Climax and Dénouement 779
trol of a kind of Committee of Public Safety. And as for the necessary new ruler of
France, as he sarcastically asked, who would accept a throne from “regicides and
democrats,” with the shame and instability that would ensue?^3 The question of
course was soon answered by Bonaparte.
The difficulties in an intermediate course were illustrated also by the Dutch. It
may be remembered from Chapter XXI that the émigré Stadholder, William V,
relying wholly on the British, was opposed by his own son (the future King Wil-
liam I of the Netherlands), who resented the loss of Dutch shipping and colonies
to the British, believed that the former Dutch regime had suffered from serious
weaknesses, and advised some kind of concession to the new forces in the Batavian
Republic. There were men high up in that republic who secretly favored a moder-
ate Orange restoration, preferably under the ex- stadholder’s son. The Hereditary
Prince had a painful scene with two Orangist émigrés at a meeting at Yarmouth in
England in March 1800. British policy at this time, as in 1787, required an almost
unconditional restoration of William V and the old Union of Utrecht. The Heredi-
tary Prince was told by his two friends that he must choose between England and
France—that the English were his benefactors, and the French robbers and rebels.
The prince, losing his temper, shocked his companions by shouting that the British
had long wanted a “dictature” over Holland and that his own ancestor, William the
Silent, had after all been a rebel. “It was hard,” said this future King of the Nether-
lands, “that a man could not declare his own opinion, if it went against the [Brit-
ish] ministers, without being declared a Jacobin.”
His friends immediately reported this distressing episode to Lord Grenville.^4
THE CONSERVATIVE COUNTER- OFFENSIVE OF 1799Never between Valmy and Waterloo did the Counter- Revolution come so near to
success as in 1799—as may be seen, for example, in the fact that the Russian
armies, operating in Italy, Switzerland, and Holland, had never until that time, and
have never since, been seen so far westward in Europe in conditions of actual com-
bat. Russian power, absent from the First Coalition, was essential to the Second.
Subsidized by the wealth of England, at a rate of £850,000 for 45,000 men, the
Russian troops were greeted in conservative quarters as the hope of civilization, to
effect the “deliverance of Europe,” as Pitt said in the House of Commons.^5 With-
out the Russians, said Mallet du Pan (who was now drawing £100 a month from
the British government), there would be an “end to Christianity, Royalty, Property,
Liberty and the whole structure of society” in central Europe.^6 And Cardinal
Maury, writing at length and repeatedly to Louis XVIII from the supposed privacy
of the conclave of Venice, during the long stalemate of the papal election, reported
3 For this and other quotations used at the head of this chapter see Appendix I.
4 H. T. Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der algemeene geschiedenis van Nederland (The Hague,
1907), IV, 1102–5.
5 Parliamentary History, X X XIV, 1044.
6 British Mercury, 5 vols. (London, 1799–1800), II, 207.