The Despatches of Earl Gower, English Ambassador at Paris from ... 1790 to ... 1792. To which are added the despatches of Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Monro, and the diary of Viscount Palmerston in France during July and August 1791, now published for the first time. Edited by Oscar Browning

Front matter

ScmDon: C. J. CLAY AND SON, j CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, Ate Maria Lane. ttamlmtjgE: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. Hfipjig: F. A. BEOCKHAUS. THE DESPATCHES tu EARL GOWER, ENGLISH AMBASSADOR AT PARIS FEOM JUNE 1790 TO AUGUST 1702, TO WHICH ARK ADDED THE DESPATCHES OF MR LINDSAY AND MR MONRO AND THE DIARY OF VISCOUNT PALMERSTON IN FRANCE DURING JULY AND AUGUST 1701, NOW PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME. EDITED FOR THE .SYNDICS OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESS n v OSCAR BROWNING, M.A., F.R.Hist.S., FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, ANT> UNIVERSITY LECTURER. CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1885 [All Rifllitu reserved.] Carnbrtlgr : PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SON, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. TO MY FRIEND PROFESSOR J. R. SEELEY THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED. CONTENTS. PAGE Preface ■a_xiy Introduction xv xxxvjij Draft of Instructions for Earl Gower 1 Despatches of Earl Gower, from June 21, 1790 to August 12, 1792 5 Mr Dundas to Earl Gower 209 Earl Gower to Lord Grenville 210 Note from King George III 211 Earl Gower to Lord Grenville 211 Mr W. Lindsay to Lord Grenville 212 George Monro to Lord Grenville 225 Mr W. Lindsay to Lord Grenville 235 George Monro to Lord Grenville 235 Diary of the Second Viscount Palmerston in France . . 283 AlTENDIX 311 I. Lord Elgin to Lord Grenville 312 R£sum£ d'Informations exactes au 25 Janvier 1794 314 Extrait d'une Lettre adressee a Milord Elgin . 340 Premiere Suite du Resume 343 Informations additionnelles 353 II. S. Fouche a Monsieur D. S. Curtis a Paris . . . 372 Relation du Voyage de la Famille royale a Varennes 373 Index 377—400

Preface

. I first became acquainted with the despatches of Lord Gower, which are printed in this volume, some years ago, when I was working in the Record Office on the foreign policy of the younger Pitt. They appeared to me, as soon as I read them, of great historical interest, and well fitted to be published. I therefore informed two leading London publishers of their exist ence and asked them whether they would undertake to print them, offering to see them through the press. The first publisher to whom I applied refused at once, saying that correspondences were a glut in the market ; the second took a little time to consider, but eventually declined. Shortly after this, when I was pursuing my researches in the French Foreign Office, I was informed by two of the best authorities on the French Revolution, M. Henri Taine and M. Albert Sorel, that Lord Gower's despatches had been read by competent Frenchmen and had been declared to be of high value ; and that their publication would be an important contribution to historical study.

Armed with this testimony I applied to a third London publisher, sending him a specimen of the letters. After a courteous delay he also refused to have anything to do with the papers, giving as his reason that he had compared Lord Gower's account of the flight to Varennes with that given by Carlyle, and while there" was nothing in Lord G. c. b

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. X Gower's description which was not in Carlyle, there was a great deal in Carlyle which was not in Lord Gower. Undaunted by these refusals, I applied to a fourth publisher of well-known liberality. He went so far as to have the correspondence copied at his expense, but after having read it he came to the conclusion that it could not be published without heavy loss. After these experiences it required great courage on the part of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press to under take a work so little likely to prove remunerative, and by doing it they deserve the gratitude of all serious students of history. The publication of documents such as are contained in this volume should not be left to private enterprise, but should be carried out by the State. The State has published a number of volumes under the superinten dence of the Master of the Rolls which have been of the greatest service to English History, and without them the works of Stubbs, of Freeman, and of Green could not '•have been written.

Similarly the collection of calendars of state papers have supplied Mr Gardiner and Mr Brewer with their best materials. But the Rolls series ends with Henry VII., just at the time when English history begins to be interesting to the student of modern international politics, while the calendars of foreign papers are at present confined to the reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth. Surely if there is any period of history which was vital for the ex istence of the English nation and for its position in Europe, it is the period of the French Revolution and of Napoleon the First. During this epoch we followed an independent line of conduct based on the inherent

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. XI qualities of our race and the traditions of our develop ment. We stood aloof from Europe both in peace and war ; we ratified the conclusions of our reason by enormous sacrifices, and we emerged in 1815 bruised and battered but indisputably the first power in the world, a position which we held for fifty years. We refused to join the coalition in 1791, we refused to make peace in 1800, we were the last to make peace in 1801, we were the first to break the peace of Europe in 1803, we were the soul of the coalition against Napoleon in 1815, we dominated the counsels of Vienna. Our conduct during this momentous epoch, the conduct mainly of an aristocratic government which has now passed away, deserves to be written for a national ex ample, as much as the history of our Reformation or of our Great Rebellion.

