the survival of the Revolution or the country’s war effort. Meanwhile, after a long period of spectacular French military successes, her continental enemies, Prussia and Austria, at last appeared to have her on the run. Finally Pitt had an overweening confidence in the ability of British armies to bring matters to a speedy conclusion.

As soon as the war broke out, with his usual administrative efficiency Pitt embarked on four major initiatives: first, to safeguard the homeland against the remote danger of invasion from France; second, and more vigorously, under Grenville’s direction, to finance Britain’s friends throughout the continent; third, to put Britain’s naval power in a state of readiness; fourth, to encourage the internal dissidents within France.

Pitt’s first priority was defending Britain. At this stage this was not taken very seriously, because France seemed in no position to defend its own borders, let alone mount an invasion across the Channel. The government considered Hampshire, Sussex and South Kent the likeliest place for French landings. Naval squadrons were to be sent to Weymouth, Dungeness and the Dunes. Regular troops were to be raised to buttress local militia in sudden levies, and a proposal for ‘driving the country’ – evacuating livestock from the potential invasion areas at speed if the French came – was adopted.

Meanwhile, Grenville’s diplomatic offensive was vigorous and practical. As already noted, the Russians had until recently been considered the chief danger to European peace, with the Prussians following as a close second. Catherine the Great was not quite an enemy of Britain, while the Austrians were now in an uneasy alliance with her which the British believed acted as a restraint. The double offensive of the Russians and then the Prussians against Poland had revolted public opinion in Britain, and Austrian silence suggested tacit connivance with its ally, Russia. With the coming of the French Revolution, however, relations between Russia and Britain were at last easing. Catherine detested the revolutionaries and she now at last agreed to a renewal of a commercial treaty with Britain, as well as a pact specifying co-operation in the event of war.