in the National Portrait Gallery)]

WILLIAM PITT

AND

THE GREAT WAR

BY

J. HOLLAND ROSE, LITT.D.

England and France have held in their hands the fate of the
world, especially that of European civilization. How much harm
we have done one another: how much good we might have done!
--_Napoleon to Colonel Wilks, 20th April 1816._

[Illustration: Publisher's emblem]

LONDON

G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.

1911

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

PREFACE

In the former volume, entitled "William Pitt and National Revival," I
sought to trace the career of Pitt the Younger up to the year 1791.
Until then he was occupied almost entirely with attempts to repair the
evils arising out of the old order of things. Retrenchment and Reform
were his first watchwords; and though in the year 1785 he failed in his
efforts to renovate the life of Parliament and to improve the fiscal
relations with Ireland, yet his domestic policy in the main achieved a
surprising success. Scarcely less eminent, though far less known, were
his services in the sphere of diplomacy. In the year 1783, when he
became First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer,
nearly half of the British Empire was torn away, and the remainder
seemed to be at the mercy of the allied Houses of Bourbon. France,
enjoying the alliance of Spain and Austria and the diplomatic wooings of
Catharine II and Frederick the Great, gave the law to Europe.

By the year 1790 all had changed. In 1787 Pitt supported Frederick
William II of Prussia in overthrowing French supremacy in the Dutch
Netherlands; and a year later he framed with those two States an
alliance which not only dictated terms to Austria at the Congress of
Reichenbach but also compelled her to forego her far-reaching schemes on
the lower Danube, and to restore the _status quo_ in Central Europe and
in her Belgian provinces. British policy triumphed over that of Spain in
the Nootka Sound dispute of the year 1790, thereby securing for the
Empire the coast of what is now British Columbia; it also saved Sweden
from a position of acute danger; and Pitt cherished the hope of forming
a league of the smaller States, including the Dutch Republic, Denmark,
Sweden, Poland, and, if possible, Turkey, which, with support from Great
Britain and Prussia, would withstand the almost r