Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century

“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 befell, 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).^[127] The fire of straw kindled by the Danes in the times of King William III. was as speedily quenched by George Rooke in the treaty of Travendahl.” ^[128]

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 voluerit confiteri. ["But I name no one, so that no one will be angry with me, other than he who might refuse to express himself openly before the event.” Cicero] 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 Stolbowa, 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.