Secret Diplomatic History of The Eighteenth Century - Karl Marx (essential reading TXT) 📗

"I had given our Court such light into his affairs as is contained in this paper; for which I beg leave to appeal to the King, and to vouch the Viscount Townshend, who heard his Majesty give that vindication." "And yet, notwithstanding all this, I have been for these five years past kept soliciting for a very long arrear still due, and whereof I contracted the greatest part in executing a commission for her late Majesty."

The anti-Muscovite attitude, suddenly assumed by the Stanhope Cabinet, our author looks to in rather a sceptic mood.

"I do not pretend to foreclose, by this paper, the Ministry of that applause due to them from the public, when they shall satisfy us as to what the motives were which made them, till but yesterday, straiten the Swede in everything, although then our ally as much as now; or strengthen, by all the ways they could, the Czar, although under no tie, but barely that of amity with Great Britain.... At the minute I write this I learn that the gentleman who brought the Muscovites, not yet three years ago, as a royal navy, not under our protection, on their first appearance in the Baltic, is again authorized by the persons now in power, to give the Czar a second meeting in these seas. For what reason or to what good end?"

The gentleman hinted at is Admiral Norris, whose Baltic campaign against Peter I. seems, indeed, to be the original pattern upon which the recent naval campaigns of Admirals Napier and Dundas were cut out.

The restoration to Sweden of the Baltic provinces is required by the commercial as well as the political interest of Great Britain. Such is the pith of our author's argument:

"Trade is become the very life of our State; and what food is to life, naval stores are to a fleet. The whole trade we drive with all the other nations of the earth, at best, is but lucrative; this, of the north, is indispensably needful, and may not be improperly termed the sacra embole of Great Britain, as being its chiefest foreign vent, for the support of all our trade, and our safety at home. As woollen manufactures and minerals are the staple commodities of Great Britain, so are likewise naval stores those of Muscovy, as also of all those very provinces in the Baltic which the Czar has so lately wrested from the crown of Sweden. Since those provinces have been in the Czar's possession, Pernan is entirely waste. At Revel we have not one British merchant left, and all the trade which was formerly at Narwa is now brought to Petersburg.... The Swede could never possibly engross the trade of our subjects, because those seaports in his hands were but so many thoroughfares from whence these commodities were uttered, the places of their produce or manufacture lying behind those ports, in the dominions of the Czar. But, if left to the Czar, these Baltic ports are no more thoroughfares, but peculiar magazines from the inland countries of the Czar's own dominions. Having already Archangel in the White Sea, to leave him but any seaport in the Baltic were to put no less in his hands than the two keys of the general magazines of all the naval stores of Europe; it being known that Danes, Swedes, Poles, and Prussians have but single and distinct branches of those commodities in their several dominions. If the Czar should thus engross 'the supply of what we cannot do without,' where then is our fleet? Or, indeed, where is the security for all our trade to any part of the earth besides?"

If, then, the interest of British commerce requires to exclude the Czar from the Baltic, the interest of our State ought to be no less a spur to quicken us to that attempt. By the interest of our State I would be understood to mean neither the party measures of a Ministry, nor any foreign motives of a Court, but precisely what is, and ever must be, the immediate concern, either for the safety, ease, dignity, or emolument of the Crown, as well as the common weal of Great Britain. With respect to the Baltic, it has "from the earliest period of our naval power" always been considered a fundamental interest of our State: first, to prevent the rise there of any new maritime Power; and, secondly, to maintain the balance of power between Denmark and Sweden.

"One instance of the wisdom and foresight of our then truly British statesmen is the peace at Stalboa, in the year 1617. James the First was the mediator of that treaty, by which the Muscovite was obliged to give up all the provinces which he then was possessed of in the Baltic, and to be barely an inland Power on this side of Europe."

The same policy of preventing a new maritime Power from starting in the Baltic was acted upon by Sweden and Denmark.