Yet the documents from which this history can be alone composed are allowed to sleep in the obscurity of the Record Office, or to moulder in the lumber rooms of country houses. It is painful to think how much material for the history of these times has been lost to us for ever. An example which we may wisely imitate is set us by foreign nations. Besides numerous publications of French and Austrian state papers may be mentioned the collections of the Prussian archives, and the volumes of the Russian Historical Society, both rich in memorials of the revolutionary period. Indeed so much attention has been paid to this subject on the Continent that we can learn the extent of our own resources better from French and German than from English writers. Sybel was the first to place the attitude of England towards the Revolution in its true light, Le Bon has narrated the 6

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. XII curious history of the negotiations between Pitt and the emigres conducted through William Wickham. Copies of English official correspondence have during recent years been sent in large quantities to Germany, and we are in danger of having our conduct in these critical circumstances described and judged by enemies rather than by friends. It is not unreasonable to ask that some part of the sum devoted by Government to publications of this character should be assigned to a period of history which must be accurately known by us if we are to form a sound judgment on the foreign complications of our own time. The volume now offered as a contribution to this knowledge contains the despatches of Lord Gower written from Paris during twenty-six months, from June 1790 to August 1792. They are not of an exciting character, nor do they shew great insight or penetration.

They are careful accounts written week by week by a competent and well-placed observer for the information of his Government, and they are perhaps more valuable because the writer did not comprehend the full significance of the events which he describes. The French Revolution has been so often lifted by sensational writers into the region of cataclysmal and almost superhuman occurrences that a narrative is specially acceptable which tends to range it among the facts which appeal to our ordinary ex perience. The despatches of Lord Gower are supple mented by a few letters written by Mr Lindsay, who was left as Charge d'affaires in Paris after his chief's departure. These are followed by a number of letters written by Colonel Monro to Lord Grenville from Sept.

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. XIII 1792 to January 1793. George Monro was a spy in the pay of the British Government. His letters resemble the form of a newspaper correspondence, and will be found interesting and picturesque. Es pecially thrilling is his account of the September massacres, of which he was an eye-witness. To these documents I have been able to add, by the kindness of Mr Evelyn Ashley, a diary of the second Lord Palmerston, the father of the Prime Minister, written in France during July and August 1791. After the declaration of war between France and England in Feb. 1793 Paris was hermetically sealed. No effort on the part of our ministry or of Lord Elgin, our representative in Flanders, could penetrate the obscu rity ; all wdio were suspected of giving information were put in prison or guillotined. The veil did not lift until the summer of 1794, when an unknown but well-informed correspondent in Switzerland was able to send to Lord Elgin some remarkable accounts of the political, military, and social condition of France.

These reports are printed at the end of this volume. I have added in a second appendix a document hitherto un published on the arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes, which I owe to the kindness of Mr Curtis of New York. It remains for me to state what I have attempted to do as editor of these papers. To have annotated them completely would have been to rewrite the his tory of the Revolution. I have therefore confined the notes to a very narrow compass, but I have included in the index a full onomasticon of persons and places which I hope will to some extent supply their place. My task in dealing with the orthography and punctuation

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. of the documents has been more difficult. Lord Gower was a bad writer of English, a faulty and inconsistent speller, and a most unscientific punctuator. These original defects were increased by the blunders either of the author or the copyist. To have printed a facsimile of the correspondence as it stands in the volumes of the Record office would have driven the staunchest student to despair. At the same time it was desirable to preserve whatever was characteristic of the man or of his habits of thought. I have therefore adopted a compromise. I have altered everything which appeared to me the result of carelessness. I have preserved eccentric spelling where it seemed to be deliberate, or where it required a graphic touch, as where Roberts pierre becomes first Roberspierre and then Robespierre.

I have altered the punctuation so as to make the read ing of the volume more easy, but it will probably be thought that I have kept too many long and rambling sentences. If after this process some bad faults remain the critic should first ask whether they are not to be attributed rather to Lord Gower than to the editor. Mr Monro's letters teem with errors of every description, and had to be corrected throughout. Lord Palrner ston's diary has been left almost untouched, although it is feared that some mistakes remain uncorrected. The French documents at the end of the volume have been revised. The volume is left to the indulgence of historical students. An attempt has been made in the introduction to estimate the historical value of the documents which it contains. King's College, Cambridge. October, 1885.