Mirage of the Moderates 539
the wife of Sir Gilbert Elliot, was astonished that the French émigrés insisted on
getting back their position and possessions as a matter of right. “I fear that great
troubles are in store for France,” she said in 1794.^12
To men and women of this kind the extreme conservatives in England were no
better. Late in 1796 Pitt sent the Earl of Malmesbury to France to enter upon
talks to end the war. Edmund Burke, frightened and angry, penned his Letters on a
Regicide Peace, in which he denounced the very thought of peace or compromise as
outrageous and immoral. The Revolution in France was a “system of robbery.” “It
must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe.” What the twentieth century would
call “co- existence” seemed to Burke impossible. “With this republic, nothing inde-
pendent can co- exist.”^13 Burke’s was not however the voice of all Britain. He was
answered by Thomas Erskine in a widely read pamphlet.
Erskine, a brother of the eleventh Earl of Buchan, was an eminent lawyer, who
had successfully defended the English “Jacobins” in the state trials of 1794. He
believed that the French Revolution had been thrown onto a radical course by the
Allied intervention of 1792. He saw the origin of an excessive British conservatism
in the fears of republicanism raised by the American Revolution, not the French.
He thought, in 1797, that the French Directory should be recognized by Britain,
that it was “fit,” as he put it ironically, “to be received into the holy communion of
the robbers and despoilers of Poland.” Pitt’s government, he insisted, in remaining
at war with France, pursued no attainable objective, and in fact, “while railing at
home against republican theorists,” was actually, since the French continued to
win, contributing to the republicanization of Europe.^14
Burke’s Regicide peace went through about a dozen pamphlet editions, Erskine’s
View of the causes and consequences of the present war with France through thirty- five.
In later times, for whatever reason, it was Burke’s effort that was remembered, and
Erskine’s forgotten.
Nor, despite all the provocations, were spokesmen for compromise absent from
the Roman Catholic Church. Both Popes of the period offered gestures of concili-
ation. Pius VI, to be sure, had little sympathy or understanding for the Revolution.
Nevertheless, when the Count of Provence, on assuming the title of King of
France, hoped for the Pope’s endorsement, Pius VI refused to give it. His Holiness,
while expressing great personal sympathy in this awkward situation, replied that
only the Almighty “will decide between you and the French people, whether they
ought to be republicans, or be subject to a king.” He hoped and believed that the
new republican regime in France was superseding the “barbarous system of terror.”^15
12 The Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot first Earl of Minto, 3 vols. (London, 1874), II, 230.
13 Edmund Burke, Letters... on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France. Letter
II “On the genius and character of the French Revolution as it regards other nations,” Work s (Boston,
1877), V, 377.
14 T. Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France (London, 1797),
to which there were numerous replies, notably John Gifford, A Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine...
(London, 1797, at least eleven editions), where Gifford insists on a French design of conquest since
1791, the danger of Jacobin conspiracy in England, and British need for a Belgium independent of
France.
15 The quotations are from a letter said to be from Pius VI to Louis XVIII, published in English in
the Annual Register for 1795 (London, 1800). I have been unable to locate any better source or author-