Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century

“It happens,” says he, “to be an advantage that at present 1 may own to have been the first so happy to foresee, or honest to forewarn our Court here, of the absolute necessity of our then breaking with the Czar, and shutting him out again of the Baltic.” “My relation discovered his aim as to other states, and even to the German empire, to which, although an inland power, he had offered to annex Livonia as an Electorate, so that he could but be admitted as an elector. It drew attention to the Czar’s then contemplated assumption of the title of Autocrator.^[124] Being head of the Greek Church he would be owned by the other potentates as head of the Greek Empire. 1 am not to say how reluctant we would be to acknowledge that title, since we have already made an ambassadors treat him with the title of Imperial Majesty, which the Swede has never yet condescended to.”

For some time attached to the British Embassy in Muscovy, our author, as he states, was later on

“dismissed the service, because the Czar desired it,” having made sure that “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 1 contracted the greatest part in executing a commission from 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 1 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 authorised 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.^[125]

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: