Yet Pitt in early 1793 did his utmost to keep these factors distinct. He was not seeking to overturn the Revolution, but to safeguard the British national interest. As war loomed, he called on France to renounce ‘all ideas of aggrandizement’ and to ‘confine herself within her own territories’.5 Months after it broke out he was happy to confirm that ‘if sufficient security and reparation could be had for this country’, he could ‘allow their government to remain even upon its present footing’.6 To Pitt, it was important to be clear that the reason for war was British security and not French royalty. He was no doubt conscious that it was necessary to motivate the British public, and he hoped for a short war in which France would be taught not to cause trouble, even with its changed government. His position was also a reflection of his own honest opinion that the war was not justified unless British interests were directly threatened. He believed, too, that the clear limitation of the objectives should eventually make it easier to find a solution. Pitt’s careful, practical and problem-solving mind was at work again, but so was the misunderstanding which would plague him in the years to come: an underestimation of how much Britain’s powerful neighbour had changed. It would turn out that the Revolution was an animal that could not be caged. The new political beast now at large would react to prodding and restraint by bursting forth with ever greater fury.
If Pitt underestimated France in the longer term, he was nevertheless clear in his mind after the events of November and December 1792 that war was unlikely to be avoided. He would be criticised by nineteenth-century Whig historians for making war too readily, an accusation levelled by Fox and the Whig minority at the time. Fox acknowledged that Louis XVI’s execution ‘stained the noblest cause that ever was in the hands of Men’,7 but saw the war against France as the reinforcement of despotic monarchies. He thought Pitt was failing to settle matters by negotiation because ‘Pitt in these businesses is a great Bungler.’8 True enough, there were several conciliatory approaches from the French to Pitt and Grenville in January 1793. Some of the French leaders saw where events were heading, and understood the danger of war with Britain even as opinion in the British government was hardening. But the overtures from Paris were always hampered by their decree of 15 December 1792, which stated that revolution would be instituted in all conquered territories. Pitt’s speech of 1 February shows the importance he attached to this:
They have explained what that liberty is which they wish to give to every nation; and if they will not accept of it voluntarily, they compel them. They take every opportunity to destroy every institution that is most sacred and most valuable in every nation where their armies have made their appearance; and under the name of liberty, they have resolved to make every country in substance, if not in form, a province dependent on themselves, through the despotism of jacobin societies … We see, therefore, that France has trampled under foot all laws, human and divine. She has at last avowed the most insatiable ambition, and greatest contempt for the law of nations, which all independent states have hitherto professed most religiously to observe; and unless she is stopped in her career, all Europe must soon learn their ideas of justice – law of nations – models of government – and principles of liberty from the mouth of French cannon.9
Concessions were offered to British sensitivities in letters from the French Foreign Minister Pierre Lebrun and Napoleon’s future Foreign Minister, Maret, in mid-January. Maret’s letter was conveyed to Pitt by an acquaintance of his called William Miles who, somewhat to Pitt’s annoyance, had set himself up as a channel of communication. When Miles passed on the letter, which offered to remove ‘the offensive matter’ in the November and December decrees in return for British recognition of the Republic, he was disappointed by Pitt’s reaction outside the Cabinet Room:
Pitt received Maret’s letter with great good humour from me, with all the marginal notes exactly as I had scribbled them, went into the Cabinet with it, and in half an hour came out furious, frighted 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. I went away chagrined.10
The Cabinet may have known at this time of the extensive French preparations for a further campaign in the Low Countries. Amidst the nuances and concessions of different approaches, they probably decided that they had to be guided by actual events and what was really happening on the ground. A final French diplomatic mission was despatched to London in late January, but was overtaken by events. The execution of Louis XVI was followed by the expulsion from Britain of the former French Ambassador, Chauvelin, under the new Alien Act. His return to Paris precipitated the French into rescinding the commercial treaty with Britain and ordering the invasion of Holland. On 1 February the Convention declared war on Britain and Holland. There was not a single dissenting vote.
The news arrived in London six days later. On 12 February Pitt led the Commons debate on the King’s message announcing the beginning of the war. Britain had, he said, ‘pushed, to its utmost extent, the system of temperance and moderation’, but had ‘been slighted and abused’. He concluded:
Such is the conduct which they have pursued; such is the situation in which we stand. It now remains to be seen whether, under Providence, the efforts of a free, brave, loyal and happy people, aided by their allies, will not be successful in checking the progress of a system, the principles of which, if not opposed, threaten the most fatal consequences to the tranquillity of this country, the security of its allies, the good order of every European government, and the happiness of the whole of the human race.11
Pitt’s brilliant reputation had been made in peace. Now it would be tested in war.
