ing Leopold and his
advisers. The Austrian Government had received a letter, dated Dresden,
27th August (the day of the Declaration of Pilnitz), stating that
England promised to remain neutral only on condition that the Emperor
would not withdraw any troops from his Belgic lands, as they were needed
to uphold the arrangements of which she was a guarantee. This
extraordinary statement grew out of a remark of Grenville to the
Austrian Ambassador in London, that, in view of the unrest in the
Netherlands, it might be well not to leave them without troops.[16] The
mis-statement was not only accepted at Vienna, but was forwarded to
various Courts, the final version being that England might attack
Austria if she withdrew her troops from Flanders, and that therefore
Leopold could not draw the sword against France until his army on the
Turkish borders arrived in Swabia. Some were found who believed this odd
_farrago_; but those who watched the calculating balance of Hapsburg
policy saw in it one more excuse for a masterly inactivity.

Still less were our Ministers inclined to unite with Catharine in the
universal royalist league then under discussion at St. Petersburg. The
Czarina having charged her ambassador, Vorontzoff, to find out the
sentiments of Pitt and Grenville on this subject, he replied that
England would persevere in the strict neutrality which she had all along
observed, "and that, with respect to the measures of active intervention
which other Powers might have in contemplation, it was His Majesty's
determination not to take any part either in supporting or in opposing
them." Now Russia, like Austria and Spain, had decided not to act unless
England joined the concert;[17] and this waiting on the action of a
Power which had already declared its resolve to do nothing enables us to
test the sincerity of the continental monarchs. As for the Czarina, her
royalist fervour expended itself in deposing the busts of democrats, in
ordering the French Minister to remain away from Court, and in
condemning any Russian who had dealings with him to be publicly flogged.
Moreover, while thus drilling her own subjects, the quondam friend of
Diderot kept her eyes fixed upon Warsaw. The shrewdest diplomatist of
the age had already divined her aims, which he thus trenchantly summed
up: "The Empress only waits to see Austria and Prussia committed in
France, to overturn everything in Poland."[18] Kaunitz lived on to see
his cynical proph