"Who knows not that the Emperor's attempt to get a seaport in Pomerania weighed no less with the great Gustavus than any other motive for carrying his arms even into the bowels of the house of Austria? What befel, at the times of Charles Gustavus, the crown of Poland itself, who, besides it being in those days by far the mightiest of any of the northern Powers, had then a long stretch of coast on, and some ports in, the Baltic? The Danes, though then in alliance with Poland, would never allow them, even for their assistance against the Swedes, to have a fleet in the Baltic, but destroyed the Polish ships wherever they could meet them."

As to the maintenance of the balance of power between the established maritime States of the Baltic, the tradition of British policy is no less clear. "When the Swedish power gave us some uneasiness there by threatening to crush Denmark," the honour of our country was kept up by retrieving the then inequality of the balance of power.

The Commonwealth of England sent in a squadron to the Baltic which brought on the treaty of Roskild (1658), afterwards confirmed at Copenhagen (1660). The fire of straw kindled by the Danes in the times of King William III. was as speedily quenched by George Rock in the treaty of Copenhagen.

Such was the hereditary British policy.

"It never entered into the mind of the politicians of those times in order to bring the scale again to rights, to find out the happy expedient of raising a third naval Power for framing a juster balance in the Baltic.... Who has taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourables of the earth? Ego autem neminem nomino, quare irasci mihi nemo poterit, nisi qui ante de se noluerit confiteri. Posterity will be under some difficulty to believe that this could be the work of any of the persons now in power ... that we have opened; St. Petersburg to the Czar solely at our own expense, and without any risk to him...."

The safest line of policy would be to return to the treaty of Itolbowa, and to suffer the Muscovite no longer "to nestle in the Baltic." Yet, it may be said, that in "the present state of affairs" it would be "difficult to retrieve the advantage we have lost by not curbing, when it was more easy, the growth of the Muscovite power." A middle course may be thought more convenient.

"If we should find it consistent with the welfare of our State that the Muscovite have an inlet into the Baltic, as having, of all the princes of Europe, a country that can be made most beneficial to its prince, by uttering its produce to foreign markets. In this case, it were but reasonable to expect, on the other hand, that in return for our complying so far with his interest, for the improvement of his country, his Czarish Majesty, on his part, should demand nothing that may tend to the disturbance of another; and, therefore, contenting himself with ships of trade, should demand none of war."

"We should thus preclude his hopes of being ever more than an inland Power," but "obviate every objection of using the Czar worse than any Sovereign Prince may expect. I shall not for this give an instance of a Republic of Genoa, or another in the Baltic itself, of the Duke of Courland; but will assign Poland and Prussia, who, though both now crowned heads, have ever contented themselves with the freedom of an open traffic, without insisting on a fleet. Or the treaty of Falczin, between the Turk and Muscovite, by which Peter was forced not only to restore Asoph, and to part with all his men-of-war in those parts, but also to content himself with the bare freedom of traffic in the Black Sea. Even an inlet in the Baltic for trade is much beyond what he could morally have promised himself not yet so long ago on the issue of his war with Sweden."

If the Czar refuse to agree to such "a healing temperament," we shall have "nothing to regret but the time we lost to exert all the means that Heaven has made us master of, to reduce him to a peace advantageous to Great Britain." War would become inevitable. In that case

"it ought no less to animate our Ministry to pursue their present measures, than fire with indignation the breast of every honest Briton that a Czar of Muscovy, who owes his naval skill to our instructions, and his grandeur to our forbearance, should so soon deny to Great Britain the terms which so few years ago he was fain to take up with from the Sublime Porte."

"'Tis every way our interest to have the Swede restored to those provinces which the Muscovite has wrested from that crown in the Baltic. Great Britain can no longer hold the balance in that sea," since she "has raised the Muscovite to be a maritime Power there.... Had we performed the articles of our alliance made by King William with the crown of Sweden, that gallant nation would ever have been a bar strong enough against the Czar coming into the Baltic.... Time must confirm us, that the Muscovite's expulsion from the Baltic is now the principal end of our Ministry."

Butler & Tanner. The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.