The Culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750–1830 9781847794666

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The culture of diplomacy

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The culture of diplomacy Britain in Europe, c. 1750–1830 Jennifer Mori

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Jennifer Mori 2010 The right of Jennifer Mori to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8272 6 hardback

First published 2010 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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Contents

Preface Abbreviations Introduction: More new diplomatic history

vii viii 1

Part I The structure of a service 1 Why diplomacy? 2 Entrance, training and promotion 3 Family, sex and marriage

17 21 41 62

Part II Of cabbages and kings

87

4 Etiquette and ‘face’ 5 Favourites and flunkeys 6 Gossips, networks and news

91 106 124

Part III Beyond the call of duty

149

7 The Grand Tour 8 From ancients to moderns 9 War, ethnography and religion

151 167 188

Conclusion: Diplomacy transformed?

211

Appendix A Male diplomats, 1750–1830 Appendix B Female diplomats, 1750–1830 Select primary source bibliography

219 227 232

Index

239

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Preface

One incurs many debts in the writing of a book, not least to the students and colleagues who listened to many versions of its contents, and often helped me to refine my ideas. Particular thanks in this respect go to Barbara Todd and Nick Rogers, as well as the members of the Premodern History Discussion Group and the interdisciplinary Eighteenth Century Discussion Group at the University of Toronto. Two sabbatical leaves from the Department of History permitted me to do much of the research on this project, which was generously funded by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Not least amongst the blessings of a SSHRC grant is the postgraduate research assistance that it supports. Here I acknowledge the labours of David Lawrence and Nicole Greenspan, recent graduates of the University of Toronto. This book could not have been written without the assistance of the many librarians and archivists who answered my queries and provided me with documents at the British Library, National Archives (UK), National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, National Registers of Archives (England and Scotland), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Durham County Record Office, Library of Congress, Lewis Walpole Library, the Bodleian Library and the college libraries of Merton, All Souls and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to consult and quote from manuscripts in private ownership are due to the Earl of Mansfield, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, the Earl of Elgin and Mrs. Susan Milton of Kemnay House, Aberdeenshire. A select bibliography of primary sources appears at the end of the text. All secondary sources have been referenced in the notes. Dates before 1752 have been given in Old Style according to the Julian calendar employed in England until that year. All books are published in London or New York unless otherwise stated. Jennifer Mori Toronto, January 2010

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Abbreviations

Add MS Anon. Auckland Correspondence

AHR Bath Archives

Bod Castlereagh Correspondence

Chesterfield Letters

CHW

DNB Online

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Additional Manuscripts, British Library Anonymous Bishop of Bath and Wells (ed.), Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1861) American Historical Review Catherine Hannah Charlotte Jackson (ed.), The Bath Archives: A Further Selection from the Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson, from 1809–1816, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1873) Bodleian Library, Oxford William Shoberl (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, Second Marquess of Londonderry, 12 vols (London: Henry Colbourne, 1852–53) John Bradshaw (ed.), The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, with the Characters, 3 vols (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1892) Charles Hanbury Williams Paper, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edition, January 2008

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Abbreviations DRO EHR FAS f. ff. Foreign Policy of Castlereagh

FRS Gower Despatches

Granville Letters

Hamilton and Nelson Papers

Highcliffe and the Stuarts

HJ Jackson Diaries

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Durham Record Office English Historical Review Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians folio folios Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 2 vols (London: G. Bell, 1925–31) Fellow of the Royal Society Oscar Browning (ed.), The Despatches of Earl Gower, English Ambassador at Paris from June 1790 to August 1792, to Which Are Added the Despatches of Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Monro, and the the Diary of Viscount Palmerston in France during July and August 1791, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885). [Edward] F.[rancis] LevesonGower (ed.), The Letters of Harriet Countess Granville 1810–1845, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, 1894) Alphonse Wyatt Thibodeau, (ed.), The Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents formed by Alfred Morrison, 2nd series, 1882–1893, The Hamilton & Nelson Papers, 2 vols (privately printed, 1893) Violet Stuart Wortley (ed.), Highcliffe and the Stuarts (London: J. Murray, 1927) Historical Journal Catherine Hannah Charlotte Jackson (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson, K.C.H., From the Peace of Amiens to the Battle of Talavera, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1871)

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Abbreviations

JBS JMH Keith Correspondence

Journal of British Studies Journal of Modern History Amelia Gillespie Smyth (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Sir Robert Murray Keith, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1849) LC Library of Congress Letters of Lady Burghersh Rose Weigall (ed.), The Letters of Lady Burghersh afterwards Countess of Westmorland from Germany and France during the Campaign of 1813–14 (London: John Murray, 1893) Leveson-Gower Correspondence Castalia Gower (ed.), Lord Granville Leveson Gower (First Earl Granville) Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1916) Malmesbury Diaries [James Harris], 3rd Earl of Malmesbury (ed.), Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury; Containing an Account of His Missions to the Courts of Madrid, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Second and the Hague; and His Special Missions to Berlin, Brunswick and the French Republic, 4 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1844) Mary Hamilton Elizabeth and Florence Anson (eds), Mary Hamilton, afterwards Mrs. John Dickinson, At Court and at Home. From Letters and Diaries 1756 to 1816 (London: John Murray, 1925) Mitchell Papers Andrew Bissett (ed.), Memoirs and Papers of Sir Andrew Mitchell, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850) NA SP State Papers Foreign, National Archives n.f. no foliation on manuscript

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Abbreviations NLS MS NLW OS P&P Paget Papers

PRONI PT Public Life of Macartney

Stratford Canning Life

TRHS Two Noble Lives

Walpole Correspondence

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General Manuscript, National Library of Scotland National Library of Wales Old Style Past and Present Augustus Paget (ed.), The Paget Papers, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1896) Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Philosophical Transactions [of the Royal Society] John Barrow (ed.), Some Account of the Public Life, and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl of Macartney. The Latter Consisting of Extracts from an Account of the Russian Empire: A Sketch of the Political History of Ireland: and A Journal from an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China: With an Appendix to Each Volume, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell & Davies, 1807) Stanley Lane-Poole (ed.), The Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe: From His Memoirs and Private Official Papers, 2 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1888) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series Augustus J.C. Hare (ed.), The Story of Two Noble Lives, Being Memorials of Charlotte, Countess Canning, and Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, 3 vols (London: G. Allen, 1893) W.S. Lewis, A. Dayle Wallace, A. Dayle and Robert A. Smith (eds), The Yale Edition of Horace

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xii

Wellington Dispatches

Werry Memoirs

Wynn Correspondence

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Abbreviations Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, New Haven (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) Lt Col. John Gurwood (ed.), The Dispatches of Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington: during His Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France, from 1799 to 1818, 12 vols (London: J. Murray, 1837–39) Eliza Werry (ed.), Personal Memoirs and Letters of Francis Peter Werry: Attaché to the British Embassies at St Petersburgh and Vienna in 1812– 1815 (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1861) Rachel Leighton (ed.), Correspondence of Charlotte Grenville, Lady Williams Wynn and Her Three Sons: Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Bart., Rt. Hon. Charles Williams Wynn, and Sir Henry Williams Wynn, G.C.H., K.C.B. 1795–1832 (London: J. Murray, 1920)

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Introduction: More new diplomatic history

In 1764 James Boswell was staying in Berlin to improve his languages and see something of the wider world. Like many tourists of the eighteenth century, Boswell spent much of his time in Britain’s embassies, one of which he had come to regard as a second home. The Berlin mission, led by Andrew Mitchell and his secretary, Alexander Burnet, could give a warm welcome to Scots, not least because of its connections to an expatriate community that included Jacobites like George Keith, 11th Earl Marischal, one-time private secretary of the Young Pretender, and advisor to Frederick II of Prussia. Boswell, then undecided about what line of work to take up following his Grand Tour, asked these men of the world for career advice. All told the 24-year-old Boswell to pursue the law in accordance with his father’s wishes and, on the subject of a career in diplomacy, Marischal was unequivocal. ‘Sir, you must begin as a secretary, and if you are not with a man to your mind, you are very unhappy. Then, if you should be sent Envoy, if you are at a place where there is little to do, you are idle and unhappy. If you have much to do, you are harassed with anxiety.’1 This image of diplomacy accords ill with what we see, whether in academic or popular depictions of diplomacy, and this book seeks to strip the craft of its image as a ‘glamorous’ profession. This is not to belittle what British envoys did, often in the face of frustration and adversity. This text nevertheless seeks to explore some of the realities behind diplomacy at the grassroots level: whether about housing, pay, marriage, work or leisure. In so doing, it will shed light on the concerns of a profession whose social and cultural dimensions in this period have been neglected by scholars or, insofar as they have been investigated, have remained separate as a body of literature from political work on international relations. The principal source base for this study is the private correspondence of c. 50 diplomats and their families drawn from all ethnic groups in the British Isles. As such, this is an exercise in the ‘thick’ prosopography that

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seeks to elucidate common beliefs and values from shared experience.2 Thirty-five men and fifteen women lie at the centre of this study, of whom a complete list is to be found at the end of this book. The phenomenon of a spouse incorporated into her husband’s profession is not a product of the twentieth century.3 Although women are less well documented than men, significant bodies of material, both in print and manuscript, survive for at least a dozen wives and partners of the period. Their remarks and reflections upon the diplomatic life are invaluable for adding depth to our understanding of diplomacy as a socio-political practice. Most research on women and international relations has focused on the sixteenth or twentieth centuries.4 Such work in itself, is by no means new. No student or scholar can begin to enter the lives and minds of British diplomats without consulting the work of David Bayne Horn. In a series of articles followed by The British Diplomatic Service, 1689–1789, Horn reconstructed the social and political worlds of envoys from the contents of their official papers and what was then available of their private correspondence. His sensitivity to the interconnectedness of history was unusual for its time, and led him to address topics from ethnicity and education to ceremonial and authorship.5 Notwithstanding the light that Horn shed upon diplomatic life and thought, few of his research initiatives - much less insights - have been taken up by later scholars. Jeremy Black’s British Diplomats and Diplomacy (2001) is an honourable exception to this rule. Black, ever an enemy to teleology and anachronism, has relied upon a lifetime of research to assess diplomats by the standards of their own time. In so doing, he has rescued the eighteenth-century service from the condescension of posterity and asserted the effectiveness of diplomacy as an arm of British foreign policy. Diplomacy, for Black, nevertheless remains the tool of a great power, a world of orders and privilege bereft of women and commoners, rather than a unique subset of early-modern political culture.6 All diplomats were obsessive letter-writers and keepers, so much so that they often apologized to family and friends for it. So voluminous is the official documentation alone that diplomatic history has often been written in episodic chunks, biographical studies or in-depth analyses of specific issues such as trade or empire. Such history was perceived as retrograde as early as 1936, long before the onset of the cultural turn.7 Despite attempts to update the field by interrogating the relationships of diplomacy to politics, culture and society in various forms,8 two disconnected bodies of eighteenth-century work have emerged: accounts which remain rooted in the traditional concerns of diplomatic history, which is to say competing ‘national’ interests, informed by analyses of

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religion and the press; and more imaginative treatments of perception and self-fashioning in international politics, many dealing with issues of gender and scandal.9 This book belongs more to the latter school in its reconstruction of diplomatic mentalités for their own sake, married to an assessment of their implications for the construction of British identities abroad. Part of the problem lies in the sources from which diplomatic historians have always worked. Only since around the 1980s have private papers, many of which lie in provincial and private archives, been much consulted in the pursuit of knowledge about the narrative of policyformation and execution: rarely have they been used to explore the meanings of diplomacy as a lifestyle and occupational identity.10 It is primarily upon correspondence between diplomats, or amongst diplomats, family and friends that this text relies. Such sources must be interrogated with some care. It is a fallacy to assume that private identities are less constructed than public ones, much less that there are rigid distinctions between the two.11 Having said this, diplomats wrote about their lives with considerable frankness. The first part of this book relies heavily upon such evidence to update the social history of the British foreign service from c. 1740 to 1830. This evaluation of the diplomatic life sets the stage for the revisionist analysis of diplomatic work which follows. Identity takes many forms: as a member of a gender, class and ethnicity as well as a profession, and we know much more about these categories of existence than was the case in Horn’s day. The eighteenth century no longer appears to us as an era of complacent stagnation, a ‘pudding time’ between the turbulence of the seventeenth century and the upheavals of the nineteenth.12 Most envoys and their wives came from the gentry or the middling sort, the boundaries between which were blurred. Men and women were also under increasing pressure to conform to domestic norms that prioritized private virtue over public honour. Last, but not least, diplomacy as a profession required its practitioners to observe cosmopolitan codes of conduct increasingly regarded at home as alien. If Europeans, as Paul Langford has noted, often found England difficult to understand, that misunderstanding of others was amply reciprocated on the part of the ‘English’ abroad.13 Career diplomats, who inhabited both worlds at once, were neither fish nor fowl. Four ethnic groups: the English, Scots, Welsh and Anglo-Irish were represented in the eighteenth century service. A complete statistical breakdown is to be found in Appendix A.14 Each, with the exception of the Welsh, possessed its own patronage and kinship connections, which in the case of the Scots and Irish might extend to Europe, thanks to a Jacobite diaspora that had sent rebel families abroad from the 1690s to

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the 1740s. Few gentlemen and women of Celtic birth before 1760 could avoid meeting their rebel kinsfolk abroad.15 Loyalty to the Hanoverian crown therefore clashed with ties of blood, honour and obligation to the extent that, for many, ‘Britishness’ was a public identity deliberately assumed, as Stephen Conway has pointed out, to share in the social and political privileges of Englishness. The ethnic self was reserved for the company of family and friends. In 1814, Henrietta Liston, who was Scottish by birth and marriage, justified her desire for a picture of the Princess Charlotte to a correspondent in London thus: ‘As an English Woman I feel an enthusiastic interest in the Education of this great Personage.’ She was the British ambassadress in Turkey at the time. In 1764, Boswell, whose Grand Tour activities included the collection of words for a dictionary project of the Scottish language, nonetheless wrote in his diary that a conversation with Mitchell about parliamentary politics had ‘revived in my mind true English ambition’.16 Welsh membership of the corps was always low. Only four men of any note: Henry Watkin Williams Wynn, Harford Jones, Charles Hanbury Williams and Arthur Paget, can be found in the service between 1750 and 1820. Of these, the last two display few indicators of alternative ethnicity because the leading Welsh nobility had long been assimilated into the English ruling elite. Paget, two of whose ancestors had served the Tudors and Stuarts as ambassadors, is one such man.17 For gentry families, whether in London or the country, clientage to powerful English families was one pathway to the spoils of state patronage. Hanbury Williams owed his appointments in part to the friendship of Henry Fox while the Williams Wynns, the leading Jacobite gentry family of north Wales, rose to prominence on the coattails of the Grenvilles, with whom they had intermarried in 1771. Colonial service, for both the Scots and Welsh, constituted another route to favour. Harford Jones, Britain’s first ambassador to Persia, was an East India Company servant.18 Since the Anglo-Irish possessed few natural connections to St James, Westminster and Whitehall, they too were marginal figures in the Hanoverian state service. Given the comparative youth of the Protestant Ascendancy as a ruling elite, noble and gentry families were connected to the social networks and patronage resources of the Ascendancy in Dublin rather than Whig families in London.19 This is not to say that English connections were undesirable nor actively sought: in the event that they were made, as George Macartney found in the case of the Fox family, patronage followed. Augustus John Foster also profited from the relationship of his mother, Lady Elizabeth, to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Henry Wellesley, Charles Stewart and Richard Meade (Lord Clanwilliam) entered the diplomatic service at the beginning of

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the nineteenth century, thanks to the clout of Richard, 1st Marquess Wellesley and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. That these two men should have risen to prominence following the 1801 Act of Union is no surprise: herein lay another injection of Celtic talent into metropolitan service. Few of the Irish or Welsh, nonetheless, rose to the top of the service and, of them, only Hanbury Williams has so far warranted a modern biography.20 Consuls were originally subjects for inclusion in this study in the hopes of making class a more important category of analysis. This group, upon investigation, proved not to have been so well documented in terms of their private lives. Two major collections of merchant-consul family papers in Oxford have nonetheless been employed to illustrate some of social tensions between the worlds of trade and politics. The frustrations undergone by the four men from these families who sought to enter the diplomatic service says much about the importance of birth and connections for success. John Philip Morier, David Richard Morier, James Justinian Morier and Francis Peter Werry were sons of consuls rather than the younger sons of the gentry apprenticed to trade, of whom the classic case of the seventeenth century was John Verney.21 By 1800, when Werry and the Moriers were starting careers in the foreign service, land and trade had to some extent parted ways, and consuls were starting to become members of what in the nineteenth century would be known as ‘the Cinderella service’.22 The distinction between consular and diplomatic work had not been so clear cut fifty years earlier. This is attributable to the fact that consular posts too constituted a form of patronage, a status they began to lose as trade escalated in importance as a measure of Britain’s strength in the world. Meritocracy, for all its ostensible egalitarianism, was defined by class in nineteenth-century Britain. Whilst these subjects have received some treatment before at the hands of nineteenth-century historians, accounts of diplomatic life have not, on the whole, been successfully integrated into political histories of Britain or Europe. For this the conventions of diplomatic history as laid down before 1940 are in part to blame. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, or so we are told, is supposed to have inaugurated the foundation of a ‘modern’ European states system in which states and their rulers abandoned confessional and, over time, dynastic allegiances to pursue impersonal interests on an increasingly global stage.23 States and their representatives are assumed, on the whole, to be independent and secular entities. Diplomats are portrayed as individualistic public lobbyists rather than corporatist private networkers. Rational self-interest, informed by greater or lesser degrees of enlightenment, is perceived to be the order

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of the day.24 This perspective has produced anachronistic accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century international relations rather than a proper evaluation of the period’s diplomacy as the product of two cultures: of the baroque court and the Enlightenment public sphere. The European states system, the nature of politics and the motives of public men and women deserve to be judged by the standards of their own time. Diplomats were, in essence, courtiers who belonged to a corps with its own codes and rules of etiquette.25 While their utility was increasingly questioned over the latter half of the century, protocols of honour played an important role in maintaining as the balance of power, a conceptual device that derived its intellectual legitimacy from a natural law cosmology of countervailing forces. To what extent this operated, or was in practice perceived to operate, as a check upon the inherent anarchy of all competing interests inside and outside Europe is a moot point.26 Britain, as an imperial power, often felt slighted because its colonial interests were distrusted or dismissed, particularly by the central and eastern powers. As Paul Schroeder writes, ‘almost every individual state had a concept of a European balance which contradicted the concepts envisioned and pursued by the others’.27 Balance, usually interpreted in the context of a state’s history, religion, dynastic connections and place in Europe relative to its immediate neighbours, was nonetheless of normative importance to all players of the diplomatic game. So too was the ego of the monarch. Prussia’s honorary status as a ‘great’ power can be attributed in great measure to the policies of Frederick the Great. A weak monarchy too, such as that of Anne, Princess Regent of Orange, was seen to contribute to the Dutch republic’s decline. Since international image was therefore a projection of court culture, balance was maintained as much through ritual and etiquette as through lobby work. Here cultural anthropology stands to shed considerable light upon the tactics, perceptions and worldview of diplomats, an approach which owes much to the ideas of Clifford Geertz and Norbert Elias.28 Postmodern approaches to history that inform other branches of the discipline are often greeted with a defensive hostility in international history that discourages constructive dialogue.29 This book seeks rather to foster it, not through the rigorous application of theory to the interpretation of the past, but by the selective and sympathetic use of its concepts to elucidate aspects of human life and experience. This brings us to the methodology employed in Part II of this book, namely the selective elucidation of diplomatic practice over time. Since distinctions between the public and the private in political life were not as well established as they would later become, attention is paid to the practices: rituals, networking and perception, rather than policy-making

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or the processes of negotiation, the histories of which are well known. The start and end dates of the text do not therefore denote full political coverage of the period. Evidence for a holistic reading of diplomacy can be found in the State Papers Foreign, which I have consulted extensively for three countries to supplement work done in private papers: France and Russia from c. 1750 to 1830, and the new United States of America from 1793 to 1830. Others may disagree with this sample, but these states were chosen for their importance in defining British attitudes towards themselves and the wider world. Bourbon France, along with its Family Compact allies, was the state against which Britain’s political, religious, economic and, increasingly, cultural identity was defined over the course of the eighteenth century, whether through denunciations of popery, absolutism or cuisine.30 This was a complex love–hate relationship based in part upon fear and envy of France’s military, diplomatic, commercial and cultural influence inside and outside Europe. Of the two, imperial factors were secondary considerations in the struggle against universal monarchy, British conceptions of which had been forged in a crucible of seventeenth-century religious and political strife kept alive by fears of Jacobitism and Catholicism until 1750.31 Important though the containment of France in Europe was to the security of Britain’s overseas colonies, the determination of its diplomats to preserve the status quo was based on continental values and considerations of status, honour and power rather than what Linda Colley and P.J. Marshall have identified as the vulnerabilities of the first British empire.32 Britain’s engagement with Europe was driven in great measure by its perceptions of France, apprehension of which escalated during the American War of Independence. No other state could threaten Britain with sedition and treason at home and abroad during the eighteenth century. Come the 1790s, French intrigue was suspected and, in some cases, to be found in Ireland, India, Canada, the Caribbean and the Islamic world, not to mention England and Scotland. By 1800, these fears had, on the whole subsided. Implicit in the belief that Britain could resist revolution was a strengthened belief in its superiority to France. 33 Over another fifteen years of warfare, that impression was gradually transformed into a commitment to active peace-keeping for the future.34 Russia, on the other hand, was the eastern empire that impinged increasingly upon the British consciousness from the 1700s onwards, emerging by 1815 as the chief state, apart from France, which could act either as guardian or threat to the stability of Europe.35 Last but not least, the United States was the constellation of rebel colonies which, in having broken away, forced the British to review their attitudes to governance

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at home and abroad. Since America was still regarded by many officials in the aftermath of its independence as a child of Britain, its affinity to France over the 1790s and 1800s forced the British to confront some of their deepest fears about the future of the old European order. Important though faith and honour continued to be to diplomacy in the eighteenth century, there can be no doubt that ‘might’, whether defined in terms of wealth, territory, military force or commercial clout came to determine which states could call themselves great powers by 1700. ‘Great’ Britain might be but it had a long way to go before becoming an efficient and modern state. Much work on aspects of eighteenthcentury British diplomacy between 1680 and 1830 has therefore focused on themes of proto or actual modernization. Even Horn’s work, despite its determination to depict things as they were, contains many implicit criticisms of the late Stuart and Hanoverian foreign service.36 The career diplomats that are the focus of this study are best seen as members of a pan-European cameralist cadre.37 They were neither administrators nor, except in times of war or crisis, policy-makers. Their place in the infrastructure of the state was one of data-provision, a role to which some, either by intellectual background or experience and the importance of their stations, were better suited than others. Where the balance in their jobs lay between early-modern court reportage and modern bureaucratic representation is something that cannot be measured with precision. On the whole, the balance lay with the former until the French Revolution. The notion of politics as a system and its relationship to law, economics, religion, history and national character is nonetheless increasingly visible in the dispatches of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such appraisals could take positive or negative forms. This is most apparent in the books and pamphlets produced by diplomats off-duty for public consumption. This brings us to the topic of cultural diplomacy before nongovernmental international organizations, a branch of international relations that can be defined in several ways. It was not uncommon during the Enlightenment for men and women to employ their rank, privileges, immunities and connections to foster better artistic, musical, literary and academic communications between Britain and Europe. Such mediatorial work has hitherto received little attention from diplomatic historians, if not their colleagues in the history of science, belles lettres, art or archaeology. Henry Newton, once resident at Milan, has been held responsible by Vincenzo Ferrone for introducing the principles of Newtonian physics to northern Italy, while Joseph Smith, British consul at Venice, has long been known to art historians as the man who sold Canaletto to the British.38 John Strange and Richard Worsley

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also went to the south for its climate and culture. Strange knew little of trade, and less of politics, at which he confessed himself to be ‘an ignoramus’.39 His twelve years in Venice were spent instead on art and geology. Involvement in the republic of letters might not be so intense. David Murray, the 2nd Earl of Mansfield, was a habitué of salons in Vienna and Paris throughout the 1760s and 70s, if only for the collection and verification of the gossip that oiled the wheels of politics and high society all over Europe. While this was not the courtier-humanist community of the Renaissance, it was nonetheless part of the information network by which news was spread, verified or refuted in many states.40 Worsley went to Venice primarily interested in art and archaeology. Come the French Revolution, he found himself in a theatre of allied military and diplomatic intrigue.41 Finding these duties not to his taste, Worsley requested a recall in 1798. While this suggests that the virtuosi were not suitable for ‘real’ work of any description, it should be recalled that William Hamilton, upon whom Worsley consciously modelled himself, made no complaint about the diplomatic drudgery of the French Revolutionary wars.42 Aesthetes could also serve their states in many capacities, and their contributions to the pursuit of knowledge are described in the third part of this book to evaluate the scope and effectiveness of British cultural diplomacy. Given that diplomats were also active as the authors of histories, archaeological catalogues, geological tracts and novels, they were also responsible for representing their host societies to Britain and Europe. The authority of these texts might be based on local knowledge derived from lengthy residence, as was the case with James Porter’s Observations on the Religion, Law, Government and Manners of the Turks (1768) or William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776). A new embassy akin to a voyage of exploration could also produce works in the ethnographic traditions of travel writing. Macartney’s Journal of an Embassy to China falls into this category.43 The writing of such memoirs long predated the Enlightenment, for as M.S. Anderson and Marshall Poe point out, the histories of Russia written by ambassadors in the sixteenth century constituted valuable sources for early-modern readers.44 Although such texts are now receiving serious academic attention, never before have they been assessed as a body of virtuoso expertise, nor as a route through which diplomats made an intellectual impact upon the wider world. Whether or not these writings were responsible for improving any ‘real’ understanding of their subjects is questionable, for this was the principal realm in which a heightened sense of British ‘imperial’ confidence is increasingly apparent.45 Power, whether political or not, is exercised and mediated in many

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theatres, as a result of which diplomats have always had to cast a wide net for information and influence. Not only have scholars, on the whole, been slow to recognize this, they have also been reluctant to admit that sites and practices of power change over time. Although diplomats in 1800 were doing many of the same things that their great-grandparents had done, the world had changed in many ways over the second half of the eighteenth century. Much work can be done with a wider range of sources: sermons, tracts and newspapers amongst others, to explore how diplomatic thinking and practice adapted to the emergence of Jürgen Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere and, with it, an increasingly vocal and often critical body of public opinion at home and abroad. These were developments that diplomats could not and did not ignore, either before or after the French Revolution, and this book treats British diplomacy to some extent as a witness of and, to a limited extent, participant in that cultural revolution. By 1830 the ancien régime values of the corps diplomatique were, as many of its British members realized, becoming difficult to sustain. Aristocratic though the corps was in membership throughout the nineteenth century, it underwent subtle sea changes at home and abroad.46 Notes 1 Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland (New York, 1953), Diary, 27 July 1764, 39 and 6 September 1764, pp. 82–3. 2 Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedelus, 100:1 (1971), 46–79. 3 Hillary Callan, ‘The premiss of dedication: notes towards an ethnography of diplomats’ wives’, in Shirley Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (London, 1975); Janet Finch, Married to the Job: Wives Incorporation in Men’s Work (London, 1983); H. Callan and S. Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife (London, 1984). 4 Peter Pastor, ‘The diplomatic fiasco of the modern world’s first woman ambassador, Roza Bedy-Schwimmer’, East European Quarterly, 8 (1974), 273–82 and ‘Culture, gender and foreign policy: a symposium’, Diplomatic History, 18 (1994), 47–70; Glenda Sluga, ‘Cold war casualties: ethnicity, gender and the writing of history’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 19 (1996), 75–85; Maria Pia Pedani, ‘Safiye’s household and Venetian diplomacy’, Turcica, 32 (2000), 9–32; Louisa Parker Mattozi, ‘The feminine art of politics and diplomacy: the roles of duchesses in early modern Italy’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2004). 5 David Bayne Horn, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams and European Diplomacy, 1748–1759 (London, 1930). See also ‘Edinburgh University and the Diplomatic Service, 1714–89’, Edinburgh University Journal (1944) 27–33,

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‘Scottish diplomatists 1689–1789’, Historical Association Publications (1944), 3–18 and The British Diplomatic Service, 1689–1789 (Oxford, 1961). Jeremy Black is nonetheless sensitive to the importance of political culture. See European International Relations, 1648–1815 (Basingstoke, 2002), ch. 2. G.M. Young, Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1936), p. 103. Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898–1914 (Cambridge, 1969) set the standard for work in modern diplomatic history for the next twenty-five years, to be followed by the structuralism of Paul Kennedy’s The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences upon British External Policy, 1865–1980 (London, 1981). The early modern period is beginning to be better served. Gary Kates, Monsieur D’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York, 1995); Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘The evil empire? The debate on Turkish despotism in eighteenth-century French political culture’, JMH, 72 (2000), 6–34, ‘Who’s afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen’, French History, 14 (2000), 241–71 and ‘From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: MarieAntoinette, Austrophobia and the Terror’, French Historical Studies, 26 (2003), 579–617; Mary Lindemann, Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (Baltimore, 2006); Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge, 2007); Nick Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (Woodbridge, 2007). Catherine Allgor is one exception to this rule. See ‘“A republican in a monarchy:” Louisa Catherine Adams in Russia’, Diplomatic History, 21 (1997), 15–43 and, more notably, Parlour Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2002). Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1988). An impression best conveyed by J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England (London, 1967). Lawrence and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1986), p. 409; P.J. Corfield, ‘Class by number and name in eighteenth century Britain’, History, 72 (1987) 38–61; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996); Robert Shoemaker, ‘The decline of public insult in London 1660–1800’, P&P, 169:1 (2000), 97–131. See also ‘The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800’, HJ, 45 (2002), 525–45 and The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth Century England (London, 2004); Paul Langford, Englishness Identified. Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives: The Story of Britain’s Pursuit of Empire and How Its Soldiers and Civilians Were Held Captive by the Dream of Global Supremacy, 1600–1850

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Introduction (London, 2002); Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003). All British male and female diplomats mentioned in the text of this book have been listed in Appendices A and B. K.W. Schweitzer, ‘Scotsmen and the British Diplomatic Service, 1714–1789’, Scottish Tradition, 7–8 (1977–8), 115–36; Göran Behre, ‘Jacobite refugees in Gothenburg after Culloden’, Scottish Historical Review, 70 (1991), 58–65; Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites, Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994); Michael Wynn, ‘Some Jacobites in Turin in the eighteenth century’, Studi Piemontesi, 24 (1995), 127–30; Rebecca Wills, The Jacobites and Russia 1715–1750 (East Linton, 2002); Doron Zimmerman, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke, 2003). S. Conway, ‘War and national identity in the mid-eighteenth century British isles’, EHR, 116 (2001), 865; NLS MS 5641, Henrietta Liston to Cornelia Wright, 9 January 1814, f. 19; Pottle, Boswell on the Grand Tour, 20 July 1764, p. 28. Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 20–1, 28; David W. Howell, Patriarchs and Parasites: The Gentry in South-west Wales in the Eighteenth Century (Cardiff, 1986), pp. 214–15; Samuel Rhea Gammon, Statesman and Schemer: William, First Lord Paget, Tudor Minister (Newton Abbot, 1973). Linda Colley, Britons, Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992); John Mackenzie, ‘On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 25 (1993), 714–39. S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992); F.G. James, ‘The active Irish peers in the early eighteenth century’, JBS, 18 (1979), 52–69; J.L. McCracken, ‘The political structure, 1714–1760’, in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland. Vol. IV, Eighteenth Century Ireland (Oxford, 1986), pp. 57–83; Joseph Robins, Champagne and Silver Buckles: The Viceregal Court at Dublin Castle, 1700–1922 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 6–7, 56–7. Horn, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams; John K. Severn, ‘A family affair: the diplomatic career of Henry Wellesley, First Lord Cowley’, Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850, 16 (1986), 339–49. Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999); Sonia P. Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey. Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667–1668 (Oxford, 1989). D.C.M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London, 1971); Charles R. Middleton, The Administration of British Foreign Policy, 1782–1846 (Durham, NC, 1977), ch. 9. Derek Mackay and H.M. Scott, The Rise of the Great powers, 1648–1815 (1983); M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (Harlow, 1993); Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 139–40.

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24 One honourable exception to this rule is Linda and Marsha Frey’s History of Diplomatic Immunity (Columbus, 1999). For the bigger picture and a critique of it, see Muriel Chamberlain, ‘The myths of british foreign policy’, in Pax Britannica? British Foreign Policy, 1789–1914 (Harlow, 1988), ch. 1. The solution, thought Chamberlain, lay in a better elucidation of the relationship between foreign and domestic policy. Black instead has called for proper attention to be paid to national and international political cultures: European International Relations, pp. 5–9. 25 William James Roosen, ‘The functioning of ambassadors under Louis XIV’, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970), 311–32 and The Age of Louis XIV: The Rise of Modern Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA, 1976); John C. Rule, ‘Gathering intelligence in the reign of Louis XIV’, International History Review, 14 (1992), 732–52; K.W. Schweitzer, François de Callières. Diplomat and Man of Letters, 1645–1717 (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter, 1995); Trevor Dunn, ‘The courts’, JMH, 67 (1995), 136–51; Frey and Frey, Diplomatic Immunity, ch. 6; Karina Urbach, ‘Diplomatic history since the cultural turn’, HJ, 46 (2003), 991–7; S.E. Meltzer and K. Norberg (eds), From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France (Berkeley, 1998); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, St Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 2004); T.C.W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2005). 26 As argued by Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994) and recently re-iterated by Michael Sheehan, ‘The sincerity of the British commitment to the maintenance of the balance of power, 1714–1763’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 15 (2004), 489–506. Jeremy Black, despite calling for modifications to this picture, still sees the eighteenth century as a period of ‘modern’ diplomacy. 27 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, p. 10 and ‘Did the Vienna Settlement rest on a balance of power?’, AHR, 97 (1992), 684. 28 Clifford Geertz, ‘Courtiers, kings and charisma: reflections upon the symbolics of power’, in Sean Wilentz (ed.), Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 13–37 and ‘Ideology as a cultural system’, in David E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964), pp. 47–76; Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols (Oxford, 1978) and The Court Society, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1983). 29 Edward Ingram, Britain’s Persian Connection 1798–1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia (Oxford, 1992), Preface; Jeremy Black’s ‘Hanover in British foreign policy, 1714–1760’, EHR, 120 (2007), 303–4. 30 Steven C. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of British Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996) ch. 5; Jeremy Black, Natural and necessary enemies: Anglo-French relations in the eighteenth century (London, 1986); Gilly Lehmann, ‘Politics in the kitchen’, Eighteenth Century Life, 23:2 (1999), 71–83.

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31 Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: England’s Involvement with France, 1759–1789 (London, 1973); Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (Basingstoke, 2000); Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756, ch. 1; Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 3. 32 Colley, Captives, pp. 4–12; Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c.1750–1830 (Oxford, 2005); Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London, 2007). 33 Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Harlow, 1986); Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793 (Cambridge, 1993); Stella Cottrell, ‘The devil on two sticks: Francophobia in 1803’, in R. Samuel (ed.), The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 2 vols (London, 1989) i. pp. 259–74. 34 Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, ii; H.M.V. Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827: England, the Neo-Holy Alliance, and the New World (London, 1925); Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston, 1957). 35 Schroeder, ‘Did the Vienna Settlement rest on a balance of power?’, 683–706. 36 S.T. Bindoff, ‘The unreformed diplomatic service, 1812–1860’, TRHS, 4th series (1935), 143–72; Charles R. Middleton, ‘Retrenchment and reform: the case of the British diplomatic presents, 1782–1832’, Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal, 11 (1974), 63–74; Raymond A. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914 (Waterloo, 1983); Keith Hamilton and Richard Langbourne (eds), The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London, 1995), ch. 3; Middleton, Administration of British Foreign Policy; Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 12–14, 18, 96, 131, 179, 188–9; Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 51–63, 176. 37 See J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989) pp. 69–85 for the character of eighteenthcentury British public administration. 38 Heiko Droste, ‘Diplomacy as a means of cultural transfer in early modern times: the Swedish evidence’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 31 (2006), 144–50; Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Atlantic Highlands, 1995), pp. 9–14; J.G. Links, Canaletto and His Patrons (London, 1977); Martin Clayton, Canaletto in Venice (London, 2005); Deborah Manley and Peta Rée, Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist (London, 2001); Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005). 39 BL Egerton 1969, Strange to John Hatsell, 25 November 1773, f. 5. 40 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 137–8, 154–65; Robert Darnton, ‘An early information society: news and the media in eighteenth century Paris’,

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45 46

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www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000001.html (2001); Mansfield Papers, TD 2002/42, Box 14, Bundle 1, Suzanne Necker to Stormont, 9 November 1779. Worsley’s collecting habits can be seen in the Museum Worsleyanum or a Collection of Antique Basso Relievos, Bustos, Statues, and Gems with Views of Places in the Levant Taken on the Spot in the Years 1785–6 and 7, 2 vols (1782); C. Roth (ed.), La Caduta della Serenissima nei dispacci del residente inglese a Venezia (Venice, 1935). J. Black, ‘“A most beneficial treaty for this country:” Anglo-Neapolitan commercial negotiations in 1789’, Journal of European Economic History, 25 (1996), 673–7. Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 284–300; Porter, Observations on the Religion, Law, Government and Manners of the Turks, 2 vols (1768); Hamilton, Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies, 2 vols (Naples, 1776); George Macartney, ‘Journal of an Embassy to China from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, in the Years 1792, 1793 and 1794’, in Public Life of Macartney, ii, pp. 163–531. M.S. Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia, 1553–1815 (London, 1958); Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, 2000); Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 46–8. Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow, 1989). Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 79–80, 107–143. For an indicator of where the field is going in nineteenth-century studies, see Markus Marslang and Torstan Riotte (eds), The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy (London, 2008).

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Part I

The structure of a service

Diplomacy has always been a lifestyle requiring its disciples to abandon some of the customary distinctions between public and private life. Since embassies ranged in size from apartments to mansions, it could be difficult to separate living quarters from reception rooms. Women organized regular dinners for expatriates, local notables and international celebrities that ate into family life and time. Children too were recruited for the entertaining of guests. Diplomats then, as now, therefore experienced above-average levels of anxiety and isolation, as a result of which endogamy in the service has always been common. Few understand the trials and tribulations of the life better than those raised or trained in a diplomatic household.1 The embassy was never a ‘separate sphere’ which, whatever its drawbacks as a purported prison of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, at least offered privacy from prying eyes.2 How family was defined in the eighteenth century is, as Naomi Tadmor tells us, more inclusive than it is now. Servants and clients were important members of a diplomat’s home, which explains in part the wealth of detail about the workings of – and human relations within – embassies that can be derived from the correspondence of their dependents.3 The family embassy, as Raymond Jones tells us, would not disappear until the 1850s. Diplomacy, like other early modern trades, was learned through apprenticeship at the hands of one’s master which meant that envoys were often acting in loco parentis to secretaries or, later, attachés.4 These emotional ties were strong and often lasted a lifetime. Since diplomats did not, on average, marry until their mid-thirties, no maternal figure was necessarily present. While surrogate fatherhood was, in a manner of speaking, conferred upon heads of station by virtue of the control they exercised over disciples, hegemonic masculinity, by early-modern British standards, could not be achieved by men who controlled households lacking in the dependent biological resources of spouses and children.5 Here residence

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abroad operated to liberate diplomats, like soldiers and sailors, from the necessity to conform to domestic norms. The sexual component of full manhood could be maintained through discreet or open mistresskeeping in foreign lands, an option that was attractive to some. As the younger sons of landed families, many envoys were not obliged to ensure the transmission of an estate or lineage to the next generation.6 Men seem – on the whole – to have enjoyed life abroad. Their spouses record more struggles of heart and mind. Having said this, both sexes had to modify aspects of their identity to survive for any extended time abroad. This was by no means necessarily a negative experience of loss. Many, like Emma Hamilton, enjoyed the comparative freedom from domestic social conventions that came with life abroad. For others with exiled family or friends involved in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, encounters with these ‘traitors’ outside the British Isles renewed old ties. Becoming European was seen in Britain to be a troublesome business, and in the case of men, best begun in one’s teens. A model for the process was to be found in Lord Chesterfield’s famous Letters to his son. In addition to training in the protocols of international relations, the performance of diplomacy began with what Chesterfield called ‘domestication’ in the families of the court nobles with whom Philip Stanhope was supposed to consort on the Grand Tour. English diplomats, claimed Chesterfield, never became ‘intimate . . . in any one house’. Only through familiarity with European domesticity could a man, the exemplar of whom was French, truly fulfil his mission, for ‘he has accustomed the people to be not only easy, but unguarded before him’. By these means, he became well placed to acquire knowledge ‘of the characters, the humours, the abilities, or the weaknesses, of the actors’ at court.7 The British, or so thought Chesterfield, made bad diplomats because their manners ill-fitted them for social intercourse in Europe. ‘Going native’ was, however, frowned upon at home. ‘Englishness’, the core component of a public service identity, was somehow at odds with cosmopolitanism, which may be one reason why the foreign service was not a popular form of employment and to what extent Britons were ill-equipped by birth and upbringing for the representation of their king abroad was debated by diplomats throughout the period. Although few agreed entirely with Chesterfield’s denigrations of their service, there is no doubt that the religious, political, social and cultural baggage of the British Isles gave the corps its own unique character. This affected how men and women performed diplomacy on the European stage.

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Notes 1 Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (London, 2002), pp. 48–111; Auckland Correspondence, ii. William Eden’s Spanish Journal, 23 January 1789, p. 146. 2 Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988). See the essays in Catherine Hall, White Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge, 1992) and Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987) for the classic statement of the bourgeois domesticity thesis. Critiques of it come from Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres: a review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, HJ, 36 (1993), 383–414 and The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998), pp. 1–12. 3 Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001). 4 Jones, British Diplomatic Service, ch. 5. 5 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination (New Haven, 1995) and ‘Manhood, the male body, courtship and the household in early modern England’, History, 275 (1999), pp. 431–2; Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (Harlow, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England, c.1580–1640’, Past & Present, 167 (2000), 75–106 and ‘From anxious patriarchs to refined gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, c. 1500–1700’, JBS, 44 (2005), 281–95. 6 Lawrence and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977), pp. 87–90. 7 Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 27 September 1748 OS, p. 155 and 25 March 1751 OS, p. 423.

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1

Why diplomacy?

In a celebrated chapter in his England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) Sir Lewis Namier sought to answer the question why did men go into Parliament? His answer may be summed up that it was fashionable and profitable to be a Member of Parliament. If we ask why men went into the diplomatic service in the eighteenth century we must find a different set of answers, since entry to this service was both unfashionable and on the whole unprofitable. (Horn, The British Diplomatic Service, p. 85)

Foreign service, as far as many were concerned in the eighteenth century, was tantamount to exile. Those seeking fame and fortune in the name of king and country tended to steer clear of postings to far-flung lands where their exertions might be overlooked or forgotten. Since influence, not merit, was the key to recognition and reward at home, most civil servants, regardless of department, were politicians for the sake of survival. Diplomacy was consequently an unattractive career. The longer one was absent from London, the more likely one was, or so it seemed, to lose any credit that one had once possessed or could lay claim to. The connections between diplomatic service and reward had not always been so tenuous. In the days when foreign policy was an uncontested royal prerogative, embassies lay within the personal gift of the crown, and diplomacy was one of several routes to royal favour. This was the world of Tudor and Stuart diplomacy. After the 1688 Glorious Revolution and a quarter century of warfare that made Britain into a ‘great’ power, diplomacy became less a matter of service to the personal interests of the crown, be they dynastic, religious or other. Representation instead began to focus on representing the political, economic and military needs of the state.1 Although Britain’s arrival on the international stage made it desirable to keep a permanent corps diplomatique on the public payroll, embassies were expensive to run, remuneration was slow to materialize, and the work in peacetime was often uneventful. Diplomats were responsible

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for feeding Grand Tourists as well, and homesick young men like James Boswell in search of a good meal were to be found all over Europe. ‘I have’, wrote Robert Murray Keith from Dresden in 1769, ‘within this month, had an inundation of English, who have nearly eaten me out of house and home. The nine-and-twentieth left me a week ago, and I have only one or two more to expect.’2 Paris, always full of tourists, was easily the most expensive station in the service. The periodic movements of the court also necessitated regular travel on the part of the ambassador, who was nevertheless under no obligation, unlike his colleague in Spain, to keep two residences: one at Madrid and the other at Aranjuez. Despite the fact that St Petersburg welcomed comparatively few British travellers, it was a costly billet for another reason: namely the bribes that Russian nobles sought in exchange for promoting the interests of foreign powers at court. In no other capital was this perceived to be so onerous an expense.3 The pay, on paper, was generous. Ambassadors, of whom there were few, only Paris, Vienna, Madrid and St Petersburg warranting one as a matter of course, received £100 a week or £10 a day. A minister plenipotentiary received £8 a week, an envoy extraordinary got £5 and a secretary of embassy £2.4 Ministers and envoys were also entitled to a service of silver plate, an initial sum in cash to outfit their mission and removal expenses. This money soon ran out, and since all Hanoverian public servants were paid at least six months in arrears, any man undertaking a mission ought to have had sufficient credit to cover initial costs and unforeseen contingencies. The Treasury was also tardy in the reimbursement of extraordinary expenses: be they for espionage, bribes or special couriers, all common items of expenditure. These facts of life were well known in establishment circles, and the history of the eighteenth-century foreign service is littered with instances of posts evaded, refused or resigned.5 This was problematic for secretaries of state always in search of gentlemen and, preferably, noblemen, to undertake diplomatic work. Diplomacy, as a profession, had a much higher social and political standing in Europe than in Britain, a fact attributable to the often direct involvement of ‘absolute’ monarchs, be it in terms of appointment, instruction, negotiation or policy formation. Britain’s Paris embassy was often headed by wealthy and titled figureheads. Since little friendship was to be expected from Bourbon France, no man of ability was normally needed to fill the position and most of the business, for which read information collection and dispatch-writing, was done by the secretary of embassy. Perhaps the most famous of such eighteenth-century pairings was that of the Marquess of Hertford and David Hume, who occupied the Paris embassy from 1764 to 1765. Embassies, as far as most peers were concerned, were short-term

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billets. Two examples of such ambassadors were Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of Minto, and John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, the former in Vienna and the latter St Petersburg. Both hoped to use the posts as springboards to better jobs and Minto went on to become Governor General of Bengal. Buckinghamshire never held office again. This is not to say that diplomat peers lacked public spirit or talent: William Henry Nassau van Zuylenstein, 4th Earl of Rochford; John Carmichael, 3rd Earl of Hyndford; and Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham, all served Britain well between 1744 and 1779.6 Two of this trio had also been bred to the trade. Rochford came from a Dutch court family ennobled by William III and Grantham had been born and partially raised in the British embassy at Vienna. For such men, diplomacy was a hereditary form of state service. For outsiders, it represented one of several possible routes to recognition. Having decided that ‘the dead weight of a Scotch title’7 barred him from any powerful or profitable employment in London, David Murray, then heir to the Earldom of Mansfield, entered the service in 1755. Scots were not well regarded in England following the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 that aimed to restore the House of Stuart to the British throne. Like many mid-century Scottish gentlemen, the young Lord Stormont was tainted with Jacobite blood, and therefore prepared to take employment spurned by his more fastidious or better-connected English brethren. After twenty-four years in the diplomatic service, Stormont collected his reward by becoming Secretary of State for the Northern Department.8 Prospects for social and political advancement were also open to those of genteel extraction who belonged to the kinship, friendship or clientage networks of powerful English political clans. George Macartney was the eldest son of a modest Scots-Irish gentry family who inherited a mere £150 from his father. In 1760, whilst on the Grand Tour, he fell in with Stephen Fox, whom he bailed out of some gambling debts. This friendship placed the Fox family under some obligation to Macartney and, by 1762, Henry Fox was promoting the interest of Macartney’s relatives and encouraging George to stand for parliament. Since the rotten borough of Midhurst was desired by the Grenvilles for one of their dependants, Fox agreed not to field a candidate at a price; namely a job for Macartney, who in 1764 was offered the St Petersburg embassy.9 After some success in the post and a strategic marriage, Macartney moved onto the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland and a series of East India Company appointments, including Britain’s first embassy to China in 1792. He ended his career as a peer and governor of the newly acquired Cape Colony in 1798.

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As the examples of Minto and Macartney suggest, movement from the diplomatic to the colonial service was common. Transfer in the other direction was not common since diplomacy, as a vocation, was interactive rather than managerial. This is not to say that men were unwilling to make the effort. In 1762 Henry Grenville went as ambassador to Constantinople having spent the decade from 1746 to 1756 as the Governor of Barbados. No sense of wider imperial priorities can be ascertained from his diplomatic correspondence. In 1801 Lord Cornwallis, Governor General of India from 1786 to 1793, went to Amiens as the nominal leader of a peacemaking mission, but with the understanding that the real business of negotiation would be overseen by the career diplomat, Anthony Merry. Army officers were much more likely than colonial governors to have adequate French and German. Transfer from the army into the foreign service therefore took place at the end of wars when officers were faced with the prospect of little but idle half-pay at home. Men who had gained some negotiating experience in the course of active duty made good candidates for the diplomatic life. Their military expertise was also useful in assessing the defensive and offensive capacities of other states. At the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the 24-year-old Colonel Joseph Yorke, a younger son of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, went to Paris as a peace commissioner. In 1749 Yorke was made secretary of embassy, then the lowest commissioned rank in the service. Like Stormont, Yorke planned to use the diplomatic service as a route to high office at home, and in 1753 he moved to the Hague. Yorke kept the post until 1786 and received a peerage for his services.10 Robert Murray Keith was less fortunate in his efforts to secure peacetime employment. His Highland regiment was disbanded at the end of the Seven Years’ War and he spent the next six years on half pay. Thanks to the friendship of the Elder Pitt and Henry Seymour Conway, not to mention the fact that Robert Keith senior was then Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Keith junior began to contemplate a diplomatic career. In 1769, thanks to Conway’s patronage, Keith became envoy extraordinary to the court of Dresden.11 He would not retire from the service until 1790. The end of the Napoleonic Wars also witnessed some movement from the army to the foreign service, though by this date the appointment of well-connected military men to diplomatic posts was regarded with some misgivings at home. As far as the gentry were concerned, diplomacy had become a source of bread and butter for younger sons, and barring unusual cases like Stormont’s, the service took the vast majority of its recruits from the dependants of patrons. Horace Mann, from 1740 to 1786 the resident in Florence, was a cousin of Robert

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and Horace Walpole. Solomon Dayrolles, the nephew of one British resident at Geneva, owed his fortunes to the protection of his godfather, Lord Chesterfield. Promotion was slow to achieve without connections. It was not, as Horn once claimed, the result of exceptional luck or merit, bearing in mind that Robert Liston and Daniel Hailes, the sons of gentleman farmers, and Francis and George Jackson, the offspring of a clergyman, became diplomats.12 When times were tight, and none were tighter than the Napoleonic Wars that closed British embassies all over Europe, those lacking strong supporters in London found themselves passed over in favour of others with highly placed family and friends. ‘As the oldest diplomatic Secretary in the King’s Service’, wrote a disgruntled Alexander Straton in 1803, ‘I conceived that I had a Right to the first vacancy.’13 Straton had gone abroad as private secretary to his kinsman, Keith junior, in 1779. When Keith retired in 1792, Straton remained in Vienna as secretary of embassy and, in 1800, was transferred to Constantinople. By 1800, time-servers like these saw diplomacy as a profession in the pursuit of which service and merit ought to count for more than connections. This was still wishful thinking. In 1813, Charlotte Jackson, the mother of Francis and George, was outraged to learn that General Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother, had been given the Berlin embassy. ‘I am quite tired of Generals being sent out as negotiators; and there never came any good of it yet.’14 Although her elder son had survived in the service without a patron during the 1800s, she was much worried about whether the younger, then unemployed, would ever see active service again. The skills of diplomacy were easily acquired. ‘Good sense, good Breeding, knowledge of the world and a complete acquaintance with modern History, joined to three weeks as to the forms of business’, wrote Liston in 1801, would suffice. Since private secretaries did much of the work in the embassies, any man willing to serve an apprenticeship that involved the acquisition of languages could become a diplomat.15 The vast majority never became peers or, for that matter, ambassadors. Despite a lengthy and honourable service record in Prussia and Russia, James Harris had to bargain hard for ambassadorial rank as a condition of taking the Hague embassy in 1783. This, for Harris, was a point of personal pride.16 Those with fewer pretensions to grandeur settled for joint accreditation and – of course – pay, as minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary. This was not enough to make a man rich, but he and his family could live very comfortably: ‘any three thousand [a year]’, once wrote Hugh Elliot as the salary target of his next mission.17 After payscale revisions made in 1787, 1804 and 1815, an ambassador

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stood to make £15,0000 per annum. An envoy extraordinary would have made £3,256. Vienna and the Hague, Britain’s time honoured allies, were the most prestigious and active stations, the latter particularly so on account of its status as ‘the whispering gallery of Europe’; the entrepot centre for the gossip of the continent. Madrid and Paris, the courts of the Bourbon enemy, were equal in ranking, if not in prospects for distinguishing oneself. Russia increased in importance over the course of the eighteenth century. Less expensive were the Scandinavian and German embassies, of which the most important was Berlin. The smaller courts made ideal starting posts for new recruits to the service. Florence, Naples and Turin were quasi-sinecures, stations that might become important in the course of a Mediterranean war, but much coveted for their low workloads and good climates. None of them were, however, cheap to run, thanks to the prominence of Italy on the Grand Tour route. Accounting, as all this suggests: of rents, wages and food prices, was a regular concern for a chef du mission and some diplomats sought to make money on the side by selling art or exploiting their right to import items for household use duty free.18 Communication routes to London, not to mention other parts of Europe, were slow and unpredictable, which meant that diplomats could be left without orders for months at a time.19 For the man who liked to be left alone, diplomacy made a good career, particularly in peacetime, when little was expected of the king’s servants beyond maintaining the status quo. In wartime a diplomat also became an executive officer with considerable latitude to promote and bind the national interest: a maker, as much as an executor, of policy. As Francis Jackson once put it: ‘A minister is very frequently, from the nature of things, a better judge of the instructions applicable to his situation, than the person from whom he receives them.’ He was therefore under the necessity of acting ‘to the best of his judgment, and upon his own responsibility, in the supposition that he had such instructions as he could wish.’20 Some envoys, whether at war or peace, used this freedom of action aggressively. In 1772, Keith junior rescued the deposed Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark, the sister of George III, from imprisonment at the hands of her political opponents. In 1774 Sir James Gray faced down the Spanish crown over its occupation of the Falkland Islands, promising reprisals from the Royal Navy in the event of Spain’s refusal to evacuate the islands. In 1794 Lord Malmesbury, anxious to cut some red tape in the protracted Prussian subsidy negotiations of the First Coalition, committed Britain to lend £400,000 to the United Provinces. In 1811–12, Stratford Canning superintended the signature of the Treaty of Bucharest, by which Turkey made peace with Russia, without any

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direction from London. Diplomats, like their masters at home, made it up as they went along.21 In 1788 Keith junior wrote angrily to the Foreign Office that he had received no fresh instructions for over a year. This outburst had little to do with the international situation for Britain was at peace with Europe, and at such times diplomats were given watching briefs to report on court politics and international news: ‘the dead silence’, wrote Charles Arbuthnot from Copenhagen in 1803, ‘which too often prevails is cruelly disheartening’.22 It was, however, tactless at any time to leave a man without support or recognition of his services. Many men were reluctant to act without orders, particularly in situations where they felt themselves at a loss for information. At the end of January 1778, Stormont, having set spies upon Benjamin Franklin in Paris, feared that France had signed a secret alliance with the rebellious Thirteen Colonies. Uncertain as to how to proceed in the face of a worsening military and diplomatic situation, Stormont begged for guidance on how best to extract confirmation of that pact from Louis XVI’s ministers: ‘I humbly hope, My Lord from His Majesty’s constant goodness to me as well as from yr Lordship’s Kindness & Friendship, that the Instructions I receive upon so important a Point will be as clear and precise as possible.’23 As it transpired, Stormont’s suspicions were well founded for the FrancoAmerican treaty was made public a few weeks later. In times of tension or crisis, diplomats – like spies – needed handholding, and when Stormont became Secretary of State for the Northern Department a few months later, few knew better than he how frustrating it was to represent Britain when it was losing a war. All the diplomats of the late 1770s and early 1780s: Yorke, Murray Keith, Elliot and James Harris, hardly knew how to answer the often malicious queries put to them by fellow diplomats and heads of state. In 1778 the newlywed Harris had gone to St Petersburg with his young wife, Harriet, full of enthusiasm to improve Britain’s relations with Russia. This proved to be more complicated than Harris had expected and, finding himself in want of guidance: ‘I am without a single instruction from home’, he wailed to his colleague Morton Eden.24 Despite some success, or so Harris thought, in establishing a rapport with the Empress Catherine II, he had in fact been misled by her flattery. By the autumn of 1781, Harris was starting to see that his mission might fail, and began to demand a recall on the grounds of illness and fatigue. Since no obvious replacement was available in London, Stormont tried to bolster the envoy’s spirits with continual praise and encouragement.25 Harris left Russia in 1783. Despite the near-complete failure of his mission, he secured a knighthood and promotion to the Hague.

