Chapter 1: So Evident A Danger
Part 1: A time of war, a time of peace - Ecclesiastes 3:8
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William Pitt the Younger, First Lord of the Treasury, Empress Catherine II and King Frederick William II
For the first 4 years of his ministry, William Pitt the Younger had astutely avoided foreign entanglements. After the disaster of the American Revolutionary War, the steady but unimaginative ministry of Lord North, and the short-lived administrations of the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, the 2nd Earl of Shelburne and the 3rd Earl of Portland, Pitt had been elevated by George III to provide stability. Despite his youth, Pitt managed to command the respect and support of both Houses of Parliament and the King and so, for those 4 years, had laboured away at mending Britain's finances and readying the nation for future conflicts. Unprecedentedly, the national debt was reduced whilst naval estimates were simultaneously kept at an all-time high. After these domestic success, the next 4 years bounced from foreign policy crisis to foreign policy crisis. In 1787, the Dutch Crisis had demanded British attention as the Dutch Patriots arrested Wilhelmina of Prussia [1]. Pitt kept Britain from direct involvement but supported Prussia's successful military invasion to restore the Orangists, which led to the signing of the Triple Alliance by the British, Dutch and Prussians in 1788. The first signs of Pitt's developing anti-Russian foreign policy could be seen here, but first there would be a confrontation with Spain over the Nootka Sound in the northeast Pacific in 1790.
Caused by the arrest of British merchants as part of Spain's aggressive colonial strategy, the Nootka Criss threatened to bring the British and Spanish to blows. The suffering of British citizens at the hands of Spanish Papists provoked much public anger and Pitt was compelled to take a firm and active stance to defend the national honour. The Royal Navy maintained a dominant position despite Spain's own efforts to rebuild their navy, but the Bourbon Family Compact threatened to change the balance. The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 had shocked the continent but France could still not be discounted if they honoured the alliance. Spanish requests for aid, however, were met with a resolute 'no' which effectively settled the crisis. Spain could not fight by itself and was thus humbled, without a single cannon fired and with no British blood spilt. After avoiding foreign entanglements, Pitt clearly had quite the talent for them, with two unqualified successes out of two. Pitt's fellow cabinet members noted the young prime minister's enthusiasm and aggressiveness, none more so than Francis Godolphin Osborne, 5th Earl of Leeds. During both the Dutch and Nootka crises, Pitt had assumed direct responsibility from his Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and run the crises himself. With Pitt's cross-departmental interference, Leeds' main achievement of his 7 years in office was to antagonise the newly-independent United States of America.
After enjoying these two successes, Pitt was faced with his biggest test in the summer of 1790. The Empire of Russia, ruled by the Empress Catherine II who was simultaneously vaunted and reviled by British popular opinion, had first thrown back the attempt of the Ottoman Empire to reclaim the Khanate of Crimea and then seized the opportunity to strengthen their hold on the Black Sea's northern coast. Commanded by the Empress' favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, and Alexander Suvorov, made a Count of both Russian and Holy Roman Empires for his role, the Russian army had repeatedly smashed their Ottoman counterparts in cooperation with the armies of Habsburg Austria. One of the early successes of Potemkin and Suvorov had been to capture Ochakov on the Dneiper-Bug Estuary whilst Austria seized large parts of Moldavia and Belgrade.
How this war came to involve Great Britain, Prussia and the Netherlands requires some explanation. The relatively minor Russian and Austrian gains would not seem to pose a threat to any of the Triple Alliance, were it not for a combination of Prussian jealousy about 'the balance of power' and a British scheme to provide an answer to both the burgeoning Anglo-Russian rivalry and the Royal Navy's need for naval stores. This combination also dragged in Poland-Lithuania, as both Prussia and Britain's interests connected to that embattled country. To untangle that part of the web, it is necessary to go back to the First Polish Partition in 1772. Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa and Catherine had joined together to carve off swathes of territory from a Poland-Lithuania that had already been reduced to a Russian puppet state. By the summer of 1790, however, Frederick the Great[1] had died and the fragile coalition he had forged against Poland had collapsed. Austria and Prussia were once again wary of each other, despite thawing of relations in the Treaty of Reichenbach in July 1790, and Catherine the Great was pursuing her own ambitions elsewhere. Frederick the Great's far less able but similarly ambitious successor, Frederick William II, also sought to expand Prussia but in a haphazard manner. His intervention in the Netherlands had been one result and Prussia's interest in the Russo-Turkish War was another.
Prussia's principle concern was that it would not achieve commensurate gains. Since Prussia had nothing to gain from the Ottomans, Austrian and Russian gains must be prevented or limited as far as possible and, as Ottoman resistance collapsed, Prussia would have to act themselves. Removing Austria from the fray proved to be relatively straightforward as Prussian pressure persuaded them to agree a truce with the Ottomans but the Russians were not so easily persuaded. With their continuing string of victories and the moral justification of an 'unprovoked' Ottoman attack, why would Catherine, her statesmen and her generals turn back? Indeed, visions of a Christian empire replacing the Muslim Ottomans were once more gripping the imagination of the court in St Petersburg. Against a belligerent and stubborn Russia, the threats of Prussia alone appeared to have little sway, and that was where Great Britain came in.
As Prussia rattled its many sabres against the Russians, the Triple Alliance was threatening to drag Pitt and his government into a war in Eastern Europe, but the ties of treaty alone were not sufficient. Pitt had avoided foreign confrontations until 1787 for good reason, Great Britain would gain little from a major continental war. In a fortunate concatenation of events for the overly ambitious Frederick William II, however, Pitt, the Cabinet and the Admiralty had produced their own ambitious scheme which would make a joint ultimatum to and even war with Russia a potentially sound strategic move. The first step was the Royal Navy's continuous need for naval stores. The financial wizardry of Pitt had ensured that the navy had remained on an even keel financially during peace time but even his genius couldn't make raw materials appear from nowhere. No, they primarily appeared from Russia and their Baltic possessions. This arrangement had worked for decades but as the 18th century had progressed, Russia was increasingly coming to be seen as a major rival and the Empress Catherine's leading role in creating the League of Armed Neutrality during the American Revolutionary War had only intensified this concern. To be almost dependant on the supplies of one country to run the nation's most formidable military machine was bad enough, to be almost dependant on one that was increasingly perceived as an opponent was unconscionable.
New sources of naval stores, however, were not easily come by. Some were already imported from Sweden and elsewhere, but in small amounts that would not sustain the Royal Navy. The search, therefore, led the Cabinet to Poland-Lithuania. On the face of it, Poland-Lithuania was an ideal candidate. It possessed the raw resources needed in sufficient quantities and its expressed interest in joining the Triple Alliance [3] meant it was likely to be a willing trade partner. As is so often the case, however, the practicalities were more complex. Poland-Lithuania had, in the 1772 Partition, been forced to give up west or Royal Prussia to Prussia which separated Danzig from the rest of the country. The accompanying massive duties that Prussia demanded for trade up and down the Vistula threatened to make the scheme unworkable. Two solutions were considered, both of which drew Pitt, his Cabinet and the country closer into a confrontation with Russia for quite different reasons. The first was to persuade the Prussians to lower their duty demands, to be recompensed either by the increased trade covering the difference or by British funds. Prussia was willing, but only if Poland-Lithuania ceded to remaining parts of Royal Prussia, Danzig and Thorn, which Prussia still greatly coveted. Despite British pressure and reassurances communicated the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the King of Poland by Daniel Hailes, the Great Sejm [4] refused to countenance any further territorial losses. This plan was not entirely abandoned by the British but the second solution was to trade through the Black Sea, from the Bug and Dneipr rivers. The Ottomans, who had controlled the land between the two rivers until the war with Russia, were thought to be amenable to such trade and, despite the much longer route, it was decided that it was a workable plan. But even before it had been made, it had another problem. Russia. Again.
The fort of Ochakov, a minor fortress easily captured early in the Russo-Turkish War, suddenly gave its name to a new European diplomatic crisis. It was strategically insignificant to Great Britain in every conceivable way, except one. Sitting on the stretch of land between the Bug and Dneipr rivers, it, if controlled by Russia, would allow them to block British trade to Poland just as effectively as they could block Anglo-Russian trade in the event of conflict. And so, by a series of tenuous links that had coalesced at just the right time, Great Britain was drawn steadily towards war. Diplomatic communications between Great Britain and Prussia began in earnest in August 1790 and it was soon agreed by the respective courts that the best plan was to demand a status quo ante bellum peace between Russia, Austria and the Ottomans. Habsburg Austria, under the more cautious new Emperor Leopold II, had already demonstrated that it could be persuaded but Russia would require an active threat of war to be forced back to their pre-war boundaries. The same conclusion had been reached in St James’ and a belief that brow-beating Russia into retreat would be easy had taken hold among not just the British Cabinet but also the Admiralty. After all, Spain and France had been humbled by merely putting the Royal Navy on active war footing, so how could Russia resist so evident a danger?