Pitt was not by instinct a military man. He had always been an enthusiast for the navy: it was partly due to him that Britain at the outset of war possessed by far the most formidable navy in the world. He had not, however, ever seen a battlefield and had little knowledge of the army, disarmingly admitting in 1794 that ‘I distrust extremely any Ideas of my own on Military Subjects.’12 Nevertheless, he soon busied himself in his typically methodical and purposeful way in preparing for the coming conflict, no doubt hoping that it would be a temporary interruption of his peacetime objectives.
On the outbreak of war in February 1793 he faced three major challenges. The first was the need to deal with the deteriorating economic situation whilst simultaneously meeting the anticipated expenses of the conflict. Government stocks lost over 20 per cent of their value that winter, partly because of international tensions but also because the rapid accumulation of capital which Pitt had lauded the year before had hit a cyclical contraction. There was a sharp rise in bankruptcies, accompanied by a run on the small banks and ‘Deputations from every Class of the mercantile World’ beating on Pitt’s door.13 He responded in April by deliberately increasing the money supply: issuing new exchequer bills and for the first time permitting the Bank of England to issue £5 notes (£10 had been the previous minimum). These measures helped to stop the contraction of credit and the withdrawal of gold and silver from the banks.
The economic situation stabilised in subsequent months. Presenting his first wartime budget on 11 March, Pitt made permanent the temporary taxes designed to finance the naval mobilisation of 1790, provided for a sharp increase in military spending but, even faced with war, resolved to continue the payments into his cherished Sinking Fund: ‘Whatever degree of exertion may be made in the present contest, which involves the dearest and most sacred objects, still we must not allow ourselves to neglect what likewise involves in it the permanent interests of ourselves and our posterity.’14 Not only would £1 million go into the Fund, but also the extra £200,000 he had allocated the previous year. Pitt’s determination to continue the increased payments into the Sinking Fund is a poignant reminder that he and his contemporaries could not have imagined the scale and duration of the conflict then beginning. In time
his Sinking Fund project would become discredited, since it relied for its success on the existence of a surplus. If the government had to borrow at high rates of interest in order to repay past borrowings financed at a lower rate, then a Sinking Fund became self-defeating; and it would not be long before these conditions would prevail.
The second challenge that spring was to put into meaningful form the de facto alliance of countries now at war with France. In March the French merrily added to the growing list by declaring war on Spain, but the allied powers possessed no unified statement of war aims or mechanism for coordinating their military activities. The task of creating some broad agreement on objectives fell principally to Grenville, and it was not an easy one. Russia and Prussia were busy suppressing the brave revolts of the Poles, and the Austrians were still pursuing their cherished goal of obtaining Bavaria in exchange for relinquishing the Austrian Netherlands. It was thus a fundamental flaw from the outset in what became known as the First Coalition against France that Britain’s major Continental allies: Prussia and Austria, were fighting from different motives than those of Britain and Holland. For them, Holland mattered little to their security but Poland mattered a great deal. An independent Poland could become the next centre of revolution after France, or by dynastic merger with Saxony could become a greater power in the region. Alternatively, if it was to be partitioned, then an agreed distribution of the spoils was important to maintaining a balance of power. This preoccupation with Poland was perhaps underestimated in London, and would certainly prove deeply destructive to the war effort in the west. To Pitt, who had to avert his gaze from what he called the ‘odious’ second partition of Poland in 1793, events in western Europe had to be separated from those in the east. For his allies, however, they were intimately connected.
For the meantime at least, the First Coalition was constructed around a series of bilateral conventions. France was now at war simultaneously with Britain, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, many northern Italian states and many small German states of the Holy Roman Empire. A bankrupt and divided nation was about to take on the combined might of almost the whole of the rest of Europe. The French navy was heavily outnumbered, and French military operations were plagued by workers’ strikes and administrative collapse. In theory the army could command 270,000 men, but already they faced 350,000 allied soldiers preparing to attack them on four fronts. It is little wonder that Ministers in London thought the war would be over in one or two campaigning seasons.
The conduct of finance and the construction of alliances were nothing new to Pitt, but the third major challenge he faced that spring required something new of him. This was the choice of how to deploy the available British forces in Europe and around the world. At full strength, the navy could put more than six hundred vessels to sea, manned by more than 100,000 men. The army, however, was very small – fewer than 14,000 men in the British Isles with perhaps twice as many again deployed to India and the West Indies. Its leadership and professionalism were at a low ebb and it possessed neither the size nor the capability to make a major contribution to a land war. The quickest and traditional way for eighteenth-century Britain to fight in Europe was to hire German mercenaries; this tradition was now continued, with the employment of 14,000 troops from Hanover and eight thousand from Hesse. Financial muscle and naval might were what Britain could bring to the war: not surprisingly Pitt, Dundas and Grenville considered they could emulate the great Chatham by blockading France, taking away her colonies such as those in the West Indies whose economic value could be transferred from France to Britain, while leaving most of the Continental fighting to others who were happy to be paid for it.