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Secretaries of State often delegated briefing and support duties to underlings, upon whom diplomats relied heavily for tidings of their brethren and confidential office news. While undersecretaries were often brought into office as clients, they remained in the state departments if they showed any aptitude or liking for the work. This continuity was fortuitous for the service since Secretaries of State came and left office frequently during the 1750s, 1760s and 1800s. Few envoys were as close to an undersecretary as Harris to William Eden – the two were brothersin-law once removed – but all career diplomats valued their connections to the bureaucrats, whose goodwill was invaluable in representing their opinions, requests for reimbursement and claims to promotion. All diplomats obsessed endlessly about this to each other and their families, because one could never be sure how well one stood with one’s masters at home. Although some diplomats were also MPs, few had anything controversial to say for themselves in the House of Commons. Oppositional postures might be undertaken by the likes of peers like Chesterfield, but those primarily dependent on the state for a living tended to toe the Court Whig line. This was sound advice for, as Lord William Bentinck was to find, the vigorous promotion of libertarian objectives, namely the introduction of constitutional monarchy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was no route to government favour.26 Court Whiggism and, after 1800, its ‘Tory’ successor were conservative, safe and consistent with Britain’s international identity. Diplomats were expected to defend the Protestant religion, the Hanoverian succession and the territorial status quo in Europe as laid down by the Peace of Utrecht. Conflicts of interest sometimes arose in the event that a diplomat was Scottish. Jacobites joined the foreign services of other powers, and Stormont’s English establishment education was undertaken to overcome the fact that his uncle had been chief secretary to the Old Pretender. Most eighteenth-century British diplomats were educated at home or a succession of schools that might lead to university.27 Several second-generation Irishmen, descendants of the Wild Geese who had fled in 1692, were in the pay of the Spanish crown. Most notable amongst these was Richard Wall, who had been born in Nantes in 1694. He was posted to Spain’s London embassy in 1748, and became its ambassador in 1751. By virtue of his birth and upbringing, Wall could be regarded as a foreigner and therefore no source of embarrassment to the Hanoverians. George Keith, the Earl Marischal, who became the Prussian ambassador to France in 1752, was another matter.28 George and his brother James had left Scotland upon the failing of the

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1715 Jacobite rising, for which the elder was convicted as a traitor and attainted by George I. As many Scots, whether Jacobite or not, had done before them, they became mercenaries and adventurers on the Continent. James rose to prominence in the army of the Empress Anna of Russia before entering the service of Frederick the Great in 1747. George, having embroiled himself in a series of Jacobite plots culminating in a rejection of the Young Pretender’s request to become his chief counsellor, joined James in Berlin a year later. Since Lord Marischal was a living Jacobite legend, his appointment to the Paris embassy was a deliberate insult to George II. It was also evidence of continuing Franco-Prussian interest in the Stuart cause, bearing in mind that Richard Talbot, the exiled 3rd Earl of Tyrconnel, had become the French ambassador to Berlin in 1749.29 While Yorke kept an eye on Marischal’s doings in Paris, Hanbury Williams in Berlin was trying without success to locate the Young Pretender in Poland. Charles Edward Stuart, having quarrelled with Louis XV, was now seeking the assistance of the northern and central European powers. The Elibank conspiracy, as it came to be known, was a tangled web of domestic plotting and foreign fundraising devoted to staging a third Jacobite rising in the British Isles. Although the plot was real, its native conspirators lacked cohesion and their network was easily infiltrated by spies. British diplomats consequently kept a careful eye on the Jacobite communities in exile throughout the late 1740s and early 1750s. The conspiracy seems not to have been taken very seriously by the British government, which was reluctant to antagonize Frederick for fear of reprisals against George II’s Hanoverian interests in Germany. Action was taken only against conspirators at home and, by 1755, diplomats had ceased to file reports on suspicious Jacobites abroad, who seem on the whole to have come to terms with the Hanoverian dynasty. They were now applying to the embassies for passports to return to Britain on family or other business. A few even entered the British diplomatic service in support capacities.30 Early-modern Scots were accustomed to seeking employment abroad, for demand had always exceeded supply when it came to jobs at home. English employment was not easy to obtain, nor was the process of doing so through attendance on English Whigs much to the taste of many Scots. This in part explains Stormont’s decision to make his way in the diplomatic, as opposed to any home-based service. English Scottophobia, an unpleasant fact of life for the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, was attributable in part to the survival of ethno-national, as opposed to supra-national, mentalités on the part of people who had yet to regard themselves as ‘British.’ Such prejudice, regardless of its origins, took time to overcome, and work abroad, whether in the colonial, diplomatic or

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armed services, to some extent freed those from the Celtic peripheries of its worst English manifestations. By 1780, as Linda Colley observes, one in three East India Company officers and one in seven diplomats, were Scots.31 By 1760, North Britons were starting to shed their image in England as Jacobite traitors, assisted in part by a campaign of deliberate appointment and promotion by the English authorities. The father and son team of the Keiths was fortunate in possessing the protection of the Elder Pitt, who promoted the senior to the St Petersburg embassy in 1759, and kept an eye on the junior’s military career. Andrew Mitchell was also in Pitt’s good books for his tactful attentions to Frederick the Great during the Seven Years War.32 As the Keiths were cousins of the Earl Marischal, whom they regarded, despite his exile, as the head of their family, they made ideal poster children for the new British polity that Pitt was trying to promote. Jacobite blood was no bar to the advancement of the Irish either. Following the defeat of James II’s cause at the Battle of the Boyne, the Huguenot mercenary Roche family lost its estates. Unlike the Walls, it was protected by a maternal uncle in Dublin with friends in the Whig Party, who gave his name to the Roches and apprenticed their two eldest sons, Robert and James, to commercial firms in the City. Robert Porter became an alderman and a member of the Common Council while James became a trade commissioner at Vienna in 1739. There he worked closely with the ambassador, Thomas Robinson. In 1746 the Levant Company accepted James Porter’s nomination as Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, and there he remained until 1762. His aptitude as a political reporter earned him the respect of several secretaries of state, and he ended his career as minister plenipotentiary to Brussels in 1765.33 The loyalty of these men to the Hanoverian cause was, in official terms, never suspect. In private life Mitchell and the Keiths socialised with Marischal and other exiles in Berlin. Upon the death of the fieldmarshal in 1771, Keith junior even went to so far as to pay for the erection of a tombstone, upon which ‘there will be no more mention of me than of the man in the moon’.34 Despite the fact that Jacobitism was no longer perceived as a threat, Keith had no wish to antagonize his masters. Few were also willing to express much support for the cause of the Thirteen Colonies during the 1770s and 1780s. Liston once confessed privately to sympathy for the American cause but took care, like the Keiths, to confine such declarations to his private correspondence. Eden and Harris flirted more openly with deviance, and hitched their stars to the cause of Charles James Fox during the early 1780s. By this date, thanks to the constitutional issues about good governance raised

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by the American War, some families in the public service were drawing a clear distinction ‘between Foreign Service & Home Politicks’.35 Few diplomats, with the exception of Robert Adair, remained loyal to Fox. By 1788, Eden had deserted to the Younger Pitt and Harris, come the French Revolution, would join him. The revolution was less problematic an issue for diplomats because the brand of egalitarianism promoted in France repudiated the courtly life and values that constituted the foundations of ancien régime diplomatic practice. Vulgar Whigs accustomed to criticizing the evils of Continental absolutism against which Britain’s political identity was defined, might cast an uneasy eye upon their country’s colonial policies, and find them wanting in constitutional principle. By 1792 the French Revolution had become impossible to measure by these standards.36 This is not to say that Foxites were ineligible for diplomatic work. Augustus John, the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, took up his first posting in 1802. Come the 1820s, fulminations against despotism were appearing on a regular basis in his private diary.37 Charles Richard Vaughan, a disciple of Holland House, became Lord Bathurst’s private secretary in 1809, and was posted to Spain a year later. He too was no slave to the government line. In joining the corps both men removed themselves from the London political stage, not that either was wealthy or energetic enough to have made much impact there as actors. In the case of Henry Stephen Fox, son of the 3rd Baron Holland, the foreign service constituted an escape from a world of which he wanted no part.38 While Raymond Jones has claimed that rogue Tory and Foxite diplomats were systematically discriminated against by the Pittite governments of the early nineteenth century, there is no strong evidence to support this claim. Despite the fact that competition for posts was stiff throughout the Napoleonic Wars, the Foxites held their own. Foster became minister at Stockholm in 1809 and Vaughan served Tory masters in Paris and Geneva before taking up the American embassy in 1825. This post had been turned down by Frederick Lamb in 1819. It would be more accurate to say that the Fox family and its friends were not promoted as fast as they would have been, had their patrons been in office. Tory Foreign Secretaries made distinctions between those who needed work and those who did not. Catholic Emancipation was the one domestic issue on which diplomats were given their heads because so many Pittites were themselves divided about it after 1801. Minto resigned the Vienna embassy that year to keep faith with his friends in London but the luxury of acting on principle was denied to Arthur Paget who, as an impoverished second son, had no private resources to fall back upon. Paget nevertheless wrote

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indignantly to his mother about what he saw as the king’s stubbornness and ingratitude to the Younger Pitt.39 In 1810, Stratford Canning also wished to resign his post on the emancipation issue. Since his financial situation was no better than Paget’s, he was told by his cousin George not to be foolish. Self-interest struggled with family loyalty in Stratford’s mind, and upon returning to England in 1812, he refused Castlereagh’s offer of a pension. Unemployment forced Stratford to change his mind and, a year later, he asked to be reinstated in the service. He would not retire until 1858.40 Henry Watkin Williams Wynn was neither as independent-minded nor intelligent as Stratford Canning. Both had been taken into the Foreign Office as précis-writers in their teens. Since Williams Wynn was a nephew of the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, his future seemed bright. His early career illustrates what can be achieved on the part of a man closely connected to one of Britain’s great political families: despite going into opposition in 1801, the Grenvillites had enough clout to secure Wynn an appointment in 1803 as envoy extraordinary at Dresden. Parliamentary votes were often traded for jobs in this period: as George Jackson put it, ‘it is no bad thing to have a violent “oppositionist” for a patron’. Even the final departure of the Grenvillites from government in 1806 made little impact upon Wynn’s status in the corps, for he was given a pension of £1,500 p.a. and left in nominal possession of a post until that had overrun by Napoleon’s armies until 1816.41 The Grenvilles would later face criticism for such acts of nepotism, and Wynn did not see active service again until 1822. This was unfortunate for a man who had no desire to be an idle sinecurist, travelled extensively during the later 1810s to prepare for a return to Europe, and always waited with bated breath upon any political negotiations that looked like they might give him employment.42 Since diplomats were often absentee MPs, like Yorke and Paget; members of family firms, such as Mann and Wynn; outsiders seeking a foothold in the establishment, like Macartney; or dependents upon the state, such as the Jacksons, they had little to say about the major reform issues of the day: religious toleration, abolition of the slave trade or parliamentary reform. All of them believed that their constitutional monarchy, whatever its defects might be, was vastly superior to all other forms of government. Those who thought their government less than perfect confined the thought to their diaries and private correspondence. ‘The English monarchy’, wrote Macartney in 1799, ‘is founded upon liberty, justice & safety, but are we to overturn it & have no government at all, because Old Sarum and Gatton send Members to Parliament or because Mr Pitt has made a score or two of new peers?’

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Not but that these things require amendment, but they must be amended gradually, all sudden changes threaten danger . . . I would meliorate representation, & pay those who lost their boroughs or property, because they were bona fide bought as such. I would limit the peerage, but I would not take it from any that have it.43

Diplomats had much more to say about fiscal and administrative reform as introduced by Lord Castlereagh at the end of the Napoleonic Wars for, along with new payscales came reductions in allowances and perquisites which envoys had come to take for granted.44 Demands for greater fiscal responsibility in the public service were also ill received by those who felt themselves to be amongst the most accountable of the king’s servants. There was little confidentiality to dispatches, extracts from which might be presented to parliament, published in the London Gazette, or distributed amongst government departments. Much confidential information was imparted to one’s colleagues and masters in the form of private, rather than official, correspondence. Diplomacy, as this suggests, relied a good deal on the exercise of discretion, the morality of which accorded poorly with an emerging code of public ethics that prioritized transparency and merit over secrecy and privilege. By 1831, when Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons that he had taken steps to abolish an ‘ancient and unreasonable practice in our diplomacy’, namely the customary use of gifts to reward envoys and officials for services rendered in negotiation, the political culture of the ancien régime was in fast retreat. Fees and perquisites had been customary rewards of court office since the Renaissance. As such, gifts were inextricable from the values of rank, courtesy and munificence which they upheld. In the course of regular duty, diplomats become recipients of royal largesse.45 In 1772, William Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine, so enchanted Maria Theresa with music that the Empress of Austria gave her ‘a gold enammeld snuff-box with her cipher set in brilliants’. In 1782 Hamilton received another present from the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia in return for having taken them up Mount Vesuvius.46 The exchange of gifts was a formality throughout Europe observed upon the ratification of treaties, and in 1784, the newly created Foreign Office standardized the allowances that envoys and clerks were to receive on this occasion. The sum of £1,000 was given to each principal and his chief while it was customary, wrote Auckland, ‘for the two Chancelleries to exchange a Present which is generally 1,000 Ducats in the foreign Court and £500 at home; & the Compliment being assured, each party keeps its own sum, and divides it among the secretaries and clerks in settled proportions’.47 Snuffboxes and royal portraits set in

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diamonds were the usual gifts a diplomat received upon signing a treaty or recall from an embassy, and failure to receive one was interpreted as a mark of disfavour. Gifts belonged to a court culture that was of decreasing importance to the career prospects of most politicians and civil servants from the accession of George III onwards. This is not to say that the court and its conventions meant nothing to the upper ten thousand; rather that they belonged to a realm to which a declining number of families, particularly those of gentry origin, belonged or sought direct access. This had not been the case in the days of Rochford, Chesterfield, Hanbury Williams and Holdernesse.48 By 1792 Auckland was writing to Undersecretary of State James Bland Burges that he could not bring himself to make gratuitous gifts to courtiers or heads of state. Chesterfield’s correspondence from the Hague is peppered with such offerings.49 Diplomats were sensitive to changes in political and social morality at home, as will become apparent in later sections of this book. It is also apparent in their attitudes to religion. From 1740 to 1790, all diplomats were brought up episcopalian or presbyterian, not that much beyond a generic protestantism is to be seen in their frequent denunciations of popery and Islam. While this period produced its share of the devout, the connections between faith and duty can be obscure. Stormont, who enjoyed reading sermons, was addressed by George III as ‘a Man of Religion’, and the two exchanged frequent observations on the workings of providence.50 It is tempting from a modern perspective to interpret these remarks as a stoic façade of resignation in the face of events over which kings and ministers had no control, but providentialism is so often to be found in the correspondence of diplomats that it would be wiser to see it as a statement of conviction: either of a belief that Britain, as a leader of the Protestant international, was destined to struggle against the forces of popery and tyranny; or, increasingly after 1750, a cosmic optimism that all was for the best in the best of all worlds. ‘I am strongly impressed’, wrote Hugh Elliot in 1779, ‘that what we often call accident is the will of Heaven.’51 To attempt a separation of faith from reason would be artificial and anachronistic, not least because natural theology was compatible with evangelical Anglicanism before c. 1780. Porter, for example, coupled an interest in astronomy with pietism. As an admirer of the Moravians, whose colony at Hernhutt he had once visited, he once helped one of their missionaries to acquire Turkish papers to travel to Abyssinia. This kind of assistance to fellow-Protestants was not unusual on the part of the British, who can be found helping co-religionists regardless of nationality well into the nineteenth century. The true mission of Christianity,

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thought Porter, was the preaching of ‘universal benevolence, social virtue and common humanity to those who differ from them in opinion’. This, he felt, had been subverted in Europe: ‘we good Christians have so far forgot humanity that we destroy one another’.52 Elliot, who entered the service in 1783, shared some of Porter’s cultural relativism. Truth, thought he, was ultimately produced by ‘the nature of the mind in which conviction is formed’ rather than empirical or ‘real proof’. Despite this conviction that feeble human minds were incapable of much investigation upon ‘any subject’, Hugh dabbled in science as well as Bible-reading. Malmesbury saw religion more as a normative system of conduct. During the last decade of his life, he kept a ‘Self-Controlling Journal’ of spiritual thoughts. A letter to his son of 1805 conveys some sense of the discipline that faith imposed upon his life: ‘we are not permitted’, stated Malmesbury, ‘to live with impunity a life of stagnation, but called upon to act and to endeavour to meliorate our condition’. This was far more than an endorsement of the vita activa for the young Harris, then contemplating a retirement from public life, was exhorted to ponder the implications of his decision for the distribution of good and evil in the universe.53 In 1752 Porter and Edward Weston had agreed upon similar principles of public service. Porter, like Malmesbury, believed that ‘moral good or ill depends on ourselves’ and that morality was ‘the very fundamental principle of our existence & a law arising from the nature of things’. Serving the ‘Supreme Being’ and the public interest was best undertaken by ‘supporting or contributing to preserve as an individual of a society the moral order of the world, according to his laws’. Every thinking man, thought Porter, ought to have framed some private code of conduct conformable to his sense of God’s will. Having done so, he could do his duty confident that ‘there are general uniform laws varying but by the will of national agents’, not that ethical considerations were foremost in his mind ‘in any given service such as negotiating, treaty, making, &c.’.54 There was nothing unusual about the eschatological principles of these mid-century men. Signs of a more introspective and, in some respects, tormented disposition are evident in the next generation. Elgin, Canning, Leveson-Gower and Paget were all brought up by devout mothers, not that this had much effect on the last two. Elgin nonetheless eschewed parties for the solitude of study in Paris and Canning would be known to colleagues as a pillar of moral rectitude. In 1809, the young Francis Peter Werry underwent a crisis of conscience which he confessed at Malta to David Richard Morier. The former would be secretary of legation at Dresden from 1815 to 1823 and the latter served as Consul-General at Paris from 1815 to 1832. Both men came from observant families and

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Morier, the elder by four years, recommended the works of William Paley, from which Werry derived ‘the greatest comfort’, to the younger man. Spirituality in the nineteenth century could take more unconventional forms: in John Philip, David’s elder brother, it appeared in a taste for Old Testament prophecy, a hobby shared by George Henry Rose. In 1832 Rose published his Scriptural Researches, according to which every event in the history of the world could be predicted from the Bible.55 It is not surprising to see a more judgmental turn amongst Britons come the French Revolution. Many, whether diplomats or not, agreed with Edmund Burke that Armageddon had befallen the world in 1789, and that it was the duty of all good Christians to contest it. ‘It is a war not for God and the King, but for God and ourselves’, wrote Quentin Crawford in 1793. Others had been less hasty in their judgments. ‘I could have been pleased’, wrote Liston in 1794, ‘to see the project of a pure Republick put to the Trial.’ Events in France since 1792 had nevertheless turned this self-confessed ‘Liberty Man and great reformer’ against the revolution.56 Older diplomats, who were often erastians, witnessed the dismantling of the Roman Catholic Church in France with consternation and dismay. ‘The Christian religion, like our constitution, is in its principles excellent, charitable & formed for the happiness of its professors’, noted Macartney in 1799. ‘But are We to disclaim it & have no religion at all because it has generated superstition, luxury & idolatry. No let us bring it back to its origin.’ By the 1800s, few had anything positive to say about France or its revolution, amongst whom Stratford Canning was the most outspoken: ‘The French’, he wrote in 1809, ‘are the vilest scum that ever fell from the overboilings of the pot of Imperial Jacobinism.’ 57 Those whose service primarily predated the 1790s displayed more tolerance for diversity, as evinced in both the range of their extracurricular pursuits – which ran the gamut from astronomy, antiquarianism and art collecting to marine biology – and their attitudes towards family, sex and marriage. Notes 1 Phyllis Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II & James II (Princeton, 1965); Christian Edmund Henneke, ‘The art of diplomacy under the early Stuarts, 1603–1642’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1999), pp. 19–78. 2 Keith Correpondence, i. Robert Murray Keith to Robert Keith, 30 December 1769, p. 123. 3 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 262–3. 4 Ibid., pp. 46–52.

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5 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 8, 21, 38; For some sense of the regularity with which station heads were replaced, see Horn (ed.), British Diplomatic Representatives, 1689–1789, 2 vols (London, 1932). 6 Geoffrey W. Rice, ‘Nassau van Zuylestein, William Henry van, fourth earl of Rochford (1717–1781)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30312; T.F. Henderson, ‘Carmichael, John, third earl of Hyndford (1701–1767)’, rev. Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, ibid., doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4706; G.F.R. Barker, ‘Robinson, Thomas, second Baron Grantham (1738–1786)’, rev. Hallie Rubenhold, ibid., doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23880; Ian R. Christie. ‘Lord Grantham and William Pitt, 12 December 1783: a side-light on the fall of the Fox–North Coalition’, HJ, 34 (1991), 143–5. 7 ‘Hastings MSS 3.138’, quoted in H.M. Scott, ‘Murray, David, seventh Viscount Stormont and second earl of Mansfield (1727–1796)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19600. 8 Horn, ‘Scottish Diplomatists’; Schweitzer, ‘Scotsmen and the British Diplomatic Service’, pp. 115–36. 9 BL Add MS 51389, Fox to Macartney, 22 May 1764, ff. 9–11; Peter Roebuck, Macartney of Lissanoure 1737–1806: Essays in Biography (Belfast, 1983), pp. 15–20, 23; Roland Thorne, ‘Macartney, George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/17341. 10 Daniel A. Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke and Anglo-Dutch Relations 1774–1780 (Hague and Paris, 1970), pp. 12–14; H.M. Scott, ‘Yorke, Joseph, Baron Dover (1724–1792)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30243. 11 BL Add MS 35354, Yorke to Hardwicke, 16 July 1748, ff. 352–4; NLS Acc. 9767, 72/1/27, Pitt to Robert Keith, 9 June 1765, n.f.; Alexander Du Toit, ‘Keith, Sir Robert Murray, of Murrayshall (1730–1795)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15272. 12 W.P. Courtney, ‘Dayrolles, Solomon (d. 1786)’, rev. S. J. Skedd, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7377; Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 39, 94. 13 Elgin MS 59/29, Straton to Elgin, 14 April 1803, n.f. 14 Bath Archives, ii. Mrs. Charlotte Jackson to George Jackson, 25 March 1813, 31. 15 NLS MS 5658, Robert Liston to Lord Henry Stuart, 1802, f. 69. 16 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, 47–8. 17 NLS MS 11084, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 3 January 1783, f. 93. 18 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 56–7, 71–4, and ‘Rank and emolument’, pp. 33–40; Jones, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 6, 50–1. 19 K.L. Ellis, ‘British communication and diplomacy in the eighteenth century’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 31 (1958), 159–67; Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 64–5. 20 Jackson Diaries, ii. Francis to George Jackson, 5 June 1807, p. 131. 21 John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1983), p. 337; Stratford Canning Life, i. David Richard Morier to Henry Unwin Addington, [1869], p. 176.

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22 Keith Correspondence, ii. Murray Keith to Carmarthen, 27 February 1788, pp. 221–2; NLS MS 5604, Arbuthnot to Liston, 1803, f. 129v. 23 NA SP 78/306, Stormont to Lord Weymouth, 28 January 1778, ff. 130–4. 24 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Harris to Eden, 20 July 1779, pp. 242–3. 25 Isabel de Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality: Sir James Harris’s Mission to St Petersburg during the American Revolution (New Haven, 1962), pp. 41, 118–214; NLS MS 12958, Gilbert to Hugh Elliot, 17 September 1781, ff. 17–19; Mansfield MS, TD 2002/42, Box 16, Bundle 3, Stormont to George III, 1781, n.f. 26 John Roselli, Lord William Bentinck and the British Occupation of Sicily, 1811–1814 (Cambridge, 1956). 27 See Appendix A for the educational backgrounds of diplomats in this study. 28 G.H. Jones, The Main Stream of Jacobitism (Cambridge, MA, 1954); John d’Alton, Illustrations, Historical and Genealogical, of King James’s Irish Army List (Dublin, 1860), p. 411; Diego Téllez Alarcia, ‘Richard Wall: light and shade of an Irish minister in Spain (1694–1777)’, Irish Studies Review, 11 (2003), 123–36 and ‘Mr. Richard Wall: the Irish–Spanish minister’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 5 (2007), 131–4. 29 Charles Petrie, ‘The Elibank plot, 1752–3’, TRHS, 4th series, 15 (1931), 175–96; Zimmermann, Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, ch. 4; Sam Coull, Nothing But My Sword: The Life of Field Marshal James Francis Edward Keith (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 144–6. Marischal was pardoned by George III in 1761. 30 P. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1976); John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, 1997), p. 766. 31 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 118–21; Colley, Britons, pp. 126–9, 156–60. 32 Amelia Gillespie-Smyth (ed.), The Romance of Diplomacy: Historical Memoir of Queen Carolina Matilda of Denmark, Sister to King George the Third. With Memoir, and a Selection from the Correspondence (Official and Familiar) of Sir Robert Murray Keith, K.B., Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Courts of Dresden, Copenhagen and Vienna, 2 vols (London, 1861), i. William Pitt to Robert Keith, 28 December 1758, p. 68; BL Add MS 35482, Robert Wood to Robert Keith, 21 August 1759, f. 213. 33 D’Alton, King James’s Irish Army List, pp. 650, 656; G.F.R. Barker, ‘Porter, Sir James (1710–1776)’, rev. R.D.E. Eagles, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/22569. 34 Gillespie Smyth, Romance of Diplomacy, ii. Murray Keith to Keith, June 1771, pp. 144–5. 35 NLS MS 11111, Gilbert Elliot to James Harris, 18 May 1784, ff. 194–7. 36 Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, ‘“The reign of the charlatans is over:” the French Revolutionary attack on diplomatic practice’, JMH, 65 (1993), 706–44; Duncan Forbes, ‘Sceptical Whiggism, commerce and liberty’, in

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Andrew Skinner and Thomas Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975), pp. 179–201; John Robertson, ‘Universal monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume’s critique of an English Whig doctrine’ in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 349–73. LC Augustus John Foster Papers – Box 6, Foster to the Duchess of Devonshire, 29 July 1820 and Box 5, 4 January 1830, n.f. Leslie Mitchell, Holland House (London, 1980), pp. 26–7; Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, p. 266. Elgin MS 60/22, Minto to Elgin, 8 May 1801, n.f.; Paget Papers, i. Arthur Paget to Lady Paget, 24 April 1801, pp. 344–347. Stratford Canning Life, i. Stratford Canning to George Canning, 8 January 1810, pp. 77–9; Lord Castlereagh to Stratford Canning, 12 January 1813, p. 188; Stratford Canning to J.N. Fazakerley, 1 December 1812, p. 191. Jackson Diaries, i. George to his mother, 1 December 1803, pp. 164–5; Wynn Correspondence, Lady Charlotte Williams Wynn to Henry Williams Wynn, 14 March 1809, p. 124; Bindoff, ‘Unreformed diplomatic service’, pp. 165–6. NLW MS 2802D, Henry to Charles Williams Wynn, 2 October 1806, n.f.; James J. Sack, The Grenvillites, 1801–1829: Party Politics and Factionalism in the Age of Pitt and Liverpool (Urbana, 1979), pp. 186–8. Bod MS Eng misc. f. 534, Commonplace Book 4, 1799, f. 15; Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 282–7. DRO D/Lo/C45(7) (i–ii), Castlereagh to Charles Stewart, 12 July 1816, n.f. Horn, ‘Rank and emolument’, pp. 34–6; Gary M. Bell, ‘Elizabethan diplomatic compensation: its nature and variety’, JBS, 20 (1981), 1–25; Maijja Jansson, ‘Measured reciprocity: English ambassadorial gift exchange in the 17th and 18th centuries’, Journal of Early Modern History, 9 (2005), 348–70; M. Geiger-Cassidy, ‘European diplomatic gifts, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries: guest editor’s introduction’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 15:1 (2007), 2–3. Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. William Hamilton to Charles Greville, 23 November 1772, p. 17 and 26 February 1782, pp. 79–80. Middleton, ‘Retrenchment and reform’, pp. 62–6; Elgin MS 60/1/69, Auckland to Elgin, 9 February 1791, n.f. CHW, vol. 76 (11387), Hanbury Williams to Frances Essex, 30 December 1755, ff. 122–3. Bod MS Dep Bland Burges 30, Auckland to Burges, 14 August 1792, f. 178; Alan T. McKenzie, ‘Courtliness, business, and form in the correspondence of Lord Chesterfield’, in Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth Century (Athens, GA, 1993), pp. 48–67. Mansfield TD 2003/13, Box 110, Bundle 1; Stormont to Lord Mansfield, March 1774, n.f.; Mansfield TD 2002/42, Box 14, Bundle 2, George III to Mansfield, 15 November 1779, n.f. Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 118–19; NLS 11084, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 12 October 1779, f. 23; Jonathan Clark, ‘Providence,

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The structure of a service predestination and progress: or, did the Enlightenment fail?’, Albion, 35 (2004), 341–74; Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, pp. 9–18, 188–228. Porter, Observations on . . . the Turks (1768), i, pp. 73–4; Lewis Walpole Library, Weston Papers W53, Reel 2, Volume 4, Porter to Weston, 23 May 1752, n.f.; BL Add MS 32420, Porter to Caspar Wetstein, 15 February 1755, f. 313; Porter, ‘Account of a visit to Count Zinzendorff’s Moravian settlement’ [1736] in George Larpent, Turkey: Its History and Progress, from the Journals and Correspondence of Sir James Porter, 2 vols (London, 1854), i. pp. 365–71; David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), pp. 58–63. NLS MS 5516, Elliot to Robert Liston, 22 June 1776, ff. 60–3; James, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury (ed.), Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury, to His Family and Friends, from 1745 to 1820, 2 vols (1870) ii. Malmesbury to Lord Fitzharris, 8 December 1805, pp. 18–20. Lewis Walpole Library, Weston Papers W53, Reel 2, Volume 4, Porter to Weston, 2 October 1752 and15 April 1755, n.f.; BL Add MS 57927, Porter to Weston, 10 December 1764, n.f. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 204–6, 212, 218–19; Werry Memoirs, Francis Peter Werry to his mother, 15 February 1811, p. 118. Elgin MS 60/1/292, Crawford to Elgin, 3 February 1793, n.f.; NLS MS 5580, Liston to unknown, 25 November 1794, ff. 93–6. Bod MS Eng misc. f. 534, Commonplace Book 4, [1799], f. 15; Stratford Canning Life, i. Canning to Richard Wellesley, Belgrade, 9 November 1809, pp. 70–1.

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Entrance, training and promotion

Between 1769 and 1779 a new crop of gentry sons and their dependants entered the British diplomatic service. James Harris, Joseph Ewart, Charles Whitworth, Morton Eden and Hugh Elliot were the principals. Two of their employees, Robert Liston and David Gray, would successfully make the transition from private to public service. All would remain in the corps for at least a decade; in the cases of Harris, Whitworth, Eden, Elliot and Grey, three or four. The average age of entrants to the service in this period was 28.6 years between 1750 and 1812. It would fall to 21.8 years between 1812 and 1860.1 Insofar as any of the principals had received much preparation for life abroad, it had come from the Grand Tour, that finishing school intended to familiarize men with the values and lifestyle of the cosmopolitan nobility. Elliot was unusual amongst his peers in having been partly educated at a boarding school near Paris. Harris, having chosen diplomacy at a young age, undertook an extended tour of Europe that included some study at the University of Leyden. All, in the course of their travels, all been introduced by Britain’s embassies to the diplomatic life. Although envoys often resented the time and trouble they had to spend on the young, in the case of Harris it was well rewarded. He had received much mentorship from Yorke at the Hague, James Gray at Madrid and Thomas Wroughton in Warsaw. Yorke and Wroughton looked upon Harris as a son.2 Elliot joined the foreign service by default rather than choice. At the tender age of eight, he had been bought an army lieutenancy by a father who destined his second son for the officer corps. By the age of ten, Hugh had been promoted to captain, and his status as a child officer outraged John Wilkes, who pilloried the boy and his family in as Scottish beneficiaries of what would come to be known as ‘Old Corruption’. The sale of commissions to boys under sixteen was abolished soon afterwards, but Hugh had become a marked man unlikely to see further promotion.3 In 1771 he went abroad to try his luck as a mercenary. Despite Hugh’s love

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of army life, he soon learned that soldiering was an uncertain profession. His making as a diplomat was attributable in part to his father’s connections, but also to the advice of Stormont, who befriended the young man at Vienna, counselled him on his career prospects, and urged the secretaries of state to give Hugh a foreign post.4 In 1774 he received his first appointment at Munich. Ewart, Whitworth and Eden also owed their starts in the service to influence, and all would learn the trade on the job or from family and friends. In this Eden was fortunate since his elder brother, William, was an undersecretary of state at the Northern Department and his brotherin-law, Harris, was in the profession. Diplomacy, or so it seems, was becoming more acceptable as a form of genteel public employment by 1780. ‘You would be astonished’, wrote Gilbert to Hugh, ‘to hear the names & rank of persons who have shewn a disposition to enter on this career.’ Why this should be is not clear since no improvements to pay or promotion prospects had taken place in the service, though it is possible that the American War had raised the reputation of diplomacy as a useful trade. By 1790, younger sons and clients of peers were attaching themselves to senior ministers abroad.5 In 1787, Francis James Jackson, a dependant of the then Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Carmarthen, went to live with Harris as a secretary at the Hague. He became a head of station in 1796. In 1790 Arthur Paget entered Ewart’s Berlin mission as a private aide. In 1791, having mastered the basics of the trade, Paget became a secretary of legation at St Petersburg.6 In 1793, Lord Henry Spencer joined Auckland at the Hague as a secretary of embassy. By 1795 he would have his own station at Stockholm, where a promising future in diplomacy was cut short by an early death. The success of French arms during the 1790s and 1800s hit the junior ranks of the service hard. As embassies closed all over Europe, competition for the remaining posts became intense. Gray, who had gone abroad as Morton Eden’s private secretary in 1787, became a secretary of legation in 1791. In 1804, having risen no further in the service, he asked to be transferred from Dresden to a lesser court rather than suffer the indignity of serving under the 23-year-old Wynn.7 Robert Liston was fortunate to avoid this fate, in part because Gilbert Elliot, now the Earl of Minto, had become a valuable member of the Pitt–Portland coalition government in 1794. Liston had joined the service of the Elliot family in 1762 as tutor to Gilbert and Hugh. When the boys left their school in Paris in 1766 for the University of Edinburgh, Liston returned to a series of teaching jobs. He then turned his thoughts to the foreign service and, thanks

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once more to the Elliots, became Hugh’s private secretary in 1774. Although Hugh had started out well, by 1782 he had besmirched his reputation with an ill-conceived marriage and divorce.8 In 1783, with his employer’s consent, Liston therefore jumped ship to a more influential patron. Lord Mountstuart had just been appointed to the court of Turin and was rumoured to be in line for promotion to an ambassadorial station: ‘if He came to be Ambassador, the Secretary should be Secretary to the Embassy’, then the first formal rung on the ladder of the service. If Liston could, through this route, get the king’s commission, it would be ‘madness in me to reject so probable a means of obtaining the favourite object of my ambition’. The gamble paid off for Liston. In 1783 he moved to Spain and was congratulated by Gilbert Elliot on having formed ‘a connection which I have no doubt must lead to your advantage, & which I think may probably be in other respects valuable & agreable to you’. Mountstuart, as it transpired, did not go to Madrid until 1795, though his patronage did result in Liston’s further promotion to secretary of legation and minister plenipotentiary.9 When Liston returned to England in 1788, he was given his own station at Stockholm, proceeding thereafter to Constantinople in 1793 and Washington in 1796. He ended his career in Turkey once more as an ambassador in 1820. Liston was not the only man to be fortunate in his friends. Daniel Hailes, who had no prior experience of state service, owed his appointment as secretary of embassy at Paris in 1783 to his principal, the Duke of Dorset. Having impressed the Foreign Office with his aptitude as a reporter, Hailes became envoy extraordinary at Warsaw when Dorset went home in 1788. By 1792, despite a few faux pas, Hailes had moved onto Copenhagen and, in 1795, reached Stockholm. There his career ended a year later.10 Diplomacy, as all these examples suggest, was learned on the job, and Castlereagh sought to formalize this in 1816 by attaching young men to the principal embassies at Paris, Madrid, the Hague, Vienna and St Petersburg. In addition to meeting the patronage needs of a new generation, Castlereagh sought to restock the corps with persons ‘properly qualified to discharge the functions of Secretary of Embassy and Secretary of Legation’. These men were different from the secretaries who had preceded them in that they received ‘a small allowance from the public (£150–300) not necessarily equal to their expenses, but in recognition of their services’. This came, not from the civil list, but from a pool of public funds designated to cover the incidental expenses of Britain’s missions. The status of the attachés as diplomats-in-training was thus clearly defined, much more so than that of their eighteenth-century

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predecessors had been. Chaplains and private secretaries had been more than servants but less than equals.11 The attachés were under no obligation to remain in the service, and Castlereagh may have meant the experience of apprenticeship to weed out unsuitable young men. This was the purpose it had served in the past. William Stewart, the second son of the seventh Earl of Galloway, had joined Keith junior as a secretary at Vienna in 1790. ‘He is not Seventeen, – has had a very good Education, is Stout & hardy – wishes much to learn, and, from what I have seen of him, possesses good Talents and an agreeable Disposition.’ After a year of residence in an isolated Bulgarian village helping Keith broker a peace between Turkey and Austria, Stewart abandoned diplomacy for the army. He died in 1827, having become a Lieutenant General in the Prince Consort’s Own Regiment. 12 Attachés had been intended only for the leading embassies, but by 1822, they were to be found all over Europe. Seven were attached to Vienna alone and, upon returning to the Foreign Office after Castlereagh’s death, George Canning wondered what was to be done with thirty-four of them, ‘a number pretty equal to that of all the Ministers & Secretaries of all ranks in actual employment: & sufficient to supply vacancies, upon a fair average, for 8 or 10 years’.13 Roger Bullen has claimed that the attaché system was nothing less than ‘a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’, and Raymond Jones has calculated that an attaché had to wait an average of nine years for promotion to secretary of legation between 1815 and 1860. This, however, was no guarantee of eventual appointment to one’s own station.14 Post-war diplomacy was an ill-advised career for a man with those without the means to support their pretensions. Its pitfalls are illustrated by the case of Werry. Francis Peter came from a family of merchant shipowners and privateers, his father having commanded a frigate during the American War. In 1793 Werry senior was made a consul by the Levant Company, whereupon he moved to Smyrna, or modern-day Izmir. His sons, of whom Francis Peter was the third, were placed in a series of schools near London. In 1803, at the age of fifteen, Francis Peter went out to Smyra to learn his father’s trade. Here he encountered diplomacy in the shape of the Elgin embassy, and was befriended by its chief secretary, William Richard Hamilton. In 1810, the young man went sent home to seek commercial employment, whereupon he renewed his acquaintance with Hamilton, now an undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. Since jobs in trade were difficult to come by, Hamilton took Werry into the office as a précis-writer. Here Francis Peter found his métier. ‘The long predilection I have entertained for this profession’, wrote he to his father, ‘is, on

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close acquaintance with its details and duties, rather augmented, and in no sense diminished.’ Werry senior would have preferred his son to go into trade, but could not stop Francis Peter from pursuing his destiny.15 In 1812 Werry accepted a position as a secretary to Lord Cathcart’s St Petersburg embassy. He had dithered over the job offer, preferring to remain at Hamilton’s side, but was urged by the undersecretary to accept the post on the grounds that it would improve his languages, give him practical experience of diplomacy, make him friends in high places and put him ‘in the direct line for promotion in the diplomatic line’. While Liston’s life story suggests that Hamilton’s advice was sound, relations between Cathcart and Werry soon began to go sour. Cathcart, who was cold and secretive, treated Werry as a scribe and excluded him from the embassy’s confidence. This is not what Werry had been led to expect, whereupon he complained to his mentor. We do not know what Cathcart thought of Werry: according to the secretary, the ambassador was not accustomed to confiding in anyone but his sons, and reprimanded Werry on more than one occasion for lack of respect to his station. What is clear from Werry’s papers is that many in the embassy felt badly treated by Cathcart. ‘Of five gentlemen who left England attached to him, I am now the only one who remains – the rest have left him in disgust.’16 When the mission decamped to Paris towards the end of 1813, Werry was left behind in Prague. Cathcart had already tried to sent him home, but Werry had insisted on staying on as long as he could be useful. Some altercation had taken place in Cathcart’s household, in the course of which Werry had struck a servant: although the secretary had apologized and admitted himself to have been in the wrong, Cathcart withdrew the remains of whatever trust he had once placed in the younger man. In 1814 Werry was finally released from Cathcart’s service, whereupon he was attached to Lord Castlereagh’s entourage at Vienna. Notwithstanding Hamilton’s continued backing, it became clear in an interview with the Foreign Secretary that Werry’s prospects for promotion were bleak. He proceeded to shew the disadvantages of it as a profession; the inadequacy of the salaries, the length of time persons were often without stations, and the manner in which fair promotion is checked by parliamentary influence, stating how much he himself is pushed by it for posts. These considerations, he said, caused him to recommend me to accept of some establishment, more particularly, as he said, I might probably be thinking of marrying. One the whole, he thought a consulship would be the best thing for me.17

Since eighteenth-century consulage provided a more secure income than diplomacy, Castlereagh’s offer was kind.18 Werry too had no natural

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talent for subservience, a skill that ambitious men without money or friends were well advised to cultivate. This Francis Jackson had written to his younger brother George in 1813. Their father had been a clergyman and tutor to Francis, 5th Duke of Leeds and Pitt’s Foreign Secretary from 1783 to 1791. When Leeds died in 1799, the Jacksons were left without a protector. By this date George had become a station head at Berlin but Francis, the younger by fifteen years, had to enter the service as his brother’s private secretary in 1801. In 1806 Francis went to America and left George to fend for himself. He secured a few short-term billets as aides to other missions, but diplomatic employment was hard to come by during these years, and from 1809 to 1812, George was a captain in the West Kent militia. Come 1813 and an appointment to General Sir Charles Stewart’s mission to Berlin, he sought rehabilitation as a diplomat. In the pursuit of this aim George was advised by his brother to ingratiate himself with anyone who could further his career.19 This was something that Werry was incapable of doing. In 1815 Castlereagh offered Werry a choice of two jobs: either a consulship or a post as a secretary of legation. I plainly saw from his conversation and manner, and from the opinion he expressed of claims and services, that he wished me first positively of myself to renounce a Secretaryship of Legation, to which he evidently thought me entitled, both because he is very much pushed for these posts by the first persons, for their sons and relations, and because then he would be sure of my taking any Consulship that might be offered me.20

Werry, who would not give up an embassy for anything less than the best Mediterranean consular stations, of which there were then none vacant, opted for the secretaryship instead. Castlereagh then appointed him to John Philip Morier’s Dresden embassy. John, known as Jack to his family, ought to have gotten on with Werry, for he too was the son of a Levant Company merchant consul. The Moriers, it is true, thought Consul Werry a monster of corruption, but were not so petty as to extend their dislike of the father to the son.21 Castlereagh’s choice of post was tactful, bearing in mind that Jack too owed his start in the service to the good offices of the Elgin embassy. In 1799 he had been taken on as a private secretary by its ambassador in part because of the strength of a family connection to William Waldegrave, Baron Radstock.22 As the family’s eldest son, Jack had been destined for commerce but his heart did not lie in trade. With Elgin he discovered his true vocation. Unlike Cathcart, Elgin soon began to trust and confide in Jack, who was sent to Syria in 1799 to report on the movements of the Ottoman Army, and to Egypt in 1800 with Sir Ralph

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Abercromby to fight the French. Jack disliked this work but undertook it ‘that I may keep in the remembrance of ministers’.23 When Elgin left Turkey in 1803, he promised to promote Jack’s interests in London. He kept his word. Jack became a consul in Albania with a political brief to contest French influence in the Balkans and, if possible, win the support of Ali Pasha of Yanina. He undertook this employment on the understanding that this would strengthen his claims to advancement in the service. Promotion for Jack was a long time in coming. In 1806, he asked Robert Adair, then the ambassador in Constantinople, to be made the embassy’s secretary of legation. This request was refused.24 Diplomats in wartime took help where they could find it, but were unwilling to create claims to entitlement when so many people were already competing for so few posts. Having failed in his bid for a transfer to Constantinople, Jack then investigated the prospect of work at the Foreign Office. While he assumed that this would place him in the heart of the establishment, Hamilton warned Jack against seeking such employment: ‘so very seldom is it that those who enter in the Situation of Clerk can ever rise to places of trust & responsibility – at least not without much greater interest, than could not fail to ensure a much more rapid rise in any other profession’.25 This is why Hamilton had urged Werry to go with Cathcart to Russia. The undersecretary also placed excessive faith in the social skills of his protegé, or underestimated the strength of the young man’s ego and ambition. Castlereagh had been told that Werry intended, ‘by long service, zeal, and merit, to endeavour to rise in the regular line of diplomacy’. As it transpired, Werry’s patience was not equal to the task. Although he and Jack had worked together ‘on the best terms possible’ up to 1821, their relations deteriorated sharply in the autumn of that year. ‘Mr. Morier has thought proper without the slightest cause on my part to put me at a very great distance & to avoid me in a very disagreeable manner.’ The two had little to do with each other thereafter. ‘I therefore thought that the best plan would be for me to follow up my own correspondence assiduously with the office.’ This went on for two years. Werry thought that he was building up independent credit with his masters but, at the end of 1823, he was recalled to London to await official arbitration of his differences with Jack.26 Jack’s private papers shed no light on these disputes. By 1822 he was purportedly ‘in a monstrous rage’ with his secretary. Werry had always been too self-important for the foreign service, and the origins of the disagreement probably lie in his efforts to seek promotion. In 1821, Werry volunteered his services as a temporary clerk to the Congress of Laybach

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in the hope of seeing Castlereagh again. This he succeeded in doing at Hanover though the meeting bore no fruit. Promotion, Werry was told ‘was now a days a very rare thing – so very few vacancies occurring and those so eagerly sought after’. Werry nonetheless asked for a new posting to Constantinople on the grounds that his relations with Morier were becoming as bad as they had been with Cathcart. Londonderry cannot have been impressed, either by the complaint or its author’s readiness to find fault with others. Both were almost certainly reported to Jack. Werry was certain that he would have a new post within months.27 In 1820, Joseph Planta at the Foreign Office had offered Werry a transfer to Munich or Copenhagen. Werry, though always on the lookout for a new station, had turned down this offer on the grounds of cost, climate and inconvenience. By 1823, he was coming to realize that the goodwill of the undersecretaries was not enough to promote his interests. ‘To serve a representative government is a thankless task to all who have not strong support.’ He had been ten years in the service with little to show for it but debt, and was always asking his father for money. Francis Peter was already depressed when he received his recall, and the strain of answering the inquiry into his differences with Jack caused him to lose his mind. Werry was confined in a public asylum for the next two years. He never returned to the public service.28 Werry had entered the profession convinced that hard work and initiative would be rewarded by success. In this he was disappointed. Jack Morier too had been bored and frustrated in the Balkans. In 1808 his sufferings as an ‘Albanian pasha-baiter’ were rewarded with a pension of £400 p.a., but Jack longed to be a proper diplomat and refused to retire. In 1810, he went as chargé d’affaires to Washington, where he acted as a caretaker minister until the arrival of Augustus John Foster a year later. Dresden was Jack’s first and last independent station. He got it in part because he married Horatia Seymour, a grand-daughter of the Marquess of Hertford.29 The Moriers, unlike Werry, were realists. In 1814, the family’s third son – David – had taken the option that Werry turned down, namely a consular station. David, unlike Francis, knew when to compromise. The willingness of the Elgin embassy to befriend the Werrys and Moriers presented both families with career prospects that seemingly promised the young more comfort, security and status than a life in trade. No prior embassy had been so generous in its offers of employment to British residents, nor so hungry for local knowledge to serve its military, political and cultural interests. In 1804 David had gone to Albania with Jack. He showed an aptitude and liking for the work: so much so that, in 1805, his father hoped to place David as a private secretary to the next

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British ambassador.30 David, the brightest of the Morier children, had spent two years at Harrow before entering the family business and, as such, had the best social connections in the family. Although no private appointment for David materialized in the Levant, he was not deterred and, upon presenting himself to Hamilton at the Foreign Office in 1806 on a visit home, left as a private secretary to Paget’s 1807 special mission to the Dardanelles. Paget, having failed to make peace between the Turks and the French, went home the next year. David stayed on as consul to the Ionian Islands and, in 1808, attached himself to another envoy. Paget had been too much ‘the great Man’ to befriend David, but this could not be said of Robert Adair, and in Stratford Canning, then a young secretary of embassy, David made a useful connection for life. These friends could not, nonetheless, alleviate the boredom of his job, which he once described as a state of ‘vegetable monotony’.31 Proper diplomacy, or so David thought, ought to be about representation and negotiation. In 1812, still no more than a consul and private secretary, David returned with Canning to London. In August 1813, he finally got the post he sought, an appointment in Lord Aberdeen’s entourage bound for allied headquarters in Europe. Several months later, he was transferred to Castlereagh’s staff. David helped draft the peace treaties in Paris and Vienna that put an end to the Napoleonic Wars. Whilst in England, David had also fallen in love with Anna Burnet Jones. When offered a consulate in Venice by Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, David did not hesitate to secure his future. The couple were engaged in July, the post was upgraded to Paris, and Castlereagh must have had David Morier in mind when he offered a consular station to Francis Peter Werry. By 1827, when Werry went mad, the consular service had been reformed by Canning and the sinecures of the previous century had disappeared.32 By 1809, though he refused to give up hope, David had begun acquire worldly wisdom: ‘I learnt how vain are the dreams formed in the idle Solitude of the waiting room at the foreign Office’, and had nothing upon arrival in England with Stratford but ‘a budget of hopes and expectations of an undefinable Something, which it will be the business of fortune to turn into Hard Cash.’33 Having as late as 1813 intended to ask Castlereagh for future employment after his stint as ‘scribbler-general’ at the Congress of Vienna, the responsibilities of marriage made David set aside his once-lofty ambitions in favour of secure employment. His career as a diplomat was by no means at an end. He and Anna spent seventeen happy years in Paris and, when David’s post was abolished in 1832, he was offered another as minister plenipotentiary to Switzerland. He retired from this position and the service in 1834. In listing the social backgrounds of 365 out of 391 diplomats, Jones

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found only twelve men from mercantile backgrounds between 1815 and 1860. The Moriers nonetheless illustrate what could be achieved by diligence and enterprize. They seized opportunities presented to them by the vicissitudes of war, and took care to make no enemies along the way. Werry had never understood the importance of these things. Francis Peter was a good nineteenth century middle-class liberal; a staunch believer in meritocracy, a faithful Christian and a fervent moralist. He believed in the necessity of reform at home and a responsible foreign policy abroad: [W]hat is wanted is a simplification of all affairs & a more orderly, just, & equitable method of administration. It is the increase in numbers & in wealth of the gentry & middling classes which are much more virtuous & intelligent than the upper or lower class of Society, which renders this revision indispensable. . . a liberal policy can alone extricate us from the terrible evils with which we are assailed in Ireland & in England – make us respected abroad & give us a moral power sufficient to controul the arbitrary States of the Continent.34

These ideas were not the keys to success in the unreformed diplomatic service. Little enough in terms of skill was required of a diplomatic secretary, but Werry was not a man with the right personality for the job. ‘He should write a good hand. . . his knowledge of French ought not to be inferior. . . Above all, he must be steady, moderate, prudent, discreet.’35 Those best suited to the station were gentlemen who did not need the £100 a year because they had money or expectations to go home to. Alexander Burnet, who served Andrew Mitchell in Berlin, answered the latter description perfectly: ‘a young Gentleman. . . who wished to spend his time agreeably (& not unprofitably in regard to knowledge and improvement) till his father died’. When Mitchell died in 1771, Burnet returned to the family estate in Scotland.36 Ciphers and accounts were easy to master, but mental agility was also desirable. Robert Stevens, whom Jackson had taken to Paris in 1804, possessed so much ‘almost childish – simplicity, that I was forced to employ him as a mere machine’.37 This was the way in which Cathcart had used Werry. What he and the Moriers, unlike Stevens, did possess was a facility for languages, and this was arguably the most useful of all talents. Liston and Keith spoke ten each by the time they retired.38 In this they were unusual. Many British diplomats found it difficult to converse and write in French, let alone any other language at the beginning of their careers. Rose complained bitterly about the linguistic inadequacies of his junior colleagues. ‘Could it not be required’, he asked Castlereagh

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in 1815, ‘that candidates for Secretaryships of Legation should know French & German, the first the key to the Southern, the latter to all the Northern (except the Russian) tongues?’ Juniors at other European missions were fluent in both, and thus qualified to move in the social circles of their host capitals gathering news for their chiefs.39 Werry had learned something of these duties from Hamilton, for he took himself into St Petersburg society to promote his country. ‘I have zealously laboured to support our interests’, he wrote to Hamilton, ‘and to prove the natural union between them and those of Russia.’ This was not the ‘second Society’ in which Rose would state that secretaries ought to move, a world of lesser nobles and officials rather than court dignitaries. Werry was learning the arts of representation in St Petersburg’s salons. In this, he was fortunate, for there were royal and noble homes ‘where secretaries are not admitted’, of which Madrid was one. The Moriers, having served their apprenticeships outside Europe, were unfamiliar with these conventions, and David found them little to his taste. ‘I wish’, he wrote from Vienna in 1814, ‘that a little Respite was allowed in Schemes of Worldly bustle & Vanity’, for he disliked spending his Sundays with ‘Emperors, Empresses, Kings, Queens, &c., &c.’.40 The Moriers had thought that diplomacy was a trade to be learned like any other and James Justinian, the family’s second son, was also attracted to the foreign service. After ten years spent in the family business, he became a private secretary to Sir Harford Jones’s Persian embassy in 1807. Although the mission fell within the remit of the East India Company rather than the Foreign Office, Jem – as he was known in the family – was determined to master his craft in the hope of later serving his country in Europe. The Persian embassies of Jones (1807–11) and his successor, Sir Gore Ouseley (1810–14), were meant to strengthen Britain’s connections to Persia with the aim of preventing French, and hopefully Russian, expansion to the east. To the protection of British interests in India was added the lure of more trade for the East India Company in the Middle East.41 In the pursuit of these objectives Jem had few resources in Tehran beyond Montesquieu, three texts of international law and ten years of the Annual Register. ‘With these I fear I should not be able to bring Bonaparte’s nose to the grindstone.’42 Jem saw international relations as a machine. ‘Are there not Wheels & Movements, & long Calculates, & Balance of Powers, & all these sorts of things to be known & set going before a Grand Idea can be formed of the State of things?’ He asked David to send him more suitable reading material and proposed to make himself an adept in political economy rather than political theory, for which some knowledge of classical languages was requisite.43

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Self-taught diplomats were not unusual in the eighteenth-century service so Jem was by no means alone. Stormont had read extensively in modern history to prepare for his first posting and Hugh Elliot spent the first six months of his first mission working his way through ‘a course of universal history’. In 1802, Liston prepared a list of books for his secretary of legation, Lord Henry Stuart. Since Stuart was destined for promotion to the Würtemberg station, Liston’s bibliography was thorough, and its texts can be classed into four groups: international law, diplomatic memoirs, histories of modern Europe and contemporary periodicals.44 Each had something unique to contribute to a diplomat’s education. Stuart’s reading in international law was to range from the classics: Hugo Grotius and Cornelius Bynkershoek on the law of the sea to Emerich de Vattel and Georg Friedrich von Martens on public law. These were intended to give him a complete and up-to-date grounding in the principles of international jurisprudence.45 The memoirs constituted nothing less than a compendium of texts on the arts of negotiation and intrigue from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Much could be learned from the French, of whose writings Liston singled out Arnaud d’Ossat, the cardinal who had made Henri IV’s peace with Pope Gregory XIII at the end of the French Wars of Religion, and the Comte d’Estrades, who had signed the 1678 Treaty of Nijmwegen at the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, as the best dispatch writers in history.46 Stuart was also to read the published correspondence of the Abbé de Vertôt, who was posted to the court of Mary Tudor, and the memoirs of Cardinal Retz, who had offered Charles II papal assistance in effecting the restoration of the monarchy. The most recent French chronicle of diplomacy had been written by the Duc de Saint-Simon.47 These texts were assigned as much for theoretical as practical purposes. The superior cunning of the French not only made for more dextrous diplomacy, but also established the importance of Britain’s vigilance against the dangers of universal monarchy. Liston bemoaned the fact that English diplomatic memoirs were in shorter supply. The best of these, in his opinion, were the works of Sir William Temple, who had helped hammer out the 1668 Triple Alliance between Britain, Sweden and the United Provinces formed to contest Louis XIV in Europe. Stuart was advised to get hold of any others he could procure: ‘Walsingham, Harrington & Strafford, Berbey, Whitlock.’48 For models of modern political composition, Stuart was referred to Lord Bolingbroke. ‘It is to be lamented that he was so much of a party writer, but you will make allowances.’ All diplomats and many writers on international law agreed that history was an essential component of an envoy’s education. Stuart’s

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list therefore contained general histories of Europe ancient and modern written by Gibbon, Robertson and Voltaire. It also contained specialized accounts of treaties and negotiations, some compiled from original sources. In reading Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant’s six volume Histoire du Traité de Westphalie, ou des Negociations qui se firent à Munster & à Osnabrug (1751), Stuart was cautioned to ‘make allowances for the strong prejudice of a Catholic’. There was little that Liston could entirely endorse in the realm of contemporary history, and his pupil was told instead to look to periodicals: the Annual Register, Gazette de Leyde and Politische Journal. The second of these was compulsory reading for diplomats for it was the best international newspaper of its day.49 Some of this list, particularly the memoir material, had been standard reading for half a century, and seventeenth-century material was in plentiful supply for those who wished to consult it.50 In 1807, whilst en route to his second mission at St Petersburg, Leveson-Gower had amused himself with A Relation of Three Embassies from His Sacred Majestie Charles II to the Great Duke of Muscovie, the King of Sweden, and the King of Denmark. These had been undertaken in 1663–64. ‘Lord Carlisle’, noted Leveson-Gower of its principal, ‘seems very anxious to maintain the dignity of his Character’ through the performance of diplomatic ritual. This older anxiety over forms of etiquette can be traced to the fact that ‘face’ was an essential component of early modern honour.51 By 1800, the identity of a gentleman and public servant was much less dependent upon such public displays of status, and LevesonGower dismissed the memoir as an amusing relic of the past. Jem, on the other hand, needed ‘treaties between Persia & Russia or Persia & Turkey’, none of which were to be had since public records did not exist at Tehran. Notwithstanding the attention that Liston gave to memoirs and histories, the contents of his travelling library demonstrate that he saw diplomacy as a branch of power politics increasingly defined in ‘modern’ terms. Jem, who owned Vattel’s Law of Nations (1758) and the 1795 edition of Marten’s Summary of the Law of Nations, Founded on the Treaties and Customs of the Modern Nations of Europe (1789), would have agreed. He wished for another copy of the latter, which he distrusted because it had been translated into English by ‘that rogue [William] Cobbett’. Both books, whether published in English or French, presented the European community as a system of states bound together by an enlightened self-interest that drove its members to co-operate with each other, even in times of war. Utility, rather than civility or abstract morality, was therefore the invisible hand at the heart of international relations.

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This is not to say that custom had become meaningless to diplomacy: according to Vattel and Martens, the precedents of the past established by treaty and practice constituted the principal sources of legitimacy for international law.52 To what extent justice was historically and culturally constructed was not an issue with which either dealt directly, nor was it something upon which Jem chose to reflect. To what extent old customs and treaties would survive Napoleon’s occupation of Europe was something that, in 1812, Liston admitted to be a moot point. He nevertheless hoped that ten years hence, ‘matters may gradually return to a state analogous to that in which they were before the French Revolution’.53 Political theory was one thing but the reality of representing Britain outside Europe was another. Jem relied not on texts, but upon his eyes and tongue. He helped to negotiate, sign and ratify the Treaty of Tehran (1812) that pledged the shah to resist all passage through his country to European armies bent on attacking India. This involved Jem in one round-trip voyage to London in the company of the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul Hasan (1809–10) and months of weary residence at Tehran. In 1816, he returned to England for good and was offered another mission with the choice of going either to Spain or Brazil. Neither possessed the status that Jem thought himself entitled to, and he accepted a pension of £800 p.a. instead. Though he hoped one day to return to the service, he came out of retirement only once in 1824 to undertake Britain’s first embassy to Mexico.54 The new embassies created by Canning in Central and South America were the sorts of diplomatic posts for which men from commercial backgrounds were suitable.55 Neither Werry nor the Moriers had much time for the conventions of courtliness that had underpinned the international states system during the eighteenth century. This is apparent in Jem’s derogatory opinion of Abraham de Wicquefort’s Mémoire touchant les Ambassadeurs (1679). This, more widely known as L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions (1681), was standard reading throughout Europe.56 By 1800, the rituals that infused the text had lost much of their earlier significance. ‘It is curious’, wrote Liston for Lord Henry Stuart, ‘to see the nonsense that took place formerly – respecting ceremonial & precedence’ and Werry, upon breaking with Jack, was content ‘to leave Mr M – to carry on his & the “representation” without seeking to have any thing to say to him’. What that term had once meant was pilloried by Jem in his second novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). This was loosely based upon Hassan’s 1809–10 mission to London: ‘The nations of Europe were fools enough in times past. . . to make matters of etiquette affairs of state, and they used to lose intrinsic advantages in pursuing these ideal ones; but they are become wiser; we look upon

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etiquette now as child’s play.’57 Jem was also mocking the importance of ceremonial in Islamic culture.58 Diplomacy, it is clear, had become less ceremonial a pursuit in the minds of its British practitioners. Cosmopolitan civility nevertheless remained an essential attribute of the diplomat. Stuart was therefore advised to read Chesterfield’s Letters to his son, in which he was told that ‘You will find a valuable portion of Diplomatick Information.’ This advice was performative and practical. ‘Politeness and a versatility of mind’, wrote Chesterfield, ‘are only to be learned at courts, and must be well learned by whoever would shine or thrive in them.’ Philip Stanhope had been the subject of an experiment in social engineering intended to cure him of his English ways. ‘You are the only one I ever knew, of this country, whose education was, from the beginning, calculated for the department of foreign affairs.’59 Notwithstanding the c. 430 letters received during the course of a ten-year Grand Tour, Philip Stanhope did not become a perfect diplomat-courtier. He died at the minor court of Ratisbon in 1768 and the letters were published by his widow in 1773. Chesterfield’s letters were greeted with abuse from many quarters. English masculinity, or so it seems, was increasingly defined in a nationalistic context that involved the denigration of foreign manners as corrupting influences upon the lifeblood of British manhood. France and Italy, in particular, were regarded as the homes of an artificial and enervated masculinity at odds with the proud and open honesty of the true Briton.60 Here new standards of masculinity, politesse and nationalism butted heads with an older code of conduct which lauded cosmopolitanism as the chief hallmark of gentility. It is questionable to what extent the new ‘nationalist’ masculine sensibility described by Michele Cohen and Philip Carter became a set of British norms by c. 1770. Francophilia, as Robin Eagles has shown, was after all by no means dead, and Britain’s relationship with France during the eighteenth century is best described as one in which love, hate, fear, envy, awe and admiration were mixed. In 1747 many would have understood, if not necessarily agreed, with Chesterfield’s claim that ‘a Frenchman, who with a fund of virtue, learning, and good sense, has the manners and good-breeding of his country, is the perfection of human nature’. Diplomats too thought their countrymen awkward and provincial in comparison to their European counterparts. As late as 1805, Williams Wynn was describing tourists as ‘blackguards. . . They generally come here to learn, but go away as ignorant as they came.’61 By 1800 attitudes to cosmopolitanism were nonetheless changing amongst more conservative members of the diplomatic community. As Malmesbury put it to his son in reflecting upon thirty-five years abroad:

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‘an Englishman who, after a long absence from England returns to it with feelings and sentiments partial to other countries, and adverse to his own, has no real mind’.62 Admiration for the manners and morals of Europe was giving way to pride in the superior virtues of British culture and society. By 1815, Rose was suggesting that his countrymen were unsuitable for intelligence work, because ‘generally speaking the foreigner is a more cunning, & less disinterested man than the Englishman’. Europeans, thought he, were creatures of effeminacy and vice, whose habits predisposed them to be ‘always in Society’ with women. Since Rose, like the Moriers, preferred sermon-reading to frivolous parties, these comments should be taken with a pinch of salt. His remarks about the Englishman’s ‘manly habits of life, and of thinking’ nevertheless indicate that an increasingly assertive, individualistic and judgmental set of masculine values was gaining ground at home. Any man who placed Europe above Britain, as Malmesbury put it, ‘has no title to enjoy the superior moral, political, and local advantages to which he is born, but of which he is insensible and unworthy’.63 Notes 1 Appendix A; Bindoff, Unreformed Diplomatic Service, pp. 150–2. 2 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, p. 136; John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (New Haven, 1989); Michèle Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour: constructing the English gentleman in eighteenth-century France’, History of Education, 21 (1992), 241–57; Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992); Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2000); BL Add MS 35368, 3 March 1767, Yorke to Lord Hardwicke, f. 160; NLS MS 12975, Wroughton to Hugh Elliot, 1 July 1774, ff. 57–8; Malmesbury Diaries, i. p. xi. 3 NLS MS 11103, Lord Barrington to unknown, 8 December 1771, ff. 173–4; Stephen Conway, ‘The politics of British military and naval mobilization, 1775–83’, EHR, 112: 149 (1997), 1179–1201. 4 NLS MS 12952, Gilbert senior to Hugh Elliot, 20 June 1771, ff. 1–2; NLS MS 11103, Stormont to Lord Suffolk, 6 April 1772, f. 217; NLS MS 11013, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot senior, 1776, 15 March 1776, ff. 120–1. 5 NLS MS 5522, Gilbert Elliot to Liston, 13 June 1782, f. 142; Horn, British Diplomatic Service, p. 13. 6 Bod Bowood Muniments, Shelburne 38, Lord Hyde to Shelburne, 7 September 1768, ff. 143–4. 7 NLS MS 5605, Charles Keene to Liston, 16 December 1803, ff. 191–2; Library of Congress, Foster Papers, Box 2. Foster to Lady Elizabeth Foster,

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28 October 1806, n.f.; NLS 5606, Gray to Liston, 19 February 1804, ff. 82–3. NLS MS 5513, Hume to Gilbert Elliot senior, 24 May 1768, f. 84 and Elliot senior to Liston, 11 July 1768, f. 98; NLS MS 5514, Grantham to Gilbert Elliot senior, 7 February 1771, f. 21 and Hugh Elliot to Liston, 24 December 1773, ff. 225–6. Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 37–8; Deborah Manley, ‘Liston, Sir Robert (1742–1836)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16771; NLS MS 5523, Liston to Andrew Dalzell, 1 September 1781, f. 62; NLS 5525, Elliot to Liston, 12 December 1782, f. 70; NLS MS 5551, George Aust to Liston, 12 September 1788, f. 201. Dep Bland Burges 47, Burges to Edward Thornton, 2 December 1791, ff. 315–16; Dep Bland Burges 32, James Craufurd to Burges, 25 July 1795, f. 80. Mansfield TD Box 2003/13, Box 110, Bundle 1. Stormont to Markham (Bishop of Chester), 12 August 1772, n.f.; NLS MS 6171, General Circular #2, 1 January 1816, ff. 11–16; Jones, British Diplomatic Service, ch. 3; Schroeder, ‘Great Powers and the European states system’, pp. 841–2. NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/30, #1, Robert Murray Keith to Anne Keith, 10 June 1790 and NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/51, #22, 25 August 1791; E.M. Lloyd, ‘Stewart, Sir William (1774–1827)’, rev. Roger T. Stearn, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26520. NLS MS 6171, Foreign Office Circular #2, 1 January 1816, ff. 11–15; Codrington Library, Vaughan Papers, Reel 8, C 130, Henry Wellesley to Vaughan, 28 October 1822, n.f.; NLS MS 6216, Canning to Charles Stuart, 2 October 1822, f. 248; Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 265–6. Jones, British Diplomatic Service, p. 21. Werry Memoirs, Smyrna Journal, 26 July 1803, 25–30; August 1803, pp. 37–8; Francis Peter Werry to Francis Werry, 12 September 1811, pp. 121–2. Ibid., W.R. Hamilton to Werry, 24 July 1812, pp. 125–6; Werry to Hamilton, 29 December 1812, pp. 146–60, 6 May 1813, pp. 179–85 and 11 August 1813, pp. 213–14. Bod Francis Peter Werry Papers, MS Eng. hist c. 1032, Werry to Hamilton, 13 March 1814, ff. 56–8; Werry Memoirs, Werry to Francis Werry, 18 April 1815, pp. 229–33. Horn, British Diplomatic Service, p. 244; Platt, Cinderella Service, p. 22–3. Bath Archives, ii. Francis to George Jackson, 29 August 1813, pp. 256–7. Werry Memoirs, Werry to Francis Werry, 18 April 1815, pp. 230–1. Balliol College Library, Morier Papers, MS A.1.9. Isaac Morier to Clara (his wife), 10 June 1805, #21 and Isaac to David Morier, 25 November 1815, n.f. Henry McKenzie Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and His Brothers (London, 1998), p. 27. Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘Morier, John Philip (1778–1853)’, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19260; Balliol MS C.2.6, Jack to Isaac

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The structure of a service Morier, 22 November 1800, #18; Elgin Papers, MS 60/11/10. Intelligence Reports from J.OP. Morier. Balliol MS E.1.1, David to Jack Morier, 15 December 1806, #22 and MS E.2.1, 22 January 1807, #4; Elgin Papers, MS 60/16, Elgin to Lord Hawkesbury, 13 January 1802, n.f. Balliol MS E.1.3, David to James Justinian Morier, 2 March 1806, #7. Werry Memoirs, Werry to Francis Werry, 18 April 1815, p. 230 and Bod MS Eng. hist c. 1032, 23 May 1823, ff. 177–8. Balliol MS G.2.1, Anna Morier to David Morier, September 1822, n.f.; Bod MS Eng. hist c. 1032, Werry to Francis Werry, 27 April 1821, ff. 159–63 and 13 November 1821, ff. 162. Bod MS Eng. hist b. 238, Francis Werry to Joseph Planta, 26 June to 7 July 1822, f. 83. Balliol MS E.2.2, David to Jack Morier, 29 November 1808, #17 and MS E.2.3, 3 January 1809, #1; PRONI D.3618/B/5/2, Lady Elizabeth to Augustus Foster, 16 February 1811, ff. 335–7; Bath Archives, i. Diary, 10 June 1810, p. 138. Balliol MS A.1.3, Isaac to Clara Morier, 25 March 1805, #22. Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys, p. 57; Balliol MS E.2.1, David to Jack Morier, 22 January 1807, #4 and to Clara Morier, 28 June 1807, #22; Balliol MS E.2.3, David to Jack Morier, 4 August 1809, #26 and 29 August 1809, #28. Balliol MS E.3.3, David to Jack Morier, 11 December 1813, #27 and MS E.3.4, David to Anna Jones, [July] 1814, #6; Platt, Cinderella Service, ch. 1; Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 278–82. Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘Morier, David Richard (1784–1877)’, rev. Henry McKenzie Johnston, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19257; Balliol MS E.2.3., David to Jack Morier, 11 September 1809, #33; Balliol MS E.3.1, David to Lord Radstock, 30 April 1811, #10 and David to Jack Morier, 11 December 1813, #27. Jones, British Diplomatic Service, p. 22; Bod MS Eng. hist b. 238, Francis Werry to Joseph Planta, 26 June 1822, ff. 79–83 and 4 July 1823, ff. 85–9; Bod MS Eng. hist c. 1032, Francis Werry to his father, 23 May 1823, ff. 179–80. NLS MS 5658, Liston to Lord Henry Stuart, 1802, ff. 68–9; NLS MS 5523, Liston to Andrew Dalzell, 1 December 1781, ff. 70–3. Horn, British Diplomatic Service, p. 67; Susan Burnet, Without Fanfare: The Story of My Family (Aberdeen, 1994), pp. 109–135. A.M. Broadley (ed.), The Journal of a British Chaplain in Paris during the Peace Negotiations of 1801–2, From the Unpublished MS of the Revd. Dawson Warren, M.A., Unofficially Attached to the Diplomatic Mission of Mr. Francis James Jackson, 2 vols (London, 1913) i. Francis Jackson to his mother, 8 May 1804, pp. 203–4 and George Jackson to the same, 4 January 1803, pp. 117–18. Horn, Scottish Diplomatists, pp. 5–6, 12–14.

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39 PRONI D.3030/4772, 23 November 1815, Rose to Castlereagh, pp. 694–5. 40 Werry Memoirs, Werry to Hamilton, 6 May 1813, pp. 179–181; Balliol MS E.3.4, David Morier to Anna Jones, 9 October 1814, #32 and 5 November 1814, #47. 41 Ingram, Britain’s Persian Connection, pp. 4–12, 93, 153–4, 159. 42 Balliol MS D.1.7, Jem to David Morier, 9 May 1811, #12. 43 Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘Morier, James Justinian (1782–1849)’, rev. Elizabeth Baigent, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19259. 44 NLS MS 11013, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot senior, 13 August 1774, ff. 78–9; NLS MS 5658, Notes for Lord H. Stuart, 1802, ff. 66–8 and Liston to unknown, 21 March 1812, ff. 29–31. 45 Grotius, Mare liberum, sive de iure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio (Leiden, 1609); Bynkershoek, De lege Rhodia de jactu liber singularis, et de dominio maris dissertatio (Hague, 1703); Vattel, Droit des gens; ou, Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains, 2 vols (Leiden, 1758); Martens, Precis du droit des gens modernes de l’Europe, fondé sur les traités et l’usage. Auquel on a joint la liste des principaux traités conclus depuis 1748 jusqu’à présent, avec l’indication des ouvrages où ils se trouvent, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1789). 46 Amelot de la Houssaye (ed.), Lettres du cardinal d’Ossat, avec des notes historiques & politiques, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1714); Godefroy d’Estrades, Lettres, mémoires et négociations de M. le comte d’Estrades. . ., ambassadeur plénipotentiaire à la paix de Nimègue, conjointement avec MM. Colbert et le comte d’Avaux, avec les réponses du roi et du secrétaire d’Etat, 9 vols (London, 1743). 47 René Aubert de Vertôt, Ambassades des Messieurs des Noailles en Angleterre, 3 vols (Leiden and Paris, 1763) iii. p. 332; E. Harrison Harbison, ‘French intrigue at the court of Queen Mary’, AHR, 45 (1940), 533–51; F.J. Routledge, ‘The negotiations between Charles II and the Cardinal de Retz, 1658–59’, TRHS, 5th series, 6 (1956), 49–68; Jean François Paul de Gondi, Mémoires du Cardinal de Retz, contenant ce qui s’est passé de remarquable en France, pendant les premières années de Louis XIV, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1698); Louis de Rouvroy, Mémoires de Monsieur le Duc de S. Simon, ou l’observateur véridique, sur le règne de Louis XIV, & sur les premières époques des règnes suivans, 3 vols (London and Paris, 1788). 48 H.M.A. Keens-Soper and Karl Schweitzer (eds), François de Callières: The Art of Diplomacy (Leicester, 1983), pp. 92–4; [anon.], The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart . . . To Which Is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, 2 vols (London, 1731); Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador: Or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu: Elizabeth of Glorious Memory Comprised in Letters of Negotiation of Sir Francis Walsingham, Her Resident in France. Together with the Answers of the Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Tho: Smith, and Others (London, 1655); John Toland (ed.), The Oceana of James Harrington, and

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50 51

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The structure of a service His Other Works; Some Wher[e] of Are Now First Publish’d from His Own Manuscripts. The Whole Collected, Methodiz’d, and Review’d, with an Exact Account of His Life Prefix’d (London, 1747); W. Knowler, The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Despatches, with an Essay Towards His Life by Sir G. Radcliffe, 2 vols (London, 1739); Bulstrode Whitlocke, Memorials of the English Affairs: Or, an Historical Account of What Passed from the Beginning of the Reign of King Charles the First, to King Charles the Second His Happy Restauration. Containing the Publick Transactions, Civil and Military. Together with the Private Consultations and Secrets of the Cabinet (London, 1682). De Lamar Jensen, ‘French Diplomacy and the Wars of Religion’, Sixteenth Century Journal. 5:2 (1974), 23–46; Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca, 1989) and ‘Political communication in the age of enlightenment: Gottlob Benedikt von Schirach’s Politische Journal’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20 (1996), 24–41. CHW 37 (11406), George Conrad Walther to Hanbury Williams, March– April 1748, p. 81. Guy Miège, A Relation of Three Embassies from His Sacred Majestie Charles II to the Great Duke of Muscovie, the King of Sweden, and the King of Denmark. Performed by the Right Honble the Earle of Carlisle in the years 1663 & 1664 (London, 1669); Leveson-Gower Correspondence, ii. Leveson-Gower to Lady Bessborough, 26 May 1807, p. 257; David Yaufai Ho ‘On the concept of face’, American Journal of Sociology, 81 (1976), 867–84. Alfred and Detlev F. Vagts, ‘The balance of power in international law: a history of an idea’, American Journal of International Law, 73 (1979), 555–80; F. S. Ruddy, International Law in the Enlightenment: The Background of Emmerich de Vattel’s Le droit des gens (1975); F. Whelan, ‘Vattell’s doctrine of the state’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 59–90; Martti Kosenniemi, ‘Georg Friedrich Von Martens (1756–1821) and the Origins of Modern International Law’, ILEJ Working Paper 2006/1, History and Theory of International Law Series, www.iilj.org, 1–24. NLS MS 5658, Liston to anon., 21 March 1812, f. 30. Balliol MS D.1.8, Jem to David Morier, 6 August 1812, #12. Balliol MS D.2.3, Jem to David Morier, 22 October 1816, #17; Bindoff, ‘Unreformed Diplomatic Service’, p. 157. Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 114–21, 146–53. Keens-Soper, ‘François de Callières and Diplomatic theory’, HJ, 16 (1973), 485–508 and, with K. Schweitzer, ‘Diplomatic theory in the Ancien Régime’, in François de Callières, pp. 19–41. Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys, pp. 128–9; NLS MS 5658, Note for LHS, 1802, f. 65; Bod MS Eng. hist c. 1032, Werry to Francis Werry, 23 May 1823, ff. 177–8; James Justinian Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), pp. 126–7. Ingram, Britain’s Persian Connection, p. 142.

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59 NLS MS 5658, Liston to Lord Henry Stuart, 1802, f. 65; Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 27 March 1748 OS, p. 114 and 29 March 1750 OS, p. 331. 60 Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996) and ‘Manliness, effeminacy and the French: gender and the construction of national character in eighteenth century England’, in Cohen and T. Hitchcock (eds), English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 1999), 44–61, ch. 2; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 78–9. 61 Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 6 March 1747 OS, pp. 47–8; Wynn Correspondence, Wynn to Frances Williams Wynn, 28 March 1805, p. 87. 62 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Malmesbury to Viscount Fitzharris, 1800, p. x. 63 Ibid.; PRONI D.3030/4772, 23 November 1815, Rose to Castlereagh, p. 694.

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For many men, marriage had to wait until middle age. The diplomatic profession was known to be badly paid, as a result of which diplomats were unattractive propositions on the London market: besides, few women wished to be parted from family and friends to live in social and linguistic isolation abroad. For older men with prospects of promotion, marriage was a more feasible and, by 1800, desirable proposition. Having said this, some diplomats remained single all their lives. Marriage, as Katie Hickman has pointed out, is a tool of career development in the modern British diplomatic service. It indicates emotional maturity on the part of the diplomat, and denotes his/her readiness for positions of higher responsibility.1 This was not the case for much of the eighteenth century, during which men were responsible for the hospitality and public relations functions that would later pass to women. In the event that a man was (or got) married, his wife became a member of the corps diplomatique in her own right, which entitled her to a share of these burdens. Few women wished to take them on in the first instance. When Dawson Warren went to Paris with George and Francis Jackson in 1801, he was amazed by the domestic duties that lay in a diplomat’s domain.2 Interior decorating, menu plans and the management of servants were essential duties for a head of station, and some men took great pride in the standards of their housekeeping. ‘The Des[s] ert’, reported Yorke after a reception held in honour of a visit from the Princess Augusta of Brunswick to the Hague, ‘represented in the middle a fine Temple with an Altar upon wch. were two flaming Hearts, on one side Neptune surrounded with Tritons & Cupids, driving his Chariot in a hurry towards the Temple; on the other Mars & Venus traveling the same way.’ On another occasion Yorke claimed to have fed 1,690 people ‘with everything the Season afforded & even the Seasons that are to come’.3 Since a diplomat was a literal representative of his master, the embassy was by definition an extension of the early-modern royal household.

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Diplomats were therefore obliged to embody munificence to colleagues and countrymen.4 This is one reason why envoys obsessed to their families and each other about the costs of their missions and, bearing in mind that before 1815 the British government expected its servants to find, lease, furnish and staff their embassies without official assistance, household expenses were a major concern. Cost became particularly important when a man was destined for a change of station, and promotions or transfers were accompanied by a flurry of letters between old and new incumbents on the costs of different posts.5 Insofar as women factored into these equations, they often did so as real or would-be dependants rather than partners and household managers. Some men preferred not to marry at all because they did not want to go to the cost and trouble of ‘training’ a wife. Eighteenth-century diplomacy was very much a career for single men. Andrew Mitchell, whose wife had died in 1726, never saw the acquisition of another as desirable or necessary. Charles Hanbury Williams, who had ‘poxed his wife’, and parted ways from her in 1742, did not have the reputation nor inclination to marry again. Both took up their first missions a decade or more after their marriages ended. Some left their wives at home because their unions were less than ideal. Macartney had made a strategic match in 1763 with Lady Jane Stuart, a daughter of George III’s favourite, Lord Bute.6 This union soon went sour, and, despite periodic attempts at reconciliation on the part of both, Jane Macartney never went to India, China, Verona or South Africa with her husband. Estranged wives often went or stayed at home on ostensible health grounds, but in peacetime a wife in a ‘normal’ marriage was expected to be at her husband’s side. Women were left behind in wartime for their own safety. Despite having spent close to a decade at St Petersburg and the Hague, Harriet Malmesbury did not accompany her husband to Berlin, Paris or Lille during the French Revolutionary Wars. Those who did, like Mary Elgin, might be captured by the enemy, a fate that befell the Elgins in 1803. Mary was allowed to go home in 1804 but Elgin spent the next three years as a prisoner of war. He was not the only British diplomat to be interned by the French. Wartime diplomacy could be risky in other ways. In 1806 Arthur Paget had evacuated his embassy in the face of a French invasion. He spent the next six years trying to get compensation for the estimated £3,000 in books, plate and furniture left behind in Vienna.7 So dangerous was wartime Europe perceived to be that, in 1813, Castlereagh insisted that his wife remain in England during his trips abroad. In answer to her protests, he argued that Priscilla Burghersh, who had insisted on going abroad with her

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husband that year, had found herself the only woman of rank at military camps throughout Europe.8 Many diplomats took mistresses wherever they could be found. One advantage to living abroad was the licence it gave to men and women to pursue irregular unions comparatively free from prying eyes.9 Given that younger men in the service were under no compulsion to partner, one would expect some mention of same-sex relationships but, apart from snippets of often malicious gossip, the sources are silent. Much has survived concerning the straight relationships of men. In 1776, the 23-year-old Hugh Elliot fled his post at Ratisbon to escape an affair that had become too hot for him to handle and, in 1801, the 30-year-old Arthur Paget fathered a child upon an Italian lover. The baby went to his sister to be raised in Wales.10 Middle-aged men formed liaisons of more longevity, occasional references to which can be found in Grand Tour journals. Older men were better placed to provide for separate establishments and illegitimate children. Though little is known about these women, one suspects that many, like Madame Minorbetti, the mistress of Horace Mann, were widows or the estranged wives of local notables who sought companionship and, possibly, financial assistance.11 It was unwise, as Hugh Elliot and William Hamilton discovered during the 1780s, to bring a mistress into an embassy, for doing so made her analogous to a spouse. Richard Worsley encountered the same hostility from British travelers when he brought a lover into the Venetian residence in 1794. Worsley, like Hanbury Williams, was a separated man who went abroad after his marriage broke down in 1782. Lady Worsley was rumoured to have taken twenty-seven lovers, and finally separated from her husband in 1788.12 In 1784 he fathered a child upon his Spanish lover, Philipa de Cordova, who left her abusive husband to join Worsley in Bayonne. After her capture and return to Madrid upon Cordova’s orders, Worsley enlisted the help of Liston in negotiating her release. ‘I have heard that with money everything is to be done in Spain. I am ready to give any Sum to liberate her from . . . her infamous Husband.’ After Philipa miscarried the child, Worlsey was freed from any obligation to support her. When she sought reconciliation with her spouse, he repented of his infatuation. ‘I am ashamed of having wasted so much money on her.’ Worsley then turned his thoughts to the art and antiquities of the Levant, and began to petition the government for appointment to the Constantinople embassy. Liston’s reward was to come in a transfer to Worsley’s service. The appointment to Turkey never took place, and in 1793 Worsley settled for Venice instead.13 The woman known to visitors as ‘Lady Worsley’ was Mrs Sarah Smith,

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a one-time actress who had been Worsley’s mistress since 1788. She ‘seemed greatly deficient’, wrote the traveller Jean Louis Mallet, ‘in these qualities which give a charm to home and female society . . . her ignorance and prejudices were such as might be expected in a person without education’.14 Here Mallet was only reiterating some class and gender prescriptions of his time. Similar things were said of Emma Hamilton by visitors to the Naples embassy. In 1785, the 21-year-old Emma Hart had been sent abroad by her lover, Charles Greville, who hoped that his uncle, the 56-year-old Sir William Hamilton, would become her next protector. She succumbed to Sir William’s advances late in 1786, and by 1789 was living in his house with her mother. Hamilton spared no expense to train Emma in music, art and languages. ‘You can have no idea’, he enthused to Greville, ‘of the improvement she makes daily in every respect.’ By 1788 she had begun to receive English visitors.15 Sir William was proud of his creation and, by 1790, was thinking of marrying her. Neither the corps diplomatique nor the Neapolitan nobility seem to have objected to the match. Hamilton was much more afraid of what his countrymen and women would say: ‘of all the Women in the World, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad.’ Were Emma to become Lady Hamilton, William feared that ‘eternal tracasseries’ over rank and etiquette would be raised by British visitors: ‘as a Minister’s Wife in every Country takes precedence of every rank of Nobility’.16 Since a man, in effect, played the role of the king abroad, his partner possessed the honorary status of a queen. Neither Italian nobles nor diplomats saw Emma in this light, and she was treated in Naples as ‘a Traveling Lady’ of no country. This fiction was alien to the Englishwomen who visited Hamilton’s house, many of whom regarded Emma’s residence there as an inversion of the domestic pecking order. Female tourists could either swallow their pride or, like Catherine Legge in 1791, boycott the embassy. ‘Mrs. L is not over-scrupulous in her manners and sentiments beyond the usual forms establish’d by the rules of society in her own country’, wrote her husband, ‘but, as she was not particularly inform’d of any change in Mrs. H[art]’s situation, she had no reason to think her present different from her former line of life.’17 Legge, who had no such female scruples, visited Emma and her lover whenever he could. Hamilton had received George III’s permission to marry Emma in 1791 on the grounds that she claimed none of the rank and privileges associated with the union. She was received by the king and queen of Naples on the same terms, which meant that she could give little help to her husband in fulfilling his official duties. By 1793, however, this had changed, thanks to the fondness of Maria Carolina for Emma’s

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company. The former artist’s model had become a royal favourite, which gave her privileged access to the royal household and, with it, no little social and political power. ‘I have carried the Ladies to the Queen very often, as she [h]as permitted me to go to her very often in private, which I do.’ Hamilton was now in a position to shift the burden of court presentations to his wife: ‘the English travelers’, wrote he with pride, ‘feel the benefit of our being so well at this Court, for Emma is now as well with the K. & Q. as I am, & of many parties with them’.18 Emma was much more successful a female diplomat than Hamilton’s first wife had been. ‘I am a bad courtier’, confessed Catherine Hamilton to her sister-in-law in 1777, and ‘I would not be in any family of Sovereigns upon Earth if it was in my power.’19 Catherine , who was twenty-five when she first went to Naples, had never enjoyed the diplomatic life. For the 17-year-old Emma, Italy was an adventure, and she was eager to learn everything that her lover could teach her. Hamilton was well qualified to guide his wives in the conventions of court life. He had served as an equerry to the future George III and his mother had been a lady in waiting to Queen Caroline. Catherine never took to this training but Emma embraced it with her own unpretentious honesty. ‘I shall never change’, she wrote to her ex-lover Greville in 1793, ‘but allways be simple and natural.’ This, according to Hamilton, earned her the trust of Maria Carolina and ‘the thorough approbation of all the English ladies’ after their marriage. The letters and diaries of grand tourists tell a different story but, so great was their need for Sir William’s hospitality, that they had to be polite to Emma once she had become Lady Hamilton. ‘You will be very happy at this’, she observed to Greville, ‘for you [k]now what prudes our Ladys are.’20 The conventions of mistress-keeping in the service can be summed up in one phrase: ‘out of sight, out of mind’. If the experience of Worsley and the Hamiltons is anything to go by, it was a women, rather than men, who regarded themselves as the guardians of British class and virtue abroad. Emma offended all contemporary notions of female modesty, obedience, discretion and sociability.21 She never became responsible for the management of Hamilton’s household, which was left in the hands of his major-domo. Her accent and manners were also mocked by visitors for Hamilton had not taught his wife how her genteel countrywomen spoke to each other. Accomplished a musician and linguist though Emma might be, she was no English lady. She gambled, which Hamilton did nothing to police, and was much too assertive and familiar in her public conduct towards her husband. This was the last sort of spouse that most diplomats wanted: what the majority sought were women who would satisfy social conventions

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at home and abroad. Hamilton took care to secure the acceptance of his family, friends and colleagues before marrying Emma. He seems not to have cared about anyone else.22 Since marriage was, for others, as much a family as a personal matter, some of these hurdles proved to be insurmountable. In 1752, the 28-year-old Yorke wished to marry a younger sister of his ex-mistress, the Baroness Christiana van Stöcken. She had once been the Swedish ambassadress in London and, in transferring his affections to her sibling, Yorke was probably seeking a substitute for what he had lost. When his parents protested against her poverty and nationality, he argued in favour of the union thus: ‘I am doomed to spend the flower of my Life in Foreign Countries, by that means I am out of the way of making my Fortune in England by a good Match.’ Yorke nonetheless abandoned the suit in the face of his parents’ objections. In 1783, after their deaths and his retirement, he would finally marry the widowed Christiana.23 It was Lady Hardwicke’s duty to find a suitable wife for Yorke at home, and one suspects that she had tried to do so throughout the 1750s. She was not the only mother to veto any alliance with a foreigner. Frances Williams Wynn and Charlotte Jackson issued the same injunction to their sons during the 1800s.24 In the case of the Yorkes and Williams Wynns, both allied already by blood to major political clans, marriage was as much a strategy of extending family influence as it was a matter of love and happiness. For the much poorer Jacksons, marriage constituted one of several possible routes to some financial security. When, in 1813, Henry Williams Wynn’s proposal was accepted by Hester Smith, Frances wrote to welcome her to the family thus: ‘Nobody knows more than yourself the inestimable value of a large family circle, and I only trust that in your new connection you will find an extension of those social affections with which you have ever been so happily surrounded.’25 Hester, a daughter of the first Baron Carrington, came to the Williams Wynns with the added blessing of a £10,0000 dowry. George Jackson was too poor to seek a spouse from the ranks of court and noble society. In 1811, when George began to contemplate marriage, he was a militia officer with slim prospects of re-appointment to the diplomatic service. His mother and brother therefore advised him to seek money rather than ‘love in a cottage’. Since marriage was a pragmatic project, George welcomed the posting of his company to the north in the expectation that it would expose him to a new pool of provincial women: ‘matches’, wrote his brother Francis, ‘are much more easily and, in general, better made out of London than in it’.26 George’s first choice of partner was the younger sister of a colleague. Although Elizabeth Rumbold was attractive and sweet-tempered, neither Francis

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nor Charlotte could approve of a woman who was purported to have only £3,000 coming to her. George ignored their advice, only to find his proposal rejected. Two months later, George was accepted by Cordelia Savile. His mother grudgingly approved the match.27 Many men, like Yorke, married upon or following retirement from the service. In 1780, after eight years at Madrid, Grantham joined hands and hearts with Jemima Yorke while, in 1801, Charles Whitworth would marry Arabella, the Dowager Duchess of Dorset. Her first husband had been ambassador in France from 1783 to 1788. Whitworth had spent a quarter-century as a bachelor in St Petersburg, where he had been supported in part by his mistress, the Countess Gerbetzov. Her attempts to stop the wedding only ended when she was given £10,000 in compensation by Arabella Dorset.28 Odd though this scenario might seem, Arabella and Whitworth were well matched. Few understood the cosmopolitan morals, social duties and security concerns of an embassy as well as those familiar with the trade. Arabella would return to Paris with her new husband as ambassadress once more in 1803. Such matches could be very successful. In 1755, Porter married Clarissa Hochepied, daughter of the Dutch ambassador at Constantinople and, in 1759, Stormont married the widowed Henrietta Frederica de Berargaard, daughter of a Saxon diplomat. When envoys wished to marry abroad, they invariably chose wives bred to courtiership or diplomacy in some way. In 1807 Granville Leveson Gower considered a union with the Princess Barbe Galitzin, whom he had met during his first posting to St Petersburg in 1804.29 Barbe, a lady-in-waiting, was the member of a powerful court family. While she enjoyed Leveson-Gower’s attentions, she had no intention of leaving Russia. Perhaps the most unsuccessful foreign match was contracted by Hugh Elliot in 1779. Charlotte von Kraut was the daughter of a Prussian nobleman whose mother’s second husband had been M. Verelst, the Dutch resident at Berlin. Celia, as she was known to her family and friends, had once been engaged to – and jilted by – James Harris. Having fallen violently in love, or so he claimed, Hugh eloped with Celia, not least because she was a minor heiress, whose fortune would, or so he claimed, make him financially secure. Trouble soon began to appear in the match. The beautiful Celia was selfish, indiscreet and the possessor of a savage temper.30 She had a good deal in common with her husband. The couple often quarrelled and when, in 1782, Celia refused to accompany Hugh on his recall to England, he accused her of infidelity with her cousin, the Baron Knyphausen. Hugh took decisive action by removing his child from its mother, fighting a duel with Knyphausen, and filing for divorce. By 1783, he was once more at liberty. Liston, now in Turin, was

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notified by his successor that Hugh had gotten rid of ‘that incarnate[e] devil’, his wife.31 The divorce destroyed Hugh’s chances of advancement in the service despite the fact that his prospects had once been bright. He got transferred to Copenhagen in 1784 in order to make a fresh start, and sent his four-year-old daughter, Isabella, to the care of Gilbert and Maria Elliot at Minto. ‘You will without doubt agree with me’, wrote Hugh, ‘that there is perhaps no worse place for a girl than a foreign Minister’s house, & that it is almost impossible a Man should educate a female child.’32 To what extent this is true deserves some consideration. As a general rule, girls remained with their mothers until their teens though boys might be brought home as young as six to start school: ‘he must have languages, he must be made to the World’, wrote Porter, who in 1765 was starting to think about formal education for his five-yearold son, George. A year later, the boy was placed at a school in Bath. The Edens, on the other hand, took eight children abroad with them to Paris, Madrid and the Hague. After a rudimentary education, the boys went onto Eton. Girls came home in their teens to enter the marriage market.33 Widowers are unlikely to have kept young children of either sex abroad when there were relatives at home willing to raise them, but Hugh’s veiled remarks about the immorality of his household suggests that he was trying to get Isabella off his hands. ‘Hitherto’, intoned he sanctimoniously, ‘I have only performed the duties of a careful Nurse & thank God I have so well supplied the place of a Mother that my daughter has escaped most of the dangers of Childhood & Her Health has gained strength since She has been under my tuition.’ Isabella could have been educated abroad by a succession of governesses, but Hugh thought her better off in the company of her own kind. She played too often with merchant children in Copenhagen, from whom he feared that she might pick up bad manners: ‘were I only to consult my own happiness I should continue to keep my daughter in my own Bosom, but I cannot shut my Eyes to the danger She runs’. The child was more likely to have been corrupted by her father’s habits and friends. Fortunately for Hugh, Gilbert and Maria Elliot were willing to take responsibility for Isabella. Hugh then returned to his bachelor ways and later formed a liaison with his cook, Margaret Jones. He married her in the early 1790s and she bore him nine children.34 This second marriage seems to have had a settling effect on Hugh. Since Margaret had been taken, in the words of George Jackson, ‘from the servant’s hall’, she was not a respectable woman, and this, in addition to his tarnished past, stood in the way of appointment to a better post. There were ‘frequent expressions of indignation’, about Margaret

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from visiting Englishwomen ‘on questions of precedence and etiquette’, and Hugh would not leave Ratisbon until his brother, Gilbert, was in a position to bargain with the government for his professional rehabilitation.35 This did not come until 1813, when the Earl of Minto returned from India covered with glory. By 1780, a suitable wife was starting to be seen as a necessary partner, particularly for mid-ranking men on their way up the ladder. This had not mattered in the days of Yorke and the Keiths, nor did it entirely bar unmarried men from appointment to senior posts thereafter. Whitworth would go to St Petersburg with ambassadorial rank as a bachelor in 1783. When Harris married the 17-year-old Harriet Amyand in 1778, he was a 32-year-old minister plenipotentiary. Like Emma Hart, she would receive intensive training at her husband’s hands in preparation for leadership of any future embassies to which he would be appointed. Thoughts of the future also drove the 54-year-old Robert Liston to seek a bride in 1796. The 20-year-old Henrietta Marchant would go with him to Washington on his first posting as a head of station. Since Liston had hitherto shown little interest in marriage, his proposal sprang from professional motives: namely the higher hospitality obligations of midto senior-ranking embassies. Homosocial though the corps might be, in theory married couples had by this date to put on a better show. As Wynn wrote from Dresden in 1803, ‘The Corps Diplomatique is pretty good here, but I am sorry that there is but one of them who is married, excepting him none of them ever give a party or an Assembly.’36 In 1804, the 33-year-old Arthur Paget asked for the hand of Catherine Harris in marriage. She, the first of James and Harriet’s children, had been born in St Petersburg in 1779. It is unlikely that Paget got round to telling the Malmesburys about his illegitimate daughter because the proposed match soon foundered on the rock of debt. ‘Mr Paget has already been mistaken in £6000 out of £12000 – which seems to let in the possibility of Error to almost any extent’, wrote her uncle of the financial statement Paget submitted to Malmesbury. Catherine’s family did not think that her suitor would mend his ways and, in this they were shrewd, for Paget’s emotions seem not to have been seriously engaged.37 The retired Malmesbury was an influential man whose connections would have been very useful to the ambitious Paget. Having been promised, or so gossip had it, £10,000 by the Addington ministry, Paget was no doubt hoping for support in his claims upon this money.38 Six months after his rejection by the Malmesburys, Paget proposed to another woman. The Princess Leopoldine Esterhazy was, like Barbe Galitzin, the daughter of another court clan. Here he fared no better, for the Esterhazys disliked his religion and social station. As the second son

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of a marquess, Paget was much offended, but rank and titles mattered in Vienna, so much so that a knighthood was perceived by British diplomats as a necessary accoutrement of any long-term residence there.39 Paget’s poverty probably rendered him as unsuitable a groom for Leopoldine as he had been for Catherine. On this occasion he was heartbroken: ‘I have in her lost the most beautiful and the best of creatures, – such a mind, such a heart! as are rarely to be met with’, he wrote to his mother. Arthur did not marry until retirement from the service in 1809. His bride was the divorced Countess of Boringdon, whose tolerance for his chequered past was demonstrated by her acquiescence in his choice of a name for their first child, Leopoldine.40 By 1815, when Sir Charles Stuart proposed to Lady Elizabeth Yorke, marriage had become a prerequisite for the senior posts.41 Stuart was not by nature the marrying type: ‘I have a long account to wind up with whores, pimps & Bawds before I can begin to live cleanly’, he wrote to Vaughan. His appointment to the post-war Paris embassy nevertheless required a full-time mistress of ceremonies at the helm and, as Stuart confessed to a colleague, ‘his only reason for marrying was to enable him through his Wife to fulfil his Diplomatick Civilities better’.42 This Elizabeth fully understood when she wedded Stuart at the British embassy in Paris a year later. This begs the question what women thought they were getting into when they chose to marry a diplomat and why, come the closing decades of the eighteenth century, a once unattractive choice of spouse had become more acceptable. Some mid-century men had tapped every network in search of a bride. In 1769, Robert Murray Keith had let it be known to family and friends what his requirements were. ‘Five & twenty, at least – I laugh at Beauty & despise Riches’, which was sensible on the part of a man of little fortune then posted to the minor court of Dresden. Having been rejected by a woman in Scotland he called ‘Portia’, Keith continued to contemplate marriage until 1773.43 He contented himself with mistresses thereafter. Those who entered the marriage market a decade later were more fortunate. Harriet Amyand, Henrietta Liston, Mary Elgin, Priscilla WellesleyPole and Elizabeth Yorke married into the diplomatic service between 1778 and 1816. By their time the profession was perceived to be stable, if not lucrative, and offered women the seeming glamour of residence abroad. These spouses came with varying degrees of emotional and mental maturity. Harriet, the youngest in the group, had once been described by her future husband as ‘the picture of No-body’.44 At twenty-seven, Elizabeth was the oldest and, as a daughter of the house of Hardwicke, no stranger to high society. As a general proposition, the

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younger the wife a man chose, the more control he wished to exercise over her life and mind. Harris was so domineering that, when his wife contemplated a separation from him in 1787, her brother-in-law wrote that ‘I pity Harriet from the bottom of my heart.’ Men like Keith and Stuart were willing to leave women more to their own devices or, when choosing a wife, sought to balance youth with ‘goodness, tranquility, good sense, ease, and docility’.45 Harriet Harris, according to her husband, was a lazy, spoiled and narcissistic young woman who needed constant correction. Harriet, unlike Emma Hamilton, did not receive two language lessons a day. Her brother-in-law Gilbert nevertheless reported her to be ‘considerably improved in point of substance’, upon seeing her in St Petersburg in 1781. Although Harriet wrote regularly to her sister, Maria Elliot, she said little of her husband or the training he gave her, preferring instead to comment on the manners and morals of St Petersburg society. What we do know is that Harriet went home with Gilbert on health grounds in 1781, and Harris was recalled a year later.46 Reading between the lines of her letters to Maria, one sees a child-bride who went abroad in high spirits, but found marriage little to her taste.47 Although Harriet did her best to be a good spouse, she soon grew disillusioned with her husband. She was by no means a bad diplomat, as Harris acknowledged in his private letters. Her chief fault, in his eyes, lay in her inability to put others, not least himself, first. Mary Elgin had also gone abroad expecting a life of adventure, and consciously modelled her conduct upon what she found in Lary Mary Wortley Montagu’s embassy letters. These, first published in 1763, may have been more responsible than any other publication for turning women away from the diplomatic life for they testify to the loneliness of wives in distant posts. The veracity of what Wortley-Montagu wrote about her life was questionable. Frances Grenville, upon reading reviews of the book, could find no similarities to her experience of Turkey.48 Most women found it difficult to cope with the social expectations of the service. The second Lady Stormont disliked the rigid etiquette of the corps in Paris and Lady Mountstuart, upon her arrival at Turin in 1782, could hardly be prevailed upon to receive visitors, even with the assistance of embassy staff. Although Harriet Harris claimed that, for the most part, she enjoyed living abroad, in her more candid moments she admitted to her sister Maria Elliot that marriage was full of compromises. ‘I should have liked much better to have led a quiet life in England’, she remarked of her husband’s appointment to the Hague in 1783, ‘but Sir James wished it so much & is so much persuaded tis for his advantage that I thought it would be useless & wrong to make any strong objections.’49 Many other wives no doubt felt the same.

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Older women possessed fewer illusions than the young. When William Eden was posted to Madrid in 1787, his wife Eleanor asked Liston for advice about her wardrobe and, in 1824, Harriet Granville faced promotion from the Hague to Paris with similar anxieties.50 This was more than mere vanity. Both women understood that, as ambassadresses, they were always in the public eye. The mistress of an embassy had to be civil at all times. An embassy was a place of secrets, and a woman had to guard her tongue. She also had to support her husband and country without giving offence to others. If she displayed partiality to his or her associates, tongues would start wagging about its potential implications. ‘To avoid intimacy of communication, to have a degree of repelling civility of manner, to have no preferences and create none, all this will rub my back up the wrong way’, thought Harriet, ‘but I think over my part so much that I must end by learning it.’ For neophytes, regardless of age, embassy life could be miserable. The nineteen year old Frances Vane Tempest Stewart loathed Vienna, in part because she was ‘bored to death’. She also disliked almost everyone male or female on the embassy’s staff. ‘The distress of not being able to speak one word of the language is dreadful’, reported Eleanor Eden from Madrid.51 She had coped well with her husband’s first mission to Paris, but her French was useless in dealing with Spanish servants. One suspects that many would-be diplomats turned down missions because their wives refused to leave England. Eleanor and Harriet were different in their willingness to oblige their husbands. Eleanor, sister to Hugh and Gilbert Elliot, had married undersecretary of state William Eden in 1776. At the age of 31, he was already an authority on political economy and a rising star in the public service. The couple first went abroad to America in 1778 when Eden was attached to the unsuccessful Carlisle Peace Commission and, to France in 1786 to negotiate the ‘free trade’ treaty that bears his name. Their diplomatic career ended in 1795, when Eden – now the 1st Baron Auckland – retired from Britain’s embassy at the Hague. Of all these posts, Eleanor had liked Spain the least. She had been plagued by ill health and was delighted to leave in 1789. What made her service palatable was the reward: a pension of £1,500 p.a. for life, which was to revert to their two eldest sons after Eden’s death.52 Harriet Cavendish, the second child of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, was another woman who struggled to balance love with duty. She had married Granville Leveson Gower in 1809 and, after his elevation to the House of Lords in 1815, became a minor political hostess. In this she was not unusual, for Eleanor Eden too had done this for her husband. In Eleanor’s day, a hostess had an active role to play – if she wished

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– in politics. By Harriet’s, argues Peter Mandler, political functions had become detached from society, leaving women as ‘ornaments’ rather than agents in politics.53 Her experiences, whether in London or Paris, suggest that this was by no means the case. When Canning returned to the Foreign Office in 1823, he began to replace some of Castlereagh’s nominees with men he could trust. It was under these conditions that the couple agreed to go to Hague. Paris was another story. The French capital had long been ‘the’ social forum of the Continent, and it was the standards of the city for style that struck fear into Harriet’s heart. The Hague was much less formal a place, with the result that many British women found it a pleasant billet: ‘my Eleanor’, wrote Eden in 1791, ‘is at the Head of all society’ there.54 In some respects, Harriet had preferred the Netherlands even to England, for the Dutch had no custom of making or receiving morning visits, and would not take offence in the event that a house was closed for the evening. ‘“Madame ne reçoit pas” said at the door affronts nobody.’ Harriet, though reserved by nature, knew that the success of Granville’s embassy in Paris would depend in great measure upon her ability to become a professional socialite. No longer could she entertain her guests in comparatively small and intimate soirées as she had done at the Hague. ‘I have asked eleven hundred and fifty’, she would write of her first ball.55 As Elizabeth Yorke had found from 1816 to 1824, much hard work went into the management of the Paris embassy. In addition to running a large household, a wife had to organize and oversee functions for local notables, the corps diplomatique and the expatriate community. These required much forethought: ‘supplementary gallery, sitting-down supper, and everything complete’. Keeping open house was not a woman’s only duty. ‘The increasing and wide-extended detail of visiting and all the business of society occupy time and thought’, reported Elizabeth’s mother, Lady Hardwicke. Harriet Granville loathed this work but was determined to do it well. ‘I have made a resolution which I am sure will please you’, observed she to her sister. ‘It is never to let any day pass without doing something which I think particularly disagreeable, such as paying a visit, sending a note, writing a letter, leaving a card, seeing somebody on business, being measured for something.’56 Here a woman was acting in support of her husband in several ways. As men and women acclimatized to new posts, they began to network and collect the gossip that acted, not only as an important source of news, but as the medium through which forms of ‘truth’ were distinguished from speculation.57 This required diplomats to see and be seen in as many venues as possible. To what extent this work was ‘social’ as opposed to ‘political’ is a moot point. Elizabeth Stuart set out to court

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high society from the day of her arrival. In so doing she was acknowledged by all to be a great success despite the fact that Elizabeth could be arrogant, pretentious and insincere. It was this older standard of cosmopolitan sociability that Harriet was afraid she could not meet: ‘her faults were blessings in the post’, wrote she of Elizabeth, ‘and I could learn as a trade her defects’. The Stuarts were a hard act to follow and Harriet wondered how, given her dislike of the French, she would make her own mark in Paris: ‘shall I . . . have everybody’s good word as she has? We shall see’.58 For the first two years of her embassy, Harriet pushed herself to reach the benchmark of elegance set by her predecessor. This involved redecorating the embassy, revamping her wardrobe and sallying forth into Parisian society. Although she could not, like Elizabeth, expect maternal assistance from the dead Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire: within two months of arrival in Paris, Harriet found a fellow-sufferer in the person of the new Austrian ambassadress, Maria-Theresa Appony. One evening, whilst paying an informal visit to the British embassy, Therese – as she was known to her friends – ‘cried real hot tears, says she hates it, wishes she could go, is in despair’. By this date Harriet had learned how to cope with the French who, despite their initial ‘rudeness and coldness’, would warm to newcomers once they learned, ‘like the children, that you mean to like, amuse and please them’. Once Harriet had discovered this, she gave her hosts what she thought they wanted. This was the system to her diplomacy. Therese, who had presided over the Austrian embassy in Rome, was neither naïve nor stupid. Harriet thought her an ‘amiable and sensible’ woman. Therese nonetheless measured her success by the warmth with which she was received by others. ‘The mistake’, observed Harriet, ‘is thinking that diplomacy is sentiment’, for she never asked for more than courtesy and respect. The two women nevertheless embarked upon their careers as society hostesses in Paris together. By 1850, when the Apponys retired, Therese had become a leading salonnière and patroness of music. Harriet, who left in 1841, was remembered rather for her ‘magnificent hospitality’. Yesterday we went to a brilliant soirée at Mme. Appony’s, on Friday I have another soirée dansante. What would the parlez-vous do without us? We are both worried, as she invites, and the worry of it is tremendous, as my Fridays are reception to the French and I have the dread of numbers. I trust in my house, which I believe could hold five or six hundred, even when but half of it is open. But it is the devil of a question between prier et non prier. Madame Appony finds that many come without invitation, and the immense trouble of inviting for each separate day, besides affronts, forgets, etc.59

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Friendships such as these could outlast postings and transcend national rivalries. Henrietta Liston and Maria Freire, wife of the Portuguese envoy to the United States, corresponded for over a decade on private and public affairs after leaving Washington.60 Female diplomatic networks existed to fulfil more than emotional needs, which is apparent in the friendship of Harriet Granville and Dorothea Lieven. The Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador to London, lived in England between 1812 and 1834. She was a major social and political force of her time, for she possessed the ear of the Prince Regent, ran a London salon that rivalled those of Lady Jersey, Lady Hertford and Lady Holland, and was one of Metternich’s trusted correspondents. Dorothea was clever, but domineering, and many people, regardless of nationality, loathed her. She and Harriet became acquaintances in 1817. Dorothea liked Harriet for her intelligence and good sense, while Harriet thought Dorothea perceptive and amusing, but lacking in modesty and charm. Dorothea was nevertheless cultivated by many men and women, not least because she was an excellent source of news.61 Dorothea Lieven was an intrigante, a type of female politician familiar in eighteenth-century Europe. Having served as a maid of honor to Catherine II, she was familiar with the socio-political dynamics of royal cabals. She put this knowledge to good use in London, both in assiduous flattery of the future George IV, and the weekly digest of court gossip she sent back to St Petersburg. Dorothea was both a shrewd observer and an incisive writer with the result that Count Nesselrode, the Russian minister of foreign affairs, found her more reliable than her husband for accounts of British politics and personalities. She was also an indefatigable lobbyist in her country’s interest, first with Liverpool, Castlereagh and Wellington, and later with Canning. All four detested her. No British and few European ambassadress sought to emulate Dorothea Lieven’s style of diplomacy. Discreet support of one’s spouse and country was appropriate womanly conduct. Strident advocacy of a cause, whether at home or abroad, was not. The Swiss Countess of Meuron was so discreet that she wrote nothing to her female friends in the corps about her husband’s thoughts or plans. This Williams Wynn found admirable. Dorothea’s fondness for ‘Kings & Princes, & the Magnates of the Land’ was less acceptable, for it denoted a love for power that was regarded as unfeminine.62 Much had changed since the days of the much maligned Emma Hamilton, the only ambassadress in this study to have succeeded as a courtier. Her status as a favourite of Maria Carolina will receive special attention later in this book since it was the most startling aspect of Amy Lyons transformation into Lady Hamilton. British visitors, including diplomats, might deride Emma,

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but resident envoys, whether male or female accepted her. In 1791, Emma wrote to Greville that she and the new Spanish ambassadress had become friends: ‘we are allways together. She is charming’.63 Most British women loathed the stiff formality of courts. Hickman has written with sensitivity of the anxiety women faced upon the occasion of their presentations, the ceremony which inaugurated a diplomate into her official duties. Harriet Harris was so overcome with fear that head and stomach pains prevented her from making her first appointment at the Winter Palace, but eventually got through ‘the horrendous ceremony’ and thirty-one formal visits to noble and diplomatic households thereafter. Elizabeth Stuart too found the experience ‘awful’. ‘How I dress, how I behave, how I curtsey so commented on, so discussed’, wrote Harriet Granville of her ordeal, ‘that I feel as if I was going to be hung, and all my reputation turning thereon.’64 Although court ritual had become more informal throughout Europe since the days of Louis XIV, the standards by which courtly conduct was judged had, to some extent, not. Courts were places where sociopolitical hierarchies were embodied in complex codes of costume and behaviour, the slightest deviation from which could cause enormous offence. Napoleon, who saw the potential of ritual for the purposes of social control, began to resurrect the formalities of monarchy after becoming First Consul in 1799.65 Much of this was alienating to British women, whose monarchy had begun to undergo desacralization during the reign of George II. Neither grandson nor great-grandson, George III and the Prince Regent, were much enamoured of ceremony either. This was the chief reason why Frances Stewart detested its counterparts in Paris, Vienna and Germany: ‘the parade and formality is very wearing’, she wrote in 1821, ‘and quite unlike our Royal Family, which are so good natured and affable’. Harriet Granville, in her turn, was relieved to find when making her visits of ceremony to cadet branches of the French royal family, that the junior female royals were both informal and amiable.66 Since Frances, Harriet and Elizabeth Stuart were noblewomen born and bred, it was not personality alone that made women regard attendance at court as an unpleasant duty. Whatever Clarissa Campbell-Orr and Ingrid Tague may say about the continued social and cultural importance of the British court after 1714, the fact remains that few diplomatic wives of this period spent much time there.67 Their ethics were derived instead from the social conventions of town and country, learned from family, friends and the press. While the rural world and its values had changed little over the course of a century, the same could not be said for towns.68 This is in part why Harriet, who felt most comfortable as ‘a Country Lady’, was so intimidated by the prospect of competition with

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Paris elegantes. Elizabeth, whose mother’s illness had often placed her at the head of the family table in London, was much better equipped to cope with whatever an embassy might throw at her.69 Peter Borsay’s ‘urban renaissance’ gave British towns a plethora of new economic, social and cultural venues ranging from lending libraries, assembly halls, shops and markets, theatres and concert halls, to public parks, racecourses and museums. These were new environments in which the mingling of men and women set new standards for polite sociability. Over the course of the eighteenth century, honour for both sexes became less a matter of public display and more a matter of private conscience, and nothing illustrates this better than the disappearance of the courtier as an ideal in domestic courtesy literature, to be replaced by the genteel man or woman. In this world, the external civility of both was, ideally, a projection of his or her inner virtue.70 Discretion of all kinds was therefore prized over display, and honesty was seen as more worthy than duplicity. Women with these values would shun courts and their hierarchies in favour of more inclusive social realms, not to mention realms of overt competition for those of self-policing restraint. This did not make them ‘ornaments’ per se. It only meant that the lobby work of petticoat diplomacy had become more firmly household and society based, whilst men waited upon kings, ministers and officials. Polite domesticity, in Amanda Vickery’s eyes, was a set of standards belonging to the gentry rather than the bourgeoisie. To what extent sentimental or ‘companionate’ marriage also belongs to this social group is also worthy of examination, since its prescriptions began to affect the diplomatic service from c. 1780 onwards.71 In 1787, Harriet Harris went to her relatives in search of support for a separation. Grass widowhood for her, in the eyes of Gilbert Elliot, would not do: The equivocal situation of a woman living separate from her husband & the doubts respecting her share in rendering it necessary which the ignorance of the world onto such private details & certainly the malice of some part of the world must be expected to raise, cannot fail of poisoning all the enjoyment she can look for in general society, supposing her to be even received without hesitation.72

As Gilbert had been, and would again be, unfaithful to his wife, this was a sanctimonious judgment to have passed on Harriet’s situation, but Gilbert believed in keeping up appearances. As he told Lady Webster, the future Lady Holland, with whom he had an affair in 1794, ‘Be kind and discreet.’73 She was not impressed with his show of ‘conjugal felicity’. Long gone were the days of libertinism, when men could seek extramarital liaisons with some impunity, and those who did, like Charles Stuart,

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increasingly incurred the disapproval of their colleagues. Stuart’s love of the Paris theatre extended to its artistes, whom he continued openly to chase four years after his wedding. This was deemed so reprehensible at the Foreign Office that Castlereagh contemplated an official reprimand. His half-brother, Stewart, thought the action ill-conceived: ‘the Evil has been talk’d of & known so long and been unnotic’d by any proceeding on the part of his Govt. that It would not of itself form sufficient grounds now for their acting in a decided Shape’. It was difficult, moreover, for Castlereagh to censure Stuart for affairs ostensibly conducted ‘in the Dark’.74 Lady Elizabeth’s complaisance was not entirely unusual. Harriet Granville had forgiven her husband’s premarital peccadilloes, going so far as to adopt his children by Lady Bessborough. Most women nevertheless expected more from their spouses, and expected to share as much as possible of their lives. In 1800, the pregnant Mary Elgin travelled out to Turkey to take up an embassy her husband had offered to relinquish on account of her condition. In 1813, the newly married Priscilla, Lady Burghersh, went abroad to undertake what amounted to a battlefield tour of Europe. In 1815, Emily Castlereagh finally went with her husband to Paris and Vienna. She did not adjust well to the demands of European high society: ‘nothing but English’, was noted of her circle from Paris in 1815, and she raised eyebrows in Vienna for wearing her husband’s Order of the Garter as a hair ornament.75 Harriet Granville was, at heart, no more elegant a woman than Emily Castlereagh, but accepted that marriage to a diplomat meant many things: social reserve, perfect manners and the adoption of an identity as a ‘public woman.’ It was for these reasons that Harriet struggled to become a Paris sophisticate and make her embassy a home away from home. This, as secretaries and tourists recalled, had once been done by men but, by 1820, their praise was going to the women. Harriet, as Anna Morier noted with approval, never excluded the consular staff from an embassy function. Social duties that had once been performed by men had passed into the female domain. This, as their husbands acknowledged, was invaluable work. ‘Her husband’, reported Lady Hardwicke of Elizabeth Stuart, ‘is well aware of his own good fortune in having obtained such a treasure.’76 Notes 1 Hickman, Daughters of Britannia, pp. 53–6. 2 Broadley, Journal of a British Chaplain in Paris, Diary, 7 December 1801, pp. 81–3. 3 Add MS 35367, Yorke to Lord Royston, 10 February 1764, ff. 22–3 and 8 June 1764, ff. 98–9; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, p. 177.