If this was indeed the strategy it contained one major defect in its conception: it would not of itself deliver any knockout blow against France. The Duke of Richmond seems to have been alone in arguing for all forces to be concentrated on a thrust into north-west France to support the royalists in that region and face the French with yet another front. It also contained a defect in its execution: Ministers were easily diverted from it when unexpected pressures arose elsewhere. For the French now took the initiative, invading Holland in late February and presenting the Dutch with an immediate crisis. Pitt and Dundas decided to send across the Channel what little reserves they had, 1500 men from the Brigade of Guards. As it turned out, the French were heavily defeated by the Austrians twice in the course of March, removing the immediate threat to Holland. But Britain had now begun a commitment to the campaign in the Low Countries from which it would not be possible to withdraw. Furthermore, the British troops on the Continent had been hurriedly put under the command of the Duke of York, George III’s twenty-eight-year-old second son, who had been in place to command the Hanoverians, who were not yet ready. As a result, he would come to command a steadily larger force, despite lacking the authority and the military experience to do so successfully.
It is therefore evident that in the opening weeks of the war the seeds of future military and diplomatic failure were being liberally sown. For the moment such problems were masked by the success of allied armies. The French were expelled from Belgium and were soon besieged by the Austrians and Prussians in Valenciennes, Condé and Mainz. More British troops were sent over to enlarge the Duke of York’s army and permit him to begin an advance into French territory with the objective of taking Dunkirk on the Channel coast. In the Pyrenees too, the French were coming under pressure. Rebellion brewed in many provinces of France. Pitt seemed to have every ground for his usual optimism. Domestic opposition to the war was limited to Fox and a diminishing group of friends. The latest motion for parliamentary reform was massively defeated in the Commons. It must have seemed a picture of steady progress in the war and relative tranquillity at home.
Yet the allies were fighting a new type of war in an old-fashioned way. The sieges on France’s borders were further inflaming the Revolution without killing it, and while many governments might have sued for peace when surrounded by a formidable coalition advancing on several fronts, the new revolutionaries were neither willing nor even able to do so. In the British Cabinet, Richmond chafed at the absence of any decisive blow. He thought that if everything was thrown into north-west France Britain ‘might be able at once to terminate this War’.15 He pressed for a withdrawal of British troops from Flanders, telling Pitt he was trying to do too much by dividing the forces between Flanders, the Mediterranean, the West Indies and plans for coastal raids on France: ‘I stated to Mr. Pitt that I thought He was going on much too fast in His Calculations. That men just raised upon paper were not soldiers … I particularly represented to Mr. Pitt that very proper [as] His schemes & Ideas were they were much too vast to be executed within any Thing like the Time He talked of. That … by undertaking too much He would do nothing well.’16 The truth was that, in common with that of other nations, British policy was partly being directed with post-war ends in mind. Seizing the rest of the West Indies would cement Britain’s maritime and financial power, while fighting in Flanders would help to entrench the Austrians in Belgium and diminish the chances of a Bavarian exchange.
The allied success on the frontiers, coupled with low French morale (their highly respected commander in Flanders, Dumouriez, defected to the Austrians), now turned up yet another notch the violence of the ever-escalating Revolution. Suspicion of treachery reached boiling point amidst rumours of the workings of ‘Pitt’s gold’ – a term applied both to British subsidies to Continental powers and to suspected bribery of French officials. All who had advocated moderation in the course of the Revolution fell under suspicion. On 2 June 1793 the Girondin Deputies found their exit from the Convention barred by 150 cannon, and handed many of their colleagues into custody. Robespierre and the Jacobins took power and began the reign of terror. In the coming months, Parisians would witness the ceaseless descent of the guillotine ending the lives of political prisoners, the Girondin leaders, failed Generals and Louis XVI
’s Queen Marie Antoinette alike. Wealth was confiscated, Christianity abolished and all normal social and economic rules swept away. In the middle of it all a resolution was passed declaring William Pitt an enemy of the human race.
The triumph of the Jacobins sparked an upsurge of rebellion, some of it royalist in nature, not only in the Vendée but also in Marseilles, Lyons and Toulon. Yet the destruction of all traditional institutions and responsibilities also provided the chance for France to be the first nation in the modern world to wage total war. On 23 August 1793 the Convention declared that:
From this moment until that in which our enemies shall have been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge weapons and transport supplies; the women will make tents and clothes and will serve in the hospitals; the children will make up old linen into lint; the old men will have themselves carried into the public squares to rouse the courage of fighting men, to preach the unity of the Republic and hatred of Kings …17
This was the beginning of the levée en masse which through the 1790s would see France call up for military service at least one and a half million men, the greatest such number the world had ever seen. In the spring and summer of 1793 alone, half a million men became available for service, ruthlessly organised from the centre by Lazare Carnot, wielding the dictatorial powers of the Committee of Public Safety. In the words of one historian, ‘The people had appropriated the absolutist heritage and taken the place of the King.’18 Western Europe’s most populous nation became wholly mobilised for civil and external war.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 39