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4 Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, pp. 39–40, 310–12; Black, British Abroad, pp. 216–17 and British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 98–9. 5 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 61–5. For lengthy answers to one set of queries about the running costs of another embassy, see BL Egerton 2002, Samuel Swinney to John Strange, 5 February and 30 April 1781, ff. 75–81 and 86–7. 6 H.M. Scott, ‘Mitchell, Sir Andrew (1708–1771)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/18833; Mary Margaret Stewart, ‘Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury (1708–1759)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29488; Roland Thorne, ‘Macartney, George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/17341. 7 Add MS 48393, C.B. Broughton to Paget, 1807, ff. 85–6; Add MS 48404B, Berkeley Paget to Paget, 1 February 1812, f. 191. 8 Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, ii. Castlereagh to Emily Castlereagh, 4 and 30 April 1814, pp. 507–9. 9 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, p. 105. 10 Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998); R.H. Gronow, The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow, Being Anecdotes of the Camp, Court, Clubs, and Society 1810– 1860, 2 vols (London, 1892), i. pp. 90–2; NLS MS 5513, James Harris to Robert Liston, 23 April 1770, ff. 185–6; NLS MS 5516, Elliot to Liston, 12 July 1776, ff. 96–7; BL Add MS 48406, Louisa Erskine to Paget, 21 May 1807, ff. 77–80. 11 Georges A. Bonnard (ed.), Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome, His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764 (London, 1961) Diary, 28 August 1764, p. 220. 12 Nigel Aston, ‘Worsley, Sir Richard, seventh baronet (1751–1805)’, DNB Online, doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/29986. 13 NLS MS 5540, Worsley to Liston, 12 & 17 March 1784, ff. 100–1, 116–7; 4 May 1784, ff. 183–4. 14 John Lewis Mallet, An Autobiographical Retrospective of the First TwentyFive Years of His Life, Printed for Private Circulation (Windson, 1890), p. 132; Earl of Ilchester (ed.), The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland (1791–1811) 2 vols (London, 1908) i. 24 April 1799, pp. 242–3. 15 These prescriptions are most forcefully stated in Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes; Flora Fraser, Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton (London, 1986), pp. 75–97; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 18 December 1787, pp. 134–5. 16 Mary Hamilton, Hamilton to Mary Dickinson, May 1790, pp. 306–7. 17 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Legge to Charles Greville, 8 March 1791, pp. 151–3. 18 Fraser, Beloved Emma, p. 177; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i, Emma to Greville, 2 June 1793, p. 176. 19 Mary Hamilton, Catherine Hamilton to Mary Hamilton, 1777, p. 145.

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20 Ibid., p. 177; Walpole Correspondence, xxxv, Hamilton to Horace Walpole, 17 April 1792, p. 441; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Emma to George Romney, 20 December 1791, p. 159. 21 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pp. 376–400; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 59, 82, 129–36, 197–202, 207–14; Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002). 22 Brian Fothergill, William Hamilton, Envoy Extraordinary (London, 1969), pp. 250–1. 23 Add MS 35385, Yorke to Charles Yorke, 26 August 1752, ff. 84–7, 22 September 1752, ff. 88–9 and 9 January 1753, ff. 92–3; H.M. Scott, ‘Yorke, Joseph, Baron Dover (1724–1792)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/30243. 24 NLW MS 2790D, Henry to Lady Charlotte Williams Wynn, 6 August 1806, n.f.; Bath Archives, i. George to Charlotte Jackson, 1 June 1810, pp. 125–6. 25 Wynn Correspondence, Frances Williams Wynn to Hester Smith, 1813, pp. 165–6. 26 Bath Archives, i. Francis to George Jackson, 30 December 1810 and 19 February 1811, pp. 187–9, 218. 27 Ibid., Francis to Charlotte Jackson, 8 April 1812, pp. 345–7 and Charlotte to George Jackson, 3 June 1812, pp. 382–4. 28 Roland Thorne, ‘Whitworth, Charles, Earl Whitworth (1752–1825)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29338. 29 Add MS 32420, Porter to Caspar Wetstein, 10 September 1755, ff. 340–1; Mansfield TD 2002/42, Box 18, Bundle 6, Mansfield to Stormont, 3 November 1758, 18/11; Leveson-Gower Correspondence, ii. Gower to Lady Bessborough, February 1807, p. 240. 30 NLS MS 11084, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 18 July 1778, ff. 18–19; NLS MS 12966, James Harris to Hugh Elliot, 17 November 1778, f. 92; NLS MS 12959, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 21 May 1782, ff. 223–225. 31 NLS MS 5537, William Baylies to Robert Liston, 23 September 1783, ff. 199–200. 32 NLS MS 11084, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 20 December 1784, ff. 118–33. 33 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pp. 297–8; Bod MS Eng lett d. 76, George Cressener to Thomas Astle, 20 January 1772, f. 6; Add MS 57928, James Porter to Edward Weston, 5 May 1765, f. 95; Add MS 34425, Eleanor Eden to Hugh Elliot, 16 August 1787, f. 373; Auckland Correspondence, i. William Eden’s Spanish Journal, 23 January 1789, p. 146; NLS MS 11104, Eleanor to Maria Elliot, 31 August 1790, ff. 98–9. 34 NLS MS 11084, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 20 December 1784, ff. 118–33; NLS MS 11161, Minto Travel Journal, 22 July 1799, ff. 11–13. By this date, Hugh and Margaret had produced five children. NLS MS 11126, Minto to Mary Palmerston, 26 July 1799, ff. 213–14; H. M. Scott, ‘Elliot, Hugh (1752–1830)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8664.

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35 Jackson Diaries, i. George to Charlotte Jackson, 16 February 1803, pp. 125–6. 36 Add MS 35368, Yorke to Lord Hardwicke, 8 November 1768, f. 328; NLS MS 12966, James Harris to Hugh Elliot, 6 and 17 June 1777, ff. 32–3, 34; NLS MS 5589, Henrietta Marchant to Miss Polson, 25 February 1796, ff. 12–13; NLW 2790D, Wynn to Lady Charlotte Williams Wynn, 3 December 1803, n.f. 37 Add MS 48411, 21 June 1801, ff. 16–17; Add MS 48403, Lord Uxbridge to Paget, 6 November 1804, ff. 28–9; NLS MS 11107, Minto to Malmesbury, 19 July 1804, ff. 44–5. 38 Leveson-Gower Correspondence, i. Lady Bessborough to Granville Leveson Gower, 22 October 1804, pp. 467–8; NLS MS 11115, Lady Malmesbury to Lady Minto, 20 November 1804, f. 18. 39 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, p. 106. 40 Add MS 48414, Princess Esterhazy (mother of Leopoldine) to Paget, 30 January 1805, ff. 3–4; Paget Papers, ii. Paget to Lady Uxbridge, 18 August 1805, 189; Lord Hylton (ed.), The Paget Brothers, 1790–1840 (1918), Lady Uxbridge to Arthur Paget, 3 June 1810, pp. 135–6. 41 NLS MS 5562, Liston to Andrew Dalzell, 29 February 1788, ff. 8–9; Robert Franklin, Lord Stuart de Rothsay (Upton upon Severn, 1993), pp. 110–12. 42 All Souls College Library, Vaughan Papers C110/4, Stuart to Vaughan, 15 December 1815, n.f.; DRO D/Lo/C23(4)(i-iv), Stewart to Castlereagh, 14 August 1819, n.f. 43 NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/6, Keith to Anne Keith, 22 October 1769, f. 118; NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/1/14(5), Keith Journal, 1 September 1771, n.f.; Keith Memoirs, i. Keith to John Bradshaw, 23 April 1773, pp. 388–90. 44 NLS MS 11044, Gilbert to Maria Elliot, 3 August 1781, f. 38. 45 Add MS 32420, Porter to Caspar Wetstein, 10 September 1755, ff. 340–1; Mansfield Papers TD 2003/13, Box 59, Lady Mary Hervey to Stormont, 23 March 1759, n.f.; NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/6, Robert Murray Keith to Anne Keith, 22 October 1769, f. 118. 46 Add MS 34414, Joseph Yorke to William Eden, 20 June 1777, f. 24; NLS MA 11108, Harris to Gilbert Elliot, 26 July 1779, ff. 13v–14; Merton College Oxford, Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1)/98, 13 December 1785, no foliation; NLS MS 11044, Gilbert to Maria Elliot, 3 August 1781, ff. 38–9; NLS 11112, Harriet to Maria Elliot, 20 July 1778, ff. 36–7. 47 NLS MS 11112, Harriet to Maria Elliot, 22 September 1780, f. 48. Harris had brought his sister, Gertrude, along as a companion for his wife but the two women did not get along and Gertrude went home in 1780. 48 Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M[ar]y W[ortle]y M[ontagu]e: Written, during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in Different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; Drawn from Sources That Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers, 3 vols (London, 1763); Adelaide d’Arcy Collyer (ed.), Despatches and

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Correspondence of John, Second Earl of Buckinghamshireshire, Ambassador to the Court of Catherine II of Russia 1762–1765, 2 vols (London, 1900) i. Henry Grenville to Lord Buckingham, 10 November 1763, p. 100. Mary Hamilton, Mary to Catherine Hamilton, 4 August 1776, p. 37; Bod MS Eng lett. c. 392, William Stuart to Lady Louisa Stuart, 17 April 1788, f. 60; NLS MS 11112, Harriet to Maria Elliot, 25 July 1783, f. 119; Louis Dutens, Memoirs of a Traveller, Now in Retirement. Written by Himself. Interspersed with Historical, Literary, and Political Anecdotes, Relative to Many of the Principal Personages of the Present Age. Translated from the French, under the Superintendance of the Author (London, 1806), pp. 15, 67. Eleanor was twenty nine and Harriet was ten years older. NLS MS 5549, E. Eden to Liston, 29 October 1787, ff. 25–6; Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Georgiana Morpeth, November 1824, pp. 310–313. Edith Londonderry (ed.), Frances Anne, the Life and Times of Frances Ann, Marchioness of Londonderry and Her Husband Charles, Third Marquess of Londonderry (London, 1958), pp. 47–50; Auckland Correspondence, ii. Eleanor Eden to Lady Eden, 4 May 1788, p. 23. Stephen M. Lee, ‘Eden, William, first Baron Auckland (1744–1814)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8459; Auckland Correspondence, i. William Eden’s Spanish Diary, 1 June 1789, p. 186; NLS MS 11104, William and Eleanor Eden to Gilbert Elliot, 2 November 1789, f. 82v. Elaine Chalus, Women in English Political Life, 1754–1790 (Oxford, 1997), p. 87; Peter Mandler, ‘“From Almack’s to Willis’s”: Aristocratic Women and Politics’, in Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001); Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (Totowa, 1973). NLS MS 11104, Eden to Gilbert Elliot, 10 January 1791, ff. 102–3. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, 1978), pp. 213–14; Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Lady Morpeth, 4 April 1824 and January 1826, pp. 271–3, 374; Judith S. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain (London, 2003), pp. 96–101. Two Noble Lives, i. Elizabeth to Lady Harwicke, 14 January 1819, p. 73 and Lady Hardwicke to Lady Stuart, March 1816, p. 39; Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Lady Morpeth, 12 December 1824, p. 324. Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, 1966); R.L. Rosnow and G.L. Fine, Rumour and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York, 1976), pp. 54–61; Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behaviour, 4th edn (Englewood Cliffs, 1993). Chalus, ‘Elite women, social politics and the political world of late eighteenth-century England’, HJ, 43 (2000), 669–697; Peter Jupp, ‘The roles of royal and aristocratic women in British politics, ca. 1782–1832’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen? Women’s

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The structure of a service Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast, 1995); Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Lady Morpeth, 12 December 1824 and October 1825, pp. 324, 358–9. Gronow, Reminiscences and Recollections, pp. 268–71; Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Lady Harrowby, November 1824, p. 316 and Harriet to Lady Carlisle, 29 November 1825, p. 367; Chopin, Nocturne in D Flat Op. 27 No. 2 (1834/35). Lord Wharncliffe (ed.), The Letters and Works of Lady Mary WortleyMontagu, 2 vols (New York, 1970), i. p. 294; NLS MS 5650 Henrietta Liston to Paola Freire, 10 December 1812, ff. 56–7. Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 338–58; John Charmley, The Princess and the Politicians: Sex, Intrigue and Diplomacy, 1812–40 (London, 2005); Lionel G. Robinson (ed.), Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, during Her Residence in London, 1812–1834 (London, 1902) Dorothea to General Alexander Beckendorff (her brother), 8 November 1815, p. 19; Granville Letters, i, Harriet to Lady Morpeth, June 1817, pp. 119–20. All Souls College Library, Vaughan Papers, Reel 8 C135, Williams Wynn to Charles Richard Vaughan, 23 June 1824, n.f.; Two Noble Lives, i. Elizabeth to Lady Stuart (her mother-in-law), 27 February 1816, pp. 37–8; PRO 30/29/17/1, Horton to Lady Granville, 10 October 1824, ff. 125–6. Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Emma to Greville, January 1791, p. 151. NLS MS 11108, James Harris to Gilbert Elliot, 17 January 1778, f. 4; NLS 11112, Harriet Harris to Maria Elliot, 20 January 1778, ff. 27–8; Granville Letters, i. Harriet Granville to Lady Morpeth, 21 December 1824, p. 330. Elias, Court Society, ch. 3; Ladurie, Saint Simon, Part I – The Court System; Philip Mansel, Napoleon. The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon I and His Court (London, 1987). Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2006); Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven, 1998) ch. 1; Londonderry, Frances Ann, pp. 46, 50, 80; Granville Letters, i. Harriet to Lady Carlisle, 12 December 1824, p. 322. Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain 1660–1837 (Manchester, 2002), pp. 3–5, 32–42; Tague, Women of Quality, pp. 186–8, 201–8. G.E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963); Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, 1994); James M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society, 1650–1750 (Harlow, 1998); Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley, 1989); Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (eds), Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth Century England: Out on the Town (Aldershot, 2003). PRO 30/29/17/1, J. Horton Wilmot to Harriet Granville, 10 October 1824, ff. 125–6; Two Noble Lives, i. p. 15.

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70 Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1989). See also ‘The London connection: cultural diffusion and the eighteenth-century provincial town’, London Journal, 19 (1994), 21–35 and ‘London, 1660–1800: a distinctive culture?’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), 167–84; Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow, 1999); G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), pp. 182–7; Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1994); Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 197–202; Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, ch. 2. 71 Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres’, 383–6; Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, pp. 260–1, 657–8, 662–4; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978), pp. 120–2; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pp. 395–9. 72 NLS MS 11108, Memo, 5 May 1787, ff. 145–7. 73 Ilchester, Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, i. 14 February 1794, p. 119. 74 Franklin, Lord Stuart de Rothsay, pp. 151, 157; DRO D/Lo/C23(4)(i-iv), 14 August 1819, n.f. 75 Betty Askwith, Piety and Wit: A Biography of Harriet Countess Granville 1783–1862 (London, 1982), pp. 76–7; S.G. Checkland, The Elgins, 1766–1917: A Tale of Aristocrats, Proconsuls and Their Wives (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 3; Rose Weigall (ed.), The Letters of Lady Burghersh, afterwards Countess of Westmorland from Germany and France during the Campaign of 1813–14 (London, 1893), pp. 2–4; Granville Letters, i. Harriet Granville to Lady Morpeth, 29 July 1815, p. 61; Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, i. p. 333. 76 Gronow, Reminiscences and Recollections, i. pp. 268–71, 299–303; Balliol College, Oxford. Morier MS G.4.1, Anna Morier to Elizabeth Jones (her mother), #1, 12 January 1829, n.f.; Two Noble Lives, i. Lady Hardwicke to Agneta Yorke, 1 June 1816, p. 42.

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Part II

Of cabbages and kings

Balance of power, as Schroeder points out, has most often been examined from a British perspective, often with misleading results from a European point of view. This, though regrettable, is understandable because few states were more assiduous in their claims to be upholding the notion of balance than Britain. This was justified by history: the experience of war against Louis XIV’s France that had given the country its identity as a constitutional monarchy at home and the defender of Europe against the aggrandizement of the Catholic Bourbons abroad. By 1720, following some final tweaking of the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, Britain had become what Jeremy Black has called a ‘satiated power’. By this is meant a state with no territorial ambitions of its own, and therefore a reluctant witness to many of its neighbours’ expansionist projects in Europe.1 Given Britain’s location on the north-western periphery of Europe, it should come as no surprise that France was public enemy number one, for it posed the greatest threat to Britain’s political, economic and strategic interests in western Europe and the wider maritime world. Vulgar Whiggism, which glorified Britain as a haven of rational freedom in opposition to the tyranny and superstition of universal monarchy, was one ideological legacy of the French wars shared by court and country alike. Its prevalence in the body politic guaranteed successive British governments the support of the nation in more than a century of wars against Bourbon and, later, revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The defence of actual Protestants, as opposed to their interests, waned in importance as the century progressed but remained a component of Britain’s international identity as late as 1816, when its ambassador in Paris could be found defending the rights of French Huguenots to freedom of worship in the constitutional arrangements of the Bourbon restoration.2 Vulgar Whiggism, as its name suggests, was also an intolerant doctrine that boasted of Britain’s superiority to the rest of Europe and, in peacetime, could incline its adherents, whether on the government or opposition benches, to isolationism.3 This political fact of life, combined

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with an ever-increasing national debt, militated against the pursuit of an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy in peacetime. It is tempting, as Cain and Hopkins have suggested, to state that Britain’s commitment to Europe during the eighteenth century was therefore half-hearted, thanks to the rising costs of empire. This, however, downplays the frustration recorded by British diplomats and statesmen who very much wished to engage with Europe, if on their own terms.4 Two forms of activity were authorized by the political theory in which Britain’s international identity was vested: the construction and maintenance of alliance systems against popish powers and the promotion of commerce, which was increasingly touted as the natural activity of a peaceful and libertarian power. Britain did not need Adam Smith or the Scottish conjectural historians to espouse trade as an ideal forum of international relations.5 British agents were assiduous and often successful in the promotion of the mercantile interest throughout the eighteenth century. The forging of pacts against the Bourbons was more problematic an objective after the diplomatic revolution of 1756 that saw Austria, Britain’s traditional ally since 1689, join forces with France. The collapse of the ‘Old System’, much regretted by many, compelled Britain to contemplate unions with Prussia or Russia, whose monarchs were intent on enlarging their territories rather than maintaining the status quo. The first of these ventures collapsed in 1763, when George III withdrew from the Seven Years War laden with colonial spoils, leaving Frederick II to fight the combined forces of Austria and France alone. In so doing Britain lost the trust of Europe, not to regain it until the later 1780s.6 British foreign policy during this period of isolation was therefore reactive rather than active, and Brendan Sims notes an accompanying shift in strategic culture and debate to accompany it. This ascent of blue water priorities in the public domain went hand in hand with a reluctance to forge new alliances with expansionist powers, most notably Russia. These would entail the commitment of resources to the defence of other empires during a period of imperial reconstruction.7 Since Britain was kept at arm’s length by so many powers, for which those new commitments were in part responsible, its diplomats could do little more than lobby heads of state and their underlings to recognize and, hopefully, comply with some of Britain’s interests. Principal amongst these was the maintenance of the territorial status quo inside and outside Europe. Much of this diplomacy was about the contestation of real or perceived hostility, much of which was seen to stem from prejudice, misperception or the machinations of other diplomats. Such was the reality of the diplomatic game. Britain’s record is better on the commercial front, for Macartney

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succeeded in renewing a trade treaty with Russia in 1765 and Eden, in 1786, negotiated a deal with France that allowed the two states to exchange stipulated goods on a most-favoured nation basis.8 It is notable that these were first missions for both men. Trade talks were not normally assigned to career diplomats, for which reason it is difficult to trace connections between the political economy of imperialism and its impact upon Europe. Those in long-term service were acculturated to specific political duties: the delivery of constant and assiduous reportage on the crown, its servants and the international community. The majority of dispatches were written, not to report progress or failure in a specific negotiation, but to shed light on the personalities, policies, animosities and allegiances that made up the world of eighteenth century politics. To do so successfully, a diplomat had to immerse himself in the values of other cultures. Notes 1 The projects of the House of Hanover in Germany were the exception to this rule, and British statesmen accepted that this was part of the price that Britons paid for the maintenance of the Hanoverian dynasty. Black, ‘Britain’s foreign alliances in the eighteenth century’, Albion, 20 (1988), 573–602; Schroeder, ‘Old wine in new bottles: recent contributions to British foreign policy and European international politics, 1789–1848’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987), 1–25. 2 FO 27/130, Colonel Charles Ross to Charles Stuart, 21 January 1816, n.f. 3 Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975) and ‘Sceptical Whiggism, commerce, and liberty’; Pincus, ‘Popery, trade and universal monarchy: the ideological context of the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war’, EHR, 422 (1992), 1–29; Robertson, ‘Universal monarchy and the liberties of Europe’, pp. 349–73. 4 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly capitalism and British expansion overseas I: the old colonial system, 1688–1850’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), 520; Bayly, Imperial Meridian, p. 30. 5 Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000); Nancy Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, 1994). 6 M. Roberts, Splendid Isolation, 1763–80 (Reading, 1970), pp. 4–7; H.M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), pp. 40–2, 47–9, 193–8; Black, British Foreign Police in an Age of Revolutions, pp. 16–19. 7 Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, pp. 514–15, 580–5; Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), pp. 15–16.

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8 W.F. Reddaway, ‘Macartney in Russia, 1765–67’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 3 (1931), 260–94; Scott, ‘Great Britain, Poland and the Russian Alliance, 1763–1767’, HJ, 9 (1976), 53–74; Ehrman, The British Government and Commercial Negotiations with Europe, 1783–1793 (Cambridge, 1962).

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4

Etiquette and ‘face’

In 1763, the Marquess of Hertford apologized to the Earl of Halifax for having filled a dispatch with so many details of his presentation at the court of Versailles. Protocol, as far as the British were concerned, had become a formality to the business of diplomacy. Hertford was nevertheless anxious to file as full a report as possible since his instructions had directed him to insure that no insult was offered to Britain by any lapse in, or omission of, the courtesies due to a new ambassador.1 Since an ambassador was a living embodiment of his sovereign, any slight delivered to him or his spouse was seen as an affront to his court. An embassy too was an extension of the king’s household, which was why all official instructions from 1660 onwards warned envoys against giving to, or receiving from, the representative of another state ‘the Hand in his own Houses’.2 According to the body language of royal etiquette, these gestures constituted concessions of status and, since they were public, could affect the standing of monarchs in the estimation of the international community. Such were the rules that governed a diplomat’s working life.3 Jean Dumont’s five-volume Corps universel diplomatique du droits des gens (1739) constituted the most detailed account of court and diplomatic ceremonial in Europe. As Chesterfield told his son during the 1750s, a familiarity with different forms of etiquette was essential for any diplomat to carry on what Werry in 1819 would scathingly call ‘the representation’. All were obliged, at the very least, to attend the weekly audience days that a crowned head might set aside for its audiences with foreign ministers. This was standard practice at Paris and St Petersburg. Smaller courts could be more informal, and in the absence of audience days a diplomat might have to attend court on a daily basis. Robert Murray Keith and William Hamilton were assiduous in this duty at Dresden and Naples respectively.4 Since deviations from established practice, whether intentional or not, could prevent diplomats from establishing a good rapport with their hosts, both men and women new to the trade sought advice as to what could be expected upon taking up

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a mission. In 1786 Yorke advised William Eden to seek accreditation to France as minister plenipotentiary rather than envoy extraordinary, because in Yorke’s day the former had commanded more respect than the latter from the representatives of other powers. ‘If that etiquette is laid aside’, commented Yorke, ‘all my reasoning falls to the ground.’5 In 1750 Lord Holdernesse, then at the Hague, wished to know how Lord Rochford had been received at Turin. Both, as members of the older generation, were sticklers about etiquette and, in asserting that no formality had been omitted from his presentation, Rochford was confirming Britain’s first-rank status in the international community. He rarely failed to mention an etiquette dispute in his private correspondence.6 ‘Face’ was seen to be of particular importance at courts of equal or higher status to that of St James. Since France claimed to come second in Europe only to the Holy Roman Empire, all ambassadors to Paris of the 1750s and 1760s: the Earl of Albemarle, Duke of Bedford, Richard Neville and Rochford, sent details of their presentations to the secretaries of state.7 By the last quarter of the eighteenth century such accounts are not often to be found in the State Papers Foreign, which suggests the external trappings of honour and face were declining in importance. Indeed, protocol had become more than a necessary evil; it was now an obstacle to the business of representation. In 1771 Keith junior noted with frustration that ‘the nonsense of etiquette’ was making it difficult for him to seek private audiences with the King of Denmark and, in 1775, Hugh Elliot apologized to the Earl of Suffolk for troubling him ‘with a greater detail concerning the ceremonial of the Diet of Ratisbon than so trifling a subject deserves’.8 Annoying though ritual could be, the corporate identity of the corps was defined by its perceived rights, privileges and immunities, many of which were encoded in the rules, both national or international, of the trade. The corps had a hierarchy of its own, in which diplomats of the first-rank powers: Austria, France, Spain, Britain, the United Provinces and Russia, took precedence over representatives of the second-rank courts to be found in Italy and Germany. Envoys from the lesser courts often felt slighted by this, as was the case of the Prussian minister at Vienna in 1739. ‘He complains that he is not treated as Excellent, that the Ministers have not visited him in form, and that the Soldiers, when he passes by a Guard, do not salute him’, wrote Thomas Robinson.9 Ambassadors, regardless of nationality, also outranked ministers plenpotentiary and envoys extraordinary. Disputes sometimes arose from balls and festivities, where omissions from the guest list or mistakes in the seating plan could set off a diplomatic incident. In 1751 the French ambassador at Vienna, the Marquis d’Hautefort,

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staged three days of festivities in celebration of the Duke of Burgundy’s birth. These consisted of a dinner, an assembly and a ball on successive nights. Those with ambassadorial rank received invitations to all the events, but when all second-rank envoys except the Spanish minister were not invited to the dinner, they decided to protest en masse by boycotting the ball. Had none but ambassadors been invited on the first night, the ministers would not have made a formal complaint, but the exception made by France for Spain was perceived by the others as an insult to the ‘Character and the Honour of their respective Courts’. Since Keith senior was Britain’s ambassador in Vienna, he was neither privately nor publicly offended by the slight. He nevertheless felt obliged to support the amour propre of the entire corps by joining the boycott of the ball.10 British diplomats could be as prickly as their colleagues about defending the dignity of their missions. In 1766 George Macartney stayed away from a court entertainment at St Petersburg because the first three seats in the diplomatic box had been given to the ministers from Spain, Austria and France. Macartney refused, by consenting to sit behind them, to a symbolic concession of their ‘superior’ status.11 The French, or so it seems from the British, were the most prone to give or take offence from lapses in protocol. Strict rules of social precedence prevailed at the court of Versailles and competition for political power there often took the form of quarrels over etiquette. Yorke remarked upon this in 1763: ‘it is impossible for a french Minister not to attempt an Innovation for himself & his Wife whenever he sets out in a new Commission, which does not surprize me at their first leaving their own Dunghill’.12 In June of 1769 there was a contretemps at a court ball in London. Two benches had been designated for the diplomats, one for ambassadors and the other behind it for ministers plenipotentiary. The entrance to the box was behind the seats. When the Russian ambassador entered the box, he sat down to the right of the ambassadresses on the front bench. Upon the appearance of the Austrian ambassador, the Russian moved to the left to make room for his imperial colleague. The French ambassador was the next to arrive, whereupon the Russian turned around to greet him. In response, the Frenchman shoved his way onto the bench between the two. Count Czernichev, or so thought the Comte de Châtelet, was claiming a status to which his court was not entitled. Strong words were exchanged between the two. When the Spanish ambassador entered the box some time later, he too seated himself beside the ladies, whereupon Châtelet asked him to sit beside the Austrian. At this, the Czernichev removed himself from their company, and placed himself between the ambassadresses of Austria and Spain. Since the rules of diplomatic

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precedence also applied to women, this constituted a reply to Châtelet’s insult against Russia. A duel was fought that evening between the two, following which Châtelet made a private apology to Czernichev.13 George III tried to forestall future incidents of this kind by announcing to the corps diplomatique that no precedence was to be observed at court balls in the future. Evidence suggests that his servants too disliked excessive displays of pomp and circumstance. In 1763 Yorke wrote that the hauteur of the French ‘about Trifles’ did them more harm than good at the more informal courts of Europe14 and, in 1775, Harris boycotted the funeral of Count Zierotin, the Directeur des Spectacles at Berlin, thinking it presumptuous of him to have written a will demanding the state coaches and liveries of the corps at the ceremony.15 Kings and masters of ceremonies could nonetheless change the rules. In 1783, the king of Turin permitted Liston, then a lowly chargé d’affaires, to enter his closet.16 In 1804 another Prussian master of ceremonies decided to exclude the diplomats from the formal dances celebrating the wedding of Prince William, the brother of Frederick William III, to the Princess Amelia of Hesse Cassel. Etiquette normally required the queen and the bride to dance a minuet with the prince, all the ministers and the corps diplomatique. Instead of protesting, the diplomats were ‘quite content to be excluded . . . and to be spectators only’.17 This distaste for ceremony and the disputes to which it gave rise was general by 1800, for it could be found in art of diplomacy texts. According to Cobbett’s 1795 translation of Martens, there were four ways to avoid conflict: by observing exact equality amongst envoys at events, by attending them incognito so as not to be offended in an official capacity, by boycotting them to avoid loss of face, or by superficial compliance to the local etiquette accompanied or followed by a written protest.18 All of these were regularly resorted to by British diplomats after 1760. A court could do its best to bypass the social codes of the corps diplomatique but any government that broke all of its rules stood to give enormous offence to others. At worst, it might find itself persona non grata in the European community. This is the fate that befell revolutionary France late in 1792. Britain had been declared neutral to the revolution in 1789 by a government whose leaders wished to hedge their bets about the outcome of events. Although Lord Gower continued to attend the audience days at Versailles, he regarded them as meaningless because executive power was clearly passing into other hands. This explains why Hugh Elliot, who had gone to school with the Comte de Mirabeau, was sent to Paris in 1790 with a special brief to ascertain the intentions of the French vis-à-vis the Nootka Sound dispute between Britain and Spain over trade and settlement rights in the Pacific northwest. Elliot’s

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confidential conversations with Mirabeau, who was still closely connected to the court, suggested not only that effective control of foreign policy had shifted from the crown to the Comité Diplomatique, but that the French were too wrapped up with their domestic problems to care much about international events.19 Nowhere is the breakdown of ancien régime politics more apparent than in the Gower dispatches, which eschew the usual social and political business of the French court for accounts of debates in the National Assembly, synopses of provincial news culled from newspapers and snippets of gossip from the diplomatic community. London observers knew not what to make of these reports, except to speculate on what turn the revolution might take next, because Gower had no access to the world of revolutionary policy-making. British ambassadors in Paris before 1789 had relied heavily for information from the circles of power and influence around the crown. These were now near useless in ascertaining what France would do next. As Linda and Marsha Frey have stated, one of the most serious threats to peace between France and the rest of Europe came from the revolution’s assault on diplomatic immunities. Much of this was not intentional for, starting in 1790, Spanish and Sardinian diplomats encountered verbal insults in the street on account of the liveries that their servants wore. A formal protest was sent by the corps to the minister of foreign affairs.20 In July of that year, a relative of the Sardinian ambassador was also ‘attacked by the populace at a small village near and on this side of Pont-Beauvoisin’ and searched for documents relating to the counterrevolution. Though none could be found, the villagers debated whether to hang him on the spot or take him prisoner to Lyons. By June 1792, many diplomats were so worried about their personal safety that they proposed to gather in one house for protection from the mob. Lord Gower refused to be a party to this project, and attended the king as usual at the Tuileries.21 The journées that overthrew Louis XVI changed everything. On 10 August the British embassy was besieged by a Paris crowd demanding the surrender of its guard ‘for the declared purpose of cutting off his head because he was a Swiss’. In the scuffle that ensued, one of Gower’s personal servants was murdered. Most of the king’s bodyguard had been massacred at the Tuileries earlier that day and, in attacking the embassies, the crowd was in search of the rest who, by virtue of their foreign birth, were deemed ‘enemies of the people’. Gower refused the offer of another embassy guard after the incident, but took the precaution of having the words ‘Hôtel de l’ambassadeur d’Angleterre’ painted over his front door. This did not inspire any popular respect for diplomatic

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immunities and, on 14 August, the Sardinian ambassador and his family were prevented from leaving Paris by another crowd. On the 17th, the Gowers received their recall from a government determined not to risk the safety of its ambassador nor sanction the de facto deposition of Louis XVI by keeping a representative in Paris. A French ambassador stayed in London until the beginning of 1793.22 Over the autumn and winter of 1792, Britain was exposed to the ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ of Pierre Henri LeBrun. This eschewed the conventional channels of diplomatic communication, which is to say attendance upon George III and his ministers, for direct appeals to the nation, whether through the press or grassroots political societies in London.23 Similar stratagems were employed by French agents in the United Provinces and – later – the United States, to arouse popular support for the cause. Revolutionary diplomacy involved much more than a rejection of the rituals that had underpinned the authority of the Bourbon crown, and was perceived by some observers as nothing less than a direct attack upon the principles of social order. These tactics, combined with the Provisional Executive Council’s justification of its military strategies in Europe by appeals to a new natural rights reading of international law, whether in the ‘liberation’ of Savoy or the French army’s passage of the River Scheldt, convinced George III and his ministers that France had repudiated the international states system in its entirety. The two countries went to war in February 1793.24 The British had no further direct dealings with the French government until the abortive Paris and Lille peace talks of 1796–97. As the Directory took shape from late 1795 onwards, British thoughts turned in the direction of peace with a stable French government that, it was hoped, would respect the rights of other countries as established by treaty. One index of the Directory’s preparedness to do so lay in the sort of reception it gave to the representatives of royal powers and the degree of respect it was prepared to display for their customs. How compatible were the principles of indirect democracy and republicanism with a European states system founded upon notions of rank and privilege? These were some of the questions to which Lord Malmesbury sought answers to when he went to Paris in October 1796. Some of the indicators were promising. When France made peace with Prussia and Spain in 1795, its envoys had revived some rituals of ancien régime diplomacy. This was done in part because things such as protocol and immunity were useful.25 Malmesbury was gratified upon arriving at Calais to be met ‘with every possible mark of respect and distinction that can possibly be shewn to a person in a publick character & even many more than I have usually received’. This augured well for the success of the mission because the

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willingness of the French to revive old ceremonies suggested that their desire to return to the community of ‘civilized’ nations was genuine.26 The international concept of a family of states relied as much upon subscription to common social and cultural values as to any agreement upon juridical principles. The republican language of natural law and natural rights conformed to none of these. Upon meeting Charles Delacroix in Paris, Malmesbury was told that France had no intention of giving up any of its European conquests. According to the 1795 Directorial constitution, Nice, Savoy, Avignon and the Austrian Netherlands had become inalienable parts of the first republic. Revolutionary diplomacy, conceptually speaking, was far from dead. Delacroix’s negotiating style too was an extension of his persona as a conventionnel politician, as a result of which he talked at, rather than to, Malmesbury. As it transpired, the French were not interested in recovering any of their colonies. This derailed the peace talks because the British had assumed that the maritime conquests they had made outside Europe would be traded for the European territories occupied by France. These were the principles that had governed peace between the two throughout the eighteenth century. When Delacroix refused to accept the notion of mutual restitution, which Malmesbury described as an international droit publique superseding any principles of the French constitution, the negotiation was, in effect, at an end.27 All his mission had proven was that the French were still unwilling to respect the conventions by which states made war and peace, which is to say they would not play by the old rules of the diplomatic game. In July 1797 Malmesbury went to Lille to renew peace talks with the French. Again he found himself greeted with courtesy and ceremony. ‘The only inference to be drawn from all their civilities’, he confided to his sister this time, ‘is, that they do not mean to break off any matters of form, & no other what ever can be derived from it.’ He nonetheless omitted no formality on his part that might give umbrage to his hosts, and was relieved that the forms of etiquette, which he described as ‘necessary & useful’ to diplomacy, had established some goodwill between his entourage and the French.28 Liston, who was no friend to Wicquefort and ‘ancient formalities’, would say much the same thing in 1812. Protocol, thought the latter, enabled the diplomat ‘to arbitrate in little differences when they arise, to repress nascent quarrels, and to prevent them when possible, by evading collision’.29 Much to Malmesbury’s delight, the three French commissioners whom he met at Lille shared his commitment to peace, and the two sides soon dropped all etiquette in favour of informal conversations over dinner. Over the month of September 1797, the two delegations bonded in their

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boxes at the theatre whilst waiting for detailed instructions from their masters. These, on the French side, were slow to materialize because the Paris coup d’état of 18 fructidor put an effective end to the peace initiative by ousting moderate republicans from the Directory. Both missions blamed the politicians and parted with expressions of mutual esteem. The frankness of the French, particularly their chief, Hugues Maret, had done much to reconcile Malmesbury towards modéré republicans. ‘They have acted openly and fairly by me;’ he wrote, ‘more so than I ever experienced from any French negotiators with whom I have had to do.’30 Informality had served Malmesbury well on this occasion but etiquette did more than break the metaphorical ice between hostile powers. It also created a forum where the inherent competition of international relations was kept in check by common rules of civility. Much of diplomacy, after all, was about dispute resolution. The importance that Malmesbury had attached to protocol at Paris and Lille had another dimension. As a one-time disciple of Edmund Burke, he had been appalled by the revolution’s wholesale repudiation of the past and its traditions, be they organized religion or the rituals of monarchy. No accommodation, insisted Burke and his followers, could be reached with men who took pride in having unleashed the bestial side of human nature. Malmesbury had gone abroad in search of the ‘spirit of a gentleman’, to prove that some meeting of minds could take place. These he had seen to some extent in Delacroix and more so in the Lille delegation.31 Experienced a courtier though Malmesbury was, his appreciative remarks about the ‘honesty’ of the French delegation reveal how much British masculinity norms had changed over the latter half of the eighteenth century. Frenchmen, once the insinuating, insincere foils against which an open and disingenuous British manhood had been pitted, had become – or so it seemed – more palatable to the British. Courtesy cut both ways. Malmesbury had gone to France prepared to make allowances for differences in political opinion and culture. He did not permit his entourage to wear the national cockade because it symbolized submission to the Directory but did not otherwise challenge the authority of the republic. He also refused to take offence, either public or private, at Delacroix’s ‘rants’ on the rights of the republic. Frances Jackson and Charles Whitworth found it easier to deal with Napoleon Bonaparte during the Peace of Amiens, in part because the First Consul had resurrected many practices, and implicitly, principles of the ancien régime. Audience days had been reinstated at the Tuileries in 1799 and the participation of the corps diplomatique was solicited for ceremonial events such as the 1802 Te Deum that celebrated the signature of the Concordat that restored France to the Catholic fold: ‘there is something new in

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every Audience Day’, wrote Anthony Merry in the spring of 1803, ‘to make it reach the regular system of a Court’.32 Merry, who had been the chief secretary of the peace delegation at Amiens, was next posted to Washington as minister ad interim. Here he became embroiled in the most famous, not to mention petty, etiquette disputes of the period. The story of Merry’s mission to the United States has been told several times from different perspectives.33 On 11 April 1803, Merry landed at Norfolk, Virginia, with his new wife, Elizabeth Leathes. Like Liston, Merry had gone in search of a spouse upon learning of his appointment to the Washington embassy.34 He had also spent the three months between his wedding and arrival in the States training his wife in the duties of an ambassadress. Few of her expectations were to be met in Washington. Thomas Jefferson, who had served his country as ambassador in Paris between 1784 and 1789, was no stranger to the protocols of ancien régime diplomacy. Upon becoming president in 1801, he sought to embody the principles of ‘true’ republicanism in the rituals of his administration. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the pell mell informality that Jefferson introduced at state functions, be they meetings with envoys or state dinners. Both Merrys were much distressed by these innovations. When Merry visited Jefferson to deliver his credentials, in effect the equivalent of a presentation at a European court, he was received by a president attired in a dressing gown and slippers. Merry, who was in no mood for a fireside chat, waxed indignant to his superiors in London. Elizabeth fared no better at her first presidential function, which the couple understood to have been given in their honour. When waiting for Secretary of State James Madison to take her into dinner, she was stunned to find herself passed over in favour of his wife: ‘the Pas and the Preference in every Respect was taken by, and given to, the Wives of the Secretaries of the Departments (a set of Beings as little without the Manners as without the Appearance of Gentlewomen) the Foreign Ministers and the Wives being left to take care of themselves.’35 Merry came to his wife’s rescue and escorted her himself. Upon entering the dining room, the couple were appalled to find no seating plans at the table. This event took place on 2 December. The couple fared no better at a state dinner a week later, following which Merry learned ‘with Pain’ from the Spanish envoy, the Comte d’Yrujo, that Jefferson’s ministers had only begun to practise pell mell after the Merrys arrival. This Merry saw as a deliberate insult to Britain. By the end of the month he had decided not to attend any functions ‘where I and my Wife might be exposed to a Repetition of the same Want of Distinction towards us’.

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This banned them from many social events in the American capital. Since there were only five diplomats stationed at Washington, Merry had over-reacted to an imagined slight, or so thought the undersecretaries of state at the Foreign Office. They never responded to his etiquette dilemmas. Merry and Yrujo nonetheless improvised their own stratagems for upholding the dignity of the corps diplomatique. If both were ever at a state function together, they agreed that they and their wives would alternate in competing for seats of honour with the locals. They were putting Martens’ advice to practical use.36 Merry claimed to have been slighted in other ways: to have been made to pay initial visits of ceremony to Jefferson’s ministers rather than waiting to receive them, and to have been left in official ignorance of the confusion until he and his wife had been insulted. Malcolm Lester has claimed that Merry was unprepared for Jefferson’s style of diplomacy despite the fact that Edward Thornton, from whom Merry was taking over, had stayed in America to welcome him to the embassy.37 Thornton had also written home two years earlier to the effect that Jefferson, upon becoming president, had abandoned the diplomatic ceremonials of his predecessors, Presidents Washington and Adams. Both had felt compelled, unlike Jefferson and the Girondins, to incorporate some old world rituals into their new political order, receiving new diplomats in some style and holding a levée for them once a week. Although Jefferson had abandoned these practices, Thornton had reported that ‘on any day and at any hour’, he would ‘receive in a friendly and hospitable manner those who should call upon him’. Merry seems not to have read these dispatches and, as Lester has noted, the worst effects of his distress manifested themselves in reports that overstated the closeness of the relationship between France and the United States. Jefferson’s determination to place all diplomats ‘on a Level as to each other and as to the lowest American Citizen’ was perceived as nothing less than a new form of revolutionary diplomacy.38 Merry was an unusual choice for the American post. He had started his career in the consular service, and acquired a foothold in diplomacy by serving as chargé d’affaires at Madrid between the departure of Auckland in 1788 and the arrival of Alleyne Fitzherbert in 1790. Since Merry had dealt firmly and tactfully with the Spanish end of the Nootka Sound crisis, he had acquired some credentials for effectiveness as a negotiator. He was briefly employed in Denmark as a consul from 1799 to 1800 and, after the Jacksons left Paris in 1802, spent seven months there as an embassy ‘caretaker’ until the arrival of a new ambassador. He owed the American appointment to the recommendations of Liston,

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Fitzherbert and Cornwallis, who praised him as a man, not of tact, but of protocol and business. These were not good qualifications for service in America. In 1803 Thornton had written to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, that any minister appointed to the United States ought to have enough inbred social confidence ‘not to be afraid of debasing himself by a great degree of condescension’ to the customs and habits of the locals.39 Merry and his wife were not such people. Merry, who was pompous and vain, disliked the ‘insufferable’ society he later encountered in Copenhagen and Elizabeth, the widow of a country gentleman, was determined to uphold the dignity of her new station. Jefferson and Madison agreed that she was an awful woman and she rubbed many Americans, not least her servants, the wrong way. By 1807, when she left the United States, all of them had deserted her.40 Merry and his wife retired from the foreign service in 1809. No other British diplomat posted to the United States in this period ever complained so vociferously, either privately or publicly, about the bad manners of the locals or the lack of respect shown to his mission. ‘It is but justice to say that I have met with nothing but the utmost civility’, wrote Francis Jackson when posted to Washington two years later, ‘and with none of those hardships and difficulties of which the Merrys so bitterly complained.’ Jackson mollified his hosts so successfully with soothing words that Madison, who as president had continued with the pell mell system, abandoned it at a state dinner to escort Elizabeth Jackson to her seat. Jackson returned the compliment by taking Dolly Madison into dinner. Jackson dismissed the trials and tribulations of the Merrys as a ‘foolish question of precedence’, and blamed the ill success of their mission in part upon Elizabeth Merry, who had stopped seeing the Madisons after her disastrous dinner with them, ‘except for an occasional morning visit’. As a result of this ‘Mrs. Merry and Mrs. Madison were always at daggers drawn.’41 Elizabeth Merry had scorned and looked down upon Dolly Madison. This was no way for a couple to ingratiate itself with its hosts. The Merrys, however, were not the only couple who mistook protocol for active diplomacy. In 1804 Charles Stuart was glad to see the back of Admiral John Borlase Warren, who had been briefly posted as ambassador to St Petersburg. ‘The principal attention of the late Embassy seems to have been devoted to the strict observance of a rigid Etiquette, which rendered their house more formal than the stiffest of Courts’.42 Warren lacked the social and political experience that would have made him an effective envoy and Lady Warren had given herself airs that made her obnoxious: ‘now it is found out that I am not a particular

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friend of her Ladyship you have no idea of the Quantity of stories I have heard respecting her pride and Grandeur’, wrote Stuart’s new chief, Granville Leveson-Gower, to his mistress. ‘She said to the wife of the Prussian Minister: Comme vous êtes heureuse Mad. de Goltz, de n’être pas comme moi ambassadrice, &c.’43 The Warrens had taken some of their old texts a little too seriously. Leveson Gower had no intention of upholding the dignity of his embassy by squabbling over the niceties of seating. This begs the question how important such things had become to the conduct of diplomacy. In 1815 the participants at the Congress of Vienna agreed, amongst other things, to lay down a new code of simplified protocol that admitted the theoretical equality of nations and their representatives. With the introduction of this code came the rejection, both literal and metaphorical, of older allegiances and alliances. When the restored Louis XVIII proposed in 1820 that France was best equipped by history and experience to interfere in Spain’s civil war on the grounds of the old Bourbon Family Compact, Castlereagh was appalled: ‘the King ought to have learned from Experience, that the World is not to be governed in these Days by such Devices’.44 Etiquette, one of these, had also been simplified to the extent that it was no longer a major cause of diplomatic incidents in the nineteenth century. The British welcomed all these developments. The maintenance of face had become much less important to men in general since 1740. Duels were on the decline at home and honour was increasingly perceived to be an individual and personal attribute. The British, who had long prided themselves upon their ‘manly’ frankness, were also, if the comments of the later eighteenth century are anything to go by, appreciative of like-minded informality amongst those with whom they had to deal.45 French republicans, as Malmesbury had discovered, might make better colleagues than French courtiers. A greater emphasis on internal, as opposed to external qualities, was therefore consistent with British masculine norms. Since women were rarely involved in the direct business of diplomacy, they were less affected by these new conventions than their spouses. The duties of the incorporated wife were indirect and public relations oriented, primarily involving networking and hospitality. Like men, British women were told to focus more on inner worth than outward display, though if male diplomats are to be believed, the ‘gentler sex’ were more ruthless in policing their own kind, and expected the same treatment from others abroad. This explains in part why Elizabeth Merry and Caroline Warren were so obsessed with the maintenance of their dignity, notwithstanding what pressures they were placed under by

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their spouses to perform. It also accounts for the assiduity with which Harriet Granville and Elizabeth Stuart later strove to make their mark as ambassadresses in Paris. Women, at any rate, were ill accustomed to official identities within the public domain. It is not therefore surprising that, in the first instance, they clutched at rules as guides for their conduct, however irksome those might be. Notes 1 SP 78/258, Hertford to Halifax, 26 October 1763, ff. 195–6. 2 CHW, Vol. 34 (10906). George II to Charles H. Williams, 1746, f. 19. 3 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 209–10; Harold Nicolson, Diplomacy, 3rd edn (London, 1963), p. 31. 4 NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/6, Keith to Anne Keith, 22 October 1769, pp. 117–18; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Charles Greville, 1777, p. 48. 5 Auckland Correspondence, i. Yorke to Eden, 1786, pp. 364–6. 6 Bod MS Eng, lett. c. 338, Rochford to Holdernesse, June 16 1750 [OS], ff. 13–16 and 17 February 1753, ff. 66–7; BL Add MS 35469, Rochford to Keith, 30 May 1750 [OS], f. 14. 7 SP 78/253, Bedford to Egremont, 17 September 1762, ff. 64–5; SP 78/257, Neville to Egremont, 4 August 1763, ff. 217–18; SP 78/271, Rochford to Shelburne, 12 November 1766, ff. 132–5. 8 NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/1/14(1), Keith Journal, 8 [January] 1771, n.f.; NLS MS 13018, Hugh Elliot to Lord Suffolk, 8 October 1775, ff. 75–8. 9 Lewis Walpole Library, Weston Papers W53, Vol. 12, 4, Robinson to Weston, 8 July 1739, n.f. 10 BL Add MS 35472, Keith to the Duke of Newcastle, 24 November 1751, ff. 47–8. 11 SP 91/77, Macartney to Conway, 4 July 1766, ff. 162–3. 12 Ladurie, St Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, pp. 32–8, 54–7; BL Add MS 35366, Yorke to Lord Royston, 1763, f. 375. 13 Mansfield TD 2003/13, Box 113, Folder 1, Rochford to Stormont, 13 June 1769, n.f. This incident was mistakenly dated by Harold Nicolson to 1768. 14 BL Add MS 35366, Yorke to Lord Royston, 1763, f. 385. 15 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Harris to William Eden, 9 February 1775, p. 134. 16 NLS MS 12969, Liston to Hugh Elliot, 8 January 1783, f. 391. 17 Jackson Letters, i. Berlin Diary, 7 January 1804, pp. 166–7, 178. 18 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 205–6, 212–13. 19 Howard V. Evans, ‘The Nootka sound controversy in Anglo-French diplomacy, 1790’, JMH, 46 (1974), 609–40; Gary Savage, ‘Favier’s heirs: the French revolution and the secret du roi’, HJ, 41 (1998), 225–58; Munro Price, ‘Mirabeau and the court: some new evidence’, French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), 39–75. 20 Frey and Frey, ‘“The reign of the charlatans is over:” the French revolutionary

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attack on diplomatic practice’, JMH, 65 (1993), 706–44 and ‘We will dance together the carmagnole: French revolutionaries and the fraternity of nations’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 24 (1997), 299–310; Gower Despatches, Gower to Carmarthen, 25 June 1790, pp. 6–7. Ibid., Gower to Carmarthen, 5 July 1790, p. 10 and Gower to Grenville, 6 July 1792, pp. 198–9. Dep Bland Burges 48, Burges to Auckland, 17 August 1792, f. 75; NLS MS Dep 313/742, Elizabeth Gower to Lady Stafford, 12 August 1792, n.f.; Gower Despatches, Gower to Grenville, 23 August 1792, p. 211; Auckland Correspondence, ii. Burges to Auckland, 4 September 1792, pp. 437–9; Colin Lucas, ‘The crowd and politics’, in K.M. Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: Vol. II. The Political Culture of the Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 259–85. J.T. Murley, ‘The origins and outbreak of the Anglo-French war of 1793’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University), Bod MS D.Phil d.2220 (1959); Frey and Frey, ‘We will dance together the carmagnole’, p. 300 and ‘Apostles of liberty: French revolutionaries abroad’, in M. Slavin and L. Patsouras (eds), Reflections at the End of a Century (Youngstown, 2002), pp. 58–78. Murley, ‘Origins and outbreak’, pp. 431–7; Henry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York, 1970); Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785–1795 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 130–4; Marc Belissa, Fraternité universelle et intérêt national, 1713–1795: Les cosmopolitiques du droit des gens (Paris, 1998). Charles Ballot, Les Négociations de Lille (Paris, 1910); Raymond Guyot, Le Directoire et la Paix de l’Europe; des traités de Bâle à la deuxième coalition (1795–99) (Paris, 1911); Frey and Frey, ‘The reign of the charlatans is over’, pp. 730–3 and ‘“Sugared tricolors and savage white bears”: French diplomats abroad’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 24 (1997), 311–21. Merton College Library, Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1)/161, 18 October 1796, n.f. Malmesbury Diaries, iii. Malmesbury to Grenville, 27 October 1796 and 20 December 1796, pp. 279, 351. Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1)/167, Malmesbury to Gertrude Robinson, 5 July 1797, n.f. NLS MS 5658, Liston to unknown, 21 March 1812, f. 30. Malmesbury Diaries, iii. Malmesbury to Pitt, 9 September 1797, p. 541 and Diary, 11 September 1797 and 29 September 1797, pp. 539, 592. Jennifer M. Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the Crusade against the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 1995); Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) para. 133; Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1)/163i, Malmesbury to Gertrude Robinson, 28–9 October 1796, n.f.; Malmesbury Diaries, iii. 7 September 1797, pp. 391–3. Paget Papers, ii. Merry to Arthur Paget, 20 April 1802, p. 50.

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33 Edward Channing, The Jeffersonian System, 1801–1811 (New York, 1906); Joel Larus, ‘Growing pains of the new republic: III, pell-mell Along the Potomac’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 17 (New York, 1960), 349–57; Ona G. Jeffries, ‘The pell-mell system: Thomas Jefferson’, in Jeffries, ed., In and Out of the White House: An Intimate Glimpse into the Social and Domestic Aspects of the Presidential Life from Washington to the Eisenhowers (New York, 1960), pp. 39–52; Malcolm Lester, Anthony Merry Redivivus: A Reappraisal of the British Minister to the United States, 1803–1806 (Charlottesville, 1978). 34 FO 353/76, Merry to Jackson, 20 September 1802, n.f. 35 William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, 1997); Allgor, Parlor Politics, pp. 9–47; FO 5/41, Merry to George Hammond, 7 December 1803, ff. 58–9. 36 Ibid., Merry to Lord Hawkesbury, 31 December 1803, ff. 92–3. 37 Lester, Anthony Merry Redivivus, pp. 18–19. 38 FO 5/18, Liston to Grenville, #10, 18 March 1797, ff. 86–8; Robert Ralph Davis Jr, ‘Diplomatic plumage: American court dress in the early national period’, American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 168; FO 5/32, #58, Thornton to Hawkesbury, 9 December 1801, ff. 309–10; FO 5/41, Merry to Hawkesbury, 30 January 1804, ff. 155–9; Lester, Anthony Merry Redivivus, pp. 78–96. 39 FO 5/38, Thornton to Hawkesbury, 11 March 1803, ff. 114–16. 40 Allgor, Parlor Politics, pp. 39–41; Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes (New York, 1904–15), p. x, Jefferson to James Monro, 8 January 1804, p. 49 41 Bath Archives, i. Francis to Mrs. Charlotte Jackson, 7 October 1809, pp. 18–19 and Francis to George Jackson, 20 October 1809, pp. 26–7. 42 Violet Hunter-Wortley, Highcliffe and the Stuarts (London, 1927), Charles Stuart to Lady Stuart, 8 November 1804, p. 50. 43 Leveson-Gower Correspondence, i. Leveson-Gower to Lady Bessborough, 1 January 1805, p. 37. 44 NLS MS 6204, Castlereagh to Stuart, 29 December 1820, pp. 935–40. 45 Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998) pp. 132–4, 176–92; Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005), ch. 1; Henry Finch and Mark Rotheray, ‘“Upon your entry into the world”: masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed elites in England 1680–1800’, Social History, 33:4 (2008), 402–22.

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British diplomats were, first and foremost, watchers: and their dispatches are dominated by the health and doings of the king and his ministers, not to mention the fortunes of factions and favourites at court. ‘In an absolute monarchy’, wrote Harris in one of his first dispatches to London from St Petersburg in 1778, ‘everything depends on the disposition and character of the Sovereign: my principal object, therefore, has been to investigate that of the Empress [Catherine II].’ Envoys also reported instances of support for, or protest against, royal policies, both foreign and domestic, in addition to confrontations between major interest groups in the state, most notably the clergy, the military, the nobility and, occasionally, other corporate groups. None of this could be done without access to the royal household, the satellite courts of nobles or the embassies of other states. For this the skills of a courtier were needed, and they were learned, either at the Court of St James, or abroad. ‘The trade of a Courtier’, observed Chesterfield, ‘is as much a trade as that of a shoemaker; and he who applies himself the most will work the best.’1 Many texts on prescriptive masculinity, not to mention the art of diplomacy, echoed the age-old advice of Baldasar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Men who wished to shine at courts were advised to practise dissimulation and flattery. As François de Callières put it, ‘one of the best means of persuasion, is to please’.2 Chesterfield therefore recommended the study of human nature, particularly its vices, to his son, and George Jackson’s apprenticeship in Paris was directed to the same ends. ‘It is my brother’s wish that I should observe, even more than I do, what is passing on this great scene of political and military intrigue, gaity and dissipation. . . He considers this a good school for acquiring some knowledge of mankind – I won’t shock you by saying of womankind also.’3 Women, though seldom mentioned in the official record, were carefully watched. They were best, thought Chesterfield, manipulated through appeals to their vanity. Since a royal consort was expected to possess some influence with her spouse, an attempt was always made

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by a new head of station to assess the personality of a queen and other women in the royal household. This was an important part of the job for British ambassadors stationed in Paris during the reign of Louis XV. The opinions of Mme. de Pompadour, a power broker and policy-maker in her own right, feature occasionally in the State Papers Foreign, as did the rise and installation of Mme. du Barry.4 Women closely connected to powerful men, most notably the Duchesse de Grammont, sister to the Duc de Choiseul, also received honourable mentions as important, if peripheral, figures at the French court. According to Hans Stanley, Grammont could have been as powerful as Pompadour, had she chosen to exert her intelligence and influence for overtly public, as opposed to private, ends. Stanley’s observations were therefore confined to secret, rather than open, dispatches.5 The influence of women, apart from consorts and lovers, was seen to be of secondary importance because women were rarely perceived to be free agents, nor did they often seek place or power in their own right. Diplomats consequently focused in their public dispatches upon the persons, usually male, whom they regarded as principals rather than subordinates. This is not to say that women did not matter: since female networking in the name of family or friends was as much a fact of political life in Britain as anywhere else, envoys speculated about the strength or weakness of women like Pompadour in their private letters.6 The exchange of such information was crucial to understanding the social dynamics of any given court. In 1765 Macartney reported that the Princess Dashkow, who was widely suspected of involvement in ‘half a Dozen plots’ against Catherine II, had fallen from royal favour. When the princess was reinstated in the empress’s good graces seven years later, Robert Gunning was disinclined to give much weight to her influence. This chauvinism was common amongst British diplomats. Gunning identified Count Zachary Czernichev instead as the chief troublemaker at the Russian court.7 Over the second half of the eighteenth century, courtiership was increasingly perceived by diplomats as a burden. Even those from court families had little to say in its favour. ‘I do indeed know what Courts are’, wrote William Hamilton to his niece Mary, who had spent the past fifteen years as one of Queen Charlotte’s ladies-in-waiting, ‘& the Lord have mercy on those who have no other dependence.’8 Courtiership required a man or woman to be constantly on display. Long hours were spent standing in cold and draughty corridors in rigid conformity to royal etiquette while success on the job required an insatiable appetite for gossip and an inexhaustible fund of small talk, not to mention indefatigable powers of self-control. When Harriet Harris went to St Petersburg in

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1778, she found the Russian court to be full of French vices. ‘They are perhaps good plants which having been raised in a hotbed have outdone their strength & are withering away before they are come to a State of perfection.’ Despite her initial sense that Russian ladies made ‘very pleasant Companions’, within six months she had changed her mind. Age and experience, wrote her husband, ‘will soon teach her that dissimulation of the countenance & tongue [is] unfortunately necessary in every country’. This Harris thought was not only part of his job, but in Harriet’s case necessitated by the immorality of European noblewomen, no more than a dozen of whom he saw as fit companions for ‘a sensible & virtuous young woman’.9 Courtly cosmopolitanism was therefore as corrupting and demoralizing an influence upon women as men. By the 1770s, Britons had enough confidence in themselves to define their identity against the European ‘other’. This had not been the case thirty years earlier, and Chesterfield’s letters reflect the once common belief that Europe was a model for envy and emulation. Domestic standards of gentility were, thought he, so boorish and parochial that Philip was directed to emulate the manners of Frenchmen and Italians. ‘Observe every look, word and motion’, wrote Chesterfield of the people to be found at the Sardinian court, for their ‘unembarrassed good breeding’ was a passport to the homes and confidence of nobles all over Europe.10 The British, according to Chesterfield, had a poor reputation for diplomacy, and this he attributed to a mix of arrogance and insecurity. False pride, thought he, prevented his countrymen from engaging effectively in European court and noble societies. ‘The principal business of a foreign minister is to get into the secrets, and to know all les allures of the Courts at which he resides.’ This required a diplomat to socialize, rather than going ‘to ask an audience of the king or secretary of state’. Such a man ‘will never know anything more than what they have a mind that he should know’.11 Chesterfield’s criticisms are more applicable to special envoys than to career diplomats. It is telling, nonetheless, that he intended to find Philip a court place in London after he had finished his European travels and before he entered the foreign service. Only through direct attendance upon one’s own sovereign could a novice truly understand what motivated others. By the time he returned to England, Philip was expected to have shed the mauvais honte, or bashfulness that characterized the British abroad: ‘the English are often awkward in their civilities, and, when they mean to be civil, are too much ashamed to get it out’. Here Chesterfield was unusual in seeing reserve as a negative character trait of the British. Although his mid-century colleagues often thought themselves outmaneuvered in Europe by the ‘insinuating

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manners’ of the French, few were disposed to emulate the competition, much less recommend Gallic manners to their apprentices.12 Intrigue, or so thought the British, not only came naturally to the French, but was institutionalized in their diplomacy. In 1813, Charles Stewart wrote to Castlereagh that the German states of central Europe were best kept in check by the influence of Austria because, if left too independent on the international stage, they would be ‘continually prey to French intrigue’ and ‘the adroit management of their diplomatists’.13 ‘The first and best advice I can give a young man entering this career’, wrote Malmesbury in 1813, ‘is to listen, not to talk – at least, not more than is necessary to induce others to talk.’ Thus was British pride to be preserved, and discretion promoted in the service of one’s country. Leveson-Gower followed this advice to the letter during his first posting to Russia. ‘You will probably hear that I am extremely reserved, and excepting with Czartoryski, and upon particular and partial politics with one of two Members of the Corps Diplomatique, I scarcely ever speak upon political Subjects.’14 Malmesbury also told the fledgeling envoy to remain aloof from devious men eager to make his acquaintance because such persons, of whom he claimed there were none in England, were either persons of no consequence seeking his support or ‘put about to entrap and circumvent you as newly arrived’. The young diplomat was also warned against trying to export British habits and manners and, instead, to sacrifice ‘your national prejudices to theirs’. This, as Malmesbury had once told his wife, was the key to successful integration into any society abroad. Harriet, notwithstanding her dislike of ‘all the European vices’, had nevertheless found much to admire in the manners, if not morals, of Russian noblewomen. ‘The fine Ladies I confess are infinitely superior to our Gang of Savages in England’, she wrote. Society women at home, or so she claimed, did their best ‘to be as rude & unpleasant to each other & everybody else as possible’.15 Whilst this sounds like an exaggeration, it was corroborated by Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, who as an ambassadress in Paris from 1790 to 1792 felt obliged to abandon what she called ‘that cold Manner & savage Behaviour which is thought so shocking to People one never saw before’ in favour of smiles and embraces in the French style. Such ritual confrontations, or so it would seem, constituted a social custom by which British women maintained their domestic pecking order. French politesse did not come naturally to Elizabeth: ‘It exhausts me so much that I am dead asleep every night at eleven o’clock & speak french in my sleep.’16 British women, like their male counterparts, had their own sense of collective self-worth. Like men, they also realized that some of their native

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manners were not conducive to the conduct of diplomacy. Although both sexes claimed moral superiority over their European counterparts, each also admitted that lessons in civility could be learned from the continent. Harriet, whose early conduct was guided by a husband determined to bring her up to scratch, learned to suppress her judgmentalism and do as the Russians did, which is to say ‘strive to outdo all others in Civility & good behaviour’. Such conduct produced nothing but good for the reputation of an embassy, and in 1787 Harris returned to the Hague from a short visit to Utrecht delighted to find that ‘Harriet during my absence had literally [sic] a Court.’ This was an unusual event and it had taken Harriet by surprise. At the time her husband was mobilizing Dutch supporters of the House of Orange to contest the French-backed republican proselytizing of the Patriot Party. Under Harris’s leadership the British embassy had become a headquarters of Orangist organizational activity and, on Harriet’s birthday (2 May), 150 people arrived without notice ‘high dress’d & en gala’ to show their respect for the Prince of Orange. Harriet, seeing that their presence constituted a demonstration in favour of the Orangist cause, fed the lot of them and accepted her unofficial nomination as an Orange princess for the day: ‘you cannot conceive how such an Event abashes poll & raises the spirits of our party’, wrote her proud husband. She did not, nevertheless, enjoy this sort of work and wrote thus to her sister: ‘What a World of trouble & pains & Ill blood People give themselves in these odious Politesses simply for want of that plain simplicity & Candour which is quite forgot. It’s like a band of Thieves.’17 Gracious hospitality was often a struggle for women. Diplomats, whether male or female, did not normally preside over a court of followers. As Granville Leveson-Gower pointed out in 1805, it was more usual for a diplomat to be courting others, whether colleagues, ministers or monarchs. ‘Are you aware that the diplomatic Service is a school for falsehood and dissimulation?’ he asked his mistress, Lady Bessborough. Leveson-Gower, who disliked the formality of court life and the deceit he was forced to practise, was nevertheless amused ‘with the different manners of pumping one for News’, which ranged from indirect queries to direct assaults, which is to say ‘the plainness and impudence of their questions’.18 As a wartime diplomat sent to St Petersburg to solicit the czar’s participation in the Fourth Coalition against France, Leveson-Gower had a much more pro-active mission than long-term incumbents of a peacetime station. For men such as Yorke and the Keiths, attendance at court was their bread and butter. This begs the question what good diplomatic representation meant. Opportunities for distinguishing oneself in wars or crises were few and

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far between. Competent diplomacy therefore involved the maintenance of cordial communications and active diplomacy was devoted to the improvement of relations between states. Either could be achieved by getting close, either to the head of state or to one of the powerful families therein. Lord Stormont, who occupied the Vienna station between 1763 and 1772, fulfilled the first brief admirably. He had started his diplomatic career at Warsaw, where he had made a friendship with the Czartoryski family that survived the elevation of its nephew, Stanislaus Poniatowski, to the Polish throne in 1764. Stormont was thus in a position to exchange personal letters with a king. Vienna was not an active station during the 1760s with the result that Stormont could say ‘there is no real Business here.’19 He and his wife nevertheless joined the salon of Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz and the couple was held by the Chancellor in high esteem. Since Kaunitz was also the minister of foreign affairs, his home was an excellent source of the privileged information upon which much of Stormont’s reputation for acute reportage was based. In 1772 he was moved to the Paris embassy. In an ideal world, a diplomat would have become intimate in this way with court nobles and, exceptionally, a confidante, whether of the monarch or his or her most trusted servants. William Hamilton, having reached this status by daily hunting for years with the Bourbon king of Naples, could write by 1777, ‘No etiquette whatever’.20 Hamilton took great pride in his daily access to Ferdinand, a privilege that was not shared by the ministers of France and Spain, who came to see the king only once a week despite the fact that their masters were Ferdinand’s blood relatives.21 In some respects, a diplomat made a good flunkey. He or she could potentially offer a monarch more in terms of money, military assistance or political clout than most native subjects and, though an envoy might be acting in conjunction with the representatives of other powers, he or she had no extensive train of followers requiring patronage. On the flip side of the coin, a diplomat served more than one master. Status as a sort of royal favourite might accompany a special relationship to Britain and this explains why Chesterfield, twice ambassador to the United Provinces, made such a fuss about the political and diplomatic value of courtiership to his son. Some of this may have stemmed from resentment because the Bentinck and Zuylenstein families were powerful clans on both sides of the Channel.22 William, Count Bentinck, was in regular correspondence with the Duke of Newcastle, Earl of Holdernesse, Joseph Yorke and Robert Keith throughout the complex negotiations that ended the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–48). Not surprisingly, Dutch and British diplomats worked together closely

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during these years to restore the Barrier Fortresses in the Netherlands to the custodianship of the House of Orange. In 1751 William IV died and his wife, who had been born the Princess Anne of England, became regent for her 11-year-old son. Upon arrival at the Hague in 1753, Yorke became one of Anne’s closest advisors, and he was always held in awe by William V. Since Yorke has been the subject of his own monograph, the story of his embassy will not be retold here. Suffice it to say that the special relationship between Britain and the United Provinces extended to the co-operation of their diplomats throughout Europe until the outbreak of the American War of Independence. Yorke’s closeness to Anne and, later, her son did not work entirely in Britain’s favour. The House of Orange was often perceived to be out of touch with public opinion, which in part explains the survival of a republican movement in the United Provinces throughout the eighteenth century. Dutch merchants had been unhappy ever since the Seven Years War about the high handed tactics of the Royal Navy in its treatment of neutral shipping and the outbreak of the American War of Independence only exacerbated Dutch hostility to Britain. In 1780 the United Provinces joined the newly formed League of Armed Neutrality and Anglo-Dutch relations did not return to normal until Harris and his Orangist friends succeeded in fighting off the attempted deposition of William V by the French-backed Patriot Party in 1787.23 In 1756, the Diplomatic Revolution resulted in a dramatic reconfiguration of alliances in Europe. Britain’s Old System of partnership with Austria was a casualty of this development, not that relations between the two countries had been more than lukewarm for some time. Since skirmishes between British and French settlers in the American backwoods were driving the two countries towards open conflict, Britain responded to the Franco-Austrian entente with an overture to Prussia. In September 1756, Andrew Mitchell was attached in the capacity of an observer to Frederick’s army with a brief to liaise with the Prussian king on the conduct of the war. Mitchell had been a diplomat for only four years when he joined Frederick on the battlefields of Europe. He was no natural soldier, courtier nor politician, and within a year was asking to be recalled on account of having been slighted, or so he thought, by the Duke of Newcastle. Despite these troubles, Mitchell had established so effective a relationship with the Prussian king that the British government did not want to jeopardize it by sending Frederick another minister. By 1759, Mitchell was asking Newcastle for a promotion to envoy extraordinary in order to cover the expenses of attending Frederick on the battlefield. A year later, the envoy was petitioning his masters for a knighthood.

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His request was granted in 1761. Few men were more dismayed when, in 1762, George III announced that Britain would be withdrawing from the Seven Years War. Although Mitchell claimed not to have ‘played the courtier’, he had come to idolize Frederick, who was called ‘my Hero’ in Mitchell’s private correspondence.24 By 1764 Mitchell’s health was worn out from his tours of duty and his remaining years in Berlin were punctuated by periodic pilgrimages to drink the waters at Spa. When he died in 1771, Frederick is said to have wept at his funeral. Few diplomats made the mistake of reading too much into royal smiles and nods but Harris once overrated his abilities as a courtier. In 1778 he was sent to Russia to woo Catherine II and her government with promises of British naval support for the policing of the Baltic. All diplomats were experienced in the uses of flattery to cajole heads of state, sometimes so much so that they became paranoid about the uses to which it might be put by real and perceived adversaries. In 1760 Mitchell confessed his fears to Northern Secretary Holdernesse that the court of France was using ‘the artfull pen of Voltaire to draw secrets from the King of Prussia’. Every time that Frederick wrote to Voltaire ‘as a wit and to a wit’, he was, thought Mitchell, leaking confidential information to the French government.25 This is not to say that the British scorned the concept of enlightened despotism. In 1790, Keith junior sought an audience of the new Austrian emperor, Joseph II, to promote a federative alliance project between Britain, the United Provinces, Austria and Prussia. In presenting the scheme, Keith made an appeal to Joseph’s well known interest in prison and workhouse reform. Upon arrival in St Petersburg, Harris showered the empress with compliments. Catherine, he noted to his father, was much more familiar with the writings of William Blackstone than he. Like Chesterfield, Harris nonetheless had little respect for female rulers, whom he thought were governed, not by their minds, but by their emotions. In 1761, Chesterfield had written of the regent Princess Anne that ‘She has sense and ambition; but it is, still, the sense and ambition of a woman; that is inconsequential.’ Harris was equally dismissive of Catherine’s intellect. ‘The worst enemies she has are flattery, and her own passions; she never turns a deaf ear to the first, let it be ever so gross, and her inclination for gratifying the latter appears to grow upon her with age.’26 In 1795 George III sent a gift of plants from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to Russia but the British did not, as a general proposition, employ this kind of enlightenment diplomacy upon Catherine. What they saw instead was a woman who had been categorized by the medical thinking of the time as a creature driven by biology. In 1765, Lady Holland teased the handsome Macartney, then just appointed to the St

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Petersburg embassy, about the probable impact of his appearance upon Catherine’s libido. The Empress was already infamous for the manner in which she had disposed of her husband, the Emperor Paul.27 By this date, German princesses who married into the House of Romanov had, thanks to Catherine’s mother-in-law, the Empress Elizabeth, acquired a reputation for promiscuity. It did not therefore surprise Macartney’s predecessor, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, that Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst had followed the path laid down by her predecessor. While Harris admitted that Catherine had ‘a masculine form of mind, obstinacy in adhering to a plan, and intrepidity in the execution of it’, she lacked ‘the more manly virtues of deliberation, forbearance in prosperity, and accuracy of judgment’.28 This was typical of British attitudes towards female royals, who were by 1760 praised by diplomats for displaying the virtues of piety, domesticity and submission to their spouses. Male fears of female sexuality were alive and well. Since it was a commonplace in the British service that Russians were greedy for bribes, Harris began his mission by offering secret service money to court officials to buy influence with and access to the crown. As Isabel de Madariaga has noted, Harris got almost everything about the Russian court wrong. Prince Gregory Potemkin, Catherine’s lover, was the most prominent of Harris’s targets despite the fact that the advice of the professional diplomat, Count Nikita Panin, carried far more weight with the empress on international affairs. The penny was nevertheless slow to drop because Harris’s tactics appeared to be producing results. Potemkin took the diplomat into his confidence and Catherine distinguished Harris with marks of special attention, inviting him to supper and cards every night.29 ‘Your Lordship may easily guess now these Distinctions alarm my Enemies, and create Envy and Jealousy in my Colleagues.’ Here, thought Harris, was successful diplomacy in practice. Catherine and her servants were merely flattering Harris’s ego. As the tide of the American War turned in favour of the colonists, Russia’s friendship became increasingly valuable to Britain. This Catherine sought to exploit. What Harris wanted in the first instance was support for Britain’s war effort against America, but Catherine had no intention of giving any real help to George III. This became clear in March 1780 when she announced the formation of a League of Armed Neutrality that offered naval protection to merchant vessels against the depredations of the Atlantic powers, most notably the Royal Navy.30 This took Harris and his masters by surprise but, since it was followed by an offer from Catherine to broker an understanding between Britain and the United Provinces on the vexed issue of neutral shipping, they continued to believe in Russia’s ‘misplaced’ but genuine goodwill. No overt protest

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was therefore made against the armed neutrality and, by January 1781, the Cabinet was contemplating the offer of Minorca to Russia as the cost of an alliance. This Potemkin had stipulated as a sure guarantee of Catherine’s friendship.31 After George III baulked at this test of his desperation, Catherine continued to keep the British in play by proposing to broker a general peace between Britain and its opponents. Neither Harris nor his government thought much of these offers and, finding the envoy inflexible on the subject of mediation, Potemkin dropped Harris as a ‘friend’ late in the summer of 1781. The cold shoulder from Catherine soon followed.32 Seeing that his mission had failed, Harris began to solicit a recall on the grounds of health and poverty. He had advanced a purported £20,000 of his own money to bribe Potemkin and others. ‘As for myself’, he wrote to Harriet in March 1782, ‘she treats me very poorly – I am no longer her constant cardmate. . . & no longer enjoy her smiles, and no longer converse d’intelligence & I am but a dupe’.33 No blame was assigned to Harris by the British government for his misreading of Russian politics and priorities. He is not the only diplomat of the eighteenth century to have been criticized for getting it wrong: Charles Hanbury Williams too has incurred the negative verdict of posterity. Their masters in London would not have agreed and one is left wondering what was expected of diplomats in the performance of their duties. Modern professional standards are inapplicable here. While envoys were expected to report on the defences and finances of their host countries, many did not possess the technical expertise nor resources to do so, and either wrote perfunctory reports on these subjects or delegated them to subordinate agents. Any useful data that appeared was extracted and passed along to the Admiralty, Horse Guards, Ordnance or Board of Trade. What the secretaries of state wanted, and to this Harris had been trained, were portraits of courts, the socio-political forces at work in them, and shifts in foreign or domestic policy that affected Britain. If possible, alignments hostile to Britain between other states had to be broken or altered. Harris had therefore gone to St Petersburg determined to contest the close friendship perceived to exist between Prussia and Russia whilst raising the credit of Austria in the eyes of Catherine and her court. Bearing in mind that diplomats could have no access to all the facts, assessments of their ability could not depend on the literal accuracy of their reports. Since envoys also operated in a world where misinformation and disinformation was often expounded to conceal the ‘truth’, they were often careful to qualify their observations and cover their backs. Dispatches were supposed to be short and to the point: while their contents might not confirm the wisdom of British policy, merit

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was invariably decided in part by whether or not one’s communiqués were consistent with what one’s superiors wanted to read. These, at the very least, had to tally with and shed light upon information received from other stations to help those at home make sense of world events. Good dispatches might also report positive or useful results: confidential political, military or diplomatic intelligence, improvements in relations or understanding, disagreements between hostile powers, or progress in a specific brief or negotiation. Excellent dispatches offered sophisticated analyses of all this information in domestic and international context.34 Since Harris, despite his faults, did all these things, he was seen as a good diplomat. He was by no means the only envoy of the period to be guilty of self-delusion. Harris had gone to Russia determined not to be fooled by royal winks and smiles. He had nevertheless been misled by reverse flattery or what, in old age, he called ‘a species of royal stage trick.’ Despite this, he never abandoned courtiership as a diplomatic system. Harris may have been too naïve in his expectations of others, particularly women. Two-facedness, he once confessed in the course of the Russian mission, did not come easily to him, and as Madariaga has pointed out, he never understood how cleverly Catherine manipulated the prejudices of others against her country and her sex. ‘I have not a grain of opinion or regard left for Catherine’, he wrote from the Hague in 1785, ‘it is useless to talk reason, sense, or sound policy with her’.35 Having said this, it is doubtful that anyone else could have done a much better job, given the gender stereotypes of the period and the urgency of Britain’s need for friends in Europe at a critical stage in the American revolution. Status as a favourite normally took time to acquire, certainly more than Harris had at his disposal, and the most successful courtier of the eighteenth century was arguably Emma Hamilton. After her return from England as Sir William’s wife in 1791, Maria Carolina allowed Emma to be presented at court in a private capacity. Upon hearing the entire story of her marriage to Sir William from her own lips, the queen took Emma ‘under her protection’.36 By 1793 Emma had become a sort of unofficial lady-in-waiting to the queen. ‘In the evenings I go to her, and we are tête-à-tête 2 or 3 hours. Sometimes we sing.’ She did not, however, presume upon her privileged access to Maria Carolina and, in public, treated the queen with all the deference and formality of a stranger. By 1794 Emma was writing to her ex-lover, Charles Greville, that Maria Carolina was ‘everything one can wish – the best mother, wife, and friend in the world’.37 Other diplomats ought to have been displeased with Emma’s status as a royal favourite but this seems not to have been the case: ‘the Ministers’

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wives are very fond of me, as the[y] see I have no pretensions; nor do I abuse of Her Majesty’s goodness’. The corps diplomatique had laid etiquette aside to visit Emma since 1787 and some of the wives had also tried to make friends with her.38 Sir William no doubt counselled Emma to guard her tongue in such company. When she began to get close to Maria Carolina, her husband was afraid that jealousy would arise from this and other quarters, but claimed that the couple had ‘carefully avoided’ it. By 1795 Emma was employing her influence with Maria Carolina in a political capacity. When the Court of St James protested against the recall of Prince Castelcicala, the Neapolitan ambassador in London, Emma ‘spoke a great deal’ to the queen about the importance of his reinstatement to the continuation of good relations between the two countries. Emma also began at this time to solicit political gossip from Greville in London so that she could relay it to Maria Carolina. What she got in return was confidential Bourbon news from Spain and Austria.39 Emma’s situation at the Neapolitan court was, in her own words, ‘very extraordinary’ and, by 1799, Sir William was describing his wife as the queen’s only female confidante. Why, it has often been asked, was Maria Carolina so attached to Emma? Flora Fraser attributes the strength of the connection to the queen’s faith in the Royal Navy for the preservation of her kingdom. This tallies with the origins of the intimacy, which Emma dated to late 1792.40 Maria Carolina began to correspond with Emma in September 1793 after the ratification of the alliance between Britain and the Two Sicilies that formed part of the First Coalition network of treaties against revolutionary France. At this time she also started to give Emma confidential documents in the hopes of their deliverance to the Foreign Office in London. Sir William was happy to oblige. The degree of trust placed by Maria Carolina in Emma is extraordinary, and probably attributable to the younger woman’s social origins and situation. She could never pose any threat to a daughter of Maria Theresa. Emma also owed much of her social acceptance as Lady Hamilton in Naples to Maria Carolina’s support. Emma seems to have served the queen well in many capacities for, come the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, she became a sort of official spokeswoman for the royalist cause following the royal family’s evacuation to Palermo. Emma claimed to have almost single-handedly negotiated the restoration of peace between loyalists and rebels. She was no uncritical admirer of the Neapolitan monarchy, and thought that the king and queen had brought the revolution upon themselves by their disregard for the sufferings of the people. ‘In short, if I can judge, it may turn out fortunate that the Neapolitans have had a dose of Republicanism.’41 However pleased Sir William was with his wife, other British

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diplomats loathed her. Arthur Paget was appalled by the strength of her influence with the Neapolitan crown and Minto, despite having met and corresponded with Emma, was horrified by the prospect of a visit from her.42 Lord and Lady Elgin, like other British visitors to Naples, found Emma vulgar in the extreme. When the Hamiltons returned to London in 1800, her reign as the queen’s deputy was at an end. Maria Carolina nonetheless continued to work closely with other British diplomats thereafter and the couple had been instrumental in establishing a close relationship between Britain and the Two Sicilies. Emma’s affair with Admiral Horatio Nelson had also secured for Naples a greater share of naval protection than it would otherwise have received. Of all the diplomats in this book, Emma was the one who went most ‘native’. Her youth and plasticity made this almost inevitable, and it was one of the reasons why she was detested by her countryfolk. Since Sir William too, had in some respects become as Neapolitan as she, there was no conflict of loyalties in her mind between private and public loyalty. In serving the Maria Carolina, Sir William and Horatio Nelson, Emma thought that she met the needs of everyone and everything that she cared about. It is not to be wondered at that her allegiances were constructed primarily in personal, rather than abstract terms. Like many women, she was more honest about this than her male counterparts. Sir William retired from the diplomatic service after thirty-six years of residence in Naples. Emma had been his partner for ten of them. Such lengthy periods of service in a single post were the products of longterm peace between Britain and certain parts of Europe in addition to a system of patronage that turned embassies into sinecures, should their incumbents have the inclination and connections to remain in situ. The Napoleonic Wars gave British diplomats of the early nineteenth century no opportunities to build up the kind of credit that the Hamiltons had enjoyed with their royal hosts. This is not to say that the arts of courtiership, as Liston and Malmesbury pointed out, no longer mattered to the British. Envoys continued to decode the politics of power in psychological and, depending on the generation to which they belonged, semiotic terms. So engrained were courtly precepts in the corps diplomatique that they were employed to make sense of politics in post-revolutionary France and America. This is why Francis Jackson and Merry reported on the emergence of the First Consul’s court at the Tuileries, and why George Jackson speculated in his diaries on the strength of Josephine’s personality and the nature of her relationship with Napoleon. ‘She seems to be so thoroughly good-natured that she might readily be credited with a wish to show attentions, independent of the promptings of her lord and master’, he wrote after one Paris soirée. Many, he observed, used

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Josephine’s words and smiles as a barometer of the esteem in which they were held by the First Consul. Her close friends nevertheless maintained that ‘her nature is too genial to be regulated after such a fashion’, and that ‘in fact, Bonaparte does not impose such restraints upon her’. To what extent Josephine, like other women, was agent or pawn remained unclear, and George knew not what to think when she began to give audiences of her own to the corps diplomatique.43 George Hammond, the first minister to be sent to the United States in 1791, was predisposed to see the forces of Jacobinism at work in the popular politics of all but the New England states. President George Washington, reported Hammond in a 1793 dispatch to the Foreign Office, was regularly vilified in the press for ‘secluding himself from the people, from motives of arrogant superiority, and with the disposition to introduce ostentatious ceremonies incompatible with the spirit of democracy, and more congenial with the formalities of monarchy’. Vice President John Quincy Adams, noted Hammond, was faring no better, having been portrayed by the Jeffersonians ‘as an enemy of democratic republicanism, and a favourer of monarchical and hereditary distinctions’. None of this, thought Hammond, augured well for the re-election of either or the establishment of good relations between Britain and the United States.44 Hammond’s successors also looked for signs of socio-political radicalism and conservatism in symbols and rituals, whether in the clothing of state dignitaries or the props at state functions. Upon Adams’ inauguration as President, he was reported by Liston to have acquired a new carriage and liveries, and began to appear in public with a sword and cockade: ‘these last seem to be regarded as the badges of authority of the President’. Adams was also maintaining the weekly levees and state dinners that Washington had laid down for the entertainment of the corps diplomatique.45 Since Jefferson was known to have played a part in devising these rituals, Merry was later inclined to read deliberate insult into the adoption of pell mell. ‘There would be little in these trifles worthy of Your Lordship’s attention’, wrote Thornton in 1801 upon Jefferson’s assumption of the presidency, ‘were it not for the doctrine connected with them.’ Public opinion in the States, added Thornton, was also much opposed to all ceremonies and distinctions of rank.46 Diplomats may have been barred from playing the courtier by the political principles of the American republic, but they continued to be guided by the courtly conventions with which they had been trained. It was in part by such signs that British diplomats identified who were their friends and foes in the United States. This is not to say that they failed

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to study the newspapers, the proceedings of Congress, the views of the merchant community, or the temperaments of the politicians with whom they had to deal. In a new nation, about which much was unknown and untested, anything that might shed light on the thoughts and inclinations of one’s hosts was fair game. Party politics soon entered the picture. In 1792, Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic Republicans in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party. By 1798, the Listons, who had gone to America with a determination ‘to please’, could report that the latter were naturally well disposed towards Britain and this was gradually confirmed by other envoys over the course of the early 1800s. Once the political and intellectual contours of American politics had been mapped, diplomats could rely less upon anthropology as a guide. As late as 1812, Augustus John Foster could nonetheless measure his standing in the eyes of the President by the attentions he received at ‘Mrs. Madison’s Drawing Room’.47 British diplomats in a Europe on the whole closed to them during the 1800s got few opportunities to exercise their gifts for overt and covert representation. The Duke of Wellington could to some extent dictate to the governments of Spain and Portugal in the Peninsula but others had to wait for the defeat of Napoleon to seem like a realistic proposition. When this took place, the spirit of hostility to France and its Emperor operated to unify the counsels of Europe far more than any individual flattery, dissimulation, or argument could do. Business, rather than form, dominates the dispatches of 1812 to 1815, and the fact that Lord Castlereagh took so commanding a role in the negotiating process minimized the contribution that individual diplomats could make to the process of ending war and making peace.48 The era of congress diplomacy that followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was not conducive to the revival of courtiership in some of the ways that it had been practiced in the eighteenth century. Castlereagh preferred to place his faith in a system of regular meetings between heads of state and their executive officers. While in some respects these staged exhibitions of unity and fraternity resembled the meetings of monarchs that had taken place since the Middle Ages, congress diplomacy was also intended to perform a modern function: dispute resolution and policy formation within the framework of a collective security network: we have only to encourage the sentiments of attachment, of which all the Sovereigns are so prodigal towards each other, and which, I believe, at this moment are sincerely entertained. I am quite convinced that past habits, common glory, and these occasional meetings, displays, and repledges, are amongst the best securities Europe now has for a durable peace.49

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Much has been made of the congress system’s failings, not least the divisions that soon appeared amongst its members, but its introduction affected diplomatic practice in important ways, not least amongst which was a lessening in the autonomous powers of an envoy to make or change policy. Once men like Metternich and Castlereagh appropriated these for themselves, diplomats dealt less on a direct basis with kings and more with their officials. In the process of doing so, the attention of the corps began to shift away from the doings of royals and nobles towards the public in its various manifestations. It is to this that we will now turn. Notes 1 Chesterfield Letters, ii. Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 21 July 1752 OS, p. 535. 2 Keens-Soper and Schweitzer, François de Callières, p. 139. 3 Jackson Diaries, i. George to Charlotte Jackson, 3 January 1802, pp. 38–9. 4 Olwen Hufton, ‘Reflections on the role of women in the early modern court’, Court Historian, 5 (2000), 1–13; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women in politics’, in Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (eds), A History of Women in the West, Volume III, Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 173–6. 5 NA SP 78/241, Joseph Yorke to Holdernesse, 17 July 1751, ff. 3–4; SP 78/252, Hans Stanley to William Pitt, 6 August 1761, ff. 23–4; SP 78/278, Simon Harcourt to Weymouth, 22 April 1769, ff. 44–5; SP 78/280, Harcourt to Weymouth, 17 February 1770, ff. 58–9. 6 Add MS 35357, Yorke to Hardwicke, 15 February 1757, ff. 96–8. See also other letters in this volume. 7 SP 91/75, Macartney to Sandwich, 12 March 1765, ff. 206–7; SP 91/97, Robert Gunning to Suffolk, 22 November 1774, f. 108. 8 Mary Hamilton, William to Mary Hamilton, 1783, p. 152. 9 NLS MS 11108, Harris to Gilbert Elliot, 26 July 1779, ff. 13v.–4. 10 Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Stanhope, 18 November 1748 OS, p. 172. 11 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 9, 52–6; Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Stanhope, 27 September 1748 OS, p. 155. 12 Ibid., Chesterfield to Stanhope, November 1739 OS, p. 13. 13 PRONI D.3030/8/83, Stewart to Castlereagh, 17 September 1813, ff. 553–4. 14 Malmesbury Diaries, iv. Malmesbury to Lord Camden, 11 April 1813, pp. 412–15; Leveson-Gower Correspondence, ii. Leveson-Gower to Lady Bessborough, 10 December 1804, p. 6. 15 NLS MS 11112, Harriet Harris to Maria Elliot, 20 July 1778, f. 37. 16 NLS MS Dep 313/742, Elizabeth Sutherland to Lady Stafford, 2 July 1790, n.f.

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17 Malmesbury Papers, F.3.3(1)/102, Harris to Gertrude Robinson, 13 March 1787, n.f.; NLS MS 11112, Harriet Harris to Maria Elliot, 21 July 1786, f. 151. 18 Leveson-Gower Correspondence, ii. Granville Leveson-Gower to Lady Bessborough, 22 August 1805, p. 115. 19 Mansfield TD 2003/13, Box 110, Bundle 1, Stormont to David Markham, Dean of Chester, 13 February 1771, n.f. 20 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 3 December 1777, p. 48. 21 Mary Hamilton, Catherine Hamilton to Mary Hamilton, January 1779, p. 148. 22 David Onnekink, ‘“Mynheer Benting now rules over us”: the 1st Earl of Portland and the re-emergence of the English Favourite, 1689–99’, EHR, 121 (2006), 693–713. 23 Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke and Anglo-Dutch Relations, p. 26; A. Cobban, Ambassadors and Secret Agents (London, 1954). 24 Weston Papers W53, Reel 3, Volume 5, Mitchell to Edward Weston, 15 February 1762, n.f. 25 Memoirs and Papers of Sir Andrew Mitchell, ii. Mitchell to Holdernesse, 31 July 1760, pp. 183–4. 26 Chesterfield Letters, ii. Some Account of the Government of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, 1761, p. 623; Malmesbury Diaries, i. Harris to Yorke, 13 February 1778, p. 175. 27 Collyer, Despatches and Correspondence of John, Second Earl of Buckinghamshire, Russian Memorandum, pp. 274–5. 28 SP 91/102, Harris to Lord Suffolk, 31 July 1778, ff. 282–6. 29 Madariaga, Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality, pp. 40–41; SP 91/106, #119, Harris to Lord Stormont, 6 October 1780, ff. 62–4. 30 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Harris to Stormont, 28 March 1780, pp. 290–1. 31 SP 91/106, #150 and #162 Harris to Stormont, 5 and 24 December 1780, ff. 204, 267–73. 32 Mansfield TD 2003/13 Box 60, Harris to Stormont, 25 July 1781, n.f. 33 Madariaga, ‘The use of British Secret Service funds at St Petersburg, 1779– 1782’, Slavonic and East European Review, 32 (1954), 466. 34 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 58–61. 35 Malmesbury Diaries, ii. Harris to Carmarthen, 2 January 1785, p. 102 and iv. Malmesbury to Lord Camden, 11 April 1813, p. 414. 36 Mary Hamilton, William Hamilton to Mary Dickinson, 15 January 1792, p. 317. 37 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Emma Hamilton to Charles Greville, 2 June 1793 and 18 December 1794, pp. 177, 197. 38 Ibid., Emma Hamilton to Charles Greville, January 1791 and 2 June 1793, pp. 151, 171. 39 Dep Bland Burges 35, Hamilton to James Bland Burges, 2 September 1793, ff. 160–1; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 24 March

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1795, p. 204 and Emma Hamilton to Greville, 19 April 1795, pp. 208–9; David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (London, 2001), pp. 211–12. Fraser, Beloved Emma, pp. 202–5; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, ii. Emma Hamilton to Greville, 18 December 1794 and 21 September 1796, pp. 197, 225. Ibid., ii. Emma to Charles Greville, 19 July 1799, pp. 56–8. Paget Papers, i. Paget to Grenville, 13 May 1800, p. 218; NLS MS 11118, Lady Minto to Lady Malmesbury, 1 August 1800, f. 92. Jackson Diaries, i. Diary, 17 February 1802, pp. 64–5 and George to Charlotte Jackson, 27 March 1802, pp. 78–9. NA FO 5/1, #5, Hammond to Grenville, 7 March 1793, ff. 78–91; C.R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of a Revolution: British Policy Towards the United States, 1782–1795 (Dallas, 1969). FO 5/18, #10, Liston to Grenville, 18 March 1797, ff. 86–9. FO 5/32, #58, Thornton to Hawkesbury, 9 December 1801, ff. 309–10. Bath Archives, i. Francis Jackson to Charlotte Jackson, 7 October 1809, 19; FO 5/84, #14, Foster to Wellesley, 12 March 1812, ff. 342–5. PRONI D.3030/T2/5, Charles Stewart to Emily Castlereagh, 4 March 1814, 11–12. Schroeder, ‘Did the Vienna system rest on a balance of power?’ and ‘The Vienna system: what made it work and what made it fail?’, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850: Selected Papers (1994), 550–66; Castlereagh Correspondence, xii. Castlereagh to Liverpool, 4 October 1818, p. 48.

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Gossips, networks and news

In 1815, George Henry Rose asked Lord Castlereagh to furnish British diplomats with better and faster accounts of political developments at home ‘in order to enable them to act usefully, at times to prevent their acting mischievously (which men groping in the dark occasionally must do)’. It was embarrassing, explained Rose, when he and his countrymen had to learn of these things from others, and worse when no light could be shed on requests for additional information. What envoys primarily sought from each other, stated he, was intelligence, and without material to trade, ‘we cannot be buyers’. By this Rose was not referring to state or party secrets, but rather ‘information on all matters of general Policy’, without adequate knowledge of which the British, he claimed, were at a serious disadvantage relative to others.1 No diplomat could know everything about what was happening at home or anywhere else. Much of Rose’s frustration at Berlin was therefore attributable to his intimate involvement in the most complex set of negotiations the British had seen since the beginning of the French Revolutionary wars. From 1812 to 1815, diplomats were swamped with foreign and domestic data which required detailed contextualization in order to be utilized effectively. Given that the information networks of envoys had also expanded to include the press and some notice of public opinion, Rose’s remarks raise important questions about the ways in which diplomats related to what Black has called a European ‘information society’.2 Networking was integral to a diplomat’s work, and it could take place in the antechambers of the royal household, the salons of the nobility, or the embassies of foreign powers. This was one of the reasons why Chesterfield had insisted that Philip Stanhope become ‘domesticated’ in the households of prominent nobles in Europe, and why Lord Albemarle, who went to France in 1749, was seen by Joseph Yorke as an incompetent. Albemarle kept ‘little or no Company either amongst the Foreign Ministers or at Court’. As a result, the ambassador received

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little news or gossip from them and his dispatches were, in Yorke’s eyes, near useless. ‘To many Questions, no answers have been returned at all, to others so late that they might have been spared, & not once any lights given into the state of Europe in general, or remarks upon the Conduct of this or any other Court in the world.’3 Spies, thought Yorke, were an embassy’s best sources for confidential information, a perception that has often been shared by historians. Information must, or so it seems, be more valuable if it is acquired by stealth and a price can be placed on it in the secret service accounts.4 The premium placed on courtiership by many diplomats would also suggest that access to secrets, however gained, constituted a failsafe index of reliability. Malmesbury, having been hoodwinked in St Petersburg, disagreed. Gossip, he argued instead, was the chief medium through which information was acquired, corroborated and exchanged. By listening rather than talking, he wrote in 1813, ‘I have. . . drawn from my opponents much information, and concealed from them my own views, much more than by the employment of spies or money.’5 For diplomats stationed at hostile or neutral courts, he was right. Oral communication networks were by no means perfect. Unreliable news, whether disinformation, speculation or falsehood, was to be had in abundance, and attempting to distinguish between these was an ongoing activity. Courtiers have always talked amongst themselves to alleviate the boredom of their duties, but envoys had compelling sociological and psychological reasons for sharing information: to reconstruct events, ascertain motives and reach consensus.6 By no means all gossip or rumour is disinterested or free of malice, which meant that diplomats also had to deny or contest reports hostile to their country, which necessitated their regular appearance at a series of venues suitable for the collection and dissemination of information. These could range from court balls to the opera, theatre and salons. While it would be tempting to visualize the rumour mill as a bazaar in which impersonal market forces determine the value of commodities, anthropology tells us not only that oral networks are manipulated: stockjobbing amongst diplomats is a classic example; but that abuses of the network are punished by the tribe. Given that the corps imposed boycotts upon its members for violations of ritual and etiquette, it is equally likely to have policed misuses of the gossip network by the shaming of its members.7 What all buyers and sellers of news took for granted was that all third-hand information was subject to distortion. Some sources were more trusted than others, and diplomats placed the most faith in what came from their masters, colleagues, family and friends. Considerable time and energy was consequently devoted to the establishment and

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maintenance of private correspondence networks by heads of station. Here diplomats often speculated about personalities, policies and events, seeking confirmation or denial of their views from others in the trade. The contents of these letters often made their way, either directly or indirectly, into their dispatches. In 1769 Keith junior gave his sister a sketch of his daily routine at Dresden, from which, given some licence for boasting, it is nevertheless difficult to make out where a diplomat’s public life ended and his private life began. Morning, eight o’clock: – Dish of Coffee, half a basin of Tea, Billets Doux, Embroiderers, Toymen, and Tailors. Ten: – Business of Europe, – with a little musick now and then, pour égayer les Affaires. Twelve: – Devoirs, at one or other of the Courts – for we have three or four – From thence, to fine Ladies, Toilettes & Tender things. Two: – Dine in Public – Three Courses & a Dessert; venture upon half a glass of pure wine, to exhilarate the Spirits without hurting the Complexion. Four: – Rendezvous, Sly Visits, Declarations, Eclaircissements & Successful Love. Six – Politicks, Philosophy & Whist. Seven: – Opera, Appartement, or private Party. A World of Business – Jealousies, fears – Suspicions, poutings, &c. After settling all these jarring Interests, play a single Rubber, en attendant le souper. Ten: – Pick the wing of a Partridge – Propos galants – petites chansons, Scandal & double entendre. Crown the feast with a Bumper of Burgundy from the fairest hand; and at twelve, steal away mysteriously, to pass the rest of the Evening with the Opera Girls &c., &c.8

Keith’s mornings were his own, but business might impinge upon leisure and pleasure throughout the rest of his day. As a bachelor, he could find the time to live so public a life, and does not seem to have minded the lack of privacy associated with his lifestyle. Others bemoaned the necessity of having to be on constant display: ‘the day is cut into small morsels, and falls through my fingers piecemeal’, wrote William Eden in Madrid. ‘It is frivolous, eternally frivolous’, complained Harriet Granville from Paris.9 This study treats gossip as a non-gendered phenomenon because its definition as a female activity says more about male fears of women’s minds and tongues than anything about the verbal exchange of information.10 In 1751 Chesterfield gave his son some guidance on the conversational matter suitable for courts ‘and most mixed companies’. This ‘sort of chitchat’ concerned itself with the public events of Europe, ‘and is then at its very best’, the family lives of princes and nobles, the military affairs of various states, and ‘the magnificence of public entertainments’. This small talk, ‘neither silly nor edifying’, nevertheless made a man seem well-informed, and qualified to engage others in meaningful conversation.11 Acquiring gossip, added Chesterfield, did not require much effort

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beyond listening to others. Everything depended on securing a successful entrée to the right circles, much of which was assured to a diplomat by conformity to the social codes of the cosmopolitan flock. Talking to one’s hosts could be boring work. Soon after moving to Vienna in 1770, Keith wrote to a friend that he found its society unappealing. ‘The play, the dance, your horse, my coach, a pretty embroidery, or a well-fancied lining, these are the favourite topics; upon every one of which I am a numskull of the first water’, wailed he. Since Vienna was full of nobles, academics, lawyers and clergymen, he had hoped to ‘find out a few choice companions of his own stamp and cast’. To what extent these were supposed to be friends rather than contacts is not clear, but Keith craved lively and informed conversation upon ‘any one subject of instruction, moral, civil, or political’. Bearing in mind that Vienna had no shortage of salons run by Maria Theresa’s cameralist administrators: notably Gottfried van Swieten, Joseph von Sonnenfels and Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, one wonders why Keith had so much trouble finding like-minded company. Many were prone from loneliness to exaggerate the hardships of new posts. Harris too had found St Petersburg society ‘insipid’ during his the first year of his mission. Vienna, where Keith remained for eighteen years, proved in the long run to be a congenial home.12 There is a good case for including diplomats in the early modern republic of letters so long as that realm is broadly defined to constitute a Europe-wide community of notables rather than an alternative and egalitarian public space. Given that much of the work on salons and the republic has been done by French cultural historians, it is useful to make some distinctions here. Most diplomats did not attend the think-tank salons described by Dena Goodman in Paris, of which equivalents have been found elsewhere in Europe.13 Having said this, diplomats kept an eye on the world of ideas, not least their real and potential impact on public policy. This explains in part why Stormont and Keith frequented the homes of Austrian bureaucrats, and why Mitchell kept a wary eye on Frederick II’s friendships with Voltaire and d’Alembert. Other men, most notably Hamilton, Worsley, Porter and Strange, sought out the company of the literati for its own sake. Some were drawn to the forms of sociability that they had known at home, and here it should be recalled that Keith junior, Liston and Elliot were children of the Scottish Enlightenment. Stormont also had a taste for salons attested to by the letters from Marie-Thérèse de Geoffrin and Suzanne Necker that survive amongst his papers. Although neither of these women were in regular correspondence with Stormont, their missives testify to the regard in which he was held by the salonnières. In 1776, the year that Jacques

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Necker became Louis XVI’s comptroller-general, Stormont had begun to attend his wife’s salon. He was also in touch with Italian science.14 By no means all British envoys were friends to the supposedly rational, secular and egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment. Yorke, for one, refused to read Voltaire’s later books, which he described as impious and obscene. He did not think much of women in politics either, and ignored several offers from a Mme. Baumer, later revealed as the Dowager Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, to intercede in the Anglo-Dutch neutral shipping disputes of 1759.15 The extent of one’s engagement in the republic was dictated by taste rather than duty. Since women were acknowledged as indirect participants in the political process, their opinions could also be perceived as important barometers of royal or noble thought. In 1787, William Eden reported in a private letter to the Younger Pitt that the ladies at Mme de Polignac’s salon one evening had ‘made war upon our whole nation with considerable violence’. Marie Antoinette had not participated in this verbal assault upon England ‘but was exceedingly silent and reserved’.16 Eden justified his reportage of this incident thus: ‘If you had been twenty months in France, you would think these female politics are not immaterial.’ What he was referring to was the weight that the queen and her circle were perceived to possess with Louis XVI. It was mondaine salons like these that most envoys frequented, which is in part why Steven Kale relied so heavily upon the diaries of Count Rudolph – the nephew of Theresa and Antal Appony – for his account of mid-nineteenth-century French salons. This is not an isolated example of a useful diplomatic memoir. Any glance at Dorothea Lieven’s correspondence with her brother will reveal the wealth of scandal, gossip, news and speculation that was to be found at Holland House.17 Before his recall, Stormont had suggested that Marie Antoinette and, by definition, Austria, would play an indirect and sporadic part in French policy-making. In reporting upon her early involvement in the appointment and dismissal of ministers, he remarked that the queen had tact and address, but ‘totally wants Application, and that Steadiness of Pursuit’, which were needed to rule. By 1776, Stormont was portraying her as a creature of ‘Levity and Dissipation’, whose popularity was entirely gone. ‘I have not seen them, but know that there exist, Libels of the most infamous and scurrilous Nature, the very Titles of which it is impossible to name.’ These are likely to have been some of the first verses that accused Marie Antoinette of adultery and lesbianism. ‘The whole Impression of one of these Libels was seized in time, but others have got about, and naturally tend to lessen Reverence even where they cannot fix a Stain.’18 Stormont is likely to have gotten the gist of this information at court but a good diplomat always sought verification of his findings from

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other local sources: either the mondaine salons and/or the Mémoires secrets, that newsletter compendium of salon gossip that circulated in manuscript form before 1777. In August 1774, he had written home of Louis Sebastien Mercier’s incarceration in the Bicêtre, for publishing an ‘infamous Libel, reflecting on the highest Characters, even the Queen.’19 Mercier, the author of the utopian tract L’An 2440, was in hot water with the French authorities throughout the 1770s and 80s. One aspect of this tale was, thought Stormont, improbable; namely Mercier’s arrest despite having exchanged correspondence on the item in question with the disgraced Chancellor Maupeou. This, in fact, was all too likely, bearing in mind that late ancien régime writers often tried to blackmail the French crown into forestalling the publication of scurrilous pamphlets.20 Although Stormont never got to the heart of this matter, he was unusual in identifying controversial texts as matters of court and public gossip. Forbidden books and pamphlets had made their way into dispatches from Paris before, but never before the 1770s had they been identified as a threat to the monarchy.21 Stormont was recalled before Louis XVI became seriously concerned about his wife’s reputation. Since London was the centre of the publishing trade in French libels throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, he was well aware of the embarrassment that scandals could cause to the French crown.22 In 1764, the Chevalier d’Eon had accused his station head, the Comte de Guerchy, of attempting to have him forcibly kidnapped from England. Earlier that year, d’Eon had published memoirs in London that exposed the workings of Louis XV’s secret service. Few libel cases would be as sensational as this, not least because d’Eon sought to protect himself from French reprisals by declaring that he had always been a woman.23 Since the British government rarely permitted either the extradition or trial of libel suspects, the French often resorted to bribery or, occasionally, murder instead. Libelles did nothing for the reputation of the French crown abroad, as Macartney noted of Pidansat de Mairobert’s racy Anecdotes sur Mme. la Comtesse du Barry (1775). Although the French, wrote Macartney, were ‘excessively angry & ashamed of it’, he added that many of its stories were ‘undoubtedly genuine’.24 Little could be done during the American War to make the British more sympathetic to libelles but, as soon as peace had been restored, diplomats began to complain about the licentiousness of the Londonbased French press. On 27 January 1785 the new French ambassador, the Comte d’Adhemar, complained to the Foreign Office about slurs in the Morning Post concerning Marie Antoinette. The newspaper had alleged in two passages published on 11 December 1784 that the queen was less than chaste and the British government, it was hoped by Louis

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XVI, would do something about it. As usual, nothing was done by the British. They were left in no doubt that the French king was concerned about his wife’s reputation when, in 1786, the Duke of Dorset asked William Eden, then a special envoy to France, whether steps could be taken in London to counteract the Comte de la Motte’s proposed publication of the Diamond Necklace affair. Dorset, Britain’s ambassador in Paris, suggested that the editor of the Courrier de l’Europe be paid ‘for a hundred pounds or two’ to publish the true story. ‘I assure you this is an object in the present temper of the times worth attention.’25 Diplomats were no strangers to public opinion in its various manifestations, and were happy when it discredited regimes to which they were hostile. Yorke had gloated about the discomfiture of the French over the d’Eon affair in 1764. Envoys were less enamoured of an international press that often passed critical judgment upon them. Diplomats were nevertheless assiduous readers of newspapers and pamphlets, as much for misinformation as for the light they shed upon international events. Here a distinction must be made between the official gazettes produced by every court and the independent gazettes, the best of which were produced in the United Provinces before the French Revolution. Official or ‘good’ gazettes contained the bare bones of official policy, but little more. ‘Bad’ gazettes put this material into perspective, but in so doing also retailed speculation and falsehood to their readers. Discursiveness in the public sphere was not a quality valued by statesmen or diplomats: in 1755, Lord Holdernesse asked station heads to send accounts of their court news home for publication in the London Gazette ‘in order to the Obviating and discrediting the many false, and often mischievous Articles of Foreign News, which are inserted in other printed Papers’.26 So unreliable were both versions of international news that many diplomats put so much work, often hours a day, into maintaining and extending their scribal networks.27 As Porter put it to Keith senior in a request for regular news bulletins from Vienna in 1749, ‘this Court [Turkey] often recurrs to me for News, which I do not care to take at second Hand from others or Trust to Gazettes; for my Business is truth and to have it from such Authority as I can depend on’.28 After an interview with Prince Kaunitz in 1781, Keith wrote of the damage that the international press could do. The Austrian Chancellor had read so many ‘French Journals, partial Newspapers and fallacious Translations of wild Parliamentary Speeches’, that he thought George III was prepared to grant independence to America.29 London newspapers too could do considerable damage to Britain’s image abroad, and they were often described as ‘CoffeeHouse Bulletins’ filled with speculation. In 1773, Keith junior wrote to Stormont that he

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had seen ‘no less than five new ministries last week from the Whitehall and St James “Evening Post”’. As a general rule, the degree to which a diplomat relied upon the press of any description depended upon the strength and confidentiality of his or her networks. Printed news was best supplemented by manuscript clarification wherever possible, and one reason why Horace Mann at Florence remained in correspondence with Horace Walpole for seventeen years was that Walpole, a man akin to a professional gossip, was an excellent source of London news. In the absence of such sources, diplomats would resort to those they trusted the most. In 1774, Hugh Elliot asked his father for news of the Thirteen Colonies. ‘Foreign gazettes’, he wrote, ‘are full of our disputes with the Americans’, and Hugh knew not how to answer questions on this subject.30 Yorke, from whom the reference to coffee-house bulletins comes, lived for twenty-eight years in the most active publication centre in Europe. Ever since the 1640s, the United Provinces had been a hotbed of multilingual publishing owing to the freedom of conscience that existed there. A free press was not necessarily friendly to Britain, and Yorke was often indignant about the temerity with which French and Dutch language authors attacked his country. Since English-language publications did not, in his opinion, enjoy a wide enough circulation on the Continent, in 1755 he began to fund his own rebuttals to ‘the Libels France is pouring out against us’.31 Yorke had hoped in the first instance for secret service funding to subsidize the ‘English’ pamphlet industry he was trying to create. Neither money nor recognition for these efforts came from London in the first instance. In 1780, Yorke sent Stormont, who had just become Secretary of State for the Northern Department, three more samples of his journalism. These tracts had not been written by Yorke, but rather by a person who used the pseudonyms ‘een Goed Patriot’, ‘le bon Patriot’ or ‘Un citoyen d’Amsterdam’.32 By this date, the diplomat was very worried about the intentions of the Dutch vis-à-vis Britain’s war with its Thirteen Colonies, and was employing spies and informers to investigate the relations between Paris and the Hague. One of these – a Frenchman named Triquette – offered to take up his pen in Britain’s cause. Stormont felt that the man was better employed in the realm of espionage. Were the spy to write too much, he would be discovered, ‘which would render him totally useless’. Stormont nonetheless encouraged Yorke to subsidize more tracts on the grounds that publications were weapons of ‘real use’. Here Yorke confessed that he had already done so much publishing that ‘all the productions of this press are laid to my account, or of my Salariés, as they are called’.33

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Ever since the beginning of the American War, Yorke had been defending the Royal Navy against merchant complaints about Britain’s embargo on neutral shipping. His attempts to coerce the Dutch into compliance had not, to put it mildly, been successful. By November 1780 his masters were anxious to know whether the Dutch would join the newly formed Russian league of armed neutrality and, when the States General voted in its favour, Yorke was instructed to present a memorial of protest to the Regents of the United Provinces. Public opinion was not on his side, as a result of which Yorke also paid to have ‘the Coffee Houses & places of public resort follow’d, & even hairdressers questioned’ to ascertain the impact of his remonstrance on the public mind.34 When the memorial failed to produce any effect upon the governors or people of the United Provinces, Yorke’s mission was at an end. He was recalled to London on 16 December 1780. Yorke’s concern about the Dutch press was new. When Chesterfield had been at the Hague fifty years earlier, he had dismissed the republic and its advocates as immaterial. ‘The Government of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces is thought by many to be Democratical; but it is merely Aristocratical: the people not having the least share in it, either themselves, or by representatives of their own choosing; they have nothing to do but pay [taxes] and grumble.’35 The appearance of the French-backed republican Patriot Party during the 1770s changed the face of Dutch politics, so much so that Yorke was forced to take notice of what has often been called the ‘bourgeois’ public sphere. Narrow-minded a man though Yorke could be, he was not – as Hamish Scott once argued – blind to the wider dimensions of Dutch politics.36 The assumption that he could dictate or change the views of regents and burghers was simply naïve. The second pamphlet campaign had materialized at a time when his government was feeling isolated and vulnerable in Europe. He was also fortunate to have been dealing with Stormont, a fellow-diplomat whose faith in Yorke was strong. State subsidization of the newspaper and pamphlet press at home was nothing new. How this might be achieved overseas, and what its impact on the public mind might be, was something perceived to be of increasing importance from the 1770s onwards. In 1785, when James Harris went to the Hague to contest the continuing intrigues of the Patriots, his masters accepted that secret-service money was needed to recruit proOrange support from merchants in Amsterdam and the Hague. Public opinion was important to Harris. ‘In a country where party runs so high’, he wrote in one of his first dispatches ‘it is very difficult to observe accurately any alteration in the minds of the people at large, or to distinguish between what is the effect of conviction, or what may be caused

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solely by disappointment or resentment.’ He was nonetheless aware that improving Britain’s image in the eyes of the Dutch would be ‘a work of time’ best achieved by the cautious wining and dining of local notables.37 Improving the London Gazette, suggested Liston in 1786, might constitute one answer to the reliance of foreign gazettes upon more racy or ‘sensationalist’ accounts of British news. Here lay one possible route to bettering public perceptions of Britain abroad. For this undersecretary of state George Aust sent his thanks and an index of the 1785 issues ‘that by knowing what we have give to the Public, you may be the better able to judge what we should’.38 The project seems to have defeated Liston. The Foreign Office decided, in the first instance, to focus on what could most easily be changed: namely its relations with the press at home. In 1790, James Bland Burges took up his pen to write a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym ‘Verus’ to explain the grounds of Britain’s trade and settlement disputes with Spain in the Pacific northwest. To what extent the Verus letters made London readers into supporters of a hardline stand on the Nootka Sound crisis is impossible to tell, but Burges believed that his efforts had been of some use.39 In October 1792 the undersecretary was writing excitedly to his colleagues that he had enticed the editor of a new London daily, the Sun, to work in collaboration with the ministry. As Lucyle Werkmeister points out, the Pitt ministry had long been dissatisfied with its representation in the press and Burges’ desire to find new vehicles for authorized news should not be seen solely as a by-product of conservative unease about the intellectual impact of the French Revolution. In 1790, Lord Gower had been sent to Paris with instructions to ascertain from whence the real direction in French policy-making came. Gower was not suited to this task. ‘We see a good deal’, wrote his wife shortly after their arrival, ‘of both aristocrates & democrates’, but little about the latter made their way into Gower’s dispatches.40 Like Harris, Gower thought the people to be intrinsically attached to their traditional forms of government. He therefore contented himself with attending the debates of the National Assembly and sending the odd royalist pamphlet to London.41 As far as the Gowers were concerned, the sooner the revolution was over, the better. At the end of June 1792, Elizabeth Sutherland was proposing to stage a dinner in the Duke of Brunswick’s honour after his troops had taken and occupied Paris.42 The tale of the Gower’s departure from Paris has already been told. What most alarmed British officials about their recall was not the inability of the French authorities to curb the violence of the crowd, but the sanction increasingly given to its activities by the ideals of pure popular sovereignty and their spokesmen. This was what made the spectre of

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public opinion so frightening. Conservative loyalist appeals to enlightened self-interest were consequently seen as a necessary response to radical invocations of the unfettered rights of man. Here fear and frustration over the freedom of the press meshed. By the end of November 1792, Lord Auckland, then stationed at the Hague, had agreed with his masters that it was appropriate for the Dutch government to subsidize counter-revolutionary propaganda as the British were beginning to do.43 Thanks to the continued presence of the Patriots in Holland, Auckland and his hosts had been monitoring the state of Dutch public opinion since France declared war on Austria in April 1792. Any Frenchman who appeared at ‘the Tables d’Hôte or Coffee Houses within this Province’ singing the praises of the 1791 constitution was asked by the Dutch police to leave the republic. The French envoy, Emmanuel de Maulde, was attending ‘low clubs’ and consorting with gazette writers, but was not perceived to be up to any serious mischief until the revolutionary armies breached the Scheldt and began to move towards the Dutch border.44 By this date, the ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ of de Maulde and the Marquis de Chauvelin in London seemed to be directed towards cowing Britain and the United Provinces into permitting France to overrun and, possibly, annex the Austrian Netherlands. It was this threat that made war between Britain and France unavoidable.45 No government constituted on the basis of popular sovereignty, thought the British, could possess the domestic stability to be trusted on the international stage. America was therefore an unknown quantity in the international arena. In 1791, America established formal diplomatic relations with Britain. An ambassador, William Pinckney, was sent to the Court of St James and a minister plenipotentiary, George Hammond, was dispatched to Philadelphia. Five consuls were also stationed in ports from New York to Charleston. In 1800, the seat of government would move to the new federal capital at Washington. Hammond saw little to begin with that suggested the existence of much goodwill towards Britain. While New England was reputed to be a bastion of political and social conservatism, he noted that the French had many supporters, the most prominent of whom was Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Hammond was uneasy about the extent to which a democratic government could contest the demands of dissidents. The press, which he described as ‘the clearest indication of the public mind’, was full of invective against a president disposed ‘to introduce ostentatious ceremonies incompatible with the spirit of democracy, and more congenial with the formalities of monarchy’.46 The United States, though neutral to the war in Europe, regarded its 1778 treaty of alliance with France as binding, pending the final settlement of a constitution on

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the part of the First Republic. The attempts of its new envoy, Edmond Genet, to strengthen that connection throughout the summer of 1793 only strengthened Hammond’s apprehensions. The story of Genet’s mission to the United States is well known. He had been sent to America by the Girondins with a wartime mandate to prevent American privateers from outfitting against France. He was also to forge a new national compact with the United States ‘in order to assist in every way the extension of liberty’ in North America. By this was meant the emancipation of Florida, Louisiana, Nova Scotia and Canada. Genet was to eschew the old diplomacy of protocol for direct appeals to the American public, which he was instructed to do ‘by means of anonymous publications’ to be inserted in the Boston and Baltimore gazettes.47 This was revolutionary diplomacy in action. Within ten days of Genet’s arrival in Philadelphia on 18 May, grassroots political organizations began to petition him with addresses of support for the revolution. He encouraged the formation of these clubs and began to mobilize followers for his army of liberation in South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky and Vermont. Upon meeting Washington and Jefferson, Genet asked for America to join the war against Britain and its allies. Notwithstanding a firm refusal, the envoy continued with his recruitment campaigns.48 On 2 August, the Cabinet met at Washington’s house to discuss Genet’s recall. He had, or so it was thought, exceeded his remit by ignoring America’s neutrality to the war, and sought to intimidate the administration with the assistance of the French lobby ‘without doors’. By this date Genet had granted letters of marquee to two privateers and was asking Americans to volunteer for maritime service. His secretary had also written two ‘scurrilous pamphlets’ against Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and one-time Secretary of War General Henry Knox.49 On 7 August, Genet addressed a public meeting at the New Coffee House in New York, where he called upon the American public to support the French alliance whilst insinuating that the administration’s neutrality constituted a breach of ‘good faith.’ On the 23rd Jefferson dispatched a request for Genet’s recall to France. The corps diplomatique was notified on 15 September. The envoy seized upon this opportunity to defend his conduct in public, and demanded that details of the incident be laid before Congress. While this was consistent with the public diplomacy Genet had been instructed to practise, his masters at home had been replaced in June. François Deforgues, who had no love for the Girondins, wished to preserve good relations with America. Genet therefore received an arrest warrant demanding his return to France at the beginning of 1794.50

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Genet, suspecting that regime change at home had marked him for the guillotine, asked for – and received – asylum in the United States. Hammond nevertheless saw Genet’s societies, which he described as ‘precisely analogous in their origin and object to the Jacobin clubs in France’, as a threat to the continuation of American neutrality because they were sending warlike petitions to Congress.51 Hammond, who had achieved little in resolving Anglo-American disputes on trade, debt and territorial boundaries, was fearful that public opinion was undermining his efforts on these matters. He was also convinced that the new French minister, Guillaume Adet, was following in Genet’s footsteps. The Foreign Office too was uneasy about the American democratic societies, which they saw as analogous to the Dutch Patriot and British radical clubs: ‘the Jacobins’, wrote Undersecretary of State James Bland Burges, ‘carry every thing before them in America, where the feeble Government, supposing it has the inclination, appears entirely destitute of the means of keeping things quiet.’52 The signature of Jay’s Treaty in November 1794 resolved the most contentious of the disputes between Britain and America, in so doing putting the fears of Hammond and Burges at rest. Liston, Britain’s second minister to the United States, was nevertheless sent off in 1796 empowered to offer the Americans an alliance to prevent them from succumbing to the wiles or threats of France. The Listons went to America to please their hosts, a goal they achieved within a year. The Americans, as Henrietta Liston put it, ‘must be led gently back to their old attachments, it is better they should be driven by the French than by us’.53 Liston’s dispatches were full of French-inspired schemes to raise insurrections in Louisiana and Canada, and he saw the French funded press in the United States as a source of bitter enmity to Britain. Here Liston hoped that the ‘offensive’ and insolent tone of its journalism would disenchant readers with the revolutionary cause.54 Adet, as it transpired, made no better impression upon the American government than his predecessor. By April 1797, Liston could report that Secretary of State Timothy Pickering had become a ‘violent antigallican’. A year later it was clear that there were many issues upon which the administration of John Quincy Adams wished to reach accommodation with Britain, one of which was the granting of American citizenship to defectors from the Royal Navy. Pickering, wrote Liston, personally wished to discontinue the practice, but was prevented from doing so by ‘the necessity the Ministers feel themselves under of yielding to the impulse of popular opinion’.55 The speed with which that opinion could turn against France was illustrated in May 1798 when America was offered what Liston called ‘degrading conditions’ for the continuation

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of its alliance with France. Peremptory demands that America abandon its neutral trade with Britain were responsible for the hardening of the administration’s attitudes, in the wake of which Adams’ popularity underwent a sharp upturn. Britain, wrote Liston, was now regarded in the United States as ‘the only bulwark remaining against the oppressive power and the destructive principles of the French Republick’. By July, the passage of Alien and Sedition Bills to safeguard the nation against subversion was underway, and an alliance with Britain, or so it seemed, would soon follow.56 Since war between France and the United States was averted on this occasion, no alliance with Britain materialized and Liston went home at the end of 1798. What was apparent from his embassy was that there was room in American politics for multiple perspectives, and it was on these grounds that the British government chose to subsidize the French royalist cause during the 1790s. Conservatives, as well as liberals, could be heard in democratic polities and the emergence of a popular counterrevolutionary movement following the execution of Louis XVI demonstrated that many were still loyal to the principles of the old regime.57 This is one reason why, come the prospect of peace with France in the late 1790s, Malmesbury went to Paris in 1796 in search of signs that social stability had returned to the country.58 The British delegation relied on its eyes and ears, rather than the gossip of the corps diplomatique. In watching the crowds that frequented Paris streets, theatres and cafés, Malmesbury was delighted to find the people ‘perfectly quiet’ while Leveson-Gower remarked that ‘the manners of the people are much improved; they are much less noisy and pert than when I was last in France’ (1790). After attending a performance at the Comédie Française, Malmesbury noted that the audience was ‘much better dressed & infinitely more orderly than at any of our Spectacles, the Opera not excepted.’ Aware that the theatre had been employed as a vehicle of instruction in egalitarian principles, he was also pleased to find the audience appreciative of ancien régime social conventions. ‘All the Allusions . . . to the Old forms were applauded, particularly one where Pasquin insists on being called Monsieur & no notice taken of those which could apply to Jacobinism.’59 If this was the true state of French public opinion, it augured well for the permanence of peace. What is notable here is the unprecedented amount of attention paid by diplomats to café and theatre culture. What was missing was a traditional in-depth analysis of executive personalities, priorities and policies, which could not be properly undertaken until the return of peace. This was the brief which the Jackson brothers went to Paris in 1801 determined to fill. They saw little to admire in

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the First Consul’s ego and ambitions, but could report a dedication to notions of deference and hierarchy apparent in the increasing formality of the household rituals enacted at the Tuileries. Like Hammond in Washington, the Jacksons were reading the rituals of court life through an ethnographic lens. Confirmation of the new regime’s social conservatism was also found in the theatres of Paris, where Édouard en Écosse, ou la nuit d’un proscrit, an old Jacobite play dealing with the fortunes of Charles Edward Stuart after the Battle of Culloden, was closed down after only two performances because the audience, or so thought the police, had given too much applause to sections of the script ‘unfavourable to the present Order of Things’.60 This, amongst other things, led Jackson to believe that there was still some love for the old order in France. This is not to say that the British ignored other sources of opposition to Bonaparte. Many, not least Francis Jackson, could be found frequenting the salon of Germaine de Staël until she was banished from Paris in 1803. The salons, which had closed during the reign of terror, reopened under the Directory whereupon de Staël re-established herself at the Rue de Bac.61 ‘Foreigners treated me with the greatest of honour’, wrote she of this period: ‘the corps diplomatique spent its life in my home, and this European atmosphere was my safeguard.’62 Although Bonaparte and Talleyrand objected to de Staël’s salon, they could not prevent the British from ‘frequenting persons . . . and Societies who are the most obnoxious to the present Government’. Women, as Francis told young George, ‘do play most adroitly a very great part in this interesting French drama’ and de Staël would be in correspondence with the enemies of Napoleon until his final defeat in 1815.63 By the time that Britain went back to war in 1803, its leaders had concluded that the revolution was over. Napoleon, rather than Jacobinism, had become the principal enemy and target of British propaganda. In 1805 the British government began to subsidize the distribution of London-based French émigré newspapers in Europe on a systematic basis. Throughout the 1790s, ad hoc subsidies had been given to editors and pamphleteers to produce counter-revolutionary political and economic tracts in French and German: amongst the recipients were the Swiss newspaper editor Mallet du Pan, his compatriot financier François d’Ivernois, and the Cambridge theologian William Marsh. An implicit condition of this financial assistance was the promotion of Britain and its ideological cause. Marsh, who had written a bilingual English-German History of the Politics of Great Britain and France, from the Time of the Conference of Pillnitz to the Declaration of War against Great Britain (1799) was rewarded with a pension by Pitt. D’Ivernois, who received a

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knighthood in 1800 for his defence of the British national debt, would continue to write economic tracts glorifying liberty, free trade and a balance of power based upon upholding the values of commercial civilization throughout the 1800s.64 Diplomats of the 1790s had also played their part as pamphleteers and advocates of ‘hack’ journalism. Perhaps the most significant interventions made in this realm were the endorsements that Hammond, Thornton and Liston gave to Peter Porcupine, alias William Cobbett, who had come to their attention as a federalist pamphleteer in the United States. Liston thought so highly of Cobbett’s Bloody Buoy that he recommended its circulation amongst the French Canadian population in 1798 to Lieutenant Governor John Prescott as a preventative against insurrection. A year later, Cobbett sought English subscribers for a new and collected edition of his pamphlets which Thornton asked Hammond to recommend as widely at home as possible. Liston had hinted after his recall that Cobbett might call upon the patronage of the British government if he wished. Although Cobbett waited until 1805 to take up this offer, he owed his introduction to the world of London publishing in some measure to these three men. Liston, for one, would subscribe to the Political Register for life.65 There is little evidence of British contact with the Spanish free press during the Napoleonic Wars.66 Diplomatic concern about public opinion in Europe resurfaced with the final campaigns and the advent of peace. By staging their own revolt in favour of a constitutional monarchy, the Dutch settled their own political future.67 Prussia, though staunch in support of its allies, was worrying on account of some hostility to the king’s ministers at Berlin. Austria, thought Castlereagh, had to emulate Russia and Spain in mobilization against Napoleon. ‘Let them sustain their magnificent Armies with a great popular movement, and the War must prove successful.’68 Italy was alarming on account of the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution. The unknown factor in the equation was France. Britain had suffered from excessive identification with the royalist cause in the past, so much so that the Foreign Secretary feared that a ‘peace party’ would appear in parliament, were he to give any formal financial, military or political support to a Bourbon prince. The French restoration, though followed with great hope and anxiety, therefore went ahead without any formal endorsement from the British.69 Neither Castlereagh nor his envoys were reactionaries trying to restore the status quo ante 1789. In 1812, Robert Liston believed that Lord William Bentinck had meant well in trying to give the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies a new liberal constitution. ‘We conceived it to be indispensable.’70 Whig nationalism was alive and well in the British corps.71 Those

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on the right of the spectrum, often called Tories, were fearful that the spirit of revolution was merely asleep. Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother, therefore saw the 1820 Neapolitan revolution as a danger to ‘the Civilization of Europe’ and an insurrection planned by an ‘impious Sect’ seeking to overthrow social order and established government. In 1824, Lord Clanwilliam reported on the presence of ‘secret societies’ in Berlin.72 Others, like Liston and Foster, were no less critical of oppressive government, whether in Spain, Italy or Greece. Envoys expressed concern about the post-war social and political stability of Europe in several ways: by abusing despotism and anarchy in equal measure, by identifying supposed dissidents, by turning to religion, and by monitoring the press.73 More interventionist action on the last front was called for by Charles Stuart in Paris from 1817 onwards. From 1817 to 1828, Stuart sent the Foreign Office repeated proposals to fund English and French language newspapers whilst improving the speed and efficiency of communication between London and Paris. The latter proposal, he hoped, would permit the Foreign Office to vet the pre-publication contents of pamphlets and journals. Since the diplomatic bags were by this date entrusted to French couriers, not the English messengers to whom before 1815 they had been consigned, the latter request was often refused on the grounds that the inclusion of such material would compromise the security and integrity of the government and its embassy.74 Britain’s reputation as a free country, after all, continued to rested in part upon the freedom of the press. Joseph Planta and William Hamilton, the Undersecretaries of State, were more willing to authorize Stuart’s bids to give covert assist French newspapers in England or English newspapers in France. In 1821, following the death of Giovanni Antonio Galignani, Stuart proposed that the British government subsidize the continued production of his Messenger, a daily English digest of news and literature that had been published in Paris since 1814. ‘Whatever you think right & useful on the subject, will of course be acceded to here, but it is essential that we should know nothing of it’, wrote Hamilton. When Galignani’s Messenger ceased to publish in 1904, the New York Times observed that, for ninety years, it had ‘provided Englishmen in Paris with daily skimmings of their London journals when they were difficult and expensive to obtain’.75 This verdict from the beginning of the twentieth century ignores the central place of digests in the world of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British publishing. Galignani’s Messenger was well regarded in Stuart’s day. Since John and William Galignani, who inherited the paper from their father, took care to stay on the right side of the French authorities, their editorial method lay in the selection of

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material vetted by the British embassy. If not, rules for its selection had certainly been established in consultation with Stuart. As ambassador, he had considerable discretion over the use of embassy funds, from whence the Messenger was paid until 1828. The Foreign Office then assumed responsibility for the account.76 French newspapers of the day were closely affiliated to the major parties in Paris, which meant that there was little to be gained – and much offence to be given – in supporting the press.77 Stuart nonetheless employed an agent to monitor its contents so that formal complaints about journalism hostile to Britain could be made. His relations with the interior ministry were good, so much so that he was able to intercede with it on behalf of British proprietors. In 1817, H.C. Wilson, the editor of Le France en Angleterre, offered to make his journal ‘as agreeable to the Government of this Country as well as that of France’. He was delighted to learn that nothing in his ‘pamphlet’ gave offence to the French. It is unlikely that Stuart was financing any other English papers on his side of the Channel though he was quick to help editors in trouble. In 1819, he helped bail out Thomas Parkin, the editor of the tri-weekly Pas de Calais, who had been driven out of business by the Boulogne Telegraph. Since Parkin had been thrown in jail by the local prefêt for libel, he was in receipt of legal rather than financial assistance.78 Anglo-French press relations had come a long way since the days of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Representatives of both nations were now prepared to work together to facilitate the transmission and rebuttal of news important to both countries. Public opinion, as an independent force, was a phenomenon with which statesmen and officials on both sides of the Channel had been forced to grapple since 1789, and British anxiety about its effects during the 1820s was no simple projection of old fears onto new circumstances. The experience of the revolution and Napoleonic Wars had convinced diplomats that constituencies of moderate to conservative opinion could too be mobilized by the press, and that a truly inclusive polity had to tolerate all points of view. What envoys feared the most by 1820 were breakdowns of consensus and communication between interest groups that permitted extreme solutions to seem attractive and, thus, viable. In that year, Stuart stated the principles of his embassy thus. A tranquil future, he maintained, was best secured by avoiding political extremes, whether or left or right, ‘and by the maintenance of a system which would admit of the conciliation of the old and the new interests which divide France’. The death of Louis XVIII that year had been attended with widespread apprehension in the international community, but when Charles X ascended the throne without a hitch, observers turned their attention to what were now

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perceived as indigenous and, in some cases, endemic sources of discontent and dissidence. As Stuart put it, the French now shared with Britain ‘the responsibility imposed by a Constitutional Form of Government’.79 These views on the need for balance in a government’s dealings with the public were widely held. Tyranny was therefore as opprobrious as anarchy, whilst external intervention was – as far as many station heads were concerned – no answer to the internal problems of a country. From 1820 to 1823, men from the Duke of Wellington to George Canning and the Foxite Augustus John Foster were as annoyed with their allies for complaining about British inaction in the Peninsula, as they were with the King of Spain for failing to compromise with his critics. Greece and its revolt were later seen in much the same light. How the European press reported on these events was not something about which diplomats said much in their private papers but, angry though station heads often were at what they called ‘lies’, what the past fifty years had taught them was that libel often had some root in legitimate perception.80 Notes 1 PRONI D.3030/4772, Rose to Castlereagh, 23 November 1815, ff. 692–5. 2 Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 118–45. He does not, however, portray diplomats as active players within that society. 3 Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 18 November 1748 OS, p. 172; Add MS 35355, Yorke to Hardwicke, 12 November 1749 and 23 February 1750, ff. 136–8, 198–9. 4 See, for example, Cobban, Ambassadors and Secret Agents. 5 Malmesbury Diaries, iv. Malmesbury to Lord Camden, 11 April 1813, pp. 412–15; Black, ‘British intelligence and the mid-eighteenth century crisis’, Intelligence and National Security, 2 (1987), 209–29; Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, pp. 132–3. 6 Rosnow and Fine, Rumour and Gossip, pp. 50–62, 77–80, 87–93. 7 Horn, ‘Rank and emolument’, pp. 35–6. 8 NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/3/6, Keith to Anne Keith, 22 October 1769, n.f. 9 Auckland Correspondence, ii. Spanish Journal, 3 December 1788, p. 126; Granville Letters, i. Harriet Granville to Lady Morpeth, 18 December 1824, p. 327. 10 Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Leicester, 1995), pp. 12–15, 19–36; Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 26–68. 11 Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Stanhope, 20 June 1751, p. 458. 12 Keith Memoirs, i. Keith to Bradshaw, 28 August 1773, pp. 441–2; NLS MS 12966, Harris to Hugh Elliot, 7 April 1778, f. 53v.; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1648–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 179–85.

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13 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1994), 95–113; Deborah Heller, ‘Bluestocking salons and the public sphere’, Eighteenth Century Life, 22 (1998), 59–82; Ulrike Weckel, ‘A lost paradise of female culture? Some critical questions regarding the scholarship on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German salons’, German History, 18 (2000), 310–36; Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2004); Antoine Lilti, ‘Sociabilité et mondanité: les hommes de lettres dans les salons Parisiens au XVIIIe siecle’, French Historical Studies, 28 (2005), 415–45; Susan Dalton, ‘Searching for virtue: physiognomy, sociability and taste in Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi’s ritratti’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 40 (2006), 85–108. 14 Mansfield TD 2002/42, Box 14, Bundle 1, Necker to Stormont, 20 June 1780, n.f.; TD 2003/13, Box 59, Geoffrin to Stormont, 31 March 1760 and Necker to Stormont, 13 April 1779, n.f. For Stormont’s Italian correspondence, see for example Add MS 23730, G. Torelli to J. Strange, 17 February 1777, f. 226. 15 Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke and Anglo-Dutch Relations, pp. 19–20. 16 Auckland Correspondence, i. Eden to Pitt, 10 October 1787, p. 220. 17 Kale, French Salons, pp. 119–20, 124–6, 143–5, 162–3, 170–1. 18 SP 78/292, Stormont to Rochford, 18 May, 8 June and 27 July 1774, ff. 80–1, 135–9, 288–90; SP 78/299, Stormont to Weymouth, 18 September 1776, ff. 514–16; Hector Fleischmann, Marie Antoinette Libertine, bibliographie critique et analytique des pamphlets politiques, galants, et obscènes contre la reine, précédée de la réimpression intégrale de quatre libelles rarissimes et d’une histoire des pamphlétaires du régne de Louis XVI (Paris, 1911), pp. 23–32; Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of PreRevolutionary France (London, 1996), pp. 137–66; Kaiser, ‘Who’s afraid of Marie Antoinette?’, pp. 254–8; Jeremy Popkin, ‘Pamphlet journalism at the end of the old regime’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 22 (1989), p. 363; Vivian R. Gruder, ‘The question of Marie-Antoinette: the queen and public opinion before the revolution’, French History, 16 (2002), pp. 280–1. 19 SP 78/293, Stormont to Rochford, 31 August 1774, ff. 150–1; Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers, pp. 118–36; Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort (eds), The ‘Mémoires Secrets’ and the Culture of Publicity in EighteenthCentury France (Oxford, 1998), 9–35. 20 Simon Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London’s French Libellistes 1758–92 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 97–110. 21 In 1750, Albemarle had sent home an edict banning the sale of two almanacs that criticized Louis XV’s foreign policy. SP 78/235, 13 January 1750, f. 9; SP SP 78/291, Stormont to Rochford, 16 February 1774, ff. 93–4. 22 Simon Burrows, ‘Despotism without bounds: the French secret police and the silencing of dissent in London, 1760–1790’, History, 89 (2004), 525–48. 23 Charles Geneviève Louis August D’Eon, Lettres, mémoires et négociations (London, 1764), pp. xxx–xxxi; Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman,

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pp. 87–120; Anna Clark, ‘Wilkes and D’Eon: the politics of masculinity’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1998), 19–48; Jonathan Conlin, ‘Wilkes, the Chevalier D’Eon and “the dregs of liberty”: an Anglo-French perspective on ministerial despotism, 1762–1771’, EHR, 120 (2005), 1251–88. SP 78/264, Hertford to Halifax, 28 November 1764, ff. 56–7; Bod MS Eng. lett. d. 374, Macartney to Lady Holland, Monday the 9th, 1776, ff. 4–7; Add MS 35369, Yorke to Hardwicke, 13 August 1771, f. 304; Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution, ch. 4. FO 27/13, d’Adhemar to Carmarthen, 27 January 1785, f. 74; Auckland Correspondence, i. Dorset to Eden, 12 July 1786, p. 397; Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, p. 23; Lynn Hunt, ‘The many bodies of Marie Antoinette: political pornography and the problem of the feminine in the French Revolution’, in Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore, 1991), 108–30. Add MS 35480, Holdernesse to Keith senior, 19 August 1755, ff. 54–5; P.M. Handover, A History of the London Gazette, 1665–1965 (1965); Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls (Urbana, 1952), pp. 290–4, 323–8. NLS MS 12969, Liston to Hugh Elliot, 27 July 1779, f. 118. NLS MS 11013, Hugh Elliot to unknown, 26 February 1775, f. 96; Add MS 35466, Porter to Keith, 21 September 1749, f. 213. Add MS 35367, Yorke to Hardwicke, 31 December 1765, f. 377; Keith Memoirs, i. Keith to Stormont, 26 June 1773, pp. 431–432; Mansfield TD 2002/13, Box 58, Keith to Stormont, 8 April 1781, n.f. NLS MS 11013, Hugh to Gilbert Elliot, 13 August 1774, f. 79; Add MS 34414, Elliot to William Eden, August 1777, f. 128; W.S. Lewis (ed.), Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, 35 vols (New Haven, 1955) vols 17–25. S. Groenveld, ‘The Mecca of authors? States assemblies and censorship in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic’, in A.C. Duke, and C.A. Tamse (eds), Too Mighty to Be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, 1987), p. 65; Craig E. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster, 1987); B. van Selm, ‘Johannes van Revesteyn, “Libraire Européen” or Local Trader?’, in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, H. Bots, P.G. Hoftijzer and O.S. Lankhorst (eds), Le Magasin de l’Univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade (Leiden, 1992), pp. 259–60; Add MS 35364, Yorke to Lord Royston, 14 October and 5 December 1755, ff. 54, 60. Yorke had been printing or sponsoring memorials for at least two years before this. Add MS 35372, Yorke to Hardwicke, 10 October 1778, ff. 37–8 and 18 May 1779, ff. 103–4. The tracts sent to Stormont were entitled Observations candides sue le memoire présenté par monsieur le chevalier Yorke, ambassadeur de s.[a] m.[ajesté] le roi de la Grande-Bretagne, à l.[es] h.[autes] p.[uissances] les Etats-Généraux des Provinces-Unies des

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Pays-Bas, le 9 Avril 1779. Précédées du dit memoire & suivies de reflexions ulterieures y relatives (Hague, 1779); The Dutch version of this, was Brief van een Goed Patriot over de Memorie door den. . . Ambassadeur de GrootBritannien aan. . . de HH. Staaten-Generaal gepresenteerd den 9 April 1779; Observations d’un citoyen d’Amsterdam, sur le mémoire presenté aux Etats-Généraux, par m. le chevalier Yorke, le 22 Juillet dernier (1779). Yorke contented himself with translating his memorials to the States General into Dutch and French. Mémoire présenté par M. le chevalier Yorke, ambassadeur et plénipotentiaire de S. M. le roi de la Grande-Bretagne, à Leurs Hautes Puissances les États-Généraux des Provinces-Unies des Païs-Bas, le 9 avril 1779 and Memorie door den heere ridder Yorke, ambassadeur en plenipotentiaris van Zyne Majesteit den koning van Groot-Brittanjen, aan Haar Hoog Mogende den Staaten Generaal der Vereenigde Nederlanden op den 9 april 1779 gepresenteerd (Hague, 1779). Mansfield TD 2003/13, Box 113, Bundle 3, Stormont to Yorke, 18 January 1780, n.f.; TD 2002/13, Box 113, Bundle 4, Yorke to Stormont, 22 September 1780, n.f.; TD 2002/13, Box 59, Yorke to Stormont, 16 May and 6 June 1780, n.f. This was printed as De ridder Yorke, ambassadeur des Konings van GrootBrittannien, heeft met den president van de . . . Staaten Generaal geconfereerd, en by die gelegendheid een Memorie, van deeze inhoud overgegeeven (Hague, 1780). Several other Dutch pamphlets connected with Yorke can be found in the British Library’s online catalogue. Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke and Anglo-Dutch Relations, pp. 62–70; H.M. Scott, ‘Sir Joseph Yorke, Dutch politics and the origins of the fourth Anglo-Dutch war’, HJ, 31 (1988), 571–89; Mansfield TD 2002/13, Box 59, Stormont to Yorke, 14 July 1780, n.f.; Mansfield TD 2002/13, Box 113, Bundle 5, Yorke to Stormont, 14 November 1780, n.f. Chesterfield Letters, ii. ‘Some account of the government of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces’ [1761], 618–24. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: A Chronicle of the French Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1977), chs 2–3; Scott, ‘Yorke, Dutch politics and the origins of the fourth Anglo-Dutch war’, pp. 576, 580–9. Malmesbury Diaries, ii. Harris to Carmarthen, 4 January 1785, pp. 90–2. NLS MS 5544, Aust to Liston, 16 March 1786, f. 94. Dep Bland Burges 47, Burges to Alleyne Fitzherbert, 1 September 1790, ff. 61–2; Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, p. 422. Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (Lincoln, 1963) ch. 7; NLS MS Dep 313/742, Lady Sutherland to Lady Stafford, 14 July 1789 and 2 July 1790, n.f. Malmesbury Diaries, ii. Harris to Carmarthen, 4 January 1785, p. 93. NLS MS Dep 313/742, Lady Sutherland to Lady Stafford, 29 June 1792, n.f. Robert Dozier, For King, Constitution, and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington, 1983); Donald E. Ginter, ‘The

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loyalist association movement of 1792–93 and British public opinion’, HJ, 9 (1966), 179–190; Jennifer Mori, ‘Responses to revolution: the November crisis of 1792’, Historical Research, 69 (1996), 284–305; Michael Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the origins of the loyalist association movement of 1792’, HJ, 39 (1996), 943–62. Dep Bland Burges 30, Auckland to Burges, 20 July 1792, ff. 172–3. T.C.W. Blanning, Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, pp. 138–159; Black, British Foreign Policy, pp. 462–3; Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785–1795 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 130–4. FO 5/1, #5, Hammond to Grenville, 7 March 1793, ff. 78–91. Meade Minnigerode, Jefferson Friend of France 1793. The Career of Edmond Charles Genet, Minister Plenipotentiary from the French Republic to the United States, as Revealed by His Private Papers (New York, 1928), pp. 142–5. Frey and Frey, Diplomatic Immunity, pp. 300–1. FO 5/1, #17, Hammond to Grenville, 10 August 1793, ff. 239–51. Genet to Jefferson, 4 July 1797, in Minnigerode, Jefferson Friend of France, pp. 413–25; FO 5/1, #19, Hammond to Grenville, 17 September 1793, ff. 291–2; Eugene R. Sheridan, ‘The recall of Edmond Charles Genet: a study in transatlantic politics and diplomacy’, Diplomatic History, 18 (1994), 463–88. FO 5/4, #15, Hammond to Grenville, 15 April 1794, ff. 175–6. Dep Bland Burges 38, Burges to Lord St Helens, 24 June 1794, f. 165. NLS MS 5590, Henrietta Liston to James Jackson, 10 May 1797, f. 87; NLS MS 5593, Liston to James Jackson, 11 May 1797, f. 25; George W. Kyte, ‘Robert Liston and Anglo-American cooperation, 1796–1800’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 93 (1949), 259–66. FO 5/14, #6, Liston to Grenville, 6 July 1796, ff. 86–8; J.A. James, ‘Louisiana as a factor in American diplomacy, 1795–1800’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 2 (1914), 44–56; Leonard A. Granato, ‘Freneau, Jefferson, and Genet: independent journalism in the partisan press’, in Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod (eds), Newsletters to Newspapers: EighteenthCentury Journalism (Morgantown, 1977), pp. 291–301. FO 5/22, #18, Liston to Grenville, 11 April 1798, ff. 148–50. NLS MS 5591, Henrietta Liston to James Jackson, 10 April 1798 and May 1798, ff. 23–5, ff. 36–7; FO 5/22, #20 and #21, Liston to Grenville, 2 May 1798, ff. 167–71, 173–7; James Morton Smith, ‘The enforcement of the Alien Friends Act of 1798’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41 (1954), 85–104 and ‘Alexander Hamilton, the alien law, and seditious libels’, Review of Politics, 16 (1954), 305–33; Marshall Smelser, ‘The Jacobin phrenzy: federalism and the menace of liberty, equality, and fraternity’, Review of Politics, 13 (1951), 457–82. Jacques Godechot, The Counter Revolution: Doctrine and Action (1972); Colin Lucas, ‘The problem of the Midi in the French revolution’, TRHS, 5th Ser., 28 (1978), 1–25; Alan Forest, The French Revolution and the

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Poor (New York, 1981); Maurice Hutt, Chouannerie and CounterRevolution: Puisaye, the Princes, and the British Government in the 1790s (Cambridge, 1983); T.G.A. Le Goff and D.M.G. Sutherland, ‘The social origins of counter-revolution in western France’, Past & Present, 99 (1983), 65–87. E.D. Adams, The Influence of Grenville on Pitt’s Foreign Policy, 1787–1798 (Washington, 1904). Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1)/162, Malmesbury to Gertrude Robinson, 25 October 1796; Malmesbury Diaries, iii, p. 271; Gower Correspondence, i. Gower to Lady Stafford, 23 October 1796, p. 130; Susan Maslan, ‘Resisting representation: theater and democracy in revolutionary France’, Representations 52 (1995), 27–51 and Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, 2005). FO 27/61, #24, Jackson to Hawkesbury, 26 February 1802, n.f. A. Challamel, Les clubs contre-révolutionnaires. Cercles, comités, sociétés, salons, réunions, cafés, restaurants et librairies (Paris, 1895), pp. 553–602. P. Gautier, Mme. de Staël et Napoleon (Paris, 1903), 78–80; Staël, Ten Years of Exile, trans. A.H. Goldberger (De Kalb, 2000), pp. 42, 54. FO 353/76, Merry to Jackson, 6 February 1802, n.f.; A. Challamel, Les clubs contre-révolutionnaires, pp. 21–2, 570–1; Jackson Diary, i. George to Charlotte Jackson, 3 Jan. 1802, pp. 39–40; Castlereagh Correspondence, x. Quentin Craufurd to Castlereagh, 29 April 1815, pp. 333–4. FO 27/56, François d’Ivernois to James Bland Burges, 2 February 1800, 104–5; Mori, ‘Languages of loyalism: patriotism, nationhood and the state in the 1790s’, EHR, 118 (2001), 33–58; Burrows, ‘The struggle for European opinion in the Napoleonic wars: British francophone propaganda, 1803–1814’, French History, 11 (1997), 29–53. Karen K. List, ‘The role of William Cobbett in the Philadelphia party press, 1794–1799’, Journalism Monographs, 82 (1983), 1–41; FO 5/22, #11, Liston to Grenville, 2 April 1798, ff. 119–20. Wellington loathed the free press. Wellington Dispatches, x. Wellington to Henry Wellesley, 16 January 1814, 452; Burrows, ‘The French exile press in London, 1789–1815’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1992) Bod MS D.Phil c.10449, 263–5. See also ‘British propaganda for Russia in the Napoleonic wars: the Courier d’Angleterre’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 27 (1993), 85–100. Castlereagh Correspondence, x. Castlereagh to Aberdeen, 13 November 1813, pp. 73–4; G.W. Chad, A Narrative of the Revolution in Holland (1814); Schama, Patriots and Liberators, pp. 61–3. Castlereagh Correspondence, x. George Jackson to Castlereagh, 19 August 1814, p. 95; PRONI D.3030/3575, Castlereagh to Charles Stewart, 14 October 1813, ff. 414–21. Castlereagh Correspondence, x. Castlereagh to Liverpool, 30 December 1813, pp. 123–5 and Liverpool to Castlereagh, 19 March 1814, p. 524; PRONI D.3030/3794, Liverpool to Castlereagh, 12 February 1814, ff.

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676–9; NLS MS 6163, Castlereagh to Charles Stuart, 19 April 1815, 9–13; DRO D/Lo/C20(22)(i–ii), #29, Stewart to Castlereagh, 2 July 1815, n.f. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh 1812–1815, pp. 47–8; NLS MS 11324, Liston to Minto, 14 October 1812, f. 87. M.M. Goldsmith, ‘The principles of true liberty: political ideology in eighteenth-century Britain’, Political Studies, 27 (1979), pp. 141–6; Leslie Mitchell, Holland House, pp. 240–8; Mori, ‘The political theory of William Pitt the Younger’, History, 83 (1998), 234–48. DRO D/LO/C23(1)(i–ii), Stewart to Castlereagh, 5 August 1819, n.f.; DRO D/LO/C55(16a)(i–iii), ‘Précis of Peace Propositions addressed by Austria to the Courts of France, Great Britain, Prussia and Russia, 1820’, n.f.; NLS MS 21289, Précis of the Journals of the First Conference held at Laybach, 16 January 1821, 19–27; PRONI D.3044/F/15/1, Clanwilliam to Canning, 8 October 1824, ff. 125–8; Wellington Despatches, ii. Memorandum to Lord Liverpool, 27 January 1825, pp. 401–2. Much here depended upon whether a diplomat was a Whig or a Tory. For Whig views, see the diaries of Augustus John Foster in the Library of Congress. For a Tory perspective, there is no better place than the Wellington Dispatches. NLS MS 6190, William Richard Hamilton to Stuart, 23 December 1818, p. 587; NLS MS 6210, Hamilton to Stuart, 19 September 1828, 473–4; FO 27/391, Stuart to Aberdeen, 19 January 1819, ff. 242–3; NLS MS 6224, Canning to Stuart, 12 November 1823, 677–9. NLS MS 6210, William Richard Hamilton to Stuart, 13 September 1821, p. 397; New York Times, 27 August 1904, p. 4; William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 293–8. NLS MS 6233, Aberdeen to Stuart, 2 September 1828, f. 433. Bertrand Aureau, ‘Langue et polémique: la denunciation de la “sophistique” libérale dans deux journaux royalists, le Conservateur et le Défenseur (1818–1821)’, Romantisme 127 (2005) 9–28. DRO D/Lo/C23(4)(i–iv), Charles Stewart to Castlereagh, 14 August 1819, n.f.; Irene Collins, ‘Liberalism and the newspaper press during the French restoration, 1814–20’, History, 46 (1961), 17–32; Lenore O’Boyle, ‘The image of the journalist in France, Germany and England, 1815–1848’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10 (1968), 290–317; FO 27/391, Stuart to Aberdeen, 19 January 1829, ff. 242–3. NLS 6196, Castlereagh to Stuart, 12 January 1819, ff. 49–54; DRO D/Lo/ C23(5)(i–ii), Charles Stewart to Castlereagh, 19 August 1819, n.f.; DRO D/Lo/C38(5)(14)(i–vi), Stewart to Castlereagh, 5 February 1820, n.f.; Castlereagh Correspondence, i. Stuart to Castlereagh, 20 April 1820, p. 248; FO 97/165, Stuart to Castlereagh, 9 October 1820, n.f. Wellington Dispatches, i. Wellington to Castlereagh, 16 April 1820, pp. 116–21 and ii. Wellington to Canning, 10 February 1823, pp. 31–3; NLS MS 6223, Canning to Stuart, 9 February 1823, 253–4; Foster Papers 8, Foster to the Duchess of Devonshire, 2 December 1823, n.f.; FO 27/328, Aberdeen to Stuart de Rothsay, 15 December 1829, ff. 170–170v.

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Part III

Beyond the call of duty

The title of this part is somewhat deceptive because much of what is described herein was unwritten duty. It was part of a diplomat’s mandate as the king’s representative to give aid and succour to his fellow subjects. This assistance could range from the acquisition of excavation and export permits in the Levant to the wining and dining of Grand Tourists in Paris. Of all these duties, hosting the tour was easily the most onerous. Ever since the Renaissance, young men and their tutors had flocked to the embassies in search of introductions to the cosmopolitan circles of Europe that would, in theory, give them a practical education in good breeding and the ways of the world.To what extent that process was taking place was a subject of increasing criticism amongst educational writers of the eighteenth century.1 Tourism was only one form of cultural interchange in which diplomats engaged. They did not practise cultural diplomacy as we would understand this term: the active promotion, with state sponsorship, of their country’s art, drama, literature or music abroad. No Talleyrand at the Foreign Office was telling his disciples to make foreigners ‘love France’. The import and export of values and beliefs was instead a business carried out by those whose hobbies and interests drove them to seek aesthetic, cultural and intellectual stimulation in their host capitals. This might take place through the authorship of texts, the sponsorship of artistic, scientific or archaeological activities, or membership of learned societies. James Porter, William Hamilton and John Strange are the best known of the virtuosi stationed in the Mediterranean during the last half of the eighteenth century. All were fellows of the Royal Society involved in the pursuit of self-funded science and antiquarian research. In so doing, they encouraged and facilitated the spread of knowledge beyond national borders and in defiance of international rivalries. This work, though on the whole unrecognized and unappreciated by their states, deserves some attention for its contribution to an international community of knowledge.

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Most diplomats did not aim so high in terms of their extracurricular pursuits. They used their expertise instead to write on topics from religion and politics to history, war and travel. Much was published upon retirement as much for self-gratification as for service to the reading community. Having said this, the books and pamphlets written by diplomats were often respected at home and abroad for the light they shed on little known cultures. James Justinian Morier’s Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan was translated into several languages and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Tales of Turkey also sold to a general audience, as did military sagas of the Peninsular War. Macartney’s account of Britain’s first embassy to China was widely read throughout Europe. Some of these texts reflect the ethnographic values of their time, and as such should be treated as works belonging to a genre of Enlightenment armchair travel literature that encouraged readers to reflect on the values of civilization, barbarism, culture and morality.2 As such, they helped to shape British attitudes about Europe and the wider world. In this sense, diplomats and their writings possessed an authority far removed from the realms of politics. Notes 1 Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, pp. 39–40, 310–12; Black, The British Abroad, pp. 216–17; Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour: constructing the English gentleman in eighteenth-century France’, History of Education, 21 (1992), 241–57; Add MS 35471, Charles Bentinck to Robert Keith, 10 May 1751, f. 63. 2 Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia, pp. 1–15; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 17–25; P.J. Marshall, ‘Lord Macartney, India and China: the two faces of the enlightenment’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 19 (1996), 121–31; Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients.

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7

The Grand Tour

Tourists and the Grand Tour were an inescapable part of every diplomat’s life, particularly for those posted to France, Italy and the United Provinces. The tour, a rite of passage for the scions of the nobility and gentry, required young men to travel in particular to France and Italy to acquire the social and culture polish that would make them ‘complete gentlemen’. By 1700, the tour had established conventions, of which reliance for guidance, hospitality and support upon Britain’s embassies was one. War might divert the tour but never put a stop to it, with the result that diplomats in Iberia, Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey received an increased share of tourists during periods of war with France. John Towner has estimated that there were 15–20,000 travellers per annum in Europe in the eighteenth century. Female tourists are much more difficult to count, if not, as Brian Dolan has shown, easier to track. Since travelers, whether tourists or not, might turn up anywhere and at any time, diplomats from St Petersburg to Madrid were obliged to put up with ‘that restless disposition which makes Englishmen appear from time to time in every part of the globe.’1 The Grand Tour was supposed to be a transformative experience by which its participants were to shed the prejudices of youth and provincialism to become sophisticated men of the world. Early to mideighteenth-century British masculinity therefore involved the cultivation of what the French called honnetête, that ease of body and tongue that made the polite gentleman. This hallmark of good breeding had been laid down in the salons of Louis XIV’s reign, and served as a model for all of Europe.2 According to Chesterfield, the honnete homme could converse easily with men and women of all ranks, neither intimidated by kings nor insolent to underlings. Since the tour, so often failed in its purpose: the creation of the man of parts blended with the man of feeling, Philip was subjected to one of his father’s devising. By the end of the century, it had been subject to half a century’s criticism from nationalist authors who denigrated the cosmopolitan values that the tour was designed to

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inculcate, not least because they were so little in evidence amongst those who had undertaken it.3 All diplomats had experience of the tour in several capacities. Many had undergone it as young men, in some cases with the explicit purpose of using it as preliminary training for the foreign service. In 1767 Harris had acquired eight letters of introduction from Lord Shelburne, by which he gained admission to Britain’s embassies. These had been solicited on his behalf by a loving father who wished to see his son well equipped for the tour. By 1791, it was possible ‘by paying two guineas’ at the Foreign Office to acquire the letters without personal supplications to the Secretaries of State. Further down the social scale, some envoys, of whom Liston and Louis Dutens are examples, had used the tour as sources of employment. Liston’s stint as tutor to the Elliot boys had given him a taste for Continental life. After his charges returned to Scotland, he went in search of further work of this description. During the winter of 1766, the Duke of Queensberry was rumoured to be seeking a ‘bearleader’ for his son. This, Liston thought, might be ‘the making of my fortune’.4 Tutors lived in expectation of life annuities from wealthy patrons, and might expect anything from £100 p.a. upwards.5 Dutens, a Swiss Huguenot by birth, had come under the protection of Lord Bute, whose connections were instrumental in attaching him as a chaplain to Stuart Mackenzie’s 1758 Turin embassy. Here Dutens undertook some of the embassy’s hospitality duties towards tourists. ‘I exerted all my power’, he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘and devoted a great deal of my time, to procure amusements, and even advantages for them, during their residence at Turin.’ None of the youths whom he befriended ‘afterwards received me with the slightest welcome when I returned to England.’6 This, one suspects, was attributable to the fact that Dutens was no independent gentleman. In 1766, after quitting Mackenzie’s service and returned to England, he was given a living of £800 p.a. by the Duke of Northumberland. In 1768 Dutens was bitten once more with a lust for travel. Having become Lord Algernon Percy’s bearleader, the pair spent the next four years travelling through Italy, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Poland and the United Provinces. The tutor managed his charge by stealth: ‘I made it a rule to shew him a great deal of complaisance in a thousand little things, in order that he might be of my opinion in those which were essential and which but seldom occurred.’7 He later put his knowledge of Europe to practical use, writing a pamphlet on the inns and routes of the tour for the edification of others. Dutens never took another young man abroad again. In 1779, he nonetheless returned to the foreign service as

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secretary of embassy to Lord Mountstuart at Turin. There he remained until Liston’s arrival in 1783. The hospitality duties of the Grand Tour were often delegated to the underlings. Most members of the service, regardless of rank, nevertheless resented the work associated with the tour. This was expressed in many ways: from complaints about the cost to animadversions upon the conduct and manners of British youth. Of the ‘upwards of 100 British travelers that have been here this winter’, wrote Hamilton in 1792, ‘I can scarcely name two or three who have reaped the least profit, for they have lived together, and lived exactly the same life they would have done in London.’8 Grand Tourists were supposed to mix and mingle with their host societies, in so doing acquiring linguistic skills and social polish. This ideal was rarely achieved, in part because travellers relied upon the embassies to structure their social lives abroad or, in the absence of the corps diplomatique, to consort with each other. This, in Chesterfield’s eyes was a deplorable aspect of the tour. By passing his time instead in the company of Frenchmen and Italians, Philip would become ‘no longer an Englishman, a Frenchman or an Italian, but an European’.The language barrier, admitted Hamilton and Chesterfield, was partly to blame for the social isolation of the British abroad, and fluency in other tongues was clearly a work of time. Despite trying to improve his French by keeping a travel diary in that language, ‘Je ne parle point la langue du pays’, noted Edward Gibbon upon reaching Italy.9 This entry was written after one of many evenings spent in the embassy of Horace Mann, who befriended many a young man during his fifty years in Florence.10 Diplomats were also asked by family or friends to act in loco parentis to the tourists. In 1750 Hanbury Williams undertook to plan the tour of the 17-year-old Earl of Essex, and much about the pedagogical purposes of the tour can be learned from his papers. Similar insights into its aims and objectives can be ascertained from the correspondence exchanged by Stormont and his uncle, Lord Mansfield, on the tour of the 19-year-old Lord Titchfield seven years later. Neither envoy sought to create Chesterfield’s perfect European: what was wanted by the mothers of these teenagers was an education as ‘a Man of the World’.11 Since both women were widows, they left the planning and execution of that education in the hands of men. In 1749, the fatherless 4th Earl of Essex was betrothed to Frances Hanbury Williams. Her father was thereby placed in a unique position as a kind of foster-parent to his future son-in-law. The tour that he planned for Essex was a model of its kind: the youth was first to spend time in Switzerland acclimatizing himself to the languages and social conventions of the Continent. This part of the tour was to be superintended

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by Hanbury Williams’ friend Arthur Villettes, the resident at Berne.12 Phase two of the tour required Essex to travel round the European courts before visiting Hanbury Williams in Dresden. Here differences arose between the two diplomats. Villettes wanted Essex to receive Hanbury Williams’ paternal counsel before undertaking the Italian portion of the tour. In so doing, the young man could be cautioned against the vices he would be exposed to in southern Europe.13 Villettes, who like Dutens was of Huguenot descent, was as steeped in the culture of Protestant moral superiority over Italy as any freeborn Englishman. As it transpired, Essex left Berne for Vienna after eighteenth months with Villettes, and after spending some months there, moved on to other German courts. He reached Dresden in the spring of 1752. Hanbury Williams was favourably impressed with his future son-in-law, but disliked the bearleader, whose modern languages he thought deficient. Villettes sprang to Lady Essex’s defence. She had at least, he argued, chosen ‘a Moral Man’ who would not permit her son to drink or gamble like other young Englishmen.14 The planning of Titchfield’s education was conducted with equal care. The young man, having just come down from Oxford, was ‘giving a bad impression’ in London and Mansfield felt that some seasoning in the ways of the world was requisite. What exactly Titchfield was up to in the capital was not clear, but Mansfield proposed that Titchfield go to live in Stormont’s house at Warsaw to be tutored by ‘what Masters can be got there’. Under the supervision of Stormont and his secretary of embassy, Benjamin Langlois, Titchfield could then be introduced into polite society.15 Langlois, thought Mansfield, would bear the brunt of the bearleading, for which he would be handsomely rewarded by the Portland family. Langlois, like Liston, stood to receive a modest pension for his services. Although the pair were amenable to the plan, finding an escort for Titchfield soon became a problem. Neither Mansfield nor the duchess wished to entrust the youth to ‘a common Bear Leader’, but he could not be permitted to travel to Europe by himself. There matters rested in June 1759.16 The comments of Mansfield, Hanbury Williams and Villettes reveal many concerns about the tour: most notably the qualifications and reliability of bearleaders; the importance of keeping good company; and the moral pitfalls of travel abroad. The chief concern of parents was that their sons would take to gambling and drink. The passage of time did not change these anxieties which, if anything, may have intensified over the century in response to the criticisms of the tour to be found in educational literature. ‘My poor Head is full of you and your going abroad’, wrote Lady Stafford to her second son, Granville Leveson Gower, in 1790.

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Young men, thought she, ‘learn follies and contract Vices in Foreign Countries without getting either knowledge or Improvement’. Many, claimed she, ‘lose all Idea of Religion; they hold the Government of the Passions in Contempt, connect themselves with married Women, and return what the World calls a fine Gentleman’.17 Superficial Continental graces were, in her eyes, no substitute for true British virtue. The ideal tour, or so thought many, involved assiduous study and the acquisition of useful skills, whether linguistic or social. What Hanbury Williams had planned for Essex had been a model of its kind. Others nevertheless managed to avoid temptation without such careful guardians, for which they were praised on account of the tour’s reputation as an opportunity to sow wild oats. In 1793 Hugh Elliot wrote to Lord Uxbridge that the conduct of his third son, Edward Paget, at Dresden was everything that a virtous father could desire. Captain Paget, despite disagreements with his bearleader, had ‘neither plaid [nor] been guilty of any one excess whatever’.18 Hugh, who had a soft spot for young soldiers, also befriended the 17-year-old Augustus John Foster in 1798. Foster had also gone to Dresden to start a ten-week military tour of Germany. Six of these were to be spent visiting fortifications, in addition to improving his language skills, ‘but what is [a] fortnight to learn anything in Mr Elliot advises me to stay here 6 or 8 months to learn German & French & military exercises’.19 Hamilton, unlike Elliot, did not see it as his responsibility to act in loco parentis to tourists. Others, most notably Keith junior, took a keen interest in the welfare of the young. This speaks, both to his fondness for company, and to a desire to oblige their fathers at home. Between 1773 and 1785 he presented 400 young men at the Imperial court and, before that, had welcomed many others to Dresden.20 Keith, who was ‘overloaded with recommendations’, never had less, or so he claimed, than twenty to forty pupils at any time. The cost of wining and dining them was enormous. Keith nonetheless saw it as his duty not only to entertain his guests, but to introduce them properly to the best society in Vienna. This he had learned from his father, who from 1748 to 1757 had been Britain’s ambassador in Vienna. In 1751 Essex had written to Hanbury Williams that he was ‘almost always’ in Keith senior’s company, by virtue of which he had been introduced into the homes of the Countess of Harrach and the Countess of Tarruca.21 Both Keiths also solicited invitations from their colleagues in the corps diplomatique on behalf of their young men. Essex dined several times at the French mission while Keith’s ‘pupils’ ended the Carnival of 1777 with a ball at the Spanish embassy.22 Although Keith did his best to ensure that his charges acquired some social graces, his ‘school’ – as

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he called it – was not meant to breed superficiality. Such criticisms were often made of the tour at home. At the same time he thought that the English: ‘you Johns’, as he put them to a friend in London, had a tendency to take life too seriously.23 Some fun and frivolity would, Keith thought, ameliorate the earnest and awkward features of the English character. Like Chesterfield, Keith was no admirer of mauvais honte, the bashful self-consciousness of the Englishman abroad. Having said this, he did not endorse Chesterfield’s ideal of the Briton as an insinuating cosmopolite. Diplomats needed this veneer for their work. Their countrymen did not for such behavior was inconsistent with British norms of ‘independent’ masculinity.24 To what extent the tour could make Chesterfield’s perfect European without constant supervision is a moot point. This is one reason why bearleaders were so common a butt of parental and diplomatic criticism. By 1760 the tour had become so formulaic that there is scepticism about how much broadening of minds was taking place. Jeremy Black has found one man who read Montesquieu’s l’Esprit des lois (1748) in preparation for his travels, but the young were much more likely to have consulted the numerous guidebooks, educational texts and manuscript memoirs that told travellers what to see and do, in addition to how those experiences should be interpreted. So much of a cultural institution had the tour become that travel letters, journals and memoirs often followed well-established formats. In consequence, it is often difficult to tell what people were getting out of it.25 Whilst in France, the tourists were exhorted to reflect on the tyranny of despotism and the superiority of Protestant reason to Catholic superstition. At Rome they were to contemplate the causes for the rise and fall of empires, and – at Venice – to consider what constituted the true virtues of commercial republicanism. The lenses, in short, through which Europe was to be seen before the French Revolution were those of Court and Country Whiggism.26 Upon starting his tour of Germany, Harris read and praised Cesare Beccaria’s Of Crimes and Punishments (1965): ‘Many great and humane sentiments in it’. He nevertheless thought that the book’s subject matter could have been better treated, had not Beccaria’s freedom of thought been restrained ‘both by the government he lives under, and the religion he embraces’. Anti-Popery and anti-absolutism were alive and well. On the subject of French culture, Harris was less than charitable. ‘They have no capital painters, few good sculptors, and still fewer authors’, wrote Harris after a visit to Paris in 1768, for their authors were ‘either totally devoid of talents, or employ them in such a manner and upon such subjects, as to render their works of very little use to the community’.27 His double-edged contempt for

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France was in keeping with the blend of admiration and envy displayed by many Britons towards their neighbour across the Channel. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars diverted the Grand Tour into central, northern and eastern Europe. Travellers also headed in increasing numbers for the Mediterranean, particularly the Levant. In 1801, Charles Stuart undertook a tour of Germany, Poland and Russia, while, in 1805, Augustus John Foster went to Greece and Turkey. Stuart’s tour conformed to the traditional Grand Tour model of introductions to the courtly and noble circles of Europe.28 By this date, tourist musings upon classical antiquity had been informed by the conservative writings of the 1790s. ‘The French Philosophers & Atheists thought that they had made a great discovery in Morality, & that thro this means, the 19th Century was to soar far above any preceding it’, wrote Foster in 1805 of Greece and Turkey, ‘but they have had a miserable crash, & shewn themselves & us that we are just what our ancestors were before us.’ Foster, having repudiated all belief in the perfectibility of man, went on to agree with Malthus ‘that Crimes & Wars are absolutely necessary, to the human species, to prevent their too great increase’. Warlike states, Foster continued, would always be the most virtuous because they shed their excess population in military casualties, in so doing freeing up property for distribution amongst the remaining inhabitants. Since inequalities of wealth were subject to periodic adjustment in such states, their residents were thus disposed ‘to all the social & moral Virtues, from being under no necessity of acting to the Contrary’.29 Rome had rose and fell, added he, because; having established itself as the paramount power in Europe, it had not possessed ‘the usual means of threwing off the Excess of its Population’. In the absence of war, scarcities in natural resources had produced ‘violent & frequent civil Contentions, & their Concomitant Vices, Robberies & all the Crime that they lead to’. Foster, in common with others, spent part of his tour reflecting on the vissicitudes of ancient and modern history. He also considered what it meant to be British, in the definition of which hostility to France remained dominant. The old ‘others’, – absolutism and Catholicism – against which Britons had pitted themselves and their nation, had been replaced with atheism, anarchism and speculative philosophy. Britain’s identity as a polite and commercial power was thus always defined in contrast to France. As Jeremy Black has pointed out, the observations made by British travellers in that country illustrate the tensions between cosmopolitanism and xenophobia inherent in the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.30 Italy, on the other hand, was no longer a great power, and had been a cultural magnet for northern Europe since the Renaissance. It was therefore easier in many ways both to praise and

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patronize. Italy, or so it has often been claimed, lay at the ideological and mythical heart of the Grand Tour. Even Rome, the dreaded centre of Popery and superstition, to which no sixteenth- or seventeenthcentury traveller could go without special dispensation, was reconfigured after the Glorious Revolution as a secular shrine for classicists and antiquarians. Italy was a site upon which genteel amateurism could be transformed into connoisseur status, in part through an informed acquisition of the art and antiquities that had long been part of a tourist’s homewards baggage.31 After 1720, thanks to the final resolution of the Habsburg-Bourbon contest for control of the Mediterranean, Italy became a second-rank political theatre in Europe. Notwithstanding the Royal Navy’s continued interest in the region, there was little political work to be done: so much so that Horace Mann, the resident at Florence, called himself ‘an ambassador of goodwill’.32 English consuls and diplomats had long been accustomed to making money from the tour, discreet though the latter often were about their activities. They not only advised tourists on where virtu might be bought, but acted as local agents for clients in Britain. Horace Mann’s correspondence with Horace Walpole is peppered with such commissions and, in 1767, the first Lady Holland asked William Hamilton to find her some Sicilian agate tables.33 Consuls were entrepeneurial dealers in souvenirs. Joseph Smith, resident at Venice from 1744 to 1760, was an ardent bibliophile and art collector who, through his patronage of Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, played an important role in familiarizing Britons with Italian landscape and portraiture. Financial difficulties forced him to start selling off his collections in the early 1760s. George III bought much of the art and the Bibliotheca Smithiana, a catalogue of which had been printed in 1755, for £10,000.The books were later given by George IV to the British Museum while the paintings, drawings and engravings remain in the Royal Collection.34 Later consuls drew upon Smith’s example. John Udney at Leghorn sold £10,000 of paintings to Catherine the Great and Sir James Wright at Venice sold another £4,000 of art to the Earl of Coventry. Genteel diplomats were more squeamish about selling their virtu so openly. Strange confessed himself ‘not calculated to bargain on these matters; especially with guests here; as others have done’, noting that his merchant predecessors had ‘really used to traffick in the art with almost every English man that came to Venice’.35 He and Hamilton preferred to dispose of their surplus art discreetly through the mediation of family, friends and business contacts at home. In 1773, Charles Greville was having trouble selling William Hamilton’s Correggio Venus. Hamilton, who had a debt of £3,000 on which he was paying 5 per cent interest, was determined

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to get the best possible price, either from the Duchess of Portland or the Empress of Russia.36 The painting had originally come from Charles I’s collection, and sold by Cromwell to Queen Christina of Sweden. Despite his protestations against art-dealing, by 1782 Smith was selling bulk lots of Old Masters.37 The going rate for twenty to thirty paintings was £1,000 and, for fifty, Strange charged £5,000. Udney had relied on his brother-in-law, a merchant named Edward Wheeler in London, to act as an intermediary for this transaction. The buyer, a Calcutta merchant named George Livins, wanted some ‘pleasing and youthful Figures with graceful Draperies’. To these Strange added some Holy Families, ‘a few Landscapes and views besides two Pictures of Animals and Companions and other pair of Flowers’. Upon protest, Livins was told that some Catholic subject matter was unavoidable in any sample of Italian art. Another such compilation of paintings was sold to the Hon. Thomas Harley in the same year.38 In May 1783 Strange’s wife died and he decided to retire to England. This necessitated the rapid sale of his collection. Friends in England and Ireland were asked to drum up interest though the market, or so he was told by dealer-friends in London, was not strong. Strange nevertheless made other big sales and returned to England in 1786. He retired from the service in 1789. Caroline Holland, a woman of wealth and sophistication, would have known exactly what she wanted from Mann. Livins was clearly more at the mercy of Strange. Since British debates on beauty were, in the words of Robert W. Jones, ‘never far removed from a conception of how members of a polite society should conduct and express themselves’, what constituted good taste was determined primarily by domestic trends.39 In addition to Old Masters, whether real or fake, British tourists sought souvenir portraits and landscapes as hallmarks of good taste and self-fashioning.40 Here diplomats were in a strong position to promote the work of local artists, as Strange did for Francesco Guardi, or British artists either studying or working in Italy. Hamilton, active in both respects, went in further in also trying to inculcate some Neapolitan interest in art patronage by appealing to Ferdinand’s love of the hunt. Local artists were commissioned by Hamilton to depict the chase, after which the king was encouraged to buy the pictures and order more. This was done in the hope that nobles would follow the king’s lead: ‘for you know how far the example of the court is followed in countries such as these’.41 That British acquisitions of art and antiquities in the Mediterranean served multiple social, cultural and intellectual ends comes as no surprise: what is news are the increasing levels of diplomatic complicity in the process. Incumbents of the Italian and, later Turkish, stations were

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often classical scholars and antiquarians who had been active agents and, sometimes, authors since the Renaissance. The scope of their activities nevertheless began to expand at the end of the eighteenth century, in part because British tourists began to enter the Levant in larger numbers come the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but also because Greece and the Near East began to command an increasing status as sites of cultural achievement. One has only to think of the Elgin marbles in this respect. All of this cultural capital was collected primarily by men. What a woman was supposed to get out of the Grand Tour was never explicitly stated. As Brian Dolan writes, ‘science and politics, national identity, ancient languages and religious toleration’, subjects appropriate for the male traveller’s gaze, were not seen to lie in a woman’s compass. While French, dancing and polite conversation were necessary accoutrements of the lady, women were supposed to acquire these skills at home. With the exception of Jacobites and Roman Catholics, few British girls were educated in Europe, and in the cases of those who were, this schooling was often looked upon as a curse. The case of Guistiniana Wynn, the illegitimate daughter of an English gentleman and his Venetian mistress, is a case in point. Guistiniana was raised primarily in Italy on account of her parentage. She embarked on a passionate affair with Andrea Corner at the age of sixteen which led to other entanglements with noblemen of dubious repute. These brought Giustiniana widespread notoriety and barred her from ever finding a British spouse. She eventually married an Austrian count in 1761.42 France and Italy were the favourite destinations for female travellers because they could go there without a male escort. Few women, as Keith junior complained in 1769, ventured into central or eastern Europe. When they did, they were little prepared for the experience. As Burnet wrote in exasperation to Mitchell, Miss Elizabeth Chudleigh was ‘a true English Woman; she is greatly surprised not to find all the Conveniences and snugness one meets with in the Inns in England.’ Chivalry and duty obliged Burnet to assist her in finding board and lodging, but ‘she expected to find everything on the same footing at Berlin as in London.’ Others, if more resourceful, found the roads and food difficult to stomach. Priscilla Fane, who could not accustom herself to ‘the garlic and onions of foreign dishes’, boiled a fowl and potatoes for ‘a good wholesome dinner every day’.43 Elizabeth Chudleigh, like Lady Hester Stanhope, was unusual in that she was single and traveled alone. Most women did not go abroad until they were married unless they came from noble families. By 1799, Hannah More was writing that foreign travel for women was corrupt

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and unpatriotic, not that these strictures prevented them from going abroad. Many independent women from Maria Edgeworth to Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Berry welcomed travel, not only for the enlightenment it brought them, but as a liberating release from English social conventions. While Wollstonecraft’s liaison with Gilbert Imlay in revolutionary Paris is the best known example of free love, many of those who criticized Emma Hamilton (Lady Elizabeth Webster, who met Henry Fox in Italy; Lady Bessborough, described by Byron as ‘the hack whore of the last century’; and Lady Elgin, who was divorced by her husband in 1807) had led – or would lead – chequered lives.44 Sexual adventure, particularly initiation, was an accepted part of the tour for men. For married women, it could serve similar purposes. Diplomatic wives bore much of the burden when it came to entertaining tourists, particularly when they were women. Some spouses were more assiduous than others at this task. Catherine Hamilton was glad to retreat with the court to Caserta in the summer, though the tourists were disgruntled to find the couple removed from Naples: ‘in the Summer [we] live much to ourselves’. Strange, who possessed a nervous and solitary disposition, left visitors to the ministrations of his wife, ‘who will compensate for my involuntary Deficiencies’.45 It is no wonder that her death sent him back to England in 1786. By no means all ambassadors at Paris or the Hague were married before 1815, and in cases where the correspondence of their wives survives, it does not necessarily say much about the care of travellers. Unlike Harriet Granville and Elizabeth Stuart, Harriet Harris, Eleanor Eden and Elizabeth Sutherland had to little say on the subject.46 From this, one suspects that tourist care became a more onerous responsibility after the Napoleonic Wars and this is borne out by criticisms of women for derelictions of duty. In 1829, Henry Austen complained to Charles Stuart that his wife had not been invited to one of Lady Stuart’s functions. This Stuart blamed on Lord Aberdeen’s failure to mention Mrs Austen in his letter of introduction. Upon returning to Paris in 1828, the Stuarts had instituted rigid conditions of access to prevent their home from invasion. Stuart refused to admit Austen’s claim that ‘not to appear at the Embassy operates as a barrier to other Society, particularly in the eyes of Foreigners’. This, asserted Austen, was the prevailing principle in other European capitals, and partly explains why tourists could not afford to shun Emma Hamilton’s company. Stuart also refused to accept responsibility ‘for the introduction of my Countrymen & their Families into the Society of Paris’. That was his wife’s duty, the performance of which lay in invitations to the embassy. Admission therein, added Stuart, was conditional upon the presentation of Mrs Austen by a lady of Lady Stuart’s

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acquaintance, ‘a preliminary which, I am sorry to say, has become absolutely necessary’.47 When Elizabeth Stuart began to entertain in Paris, she had been bewildered by the hordes of guests at her parties. ‘I have now achieved at least knowing all the French people who come to my parties’, she observed in 1816, ‘but I am puzzled now and then by the English, if I have not a clue to their names.’48 It was as well that the Stuarts had instituted some conditions of admission upon undertaking a second tour of duty. As Harriet Granville noted, Elizabeth had been taken up by the élégantes, the most fashionable trendsetters of the French capital, which was no small contributing factor to her success as a hostess. Harriet, who disdained such company, preferred instead to upstage them. After I had settled my dinner and dance for last Friday, I heard that Esterhazy had asked for that day all the élégantes to dine and spend the evening at Roisny. There were two things to be done, to put myself off, or to ask them to put him off. Do you think I did either? I know them better. I asked all the Diplomacy to dinner, sent Guiche and Fimarçon word that I was sorry I should not see them, as I knew they would probably stay late, that it was not worth their while to hurry back, and bid Cradock tell them not to gêner themselves, for I should not expect any of them. The result? They made Paul [Esterhazy] give up his dinner, and all rushed here at an early hour. It was a bold stroke, for the fact is I should have lost all my best dancers and prettiest women had I failed, but I trusted to my knowledge of them and was not disappointed.49

Had things not gone in her favour, she is unlikely to have been so proud of herself. Harriet had laid down entertaining rules of her own for tourists. Upon starting to find her feet in Parisian society, she soon discovered not that English tourists did not mix well with the French. ‘I am every day more convinced that any amalgamation of French and English in society is impossible.’50 The French saw the English guests as intruders, and the English, ‘not paid for it like me’, made no effort to socialize with others. Her strategy, which involved the organization of separate events for the two groups, was not new. Forty years earlier, the Duke of Dorset had served tourists and expats by staging weekly dinners from which Lord Elgin, then a student in Paris, had stayed away.51 Harriet dealt with the Cannings’ visit of 1826 by holding two functions in their honour: a large party of 100 for British travellers expecting to see the couple and, the following evening, a small soirée ‘entirely French, with the exception of [the] Cowpers, Hardys and Lord Ashley’. Cosmopolitans could be safely introduced to the French, and the élégantes found Ashley ‘superbe, magnifique, and he is much pleased’.52

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Lord Granville, like others with independent means, never complained about the cost of the tour nor the burdens that it placed on the embassy. Keith junior, on the other hand, had wailed for the loss of his Tweeddale acres while Hugh Elliot, amongst others, cited the costs incurred by the tour as grounds for promotion. These complaints did not fall upon deaf ears though extra money was not always available. In 1816, Stuart was told by William Richard Hamilton that the Liverpool ministry would not underwrite special fêtes. ‘Can you not contrive to reduce your Establishments, by publicly announcing that you adopt the general system of reform and Oeconomy – give no grand Dinners – for a time’, wrote the undersecretary. The government knew that Paris was full of ‘Crowds of English who Expect to be fed’, but in the aftermath of an expensive and prolonged war, money was not to be found. The Stuarts were advised to take a house in the country and live á l’Anglais during the summer months. Stuart was to commute into Paris when required ‘on the post days, or for conferences’.53 Many diplomats had adopted the country house expedient during the eighteenth century. Though the cost of the tour was rarely mentioned as a cause, one suspects that it was no small contributing factor to the periodic return of British diplomats from the courts and capitals of Europe. Notes 1 John Towner, ‘The grand tour: a key phase in the history of tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 3 (1985), 304; Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London, 2001); Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour, Or, A Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France . . . 4 vols (1756) i. p. xi; Auckland Correspondence, ii. Spanish Journal, 27 November 1788, p. 120. 2 French and Rotheray, ‘“Upon your entry into the world”’, pp. 405–6, 420–1; Robert Wokler, ‘Rites of passage and the grand tour: discovering, imagining and inventing European civilization in the age of Enlightenment’, in Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto and Niki Koniordos (eds), Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images (New York, 2007), pp. 205–21. 3 Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour’, pp. 241–5. 4 Walpole Correspondence, xxxv. Hamilton to Walpole, 17 April 1792, p. 440; NLS MS 11012, Liston to Elliot, 5 December 1766, ff. 82–3. 5 NLS MS 5514, Thomas Johnes to Liston, 1771, ff. 79–80. 6 Dutens, Memoirs of a Traveller, i. pp. 223–4. 7 Ibid., ii. pp. 120. 8 Walpole Correspondence, xxxv. Hamilton to Walpole, 17 April 1792, p. 440; Chesterfield Letters, i. Chesterfield to Stanhope, 30 April 1750 OS, pp. 336–7.

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9 Ibid., ii. Chesterfield to Stanhope, 22 September 1752 OS, pp. 547–8; Bonnard, Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome, 9 August 1764, p. 204. 10 Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers in Italy, pp. 635–6. 11 Mansfield TD 2002/42/18/6(7/1–2) Box 18, Bundle 6, Mansfield to Stormont, December 1757. 12 CHW, vol. 51 (10909), Essex to Hanbury Williams, 12 December 1750, n.f. 13 CHW, vol. 12 (10898), Villettes to Hanbury Williams, 30 January 1751, n.f. 14 CHW, vol. 18 (10889), Villettes to Hanbury Williams, 6 May 1752, 164–6. 15 Mansfield TD 2002/42/18/6/(5/1–2), Box 18, Bundle 6, Mansfield to Stormont, 8 November 1757. 16 Mansfield TD 2002/42/18/(12), Box 18, Bundle 6, Mansfield to Stormont, 5 June 1759. 17 Leveson Gower Correspondence, i. Lady Stafford to Leveson Gower, 14 February 1790, p. 39. 18 NLS MS 13021, Elliot to Lord Uxbridge, 15 January and 7 March 1793, ff. 110–11, 115. 19 Augustus John Foster Papers, Box 1, 2 September 1798, n.f. 20 Keith Correspondence, i. Keith to Keith senior, 30 December 1769, p. 123; Romance of Diplomacy, ii. Murray Keith to Andrew Drummond, 27–8 September 1785, p. 189. 21 CHW, vol. 54 (10910), Essex to Hanbury Williams, 30 August 1751, ff. 19–20. 22 Romance of Diplomacy, ii. Keith to Anthony Chamier, 11–12 February 1777, pp. 80–1. 23 Ibid., i. Keith to Bradshaw, 28 August 1773, p. 442. 24 McCormack, The Independent Man, pp. 10–14. 25 Black, The British Abroad, p. 232. 26 Black, France and the Grand Tour (Basingstoke, 2003); Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1997); John Eglin, Venice Transfigured. The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660–1797 (Basingstoke, 2001). 27 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Prussian Diary, 17–18 July 1767, p. 1 and Harris to Harris senior, 9 November 1768, pp. 162–3. 28 Bod MS Eng. misc. c. 256, Travel Journal of Stuart de Rothsay, 1801, n.f. 29 PRONI D.3618/C/4, Grand Tour Diary of Augustus John Foster, Greece & Turkey, c. 1805, ff. 227, 231–2. 30 Black, France and the Grand Tour, p. 125. 31 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London, 1998); Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 1996); Clare Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London, 2000); Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2003). 32 W.S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven, 1927–83), vol. 17, p. xxxii.

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33 Lewis Lesley, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (London, 1961); F. Haskell, ‘The foreign residents’, in Patrons and painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, 2nd edn (New Haven, 1980), pp. 299–316; Autograph Letters, i, Lady Holland to Hamilton, 20 June 1767, p. 6. 34 W.G. Constable and J.G. Links, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697–1768, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Oxford, 1969) i. pp. 16–26; F. Vivian, The Consul Collection: Masterpieces of Italian Drawing from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, Raphael to Canaletto (Munich, 1989). The residue was sold after Smith’s death in 1772. The sale started on 25 January and took place over thirteen days. The collection, which included missals and manuscripts, contained 2,099 items. 35 Ingamells, pp. 227–8, 962–3; Add MS 33349, Strange to Thomas Martyn, 24 September 1782, ff. 12–13; Add MS 60537, Strange to Edward Wheeler, 28 June 1784, f. 92. 36 Nancy R. Ramage, ‘Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter and Dealer: The Acquisition and Dispersal of His Collections’, American Journal of Archaeology, 94 (1990), 469–80; Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 8 June 1773, pp. 21–2. 37 Ingamells, pp. 871, 903–4; Ilaria Bignamini and Giorgio Marini, ‘Venice’, in Ilaria Bignamini and Giorgio Marini(eds), Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 186–7. 38 Add MS 60537, Strange to Edward Wheeler, December 1782, ff. 86–9 and Wheeler to Strange, 5 February 1784, f. 90; Clare Haynes, ‘The culture of judgement: art and anti-Catholicism in England, c.1660–c.1760’, Historical Research, 78: 202 (2005), 483–505. 39 Leon Rosenstein, ‘The Aesthetic of the Antique’, Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, 45 (1987), 393–402; Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge, 1998), p. 2. 40 Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800 (London, 1925); Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, 1993). 41 Ingamells, pp. 14, 78, 208–9, 563–4; Walpole Correspondence, xxxv. Hamilton to Horace Walpole, 28 May 1782, p. 433. 42 Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers, p. 10; Andrea di Robilant, A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2003). 43 Burnett of Kemnay Papers, Bundle 85, Mitchell to Burnet, 9 July 1765, n.f.; Letters of Lady Burghersh, Lady Burghersh to Emily Wellesley Pole, 22 October 1813, p. 35. 44 More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 3rd edn, 2 vols (1799) i. pp. ix, 101–2; Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and

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45 46 47

48 49 50 51

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Journals, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1973–1994), p.vii. Byron to J. Murray, 31 August 1820, p. 169. Mary Hamilton, Catherine Hamilton to Mary Hamilton, 1768, pp. 3–4; BL Egerton 1969, Strange to John Hatsell, 25 November 1773, f. 5. Leveson Gower Correspondence, i. Lady Sutherland to Lady Stafford, January 1791, p. 30. NLS MS 21305, Henry Austen to Stuart de Rothsay, 14 and 15 December 1829, ff. 58, 59 and Stuart de Rothsay to Austen, 15 December 1829, ff. 57–8. The Story of Two Noble Lives, ii. Elizabeth Stuart to Lady Stuart, 10 June 1816, pp. 41–2. Granville Correspondence, i. Harriet Granville to the Duke of Devonshire, July 1825, pp. 348–9. Ibid., i. Harriet Granville to Georgiana Morpeth, 20 September 1826, p. 392. Hector Bolitho, Rough Draft of Opening Chapters of a Biography of Thomas, Earl of Elgin (1920), p. 104. I am grateful to the Earl of Elgin for permission to consult this text. Ibid., i. Harriet Granville to Georgiana Morpeth, 9 October 1826, p. 397. Romance of Diplomacy, ii. Keith to Andrew Drummond, 28 September 1785, p. 189; NLS MS 6172, Hamilton to Stuart, 1 November 1816, ff. 573–6.

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8

From ancients to moderns

Diplomats always lived in several intersecting worlds, and notwithstanding the fact that much of their time was spent at court, they were capable of exercising intellectual and cultural influence on trends outside it. The status of Rome as the cradle of western civilization, combined with the civic humanism of the eighteenth century that made the British identify with aspects of classical politics and governance, ensured a high degree of interest in archeological and philological work on ancient Italy. Through an implicit authority based on residence and familiarity with the region, diplomats possessed the potential – if they chose to exercise it – to shape British thinking about the classical world. William Hamilton and John Strange, both amateur antiquarians and scientists, left their mark on British perceptions of the peninsula in different ways. Sir William’s unique influence upon British views of southern Italy is now recognized by historians, classicists and literary scholars. Like other northern European residents of the region, he loved all objects of virtu. Unlike others, he saw people as possessions too. As David Nolta has pointed out, ‘nothing of interest, no curiosity of nature, no artist of any talent, no archeological find, turned up in the vicinity of Naples without passing through, and sometimes remaining in, Sir William’s hands, or at least his house’. There they could be admired by tourists or later returned to England associated with his name.1 Although Strange too had a weakness for virtu, and like Hamilton sent accounts of his finds to the Society of Antiquaries in London, the former was not as assiduous a self-publicist as the latter. When Hamilton took his first leave of absence from Naples in 1771, he brought home a collection of 730 vases, 175 terracottas, 300 specimens of ancient glass, 627 bronzes, 150 ivories, 150 gems, 143 gold ornaments and 6,000 coins. Others collected art and antiquities, but had nothing to equal this. The collection was introduced to the public in 1766–67 by the publication of four illustrated folio volumes accompanied by a catalogue put together by the artist Pierre François Hughes, whose nom de plume was the Baron

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D’Hancarville. The Antiquités etrusques, grecques et romaines, had cost Hamilton £6,000 to produce, arguably to little profit for the British Museum bought the collection in 1772 for only £8,410. Strange and Worsley collected to please themselves rather than others, for they had no burning desire ‘to assist and promote the arts.’2 Hamilton’s determination to place his stamp upon British taste took some novel forms. In 1773, he sent his collection of ancient glass fragments to Matthew Boulton, owner of the Soho Works in Birmingham, with hints as to the use of the artifacts as models for modern glassware. ‘Vases of good forms of this kind of composition, imitating onyx, verdantique, serpentine, &c. with ormoulu wou’d be charming.’3 Hamilton never received a word of thanks from Boulton and sent no more presents to Soho. In 1768 his brother-in-law, Sir William Cathcart, had lent some proofs from the Antiquités to Josiah Wedgwood. When Cathcart became the ambassador to Russia in 1768, Wedgwood supplied him with vases for display upon ‘her Ladyship’s Chimney Pieces’ in the hope of enticing Russian nobles to order his wares.4 In 1770, Wedgwood received an order from Catherine II for a cream Queen’s Ware dinner service of twenty-four place settings. This, the Husk Service, was hand painted with flower motifs. In 1773, she ordered a second Frog Service of dinner and dessert plates which were to be hand-painted with scenes of ‘real views & real buildings’ of Britain.5 Choice items from the 944 piece service were exhibited in 1774 at Wedgwood’s new London showrooms, where they excited considerable interest. Since the production costs of both Russian services were high, the firm made comparatively little profit on these orders. Their publicity value to Wedgwood was incalculable. By 1772, Wedgwood was convinced that his products were best introduced to Europe through Britain’s embassies. ‘If we had a clever ambassador’, he wrote to his business partner, Joseph Bentley, ‘something might be done’, and the pair went on to solicit the support of Ainslie at Constantinople, Stormont in Paris and Auckland at the Hague.6 Wedgwood found the Antiquités and the Hamilton Collection in the British Museum an inspiration for the production of new ‘Etruscan’ ceramics, most notably black basalt. The diplomat was pleased to patronize the potter. ‘I shall surely send you some drawings of the fine shaped vases soon; continue to be very attentive to the simplicity and elegance of the forms, which is the chief article, and you cannot consult the originals in the museum too often.’7 The most famous Wedgwood copy of a Hamilton collectable is the jasperware, still in production, that was modelled on the Portland Vase. Hamilton had sold the Barberini Vase to the Duchess of Portland in 1784, and Wedgwood managed to borrow it for a year after her death to

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take copies. In 1786, he sought testimonials concerning the vase’s origins from Hamilton ‘which I mean to print and deliver’ with the finished product.8 Sir William was happy to oblige. He did these things for the greater glory of his name, and was easily slighted by what he perceived as ingratitude. By 1776, he was becoming annoyed by the attitude of the British Museum towards his offerings. The presents I have made, & have further to make to the Museum since my return here have, I am sure, cost me near £300, tho’ the old dons do not so much as thank me when I send a work of art. They are delighted with a spider or a shell, & sent me many thanks for such presents.9

He continued to send objects to the museum ‘for the honour of the Hamiltonian collection’. Amongst these were the wax ex voto offerings made by the wives of sterile men at the annual rite of St Cosmo, the remnant of an ancient fertility cult that Sir William discovered at Isernia north of Naples in 1781. In 1782, he sent the museum some of the waxes, along with an account of the festivities celebrating St Cosmo’s great toe, ‘for so the Phallus is called, tho’ it is precisely the same thing’. After witnessing the rite for himself in 1785, he described it at length in a letter to Richard Payne Knight, who printed it in his Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786). The British Museum’s account, along with the offerings, were to be placed for display alongside the original artifacts of the cult. In sending his good wishes to Joseph Banks, Hamilton hoped that ‘your Great Toe & your purse may never fail you’.10 Hamilton cared little for the provenance of his collectables. Merit lay in their beauty, rarity or novelty. In 1788 he had started to collect again, spurred by the discovery of new vases in Neapolitan and Sicilian tombs. ‘I do not mean to be such a fool’, he wrote in 1790, ‘as to give or leave them to the British Museum.’ A second illustrated catalogue, considerably cheaper than the first, was produced in four volumes between 1791 and 1795. Hamilton had spent £3,000 on the acquisition of these vases, and wished to set his own price on the sale. Although the war with France retarded the disposal of this second collection, cheap editions of the Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases Mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship Discovered in Sepulchres in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were soon in circulation, and had a significant impact upon the work of British painters and sculptors.11 Antiquarians and classicists too, would ‘have the greatest obligation to me’, for the images on the vases depicted many subjects from Homer, and would cast much light upon the history and mythology of the ancient world. Last, but not least, Hamilton expected thanks from ‘manufacturers in earthenware’. If

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Wedgwood had access to this collection for two years, ‘he wou’d profit much by them’.12 Sir William was not the first diplomat-collector of the eighteenth century to have resided at Naples. Sir James Gray, from 1753 to 1763 the incumbent of the station, had also been an avid antiquarian. Hamilton, who had begun to collect art in London, was different in that he encouraged others to emulate his example. In 1794, Richard Worsley, recently arrived at Venice, issued the first part of his own illustrated catalogue, the Museum Worsleyanum. A second part appeared in 1804. Having left Philipa de Cordova in Spain, Worsley embarked from Rome in 1785 on an extensive tour of the Levant, which took him to Athens, Rhodes, Troy, Cairo, Constantinople and the Crimea. He returned to England in 1788 with an impressive collection of statues, reliefs and gems, which were placed on display at his Appledurcombe home on the Isle of Wight. Only 150 copies of the Museum Worsleyanum were printed in English and Italian at a cost to the author of £2,887. Worsley too had a big ego: ‘I think it the finest printed Book I have yet seen.’13 By 1794, two volumes of Hamilton’s second collection had been published and the two men exchanged copies of their work. John Strange also followed in Sir William’s footsteps, engaging in much the same pursuits: art collecting, antiquarianism, marine biology and geology. 14 Hamilton came first to art and last to science. Strange followed the opposite trajectory. Having inherited a fortune from his father, once Master of the Rolls, Strange travelled in France, Switzerland and Italy between 1757 and 1764. During these years he acquired a passion for botany, geology, natural geography and archaeology, in part through introduction to Italian naturalists and antiquarians. In 1766 Strange became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and, shortly thereafter, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. By the time of his posting to Venice in 1773, he had published several notable papers in Archaeologia and the Philosophical Transactions. He had also been elected a member of several foreign academies.15 Hamilton did not get interested in volcanoes, lightning or earthquakes until he moved to Naples. His enthusiasms were broad rather than deep, for he had a peripatetic mind that was interested in everything new. In this, he was not unusual amongst the virtuosi. Hamilton’s communications, whether to the Royal Society or the Society of Antiquarians, were in general better received than Strange’s. Both organizations were eager for new discoveries, with the result that papers on Pompeii and Herculaneum were more interesting than another article on Roman philology. Strange, whose knowledge of history and classics was much deeper than Hamilton’s, had been praised for papers of the early 1770s

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on the ancient landmarks of Dalmatia and Istria. He cannot have been pleased when, in 1777, Dr Jeremiah Milles, the President of the Antiquarians, complained that ‘Inscriptions merely, as such (as you know) are ye least entertaining of any literary subject.’ Strange was also castigated for having submitted another article, seventeen of whose thirty-seven pages was devoted to ‘topographical and natural observations’, which ‘do not properly belong to us’.16 Such material ought to have been going to the Royal Society. While this testifies to a parting of the ways between the antiquarians and natural philosophers, Strange cannot have been entirely happy to learn that Hamilton’s drawings of Pompeii were appearing in the fourth volume of Archaeologia. Pictures, rather than text, were Hamilton’s forte. He admitted this freely to William Beckford in 1794 while the second volume of the Collections was in press. ‘The Merit of my Work is in the exact Execution of the Plates’, which had been made by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, director of the art academy at Naples. The explanatory text had been put together by Hamilton and his friends in an attempt to save money. Sir William, who had undertaken all the translating and editing himself, gave credit where it was due: ‘you will like some of Italinski’s explanations of the Vases – to him I give all the Merit of the Erudition for you know from my early entering into the army my Classical Knowledge is very scanty indeed’.17 The Chevalier Italinski was the Russian minister at Naples. Hamilton’s motives were more self-interested than academic, for his letters to the academies were intended to advertise his activities ‘without expence’. After a visit to Herculaneum in 1781 in the company of the illustrious antiquarian Jean Baptiste d’Agincourt, Sir William’s rationale for the composition of an article was thus: ‘what I have collected is from such good authority and of so curious a nature, that the public will be much obliged to me’.18 Strange published with the chief intention of making a contribution to knowledge. In 1770, two years after completing a tour of South Wales, he contributed ‘An account of Roman remains in and near the city of Brecknock’ to the first issue of Archaeologia. This was so much admired that Strange wrote another three papers for the society.19 Worsley, who shared his tastes for antiquarianism and history completed a History of the Isle of Wight begun by his father and grandfather in 1781. He was elected both FRS and FAS in recognition of its quality. Worsley was also an informed collector of art and furniture. The privately printed Catalogue Raisonée of the Principal Paintings at Appledurcombe (1804) was an annotated catalogue of Worsley’s most notable acquisitions, be they French clocks, Greek busts or Italian cameos. Their owner understood the historical context of his possessions, which he

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described in loving detail.20 Both men were thus more serious scholars than Hamilton. As Hamilton was the first to admit, his science was more rigorous than his antiquarianism. ‘I shall content myself’, he wrote in 1782, ‘with collecting texts & Art who will form themselves into a system afterwards.’21 To some extent, this was the product of a reluctance to intrude too far into realms of established erudition, but Hamilton was also a sceptic when it came to received wisdom. Geology, which was not so freighted with academic baggage, was a subject to which Sir William could stake a claim on the basis of common-sense empiricism. By 1773, he had decided that the earth was in a constant state of metamorphosis. Hamilton refused a gift of rock samples from his nephew because ‘I love every specimen that can serve to prove that there is nothing in its primitive state upon the surface of the globe within our reach.’ He therefore sought ‘fossils with a nucleus of agate flints, crystals, minerals, &c., proving their aftergrowth’.22 This hypothesis, demonstrated through images and reprints of his Vesuvius letters to the Royal Society, appeared in the 1776 Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies. This has been described as a work of popular science despite the fact that it was by no means cheap. The illustrations, which were hand-coloured prints, had cost Hamilton £1,300 to commission. The book, which reproduced the letters in English and French, nonetheless established its author in the eyes of the educated public as the custodian of Vesuvius. By 1780, the volcano had become an established part of the European Grand Tour. When it came to science, Hamilton’s mind ranged much further afield than his own back garden. Having read George Foster’s account of James Cook’s second exploratory voyage of the Pacific, he thought that the mountainous South Sea islands had been made by sub-oceanic volcanic eruptions, while ‘the low Islands seem to be the work of Insects, that is they are Coral Banks’.23 Although he corresponded on these subjects with the likes of Joseph Banks, Hamilton took little from the work of other geologists. He cared little for ‘ingenious systems’ of theory, and in 1778 derided Strange for having quoted the Jesuit priests G.M. Della Torre and Joseph-Jerome de Lalande as authorities ‘too respectable to be contradicted’ on the basalt of Venice. Both vulcanologists had also declared that Vesuvius was a ‘primitive mountain’ because ‘ancient rock’ was visible in many places. The only time that Lalande was on Mount Vesuvius I was of the Party, with Padre Torre & Padre [Roger Joseph] Boscovitz. I made Torre show me that ancient rock. It appeared whitish by being exposed to the air &

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having got a patina, but I took my hammer, knocked off a piece & shewd the inside to be the very same sort of Lava as had run from Vesuvius a few months before. They were all convinced, but as Lalande when he wrote his book found his materials in Padre Torre’s History of Vesuvius to compose a chapter on that subject he copied him exactly the old Padre Torre knows he was mistaken but thinks it too late to take up a fresh system particularly as he has many of his books to dispose of still. I mention these particulars to show how difficult it is to get at the truth & how easily errors are propagated.

Lalande, Torre and Boscovitch are unlikely to have been convinced by this explanation, but Sir William treated the volcano as his private property.24 Strange, who did not have an active volcano on his doorstep, was by 1780 hoping for transfer to Naples, a station with much to interest a natural philosopher. In this he was disappointed because Sir William did not retire for another twenty years.25 Strange owed his appointment to Lord Bute, who had arranged the crown’s purchase of Consul Smith’s collections. The duties of the Venice station were very light, even more so than Naples. ‘I have no Court to attend and all commerce is interdicted between me and the venetians’, wrote Strange upon arrival in 1773. Like Worsley, he regarded the consulship as a sinecure in the first instance: ‘I consider myself as much a Planet as ever’, and intended to use Venice as a base for exploring the Alps, Apennines, Greece, Germany and the Adriatic.26 He soon learned that this was not to be, for he was obliged to receive tourists.27 Strange did his best with what was worthy of study around Venice. He paid Girolamo Festari to act as a geological research assistant and, in 1775, published ‘A curious Giant’s causeway. . . newly discovered in the Euganean hills near Padua’ in the Philosophical Transactions. In 1777 another article appeared on ‘The tides in the Adriatic’. By 1780, Strange was looking for fresh fields to conquer. Porter, unlike Strange, held a station with real responsibilities, namely commercial and political mediation on behalf of the Levant Company which funded the embassy at Constantinople. Four years after Porter’s retirement from the diplomatic service in 1764, he declined to be nominated President of the Royal Society, ‘not feeling himself of sufficient consequence or rich enough to live in such a style as he conceived that the president of such a society should maintain’.28 To what extent this is true is questionable for Porter had a reputation, perhaps undeserved, for wealth; having exercised careful economy in his household at Constantinople and charged ‘aliens, Jews, [and] Armenians’ for the protective services of the embassy. Having come from a mercantile background, he was an unusual choice for the presidency. He had, moreover,

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published only three papers in the Philosophical Transactions: ‘On the several Earthquakes felt at Constantinople’ and ‘New Astronomical and Physical Observations made in Asia’ appeared in 1755. The ‘Observations on the Transit of Venus made at Constantinople’ were published in 1761. When seeking membership of the Royal Society in 1748, Porter confessed that he was no adept: ‘what I would want it for would if I ever return make use of it for my instruction and amusement’.29 Porter’s investigations in Turkey and the Levant encompassed printed books, Biblical manuscripts and mathematics. He took no great interest in antiquities beyond their acquisition for others on commission, nor was he a patron of the arts. Odds and ends: shells, fossils, medals, corals and Egyptian mummies fell into his hands from time to time, to be sent to the British Museum or sold to private collectors in England. Porter did not collect these items systematically.30 Porter took his membership of the Royal Society seriously. ‘What services. . . I can do. . . [to] contribute towards the republic of knowledge, I will.’ His publication record is no indication of his many interests, which were expressed in a far-flung correspondence on subjects from medicine to religion. It is a shame that so little of this survives. His participation in the 1761 transit of Venus project, an international attempt to map and time a planetary eclipse of the sun, established Porter as a full-fledged member of the scientific community. Although the ‘Observations’ consisted of nothing more than the raw astronomical data Porter had gathered from observing the eclipse through a simple 1½ inch telescope, he probably spoke for all the project’s participants from Hudson’s Bay to Peking in wishing ‘to behold the solution of some beautiful phenomenon in nature, the solution of some pleasing important problem perceived in theory’.31 In 1716 an ageing Edmund Halley had proposed that the accurate timing of a planet’s passage across the face of the sun during an eclipse, particularly its seeming contact with the edges of the sun’s disc at ingress and egress, be taken from several locations on the earth’s surface. Johannes Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, as Porter put it; ‘the squares of the times of the periodical revolutions of the planetary system are the Cubes of their distances’, had permitted seventeenth-century astronomers to build a scale model of the solar system without the scale, for nobody knew the linear distance from any of the planets to the sun. The data from the transit would permit astronomers to ascertain the solar parallax, the angle subtended by the earth’s equatorial radius at the centre of the sun, at the mean distance between the two bodies. Once that angle had been ascertained by triangulation, the dimensions of the

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solar system could be determined. The Royal Society, the Academie des Sciences and a host of other scientific bodies participated in the project. Unfortunately for everyone, contradictory solutions to the trigonometry emerged from the 1761 findings, and the whole project had to be redone in 1769. No clear answer emerged until the next century. Joseph Banks, who had the private wealth to help fund the next transits project, made a much better President of the Royal Society than Porter. It was in this capacity that he corresponded with Hamilton and Strange. The latter’s passion for geology and physical geography led him to spend the 1770s and 1780s exchanging letters and rock samples with a far-flung network of correspondents from Ireland and Scotland to Switzerland and Germany.32 James Hutton, the Earl-Bishop of Derry, Charles Bonnet, Albrecht von Haller and Abraham Tremblay were amongst the naturalists and geologists whom Strange consulted in connection with his theory of the earth. Strange was also a member of several Italian academies and hosted weekly salons. Strange played an important role as an intermediary between British and European science.33 His correspondence was truly collaborative, which is to say that he both gave and received feedback on hypotheses, speculations, observations and samples. He also brought Italian science to the attention of a British audience by promoting the publication of works like Giuseppe Torini’s new translation of Archimedes by the Oxford University Press. As early as 1761, Strange had been recommending Italian scientists and their publications to the Royal Society. Since Carlo Guadagni, the Professor of Experimental Philosophy at the University of Pisa, had given Strange ‘the Meteorological, Thermonostical and Barometrical Tables for Pisa, Florence and other places for these 20 years past’, he felt obliged to notify the society of Guadagni’s forthcoming book on experimental philosophy. The professor was also touted as ‘a very serviceable Correspondent’ on physics or ‘any other subject of Inquiry’. A year later, Strange notified Dr Birch, the Secretary of the Royal Society, that Guadagni’s De Naturali Historiae Universalis Ditrinis Pistoriensis, then in press, would be sent to London as soon as it was available.34 Throughout his residence, Strange ensured that the best of Italy’s scientific publications reached the Royal Society and, from 1779 until his retirement, he kept Banks briefed on new developments in northern Italian science. Any examination of Strange’s papers in the British Library will reveal a network of men united by their interest in collecting, whether of art, antiquities, rocks or fossils, in the study of the natural world, and in the exchange of books. This, like Calvet’s web, was an unstable network that was always acquiring and losing members.35 It was firmly grounded in

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natural history and displays its owner’s facility with languages: German, Italian, French and Latin. Strange was no nonentity as a scientist, and the academic functions of his web are most apparent in the correspondence relating to the ‘theory of the earth’. This project consumed much of his time and energy from 1771 onwards. In the spring of that year, Strange had met the Abbé Alberto Fortis, who encouraged him to undertake local fieldwork in Italy. After spending a year studying extinct volcanoes in the Veneto, Strange decamped to the Alps and ‘some important Discoveries in physical Geography’ were the result of this tour.36 The spring of 1773 found Strange in Valay and the Haute Auvergne examining giants’ causeways but his basic hypotheses had taken shape, undergone some modification in response to the latest literature, and were circulating amongst Bonnet, Haller and Tremblay. In November Strange was appointed to the Venice station. By this date he and Bonnet had decided to go into print on the subject. This Swiss naturalist, however, withdrew from the project for reasons unknown and Strange published in German and Italian on his own.37 In a series of letters from April to December 1773, Bonnet had given Strange a grilling on the geographical, chemical and palaeontological aspects of his work. Its merit lay in foundation ‘solely upon observations and mechanical Principles, hitherto from Homer or Thales down to the specious de Buffon we have dealt only with Hypothesis’.38 Strange, like Descartes and Leibnitz, thought that the earth had once been a small sun. By ‘gradually cooling around’, the planet had taken on a compact and spherical form. All its land masses were composed of igneous rock, either basalt or granite. Fire was the first prehistoric force to shape the earth, to be followed by water, which had extinguished the flames. The gradual retreat of the earth’s oceans explained the presence of fossilized shells in sedimentary rock atop a volcanic base while the continued existence of fire in the earth’s core accounted for active volcanoes and the layers of volcanic strata that could be found adjoining sedimentary rock. Only the oldest, or most primitive mountains, had been created by volcanoes, as a result of which they were entirely comprised entirely of igneous or ‘vitrifiable’ rock. In acknowledging that a secondary phase of ‘marine mountain’ formation had taken place, Strange was accepting some ideas of the neptunists, for whom the lithostratigraphy of the time suggested that water was primarily responsible for the geology and geography of the earth.39 Strange therefore stands between the vulcanists and their neptunist opponents. The hexagonal shape of the columns that made up giant’s causeways led Strange to suspect that basalt had a crystalline structure. He had also noted its visual similarity to lava. Though Strange had little faith

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in the power of chemical forces, which Bonnet had suggested might explain the different types and textures of rock in existence, chemical analysis would prove the relationship of basalt to basic lavas by the end of the century. Thus were the neptunists and their belief in the aqueous origins of the earth discredited. Bonnet also found Strange’s account of granite formation unconvincing. This, the latter opined, was the result of ‘intersusception’, or the effects of heat and agitation upon a mixture of subterranean materials. ‘True’ granite had been formed as the earth cooled and solidified at the beginning of time. ‘False’ granite, on the other hand, had taken shape after the great deluge. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who had yet to complete his fusion experiments on granites and porphyries, shared Bonnet’s scepticism. When questioned about Strange’s theory in 1778, Saussure nonetheless still believed that granite was an aqueous crystallization.40 Strange continued to tinker with these ideas throughout the 1770s and 1780s. Despite his uncertainty about the provenance of granite, he was invited to join the Royal Society’s council in 1788. A year later, he gave up the Venice embassy, never to return to diplomacy.41 In 1800, a year after his death, a catalogue of his natural history collection was published. Many of the fossils, minerals and shells it contained were bought by Cambridge University, for which Strange had Thomas Martyn, the university Professor of Botany, to thank. Martyn had been amongst the most valuable and supportive of Strange’s correspondents. The two had met during the Grand Tour of Martyn’s ward, Edward Hartopp, in 1780, where the academic had amassed a collection of fossils and rock samples to illustrate a new series of lectures on geology and palaeontology, and the professor was pleased to report in 1782 that the study of petrology was gaining ground in Cambridge. In our time, you know, it was a study scarce heard of among us; we were looked upon as no better than cockle-shell pickers; butterfly-hunters and weed gatherers; and I remember very well when I walked forth now & then, with a little hammer concealed under my coat, I looked carefully around me, lest I should be detected in the ridiculous act of knocking a poor stone to pieces.42

Since the Woodwardian Cabinet was ‘very deficient’ in fossils of all descriptions, it was natural for the university to buy the Strange collection in 1800. It is now to be found in the university’s natural history museum. Comparatively little is known about Strange’s collection of antiquities. According to the new DNB, he contributed to the formation of several major private collections during the 1760s, but there is little

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evidence for advisory work of this description after his posting to Venice in 1773. The consistency of his publication record on Rome, moreover, suggests that he did nothing to foster the growing interest in Greece and the Near East increasingly apparent during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The catalogues printed by Hamilton and Worsley were much more important influences on the decorative arts, as were the fruits of Lord Elgin’s famous embassy to Constantinople. Elgin’s original plan, devised at the suggestion of his architect, Thomas Harrison, was to make accurate architectural drawings of the classical buildings that survived in Athens, along with full-sized plaster casts of their chief architectural and sculptural elements. Harrison, who had rebuilt Broomhall, Elgin’s principal country seat, between 1796 and 1799, had studied in Rome between 1770 and 1775. There Harrison had almost certainly encountered Hamilton’s first catalogue and some of the artists who had fallen under its spell. This may have led Harrison to suggest that Elgin use the Turkish mission to improve the arts in Great Britain. The architectural drawings were intended for publication after the manner of the celebrated Antiquities of Athens (1762–1788). No other text exercised so significant an influence upon late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British neoclassical art and architecture. In March 1751, a pair of architects named James Stuart and Nicholas Revett arrived in Athens funded by subscription to survey its classical buildings.43 Although Greece had been recognized since the Renaissance as the mother of Rome, the difficulty of working as Franks in a territory belonging to the Ottoman Empire made it difficult for artists and architects to conduct extensive research there. Stuart and Revett ran into many problems. The existence of a Turkish garrison on the southern ridge of the Acropolis made it difficult for the pair to take measurements without being accused of military espionage, and they sought the intercession of the British embassy in Constantinople with the Turkish authorities on more than one occasion. Porter wrote in 1751 that ‘they have subsisted there by a miracle, and gone through more than ever any from Christendom have done before them’. Bearing in mind that Greece was, in Porter’s words, ‘a country of jealousy, suspicion, ignorance, roguery & perfidy’ it was safer for people to be working in Greece under diplomatic protection.44 The labour that went into Julien-David Leroy’s Les ruines des plux beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) had been considerably facilitated by the good offices of the French embassy. In 1753, Stuart and Revett were forced out of Athens by riots, an outbreak of the plague, and what Porter called ‘a damned villain of a Greek consul’. As it transpired, five out of six of the buildings they surveyed had been products of the Hellenistic or Roman periods, rather than

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monuments of the fifth century. Since the pair never returned to Greece, there was much for other artists and architects to do. The plaster casts, or so Elgin hoped, would become models for artists. When the British government refused to fund the scheme, the peer decided to proceed at his own expense. The rest of the story has been admirably told by William St Clair. When British artists refused to accompany Elgin, Italian artists and mould-makers were recruited for the venture. The team was dispatched to Athens in 1800, where it was charged an exorbitant per diem for permission to make drawings, and no mould-making was permitted. The situation changed in 1801, when British forces led by Sir Ralph Abercromby expelled the French from Syria and Egypt. Some of the Ottoman government’s gratitude took the form of a firman, or official decree, asking the Turkish authorities in Athens to grant more generous privileges to Elgin’s entourage. Philip Hunt, the embassy chaplain, was then in Athens to report on the progress of the artists. He was appalled by the careless attitude towards the antiquities displayed by the Turks, and the pillage of the city’s treasures that had already taken place at the hands of western visitors. Although the firman did not authorize the removal of artifacts from the buildings, Hunt bribed and threatened local officials into accepting the disinterment and, later, export, of sculptures, vases, jewellery, inscriptions and coins. When the French government protested, Elgin and his successors obtained additional firmans from the Turkish authorities.45 In 1803 Elgin withdrew all but one artist, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, from Greece. Lusieri would supervise the excavation, dismantling and shipment of antiquities for Elgin up to 1820. The embassy party was taken prisoner of war by Napoleon on its way back to England. In 1806 Elgin was released under a parole that required him to return to France at the pleasure of its government. This, in effect, rendered him unemployable as a diplomat, whereupon he began to think about selling his collection. He had been placed under some pressure to do so by the French, and after exhibiting the marbles to artists in his Park Lane house, offered them to the government in 1811 for £60,000. This was rejected as too high a price. By 1814, Elgin was becoming anxious to sell. He wished nonetheless to be seen as ‘a benefactor, not a petitioner’, and when, in 1815, the government rejected a second offer at the higher price of £73,000, he asked that the matter be referred to a select committee of the House of Commons. In 1816 the collection was bought for the nation for £35,000, a paltry £5,000 more than the government had offered Elgin five years earlier. He claimed to have spent £62,440 on getting the marbles to England.46 In 1790, William Hamilton had written to Greville that he would make

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no more presents to the British Museum, ‘nor will ever have recourse to Parliament again’.47 Elgin would have agreed. In addition to losing immense sums of money, he had been portrayed by Byron as the looter of Athens in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and faced a Commons inquiry that dealt in part with accusations that he had abused his powers as an ambassador. By no means all Elgin’s contemporaries thought his actions justifiable. Upon visiting Athens in 1811, Williams Wynn’s indignation about the rape of the Parthenon destroyed some of his pleasure at beholding ‘the most magnificent ancient Building I ever saw’. Wynn recorded that there were two schools of opinion in Athens about the marbles. One, led by the French, abused Elgin and called him a thief. The other excused him by claiming that he had forestalled the French or the Turks in removing or destroying the marbles. Wynn thought that the Parthenon was too well constructed to be worth destroying by the Turks. He was silent on the subject of the French.48 Bonaparte’s activities during the 1798 Egyptian campaign had raised the stakes of antiquarian and archaeological research in the eastern Mediterranean.49 The French had long scoured the Levant for coins, medals, busts and inscriptions. Such pilfering nevertheless paled in comparison to an army of invasion that arrived with a team of 150 savants to study Egyptian civilization, and departed with mummies, canopic jars, statuettes, amulets and manuscripts. Such activities, presaged by the French occupation of Italy, added an academic dimension to the war between Britain and revolutionary France. The chance discovery of the Rosetta Stone by an engineer in a muddy field suggested that the cultural artifacts of the Near East might shed some light on the worlds of the ancient Greeks and, possibly, Christians. Thus thought William Richard Hamilton upon visiting Egypt in 1802. As the French had ‘carried away from Egypt all the MSS they thought valuable in this language as well as the Arabic’, arrangements ought to be made with the Ottoman and Coptic authorities to acquire ‘a complete collection of the Holy Scriptures in the Ancient Coptic: such a collection in its full extent does not I believe exist’. Mastery of knowledge about the ancient world had become a competition. Since the Greeks, thought he, had derived all their knowledge of astronomy from the Egyptians, ‘a people extremely unwilling to communicate their Discoveries’, this science had been transmitted to Greece in a ‘very imperfect’ state, from whence it had passed to modern Europe. ‘It is then very probable that in some Respects we are still behind our Original Masters’, though this situation might be resolved by a few visits on the part of astronomers to the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt.50 These were the sorts of projects that the British government was

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willing to fund.51 In 1799, at the request of George Pretyman-Tomline, Bishop of Lincoln and close friend of Prime Minister William Pitt, Joseph Dacre Carlyle, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, was attached to the Elgin mission with a salary of £400 p.a. Carlyle, an adept in oriental languages, had published the Rerum Aegypticarus Annales, a translation of part of a History of Egypt under Mohammedan Rule written by the fifteenth-century Yusuf ibn Taghri, in 1792. His personal interest lay in early manuscripts of the scriptures, with which he intended to prepare an Arabic edition of the New Testament for missionary use in Africa and the Middle East. Despite all Elgin’s efforts on his behalf, Carlyle could not gain admission to the library of the Seraglio, where he had hoped to find materials relevant to his research. Carlyle, in making the request, had asked only to look for Greek books in the Seraglio. Having been told on several occasions that no such works existed there, a final refusal from the Sultan was issued in February 1801. By this date, Carlyle had spent fifteen months in the Levant.52 In 1800 he had made a tour of Syria and borrowed some manuscripts from the monastery of St Saba, which with the authorization of its abbot, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, he was allowed to take home on indefinite loan. The Patriarch, who approved of the Arabic Bible scheme, also lent Carlyle some material from his library at Constantinople. A search of the city’s other repositories, the Orthodox monasteries of the region, and Turkey’s many bazaars had unearthed Greek texts of the Gospels and Epistles, ‘a vast collection of Arabic and Persian Manuscripts of different parts of the Scriptures’, and nearly a hundred Arabic books comprising what, in the professor’s opinion, were the best works of history, biography, natural history, geography and poetry. The Sultan’s refusal, in addition to failing health, made the 41-year-old Carlyle decide to return to England after inspecting the monastic libraries of Greece. There he found a treasure trove of riches. On Mount Athos alone, Carlyle discovered many things: MSS copies of both the Iliad & the Odyssey, of many of the plays of the Greek tragedians, of Pindar & Hesiod, of Demosthenes, Oschines & parts of Aristotle. We saw also a very large number of copies of the New Testament, some of them ancient & very well preserved, and many beautiful MSS of the different Fathers – except these the shelves were filled with lives of saints – Liturgies – Canons – books of controversy & books of offices peculiar to the Greek church.

Once this trip had ended at Patras, Carlyle took ship for home.53 Elgin didn’t think much of Carlyle’s Arabic interests, as compared to those of Philip Hunt, whose passion was Greek literature. The

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ambassador believed that Carlyle had been barred from the Seraglio library because his request had stemmed from ‘pure curiosity’. Carlyle was disgruntled by what he perceived as Elgin’s lack of support for his research. ‘He conceives that I should have made it an object of political importance: I should have pursued it, as a matter upon which I was authorised to proceed in the King’s name, the success or non-success of which, would influence the disposition of Great Britain towards Turkey.’54 When the embassy had set out from England, its government had supposed that Elgin would be the recipient of Turkish gratitude for Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile. This had not come to pass for the French dug in their heels, the Ottoman Porte distrusted Britain, and no favours were forthcoming from its Sultan ‘till Egypt should be conquered, when all marbles would be at my Disposal. The fact has been distinctly so’. Had Carlyle been willing to wait until Abercromby’s expulsion of the French from the Holy Land, he could, thought Elgin, have had anything he wanted, ‘and in particular Egypt, where, already, some persons going under the English protection, have discover’d Arabick Manuscripts’. By 1804, Carlyle was dead. His Bible, edited by Henry Ford, Professor of Arabic at Oxford, was published in 1811. Carlyle left an orphan daughter, in support of whom his sister and executrix sold his Greek manuscripts to Charles Manners Sutton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hunt, with whom Carlyle had bought many of the manuscripts during the tour of the Greek monasteries, generously resigned his claim to any share of the proceeds. Hunt assumed that Miss Carlyle had told the archbishop about the conditions of the loan, but this information had not been transmitted to his Grace. In 1814, Hunt learned from William Richard Hamilton at the Foreign Office that the Patriarch wanted his manuscripts back. Hunt, who had signed a declaration in Constantinople promising that they would be returned, wrote several times to the archbishop to explain the situation, offering to help if necessary in the identification of the borrowed items. After a second demand from the Patriarch, Hunt confronted Sutton in person, and demanded the speedy return of the manuscripts. Carlyle had taken ‘2 MSS of the 4 Gospels – 3 MSS of the Acts of the Epistles – 1 MS of Libanius, all from St Saba, and 3 MSS of the 4 Gospels, 2 Psalters and 1 Eutropius in Latin’. He had also borrowed ‘1 MS of Cantacuzenes against Mahomet – 2 MSS of Ecclesiastical History – and 1 MS of the Natural History of Cyprus in Modern Greek’ from the Patriarch’s library at Constantinople. As these had not been mentioned in the Patriarch’s second letter, Hunt thought it probable that Carlyle

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had returned these before leaving Turkey. If they had gone to the archbishop, ‘they must now be restored’.55 In 1817, the Patriarch was finally reunited with his lost property. Hunt may have had few qualms about the removal of antiquities from Greece without proper permission, but to him manuscripts were sacrosanct: even if, as he wrote dismissively in 1816, they had never been collated ‘probably because they have not been found worthy of that labour’. Carlyle too had been sorely tempted by the riches of the Ottoman libraries, though he assured Tomline that ‘I have not stolen even one.’ The depredations of Hunt, Lusieri and others set a deplorable example for future diplomats and military men. Many treasures of the ancient world now adorning the museums of Europe would be removed from their homes over the course of the nineteenth century. The private ventures of British diplomats in the Mediterranean testify to the breadth of their intellectual and cultural interests, and their commitment – in a manner of speaking – to serve the public interest. While the patronage wielded by these men in the realms of art, architecture, archeology and science was a product of self-identification as learned and cultured gentlemen of leisure, this character was inseparable in some respects from what made them public men. It was a far cry from the character of the professional politician or bureaucrat that would emerge during the nineteenth century. Some diplomats, of course, cared little for the arts or sciences. In contrast, Elliot and Liston dabbled in electrical and chemical experiments while Morton Eden became a Fellow of the Royal Society without publishing a single article in the Philosophical Transactions.56 Lord Burghersh, a composer and founding member of the Royal Academy of Music, was an ardent fan and patron of the Florentine opera while Charles Stuart was active as a theatrical impresario in Paris.57 The personal interests of diplomats took them in many directions, many of which qualify as cultural diplomacy broadly defined. One common thread runs through later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sponsorship of art, music, architecture, archeology and science.58 Those who were stationed in the Mediterranean had been raised with an awareness that classical antiquity was the fount of all that was good in western culture. The first principles of beauty, truth and liberty were to be recovered from the past and, if applied to the present, would constitute the acme of human achievement.59 While this might be characterized as an updated version of Renaissance humanism, not least in its emphasis upon rejecting the corruptions and superstitions of time, men of the Enlightenment believed in marrying the best of antiquity to new forms of knowledge. Porter, Hamilton, Strange and Elgin

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all sought to recover the past, in part for its own sake, but with an eye to the future. In this sense, all were participating in a venture greater than themselves. Notes 1 David D. Nolta, ‘The body of the collector and the collected body’, in I. Jenkins and K. Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes, Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (London, 1996), p. 109. See other essays in this volume for a complete appreciation of Hamilton’s work. 2 Walpole Correspondence, xxxv. Hamilton to Walpole, 17 April 1792, p. 442; Haskell, ‘The Baron d’Hancarville: an adventurer and art historian in eighteenth century Europe’, in Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, 1987), 30–45; Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven, 2002), pp. 172–9. 3 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 8 June 1773, p. 22; Nancy F. Koehn, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Boston, 2001), pp. 11–42. 4 Katherine Farrar (ed.), Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, 3 vols (Manchester, 1973), i. Wedgwood to Joseph Bentley, 20 Sept. 1769, p. 279. 5 Brian Dolan, Josiah Wedgwood. Entrepeneur to the Enlightenment (London, 2004), pp. 118, 207, 234, 238. 6 Farrar, Wedgwood Letters, ii. Wedgwood to Bentley, 8 August 1776, p. 302 and 17 July 1777, p. 365 and iii. Josiah Wedgwood Jr to his father, 4–5 July 1790, pp. 142–9; Dep Bland Burges 30, Auckland to Burges, 6 July 1790, f. 35. 7 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Messrs. Wedgwood and Bentley, 2 March 1773, p. 19. 8 Milo Keynes, ‘The Portland vase: Sir William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood and the Darwins’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 52 (1998), 237–59. 9 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 2 January 1776, p. 44. 10 Nicholas Penny, ‘Sir William Hamilton’, Burlington Magazine, 138 (1996), 415–17; Add MS 34048, Hamilton to Banks, 17 July 1781, f. 14. 11 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 2 March 1790, pp. 142–3. 12 Ibid., Hamilton to Greville, 21 September 1790, p. 148. 13 Add MS 51315, Worsley to Hamilton, 18 January 1794, ff. 66–7. 14 Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, pp. 112–14. 15 Robert Sharp, ‘Strange, John (1732–1799)’, DNB Online, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/26636. 16 BL Egerton MS 2002, Jeremiah Milles to Strange, 23 January 1779, ff. 3–4. 17 Bod MS Beckford c. 31, fos. 107–26, Hamilton to Beckford, 11 March 1794, f. 119.

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18 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 23 October 1781, p. 77. 19 Egerton MS 2002, Milles to Strange, 23 January 1779, f. 3. 20 A Catalogue Raisonné of the Principal Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, &c. &c. at Appledurcombe House, the Seat of the Rt. Hon. Sir Richard Worsley, Bart. (1804). 21 Ibid. 22 Hamilton and Nelson Papers, i. Hamilton to Greville, 8 June 1773, p. 21; Mark C.W. Sleep, ‘Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803): his work and influence in geology’, Annals of Science, 25 (1969), 319–38; Elvira Choisi, ‘Academicians and academies in eighteenth century Naples’, Journal of the History of Collections, 19 (2007), 177–90. 23 Add MS 34048, Hamilton to Banks, 10 January 1778, f. 1. 24 Ibid., Hamilton to Banks, 23 April 1782, ff. 15–16; G.M. Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755) and Supplemento alla storia del Vesuvio ove si descrive l’incendio del 1760 (Naples, 1761); Add MS 34048, Hamilton to Banks, 10 January 1778, f. 2. 25 Add MS 41198, Strange to Hamilton, 1 January 1779, f. 24. 26 Egerton MS 1969, Strange to Hatsell, 25 November 1773, ff. 5–6. 27 His prior travels in Italy had given rise to two Royal Society papers: ‘The origin of natural paper found near Cortona in Italy’, PT (1769) and ‘Some specimens of sponges from Italy’, PT (1770). Lengthier versions of both were later published in Italian. 28 Porter, Turkey, i. pp. 6, 11. 29 Add MS 32418, Porter to Caspar Wetstein, 22 November 1748, f. 395. 30 Add MS 32421, Porter to Wetstein, 1 June 1757, ff. 124–5; Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (1995), pp. 213– 219; Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, pp. 87–9; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 6. 31 Add MS 32420, Porter to Wetstein, 15 February 1755, ff. 309–13; Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth Century Science (Princeton, 1959). 32 For this correspondence, see Add MS 23730. 33 Luca Ciancio, ‘The correspondence of a “virtuoso” of the late Enlightenment: John Strange and the relationship between British and Italian naturalists’, Archives of Natural History, 22 (1995), 119–29. 34 Add MS 4319, Strange to Robert Birch, 29 January 1761 and 6 May 1762, ff. 23, 24; Lord Stanhope to Strange, 12 April 1776, f. 115; Add MS 37230, G. Torelli to Strange, 12 March 1776, ff. 219–20 and Lord Stanhope to Strange, 28 June 1776, f. 221. 35 Lawrence Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth Century France (Oxford, 2002), pp. 78–9. 36 Egerton MS 1969, Strange to Hatsell, 25 November 1773, f. 6. 37 Strange, ‘Alte vulcanem im Venitianischen Gebiete’, Mineralogische Beschreibungen (1792), 5–161; C. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl

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Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii and the Stabiae Rome (Cambridge, 1988). Add MS 23730, Charles Bonnet to Strange, 12 April–3 December 1773, ff. 12–82; Egerton MS 2001, Hutton to Strange, 1772–3, ff. 19–30; Egerton MS 1969, Strange to Hatsell, 25 November 1773, ff. 6v–8. Add MS 23730, Strange to Bonnet, 24 March 1774, ff. 85–93; D.R. Dean, ‘Plutonists, Neptunists, Vulcanists’, in G.A. Good (ed.), Sciences of the Earth: An Encyclopedia of Events, People, and Phenomena, 2 vols (New York, 1998), i. p. 692. Add MS 23730, Bonnet to Strange, 12 March 1774, ff. 78–82; Strange to Bonnet, 24 March and 15 May 1774, ff. 85–93, ff. 100–5; Emile du Tex, ‘Clinchers of the basalt controversy: empirical and experimental evidence’, Earth Sciences History, 15 (1996), 37–48. Egerton MS 1970, Andrew Skiddy to Strange, 13 June 1783, ff. 139–40 and John Dick to Strange, 29 June 1783, f. 146; Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, pp. 181–2. Egerton MS 1970, Martyn to Strange, 2 July 1780, 17 June 1781 and 4 August 1782, ff. 44, 63, 80. Lesley Lawrence, ‘Stuart and Revett: their literary and architectural careers’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2 (1938), 128–46; Jacob Landy, ‘Stuart and Revett: pioneer archaeologists’, Archaeology, 9 (1956), 252–9; David Watkin, Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Revival (1982); J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival: Neo-classical Attitudes in British Architecture, 1760–1870 (London, 1972); Holger Hoock, ‘The British state and the Anglo-French war over antiquities, 1798–1858’, HJ, 50 (2007), 53–4. Add MS 32420, Porter to Wetstein, 2 December 1752, f. 100. William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, 3rd rev. edn. (Oxford, 1998). Elgin Papers MS 60/4/68, Elgin to William Richard Hamilton, 27 August 1814, n.f.; Hoock, ‘The British state and the Anglo-French war over antiquities’, 61–2. Add MS 60391K, Hamilton to Greville, 6 June 1790, ff. 99–100. Bod MS Eng misc c.488, Mediterranean Travel Diary, 26 June 1811, f. 24. Ferdinand Boyer, ‘Les diplomats du Directoire et le monde des arts, des lettres, et des sciences en Toscane, 1796–1798’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes, 13 (1967), 267–289; Marie-Noelle Bourquet, ‘Science and memory: the stakes of the expedition to Egypt (1798–1801)’, in Howard G. Brown and Judith A. Miller (eds), Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon (Manchester, 2002), 92–109; Hoock, ‘The British state and the Anglo-French war over antiquities’, 55–7. Elgin MS 60/17/22, William Richard Hamilton to Elgin, 2 July 1802, n.f. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, pp. 233–47; Hoock, ‘The British state and the Anglo-French war over antiquities’, 51–2; Deborah Manley and Peta Rée, Henry Salt. Elgin MS 60/17/28, Carlyle to Pretyman Tomline, 27 February 1801, n.f. Elgin MS 60/11, Carlyle to Elgin, 28 April 1801, n.f.

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54 Elgin MS 60/17/28, Elgin’s Memo on J.D. Carlyle, September 1801, n.f. 55 NLS MS 5645, Hunt to Liston, 20 June 1816, ff. 210–13. 56 NLS MS 5516, Elliot to Liston, 2 June and 11 July 1776, ff. 60–2; NLS MS 5522, Elliot to Liston, 17 July 1782, f. 157. 57 Rachel Weigall (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord Burghersh, afterward Eleventh Earl of Westmorland 1808–1840 (London, 1912), p. 252. 58 Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, p. 233. 59 Luke Syson, ‘The Ordering of the Artificial World: Collection, Classification and Progress’, in Kim Sloan with Andrea Burnett (eds), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), pp. 108–21.

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In the last chapter of the British Diplomatic Service, Horn listed many of the novels, essays, pamphlets and books sponsored or produced by members of the foreign service. These ranged from an illustrated Views in Egypt to an account of the madness of George III. Horn was deterred from analysing them in any depth because few dealt in any way with international politics.1 What officials had to contribute to the republic of letters in its own right was not a subject that much interested him, nor were the intellectual and cultural links between ethnography, the Enlightenment, Europe and the wider world that might be identified in these publications. It is here that connections can be traced between the social, political, national and imperial identities of British public men during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Government documents, whether colonial or diplomatic, are formulaic texts in which men are anxious to present themselves in the best possible light, and the private papers produced by men and women say little about wider constructions of truth and identity. The very absence of political content in these writings is interesting, for it speaks to the literary ambitions of their authors, the print culture of their time and the distinctions made by public servants between different sectors of their lives. Courtiership, as Steven Shapin once wrote, had always constituted one of the ‘dishonest’ categories of male existence, which explains why many authors were careful in the realm of print to present themselves as private gentlemen. This identity, thanks to its honour codes, commanded more respect from genteel readers before the mid-eighteenth century than that of a man sent abroad to lie for his country.2 From c. 1740, nonetheless, public welfare, expertise and efficiency were important objectives of cameralist administration throughout Europe, which meant that career diplomats, like other ‘civil’ servants, were expected to possess superior powers of observation and analysis. Over time, they were also expected to buttress their observations with increasing

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amounts of empirical data.3 As far as the British were concerned, these objectives began to become important during the reigns of Charles and James II, and became established as bureaucratic norms alongside the fiscal-military state. It could be said that Chesterfield’s Letters to his son was the courtier’s riposte to these standards of public service. Since the writings of diplomats were therefore invested with two forms of authority: privileged access to information and, to a lesser degree, some facility in its analysis, unwritten rules governed their authorial activities. Publications upon sensitive issues might be suppressed on the grounds that they stood to give offence to other states. In 1748, a pamphlet by Porter on the First Partition of Poland was withdrawn from circulation and, in 1790, another by Hailes concerning Britain’s interest in preserving Dantzig as a free port in the Baltic, disappeared. Although no British government approved of the partitions, its servants were not supposed to say so outside court circles.4 Both pamphlets, despite the resources of the English Short Title Catalogue, have vanished. Needless to say, the revelation of state and diplomatic secrets was strictly forbidden. When the Lettres, mémoires et négotiations particulières du chevalier d’Eon were published in 1764, all envoys thought its author mad for revealing the workings of Louis XV’s secret service, and the corps diplomatique in London made ‘Cause Commune to address the Crown to protect them against such Libels’. This constituted nothing less than a request for the creation of a new form of diplomatic immunity, which is to say the imposition of British censorship upon foreign-language publications dealing with the confidential details of diplomatic practice. When this request was refused by George III and his ministers, Yorke could not resist boasting about the superior discretion of his colleagues: ‘fewer English secrets’, he wrote, ‘have got abroad through Foreign Ministers, than in any court in Europe’.5 What penalties might accompany the disclosure of such secrets was revealed in 1804 by the disgrace of Francis Drake, Britain’s counter-revolutionary spymaster in Napoleonic Europe, for the theft and publication of his correspondence with the double agent Mehée de la Touch. Be sure, Malmesbury warned one apprentice diplomat in 1815, ‘to keep . . . but not to boast of your precautions, as Mr Drake did’.6 So strong was the diplomat’s sense of personal discretion that Louis Dutens agonized for three decades about whether or not to publish his memoirs. In 1806, they finally appeared in French and English although six copies of the book had been printed privately in 1778 for friends. Dutens was unusual amongst diplomats in writing for profit, and had by this date penned over twenty pamphlets in French on subjects ranging from antiquities to tourism and poetry. In 1782 he considered releasing

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the memoirs, perhaps under a pseudonym, in Switzerland: ‘the idea to comprehend all the anecdotes Historical, Political & Litterary, which I have been able to collect for these thirty years past, and the Characters of the most celebrated personages of this age’.7 Character sketches, whether of actors, authors, playwrights or politicians, had long been a staple of descriptive texts. Since Dutens saw writing, if anything, as his real profession, one suspects that he had become jealous of Nathaniel Wraxall’s Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden and Warsaw (1778). This was a gossipy travelogue that purveyed a tourist’s account of life in high society. The publication of the memoirs was nevertheless unwise while Dutens was still attached to the Turin embassy and he decided to wait until most of celebrities in the book were dead. Memoirs were published by one’s heirs as acts of commemoration. They were supposed to have no self-interested place in British political culture. In 1844, Robert Adair apologized to the readers of his Historical Memoir of a Mission to the Court of Vienna for presuming, while still alive, to publish an account of his embassy. Adair was no stranger to the art of memoir-writing, having in 1811 published A Sketch of the Character of the Late Duke of Devonshire, an honorary leader of the Whig Party. The Vienna memoir had been written to clear Adair’s onetime chief, friend and kinsman Charles James Fox from what were described as the slurs of French and German historians.8 Napoleon’s death in 1841 was followed by numerous retrospectives, amongst which were some animadversions upon Fox’s conduct as Foreign Secretary in 1806. In assuring readers that the publication of the original documents had been authorized by Metternich and Lord Aberdeen, Adair was making it clear that the memoir constituted a defence of family honour and Whig principles rather than an assertion of ego or a breach of confidentiality. Adair, who had been recognized for his public service by a seat on the privy council, had no need to boast about his career. He was also seen by his contemporaries as the last Foxite Whig. In publishing a personal memoir, Adair was nonetheless exposing himself to partisan attack. When he found negative comments on his performance as ambassador at Constantinople in the posthumous Malmesbury letters a year later, he could not resist issuing a reply. The Negotiations for the Peace of the Dardanelles in 1808–9 contained yet more party politics and embassy correspondence. Nobody seems much to have cared for, by this date, personal and party memoirs had entered the political arena.9 The third Earl of Londonderry’s two volume Recollections of a Tour in the North of Europe (1837) can only be described as a vanity publication. At the end of 1834, the new Prime Minister – Sir Robert Peel – had asked Londonderry to come out of retirement to accept a nomination

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to the court of St Petersburg. This appointment had been opposed by ‘the violence of party spirit’, whereupon he refused the mission.10 Since Wellington was about to be demoted from the premiership to the Foreign Office, the Whigs feared that Londonderry’s appointment constituted an attempt to reconstruct the Tory cabal of diplomats who, in Castlereagh’s day, were perceived to have held a stranglehold grip over the conduct of British foreign policy. Londonderry’s Recollections were intended to tell his Whig detractors how graciously he had been received as a private citizen by the crowned heads of Sweden, Prussia and Russia and, in so doing, assert his credentials in the realm of diplomacy. By this date Londonderry was no stranger to memoir-writing, having published two accounts of his military career during the Napoleonic Wars. Along with his fellow soldier-diplomat, Burghersh, Londonderry hoped that his work would ‘be useful to . . . brother soldiers, and not without interest to the public at large’.11 So unsure was he of his literary abilities in the first instance that he employed an amanuensis to help arrange his papers for the Narrative of the War in the Peninsula (1828). When the text was attributed by critics to the assistant, Londonderry was much hurt. Burghersh, who had lower literary ambitions, merely announced that his subject, a Memoir of the Early Campaigns of the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula (1820), ‘must be interesting to every reader’ for the tale it told of the British army’s arrival as a military power in Europe.12 What these texts did, amongst other things, was rehabilitate the image of the British army as a fighting force in Europe. Burghersh, who saw no reason to complicate his text with unnecessary details, had strung together a series of battlefield reports to deliver a triumphalist narrative of the Peninsular War in which all the actors were reduced to caricatures. Wellington starred as the indomitable commander who led his fearless troops in combat against the bestial French. The Spanish and Portuguese featured as proud and often obstreperous fools unable to submit to British leadership. Such memoirs reduced Iberia to a sort of wayward colony over which leadership was a clear and natural product of political, military and cultural superiority. Such tales, declared Burghersh, ‘will be handed down, with the rest of those great events which have distinguished the triumphant career of Lord Wellington, as a beacon to guide hereafter all military men in the pursuit of fame, combined with justice, with moderation, and with virtue’. By such means was a cult of Wellington worship established in post-war Britain.13 Although Londonderry’s Narrative too contributed to a school of post-1815 battlefield tourism literature, what its author produced was a much more nuanced tale of the British military experience in Europe.

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Reform, argued Londonderry, had since the Seven Years War made the promotion of officers dependent on merit rather than venality. The British army could therefore claim to be an institution that rewarded loyalty, courage and ability. The establishment of hospitals for the wounded and schools for the offspring of the fallen had, he added, vastly improved the morale of British troops. No longer could soldiers be regarded as the cannon-fodder of an overmighty and impersonal state. Whether Britain had the military leadership to defeat the French army was, he admitted, unclear in 1808, but the courage and tenacity of the Spanish and Portuguese people had been invaluable to the final victory over France. Londonderry did not neglect to mention Wellington’s disputes with the Iberian authorities. Unlike Burghersh, he forebore from making disparaging comments about Britain’s friends or foes and admitted that discipline amongst his own troops left something to be desired. War, wrote Londonderry, placed severe burdens of mind and body upon all its participants. Defeat and evacuation, admitted he, had seemed much more likely than victory until 1812, or so thought many officers on the British side. It was not until Napoleon’s defeat in Russia that things began to look more positive in the Peninsula.14 Both Burghersh nor Londonderry sought to depict the war as a triumph for Europe over the forces of tyranny and revolution. According to Burghersh, from 1813 onwards all the nations and peoples of Europe, not excluding the French, had united with one voice and mind to vanquish the agents of Napoleon and restore the Bourbon monarchy. ‘Such was the extraordinary termination of the French Revolution’, he wrote in his Memoir of the Operations of the Allied Armies. Splendid as were many of the achievements by which it was marked, riveted as it was considered to be in the feelings of the vast majority of the French people, yet it passed away, seemingly without a struggle. From the moment the French capital was occupied by the Allies, peace and goodwill seemed at once established among the various people, so singularly brought together, and so lately in violent hostility to each other. The spirit of conquest and oppression, from which had flowed such vast desolation through the world, seemed at once to be extinguished.15

What Burghersh had written constituted a propaganda piece for the allied cause, rather than an account of British trials and tribulations in the European theatre. The same could be said for George William Chad’s A Narrative of the Late Revolution in Holland (1814). This told the tale of Patriot defeat and William I’s installation as King of the United Netherlands, complete with a copy of the new Dutch constitution. The restoration of the House of Orange, wrote Chad, was undertaken with

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‘the honest and enthusiastic joy of the people’ rather than ‘the voice of the mob’ or ‘the corruption of military despotism’. Thus were older British policy objectives revived in the public mind.16 Londonderry’s Narrative of the War in Germany and France, in 1813 and 1814, though not published until 1830, gave its readers some sense of the diplomacy that underlay the military movements that brought about the downfall of Napoleon. Here Londonderry was outspoken about the disagreements that had arisen amongst the allies in the Sixth Coalition. He recorded his personal distaste for the preliminary agreement made between the allied powers and the Comte de St Aignan at Frankfurt in 1813, whereby peace was to be made with France on the basis of the 1792 status quo. Everything from the supreme command of the armies to the post-war political settlement of France was, recalled he, a contentious issue. Londonderry had eschewed literary assistance to produce this Narrative on his own, and apologized to his readers for the rough narrative of a soldier. He had nevertheless written the text in part as a diplomat and went so far towards the end of the book to outline his vision for the future of Europe. Londonderry had not, or so he claimed in the preface, consulted Castlereagh’s papers in the writing of the second Narrative. The opinions and documents that he cited were entirely his own. Despite the fact that France had been vanquished, Russia was the great power and menace of the future. Its might had been contained by ‘the personal character of the reigning Emperor Alexander; a mixture of benevolence and rectitude, a high sense of religion, and a generous view on all subjects’. The tsar, however, had died in 1825 and when the Narrative was published in 1830, Londonderry was apprehensive about what the future would bring. Such concerns had not characterized the diplomatic writings of the pre-1790 period, in which the spectres of war and anarchy, if not universal dominion, had never arisen.17 This was not Kissinger’s world restored, but a new world order. The Narrative of the War in Germany and France attests to Russia’s arrival as a great, and in the person of Alexander, to some extent a ‘civilized’ power. It had hitherto been regarded as a peripheral state in the private and public estimation of diplomats, and often subject to analysis according to the paradigms of conjectural history and environmental determinism laid down by the French and Scottish Enlightenments.18 Russia consequently served a purpose similar to Spain in the comparative placement of Britain’s standing in Europe. This message is clear, despite differences in emphasis, in the writings of Macartney and the Harris couple. Macartney has long been seen as an enlightenment man, an accurate

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portrait of whom was presented to British readers by his biographer and private secretary, John Barrow. Macartney’s 1767 Account of Russia, in effect a summary of its author’s embassy, had originally been printed for circulation amongst Macartney’s friends. This sketch resembles other diplomatic ethnographies of Russia in its attempts to penetrate the veil of court and noble life. What also interested Macartney were the population, arts, commerce and social structure of the country. In reprinting Chapters II to IV of the tract in Some Account of the Public Life, and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings of the Earl of Macartney, Barrow was outlining the principles that drove Macartney’s diplomatic work.19 Like other western observers, Macartney saw the Russians as a primitive people whose nobles had acquired a veneer of civilization from their contact with France. This he thought deplorable. ‘The Russian gentlemen are certainly the least informed of all others in Europe’, he wrote, not least because devotion to alien standards made Russians on the Grand Tour incapable of discriminating between what was worthy of imitation or rejection elsewhere: ‘it not only divests them of all national character, but prevents them from aspiring to the praise of all national virtue; it represses their native energy of mind and extinguishes every spark of original genius’. Without some sense of ethnic pride, thought Macartney, there could be no real political or social virtue in the realm, yet in comparing Russia to ‘the barbarism of our own and of other countries a few centuries past’, he ventured to hope that Russian nobles would eventually acquire a true sense of selfhood.20 The ‘othering’ of Russians as little better than savages constituted part of the process by which Britons validated their faith in a linear narrative of polite and commercial progress. Macartney was nevertheless critical of contemporary western attitudes towards Russia’s peasants, whom he depicted as an intelligent and practical people. Limited though his contact with these people must have been, he pointed out that ‘the soil is naturally good, and capable of being turned to prodigious advantage.’ The merchant community he thought akin to the peasantry in their ‘rude and humble simplicity.’ Since Macartney was to some extent sympathetic to British critiques of Old Corruption, one senses that the Russian bourgeoisie and peasantry were expected to act as checks upon the nobility, contact with whom seemed to make the other groups ‘affected from imitation’ or ‘modest from conscious inferiority’.21 Since Macartney’s account was based on a mere three years of residence in St Petersburg, it said much more about his prejudices than it did about Russia. The text nonetheless displays a faith in the enormous potential of the country for its own sake as well as its relations with

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Britain. Macartney attributed the backwardness of Russia to its despotic government rather than its climate or education. Swedes, asserted he, were a much more civilized people to be found in the same part of the world. Only under a freer form of government, thought Macartney, would Russia’s social, economic and intellectual potential be released. He did not place much faith in Catherine’s Enlightenment projects, which he described as ‘impracticable’.22 Oriental despotism was not a western myth subscribed to by James Porter, who having spent a quarter-century of his life in Turkey, felt qualified to contest and, if possible, debunk, fictions about the Ottoman Empire apparent in the literature of his day. The Observations of the Religion, Law, Government and Manners of the Turks (1768) was written in part to supersede Paul Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), a text also written by an ex-diplomat that possessed the status of a classic. That Porter had a European audience in mind is apparent from the fact that the second edition of 1771 was also published in French.23 There was security of life and property under the law in Turkey, wrote Porter of politics and government, not to mention limits on the sultan’s ‘absolute’ authority. The connections to Montesquieu’s definition of liberty as property are clear. ‘Despotism’, added Porter, ‘may be defined as a government in which exists neither law nor compact, prior to the usurped power of the sovereign; a sovereign, on whose arbitrary will the framing or the execution of the law depends, and who is bound neither by a positive divine restriction, nor by a compact with the people.’ Much of that compact, noted Porter, could be found in the Koran, and some separation of powers existed in the legal infrastructure of the Ottoman state. Arbitrary government henceforth stemmed, not from the ‘immorality’ of Islam, but from the corrupt administration of law and governance. There was no absence of law or arbitrary law: ‘the Turkish Empire, if not in every respect a limited Monarchy, borders upon that kind of government’. Porter nevertheless envisioned no progress taking place in this or any other state of affairs. In this silence lay his affirmation of European superiority.24 Religion, not surprisingly, lay at the core of Porter’s text. As a devotee of natural theology, he had no time for advocates of its revealed counterpart who made comparisons between the Koran and the Bible: ‘it must be evident to all sagacious and impartial men: that the whole Koran is a discordant, incoherent jumble of sentences, gleaned from fugitive Jews, and Christian sectaries, Nestorians, Monothelites and Eutychians.’ These, having been assembled by Mohammed, were ‘imposed on an ignorant, enthusiastic people, who could not give a stronger mark of

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barbarism than in believing it to be the word of God’.25 Having said this, neither the Koran nor the Turkish people were devoid of ethics or humanity. Islam, in Porter’s opinion, was a poor creed because it enjoined obedience to a Holy Writ that flew in defiance of reason and preached intolerance to all other churches. True faith for Porter combined ‘perfect simplicity and universal benevolence’ with intellectual rigour. Some of this could be found in the theological disputes of the Islamic world. The Greeks, on the other hand, had ‘entirely neglected to cultivate the practice of true religion.’ Like Roman Catholics, they had become slaves to ritual: ‘absurd and superstitious practices abound among them’. For Porter, like Edward Gibbon, the rise of barbarism and the corruption of religion were inextricably linked. A loss of faith could only be followed by decline and fall. Modern Greeks are portrayed in the Observations as wretches who had lost the virtue, arts and learning of their ancestors. They were crafty, subtle, intriguing, vain and vindictive; as such, no fit objects for Christian pity because they lived under the yoke of Muslim governors who were, comparatively speaking, sagacious and steadfast people. Only when selfinterest became an object of competition did Turks become ferocious towards themselves and others. Misguided though the Turks might be in their attachment to the Koran, they had not lost sight of the wisdom or mercy of God. Islam was a religion that ‘perverts the rectitude of nature’, but was otherwise capable of inspiring notable human achievements, not least the avoidance – as Porter saw it – of excessive strife between its own sects. Some ‘absurd’ Christians, he noted, had no such charity.26 Though he did not refer to the Embassy Letters by name, Porter’s chapter on manners and customs owes much to Lady Mary’s standards of reportage. His description of the bath house is a pale imitation of hers. While Porter’s derisory remarks on the beauty of Turkish women – and the prevalence of western myths about them – may indicate nothing more than misogyny, it is more likely to designate a distaste for sexual fantasy. He depicted Turks as law-abiding and family-loving folk who, despite their prohibitions against wine, were as fond of amusement as any other people. Since they were not savages in their daily intercourse with others, Europeans ought not infer from atrocity tales about the intolerance of Islam ‘that they are universally, and without exception, destitute of virtue; nor of all humanity towards strangers’. Porter was honest enough to say that he lacked the evidence to say much more.27 So much has been written about the Embassy Letters from different academic perspectives that it has lost whatever status it once possessed as an authentic memoir. Isobel Grundy has ascertained that the text,

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written sometime between 1719 and 1724, was based on Montagu’s embassy journal of 1716–17 and, possibly, some of her letters. The completed text was widely circulated in manuscript during its author’s lifetime. As many scholars have noted, the self-reflexivity of the Embassy Letters subverts male and, to some extent, western categories of observation and experience. This too, as far as European stereotypes are concerned, was Porter’s intention. Despite his call for the rehabilitation of Turks in the eyes of his peers, the Ottoman Empire emerges from his text as a stagnant empire. Nowhere was its arrogance more apparent than in the diplomatic rituals that reduced all other powers to the status of supplicants.28 Like Macartney in China, Porter detested the ceremonies of abasement imposed upon newly arrived ambassadors in addition to the assumption that all official gifts were forms of tribute. This was alien to the commercial ethics, if not the practices, of the First British Empire. The failure of Britain’s first embassy to China was once attributed to Macartney’s refusal to kowtow. The Emperor of China was used to receiving supplications from its vassals, and did not send agents to bargain with other states as equals. By 1760, tea, once an exotic luxury item, had become a staple in the British diet, and it came primarily from China, or rather Canton, the single treaty port through which the crown had authorized merchants to trade with the European ‘barbarians’. During the 1780s, the British had faced rising export duties and constant conflict with the Hong consortium of merchants. Macartney was therefore sent in search of reduced duties, greater trade privileges and permission to build warehouses and factories on and offshore. Diplomatic weight was thus given to the East India Company’s long litany of complaints about the Hong.29 What Macartney was peddling was a British myth of informal imperialism in which peaceful trade was a benign instrument of mutual economic and social intercourse. In addition to a team of botanists and mechanics, Macartney had brought samples of industrial goods to China. Neither these nor the Herschel telescope sent by George III as a gift to the emperor were received with more than polite interest for the Chinese cared little for the products of other cultures. Macartney’s unwillingness to accept the Chinese reading of his mission was apparent in his proposal to amend the ceremony of presentation by requiring ‘a person of equal rank as mine’ to kowtow to a portrait of George III. Only then would he ‘make nine prostrations or inclinations of the head to the ground’ on his knees in front of the emperor.30 The Chinese eventually absolved Macartney from compliance with the customary rituals but did so from politeness rather than any recognition of European values or diplomatic norms. Towards the end of the embassy, Sung-Yun, one of

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the mandarins in attendance upon the British entourage, was surprised to discover that its leader had spent three years in Russia, and ‘asked me what I could be doing there so long’. Macartney tried to explain why diplomats were stationed in foreign countries, whereupon Sung-Yun replied ‘that it was otherwise in China, which never sends ambassadors to foreign countries; that ambassadors from foreign countries were only occasionally received’.31 Overcoming this insularity could take several forms. Unwilling though the Chinese were to receive embassies, Macartney thought it best to install an official ‘totally unconnected with trade and clearly known to be so’ at Canton. In assessing the poor state of relations between Britain and China, he held the agents of the East India Company partly to blame. ‘We keep aloof from them as much as possible. We wear a dress as different from theirs as can be fashioned. We are quite ignorant of their language.’ It was not to be wondered at, thought Macartney, that the Chinese were disinclined to trust the British. ‘They are jealous of foreigners but are they jealous without reason? Is there any country on the globe that Englishmen do not visit where they do not display that pride of themselves and that contempt of others which conscious superiority is apt to inspire?’32 Since the first volume of Barrow’s life was devoted to Macartney’s record as a colonial administrator in India and South Africa, it is clear that he saw his patron as a man of action. To what extent the Journal was meant for public consumption is a moot point. Macartney claimed to have kept it in part ‘to serve for my own use and recollection, and partly to amuse the hours of a tedious and painful employment’. He also added the disclaimer that the journal was unlikely to be ‘of much advantage or entertainment to others’. It was not, unlike William Eden’s Spanish Journal, to be ‘read to the children’.33 Macartney’s account was nonetheless written by a man whose sense of his public importance was at least as strong as his private conscience, and the journal is therefore both an ego-document and a testament to the thought-processes by which one official made sense of China and its inhabitants. ‘Nothing would be more fallacious than to judge of China by any European standard.’ Barrow exercised little editorial licence upon the Journal, which meant that readers received a detailed relation of Macartney’s perspectives on politics, culture and society. China was an old and tired power that overawed its neighbours with its size. When its authority began to disintegrate, Britain would be amongst the foremost of the powers scrambling for a piece of China trade in the east, and ‘rise superior over every competitor’. Macartney had rejected many stereotypes about China, not least the rigidity of its laws and the reserve of its people.

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Such attitudes, thought he, contributed nothing towards better relations between China and the west, and he paid tribute to the French Jesuit Joseph Amyot for helping to break down mental barriers between the two in the 15-volume Memoirs Concerning the History, Sciences and Customs of China (1776–89).34 Macartney absolved the Chinese people of any blame for the failure of his mission. Court politics in Tientsin, he thought, were the real culprit. All the mandarins with whom he had dealt were ‘sociable, conversable, good-humoured and not at all indisposed to foreigners’. The lower orders too ‘are all of a trafficking turn’, which augured well for Britain’s commercial relations with China. Macartney’s praise for the country was not unqualified: he was no admirer of its food or architecture. He nevertheless saw much to bind the two countries from the common values of human existence.35 This was not enlightenment against empire but it constituted a plea for greater tolerance on the part of Europeans towards other cultures, whether in ascent or decline. The embassy memoirs published after 1800 display less soul-searching and more confidence in Britain’s global responsibilities. This can be attributed to the consolidation of the empire following the American War of Independence and an improvement of the British presence in India.36 Jem Morier, whose family had – or would – witness Britain’s expansion projects in Palestine, Malta, the Ionian Islands and Sicily, came to the Persian embassies of 1807–15 with a strong sense of Britain’s interconnected political, economic and military priorities in the Mediterranean, Middle East and South Asia. In this he was unusual amongst British diplomats, for few accepted that greater influence in the east would counterbalance military setbacks in Europe. Jem’s two journeys through Persia are problematic texts because they constitute conscious exercises in social and literary self-fashioning whereby a man from a mercantile background sought to write for a more educated and genteel audience. This is apparent from the private correspondence between Jem and David, in which the former is frank about his goals and aspirations. A Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and 1809 (1812) was based upon Jem’s journal as secretary to Sir Harford Jones, and placed with a publisher upon Jem’s return to England in the company of Mirza Abul Hassan. Here Jem eschewed personal commentary for a descriptive account of princes, nobles, peoples and landscapes that owes much to George Staunton’s narrative of the China embassy published in 1795. In truth, Jem saw the inhabitants of Persia as ‘lawless, profligate Fellows’ whose eagerness to please made them seem servile in comparison to the Turks. Oppression and tyranny, wrote Jem in private, characterized ‘the Government & People of Persia’.37

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Shortly before the book’s publication, Jem agreed to return to Tehran as secretary to Sir Gore Ouseley’s 1811 embassy. This he hoped would be the making of his fortune as a diplomat and author. To David he wrote that he would make a study of Persian literature, ‘not because I take any delight in it, but because it is a sort of thing expected from a Man who has lived in Persia’. Jem, who had no high opinion of its historians and poets, planned to set himself up in opposition to ‘our Oriental Scholars’ and their praises of Middle Eastern culture.38 Jem, or so it seems, was no fan of Sir William Jones or the Asiatick Society of Bengal. Jem later abandoned these schemes, for no discussion of literature, poetry or history appeared in the Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, Between the Years 1810 and 1816 (1818) or the diaries on which it was loosely based.39 These bear testimony to Jem’s misery in Persia, some of which appears in his concluding remarks upon quitting the embassy. In Persia there is nothing to attract the heart – the people (with some exceptions) are false, the soil is dreary, and disease is in the climate. At a distance from civilized life, seldom hearing from our country or friends, without the resources of society, the life we led was little better than a state of exile.40

Jem’s only regrets were for the companions he was leaving behind in Tehran. What came to drive Jem’s work was his faith. In 1815 he wrote to David that he was illustrating ‘the manners and customs recorded in the Scriptures’ from the Persian daily life of his own day. This pursuit made exile much more palatable and Jem was using Thomas Shaw’s Travels and Observations in Barbary and the Levant (1738) as a model.41 Shaw was also a noted archaeologist, naturalist and one-time chaplain of the English factory at Algiers, who had employed his skills in classics and Hebrew to illustrate the natural history of North Africa and the Near East. Jem, who had no such expertise, confined himself to confirming ‘the beauty, the accuracy and the propriety’ of Holy Writ.42 Very little was said of Islamic society, and herein lay Jem’s recognition of his public responsibilities. His real commentary on Persian manners, morals and literature was reserved for The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), which he thought unlikely to be taken seriously by men in high places. In this he was mistaken. The central character of the Hajji Baba novels is a picaresque hero who is driven by a pragmatic cunning that manipulates the weaknesses of others for personal gain. Unlike Porter’s Turk, the Persians are not openly competitive in their pursuit of self-interest. In depicting Hajji Baba’s rise from poverty to power, Morier lampooned his old associate

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Mirza Abul Hassan, as a result of which the novel should be read in the context of Jem’s frustration with Hassan and his government: the former for refusing Jem permission to translate the Hayrat-nama, Hassan’s memoir of Persia’s first embassy to London; and the latter for rejecting Jem as Britain’s next envoy to Persia. So offensive were Jem’s portrayals of the court that a version of Hassan’s written protest was printed in the introduction to the second Hajji Baba novel. ‘That very bad book, sir. All lies, sir. Who tell you these lies, sir?’ Jem’s disingenuous response followed. ‘You say Hajji Baba all lies. To be sure all lies. Thousand and One Nights all lies. All Persian story-books lies; but nobody angry about them.’ The King of Persia, wrote Hassan, had loathed the book.43 Jem wished to evade responsibility for Hajji Baba by passing him off as a creature of fiction. As a man still hankering for employment from the Foreign Office, Jem nonetheless felt some responsibility for amending his faux-pas in cultural diplomacy. In The Adventures of Hajji Baba in England (1828), the ambassador and secretary of embassy say many critical things about English culture and society. Here Jem undertook a reconstruction of the Hayrat-nama that is not far removed from Hassan’s text. The original was nonetheless more discreet in its observations, not least because Hassan hoped that it would be ‘a useful guide for future ambassadors’.44 Here Jem used Staunton’s account of the China embassy once more as a model. Staunton, Macartney’s secretary of embassy, had felt the failure of the China mission as keenly as his chief; and given Britain’s continued thirst for tea, had no wish to offend his hosts. Poor relations between the Chinese and the English at Canton, he wrote, proceeded from ‘the abuse of liberty in the vulgar and uninstructed minds of British seamen, and other persons in inferior stations’. To a people ‘whose minutest actions are controlled by specific regulations’, this lack of self-discipline was ‘peculiarly disgusting and offensive’. While Jem’s portrayal of the Persian mind was not lacking in such insights, Hajji Baba and Mirza Firouz were not the satirical Uzbek and Rica of the Lettres persanes.45 Jem was no political philosopher. Since Jem never returned to the diplomatic service, he need not have claimed, as he did in the prefaces to Zohrab the Hostage (1832) and Ayesha, The Maid of Kars (1834), that he was writing fiction. These were no less judgmental than the Hajji Baba novels in portraying Persia as a site of despotism and misogyny. The link between Jem’s books and the embassy memoirs of Porter and Macartney lies in their common use of Enlightenment paradigms: to establish a historic case for intellectual, moral and cultural superiority before justifying the export of ‘improvement’ to other peoples. The commercial ethos of the eighteenth century was intrinsic to this reasoning, but herein lies the link between an empire

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of trade and an empire of dominion. Macartney and Staunton realized that the mission imposed high ethical standards upon its agents. Jem, who had not been educated from childhood in the dictates of public duty, learned this the hard way. The pietism that drove the Moriers, a spiritual force whose judgmentalism was often hostile to enlightenment values, would inspire a very different kind of text, the nineteenth century spiritual memoir. Here retired public men, amongst them diplomats, explained why, and upon what grounds, they believed in Christ. George Henry Rose published Scriptural Researches in 1832, David Morier’s What Has Religion to Do with Politics? appeared in 1848 and Stratford Canning’s Why I Am a Christian was produced in 1873.46 The genre was by no means new. What distinguishes these tracts from their predecessors is their passionate tone, the intensity with which salvation is promised to readers who keep the faith. This is symptomatic of an age in which many Anglicans thought that their society was losing its virtues and morality. It was therefore incumbent upon public men to provide guidance to others, in so doing passing verdict upon their own kind. All of these authors had been born after 1765 and reached maturity during the Napoleonic Wars: as such, they were products of a society that saw the French Revolution as a punishment sent by God upon his doubting and disobedient people. All, as a result, were conservative enemies to infidelity and popular commotions who believed that human suffering was an inescapable outcome of original sin. Morier is best described as a mainstream moderate evangelical for whom God was, on the whole, a benevolent watchmaker and everything we know about Canning suggests a similar outlook. Rose, in contrast, was a radical premillennialist and member of a small, if influential school of adventists, for whom the second coming of Christ was to be accompanied by the repatriation of the Jews to Zion.47 While little is said directly in these texts of Britain’s global responsibilities, comparisons to other cultures and religions speak indirectly of connections to a wider world grounded upon a common consciousness of God’s will. Infidelity, wrote Rose, had to be combated by every possible means, in the war against which he presented his interpretations of various facts recorded in the Old and New Testaments. He had combed the Old and New Testaments in search of instances ‘when there is a striking recurrence of a combination of peculiar circumstances in facts happening more than once, when things of little apparent importance, or standing by themselves, and unconnected with events which precede, or follow them, are related circumstantially’. Here, thought Rose, in addition to cases ‘when immoral conduct is depicted in detail’ without reprehension

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or punishment, were to be found forecasts of the future. In this he was unusual, given that many pre-millennialists focused primarily on prophecy from the books of Daniel and Revelations. In dealing with the Old Testament, Rose sought to prove its veracity and didactic purpose through the citation of supporting evidence from complementary sources ranging from geology and Greek myth to the travellers’ tales of Barrow and Staunton. In this sense, his work was somewhat similar to Jem’s. China, claimed Rose, was a living exemplar of a moral society preserved by God, with ‘the gracious intention of exhibiting to all generations, and to all nations, a perpetually living proof of the picture of the patriarchal age traced in the Mosaic record’. Despite next to no knowledge of Chinese history, Rose asserted that China’s society could be no copy of ancient Israel, but was instead a ‘fellow original existing from a period antecedent by two or three hundred years to the time of Abraham down to our day’.48 The moral lessons for the global order were clear. While the children of Ham had been punished for their disobedience by enslavement, those of China had prospered through their devotion to God’s word. Rose was promulgating a unique form of revelation through comparative history. Rose was not alone in these pursuits for Jack Morier, as Werry tells us, was engaged in the same enterprise of Biblical prophecy at Dresden. As David Bebbington tells us, neither was writing in a vacuum in calling for more research on these ‘mysterious and inexpressibly interesting masterpieces of heavenly skill’. Where possible, Rose employed the evidence of archaeology and science to illustrate the Bible’s veracity: citing, for example, fossil evidence in support of the flood that had launched Noah’s Ark. The absence of a hieroglyphic record of the Exodus was attributed in its turn to the recent discoveries of Egyptologists, according to whom Ramses II had been the last builder pharaoh. No monuments could therefore exist to record the departure of the Jews. Much of this logic is, to our eyes, specious but Rose’s interest in the prophetic potential Holy Writ is illustrative of the ‘new’ uses to which it could be put. If the Scriptures did not contain the literal truth of the past and present, it was possible that they contained something far more valuable: intimations of the future. God, after all, did nothing without a purpose.49 Bearing this in mind, David Morier’s response to the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 was the publication of What Has Religion to Do with Politics? This text told its readers that disobedience to the laws of God and man could only result in anarchy. David began by defending social inequality as a fact of life and rationale for civil government. Since all government, in practical terms, was based on consent, it was the duty of the governors to study ‘the real and permanent interest of all classes

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of society and promotion of the general welfare’ whilst remaining in touch with public opinion. This he defined, not as mob rule, but as ‘the prevailing sentiment practically influencing the conduct of the governed, collectively, in their relations with the government’.50 David made the governors of a country responsible for promoting the moral welfare of its subjects. Because man was stained with original sin, he could never attain perfection in this life. His selfishness could nonetheless be restrained by the inculcation of private and public duty. This was best done through a system of national education configured to strengthen the moral fibre of individuals. In the economic realm, the poor could not be overburdened with taxes while the rich needed security in their possession of property. If possible, landowners and industrialists were to be encouraged to take an interest in their employees’ welfare, ‘provide for their comforts and recreation, and, above all . . . bestow upon them the most precious of gifts, occasional leisure to attend to those higher and more enduring interests which are equally the patrimony of the poor and the rich.’ Vulgar materialism, which David saw as one bane of his age, was to be discouraged in favour of its pious substitute.51 Only when these things had been done could it be said that a nation was progressing toward whatever prosperity could be attained in this life. Were a state to adopt ‘the real charter of mankind’, which was ‘catholic Christianity’, it would evade both the injustices of absolutism and the anarchy of mob rule. By this he did not, of course, mean Popery but rather a strict adherence to the conservative social and political implications of Christ’s teachings. No government, admitted David, had ever successfully done so, which accounted for much of the hardship in the world. The French leaders of 1848 had instead made the mistake of conflating the message of universal love with popular sovereignty. The revolutions of that year were therefore a warning to others, particularly Britons, not to be tempted by theoretical schemes of governance that ignored the social inequalities decreed by God.52 This was the relationship between religion and politics. Stratford Canning too tried in later life to mediate between what Matthew Arnold called the ignorant armies that clash by night. Since he saw in salvation the true message of Christianity and sought, therefore, to reach the widest possible audience, he eschewed Biblical scholarship and political analysis for a simple appeal to faith. Why I Am a Christian (1873) presented sixteen reasons to believe in Christ. Like Rose, Canning deplored what he called the current fashion for scepticism and, like Morier, believed that the health of the soul was lost sight of amidst calls for progress of the mind and body. A conflict, as he saw it, existed

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between those who derided modern secular knowledge for the purity of traditional faith, and others who confounded a love of liberty with a distrust of religion. Christianity, asserted Canning, could shelter all beneath its wings. In a world without the ethics that it upheld, of which tolerance was one, no improvements in human existence could take place. One ought to believe that Christ was the Messiah because, against all the historical odds, the cult of a humble, if ‘perfect, [and] irreproachable’ carpenter’s son, had spread and prospered.53 Natural theology had become increasingly difficult for thinking Anglicans to defend from the 1850s onwards. As a result, the Bible had nothing to do with science. It existed to tell people about God, the relation in which his creatures stood towards him, and the salvation that awaited them. ‘Now, what necessary dependence has the revelation of these matters upon science as applied to natural objects, whether astronomical, geological, or any other department of human research?’ Since humans were imperfect creatures, added Canning, it was hardly surprising that the Bible was less than truthful in all its particulars.54 In The Greatest of Miracles (1876) he described the scriptures and their account of creation, providence and the life of Christ as matters ‘without limitations of person, time or space.’ He nevertheless also admitted the implications of this creed, that the Bible was a set of morality tales best read as a compilation of proverbs rather than any actual account of empirical ‘truth’ or history. ‘That a belief in them is necessary to a full acceptance of Christianity forms no part of my argument.’ This Rose had conceded for the contents of the New Testament, which he read metaphorically. The first communion administered by Christ at the Marriage of Cana was, in his eyes, figurative, ‘of the joyful and mystical union of the Church with its great head’.55 Something, as Boyd Hilton says, was lost with the passage of the atonement as a creed, and with it went some of the direct connections between faith and reason. During Porter’s day, the two could co-exist in a state of harmony that was, by Rose’s time, becoming difficult to sustain. Infidelity, of which scepticism was the chief weapon, was for the devout the scourge of western civilization. Only, as Morier put it, by ‘measuring our social progress by our nearer and nearer approach to the immutable standard of His truth, may [we] confidently trust to stand secure and uninjured amid the great convulsion, of which the first throes are quickening and inflaming the pulses of the whole civilized world’.56 The ontological foundations of Christianity had therefore to be maintained in public debate against the epistemological onslaught of pure reason if Britons were to have any claims to virtue, let alone supremacy in the wider world.

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The spiritual memoirs of the nineteenth century thus stand apart from the more ‘conventional’ travel or embassy memoirs of the earlier period. Having said this, all these authors wrote, in part, as a public duty, the sense of which was derived from many sources: the desire, as in the case of Porter and Wortley-Montagu, to debunk old myths; the urge, as in Macartney’s, to articulate faith in the progress of humankind; the intention, as expressed by Staunton, to serve the public’s demand for knowledge; or the need, strong in the Moriers, to illustrate the truth of God’s word. All of these texts, particularly the Turkish memoirs, Macartney’s China Journal and Morier’s Journeys, were avidly read in Britain and Europe. They illustrate a gradual shift in British attitudes towards Europe and the wider world whereby the ‘laissez-faire’ assumptions of informal empire slowly give way to a more custodial sense of international power and responsibility. Integral to this process was the assertion of literal or putative superiority, if only in print: be it spiritual in Turkey, political and military in the Peninsula, economic in China or intellectual and cultural in Persia. It should come as no surprise that public servants were such active contributors to this development in the emergence of ‘modern’ British identity.’ Notes 1 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 284–300; L. Mayer, Views in Egypt from the Original Drawings in the Possession of Sir R. Ainslie . . . with Historical Observations and Incidental Illustrations of the Manners and Customs of the Natives of That Country (1801); Dutens, An History of the Late Important Period, from the Beginning of his Majesty’s Illness, to the Settlement of the Executive Government in the Appointment of a Regent. To Which Are Added Observations on the Conduct of the Two Contending Parties, etc. (1789). 2 Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago, 1994), pp. 99–100. The phrase first appeared in Henry Wotton, Reliquiae Wottonniae (1591). 3 Cameralism is best known as an eighteenth-century German doctrine of governance but it had British manifestations. Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1984) and ‘Cameralism and the science of government’, JMH, 56 (1984), 263–84; Julian Hoppitt, ‘Political arithmetic in eighteenth century England’, Economic History Review, 49 (1996), 516–40; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, 2000); Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, pp. 118–19; Michael Jackson, ‘The eighteenth century antecedents of bureaucracy, the Cameralists’, Management Decision, 43 (2005), 1293–1303.

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4 Dep Bland Burges 30, Burges to Auckland, 28 August 1790, f. 54; Colin Brooks, ‘British political culture and the dismemberment of states: Britain and the first partition of Poland, 1762–1772’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 13 (1993), 51–64. 5 Kates, Monsieur D’Eon Is a Woman, pp. 119–32; BL Add MS 35367, Yorke to Hardwicke, 20 April 1764, f. 74. 6 Malmesbury Diaries, iv. Malmesbury to Lord Camden, 11 April 1813, p. 413; Rapport du Grand-Juge [Claude Ambrois Régnier, duc de Massa] au Premier Consul, Paris (1804); Second rapport du grand-juge relative aux trâmes du nommé Drake, minister d’Angleterre à Munich, et du nommé Spencer Smith, minister d’Angleterre à Stutgard, contre la France, Paris (1804). 7 Horn, British Diplomatic Service, p. 286; BL Egerton MS 1970, Dutens to Strange, 20 July 1782, ff. 92–3. 8 Adair, Historical Memoir of a Mission to the Court of Vienna in 1806, by The Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Adair, G.C.B. With a Selection of His Dispatches, Published by Permission of the Proper Authorities (1844), p. x. 9 The Negotiations for the Peace of the Dardanelles in 1808–9: with Dispatches and Official Documents, by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Adair, G.C.B., being a Sequel to the Memoir of his Mission to Vienna in 1806, 2 vols (1845) i. pp. vii–viii. 10 Londonderry, Recollections of a Tour in the North of Europe, in 1836–1837, 2 vols (1837), i. pp. iii–iv. 11 Wellington Dispatches, vi. Wellington to Charles Stuart, 21 April 1810, p. 51. 12 Londonderry, Narrative of the Peninsular War, From 1808 to 1813 (1828), p. x; Burghersh, Memoir of the Early Campaigns of the Duke of Wellington in Portugal and Spain, By an Officer Employed in His Army (1820). 13 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), pp. 305–40; Piers Mackesy, ‘Strategic problems of the British war effort’, in H.T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 162–4; Iain Pears, ‘The gentleman and the hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the nineteenth century’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 216–36. 14 Londonderry, Narrative of the Peninsular War, pp. 3–4, 147, 210–11, 378, 415. 15 Burghersh, Memoir of the Operations of the Allied Armies, under Prince Schwartzenberg, and Marshal Blucher, During the Latter End of 1813, and the Year 1814 (1822), pp. 309–10. 16 Chad, Narrative of the Revolution in Holland, pp. 152–73. 17 Londonderry, Narrative of the War in Germany and France, in 1813 and 1814 (1830), pp. vii, 217–18, 243–5, 255–6. 18 Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 556–622; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The

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Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994); Poe, A People Born to Slavery, pp. 6–7, 15, ch. 2. Photocopied text in R.G. Cross, ‘A Russian almanack for the year 1767’, which was never published, in George Macartney, An Account of Russia MDMCCLXVII [1977] Bod Vet. A5 d.1349; Marshall, ‘Lord Macartney, India and China’, pp. 121–31; Barrow, Public Life of Macartney, ii. pp. 2–93. Macartney, ‘Extract from an Account of Russia, in 1767’, in Barrow, Public Life of Macartney, ii. pp. 47–52, 55–9; Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia, pp. 93–107. Macartney, Account of Russia, pp. 28–31, 44. Michael Bittner, ‘George Forbes’s “Account of Russia, 1733–1734”’, Slavonic and East European Review, 82 (2004), 886–920; Macartney, Account of Russia, pp. 60–5, 181. Horn, British Diplomatic Service, pp. 290–1; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, p. 72; Franco Venturi, ‘Oriental despotism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 133–42; Adrienne Ward, ‘Eastern others on western pages: eighteenth century literary orientalism’, Literature Compass, 1 (2003) doi:10.1111/j.1741–4113.2004.00068.x; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, pp. 46–8. Porter, Turkey, pp. 255, 264–6, 273. Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), 28–33; Robert C. Bartlett, ‘On the politics of faith and reason: the project of enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu’, Journal of Politics, 63 (2001), 1–28; Tamara Gregg, ‘Universal history from counter-reformation to enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 219–47; Porter, Turkey, i. p. 252. Porter, Turkey, pp. 55–6, 73–4, 223–5, 237–8, 253–4, 259, 340. Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ii. pp. 284–6; Porter, Turkey, pp. 250, 273–5, 322, 324–5, 329; Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, 1999), pp. 138–9. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, pp. 199–200; E.W. Fernea, ‘An early ethnographer of Middle Eastern women – Montagu, Mary Wortley (1689–1762)’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 40 (1981), 329–38; Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 78–82, 85–98; Mary Jo Kietzman, ‘Montagu’s Turkish embassy letters and cultural dislocation’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 38 (1998), 537–51; Katherine S.H. Turner, ‘From classical to imperial: changing visions of Turkey in the eighteenth century’, in Steve Clark (ed.), Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London, 1999), 113–28; Teresa Hefferman, ‘Feminism against the east/west divide: Lady Mary’s Turkish embassy letters’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (2000), 201–15; Joanna De Groot, ‘Oriental feminotopias? Montagu’s and Montesquie’s “seraglios” revisited’, Gender & History, 18 (2006), 66–86.

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29 E.H. Pritchard, The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750– 1800 (Washington 1936); J.L. Cranmer-Byng, ‘Lord Macartney’s embassy to Peking in 1793, from official Chinese documents’, Journal of Oriental Studies, 4 (1957–8), 117–87; Aubrey Singer, The Lion and the Dragon: The Story of the First British Embassy to the Court of the Emperor Qianlong in Peking: 1791–1794 (London, 1992); Alan Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilizations: The British Expedition to China, 1792–1794, trans. Jon Rothschild (London, 1993); James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Quing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC, 1995). 30 Macartney, China Journal, in Public Life of Macartney, ii. 15 August 1793, pp. 199–201; 29 August 1793, pp. 224–5. 31 Ibid., 10 October 1793, pp. 316–17. 32 Macartney, China Journal, 2–7 January 1794, pp. 396, 400, 402. 33 Ibid., 15 January 1794, pp. 409–10; Auckland Correspondence, ii. Eden to Eleanor Eden, 28 March 1789, p. 163. 34 Macartney, China Journal, 4 October 1793, pp. 303–8. 35 Ibid., 2–7 January 1794, p. 398–9. 36 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 102–6, 186–8, 197–201. 37 Balliol MS D.1.6, #7, Jem to David Morier, 16 November 1809, n.f. 38 Balliol D.1.7, #1, Jem to William Morier, 25 May 1810, n.f. and #12, Jem to David Morier, 9 May 1811, n.f.; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, pp. 17–25; J.D. Yohannen, ‘The Persian poetry fad in England 1770–1825’, Comparative Literature, 4 (1952), 137–60. 39 These are to be found in the British Library. Add MS 33839–33844. 40 Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and 1809 (1812), p. 390; Balliol MS D.1.7, #13 and #19, Jem to David Morier, April and 1 June 1811, n.f. 41 Raymond Phineas Stearns, ‘Fellows of the Royal Society in North Africa and the Levant, 1662–1800’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 11 (1954), 75–90. 42 Balliol MS D.2.2, #2, Jem to David Morier, 10 March 1815, n.f. 43 Hassan to Morier, 21 May 1816 and Morier to Hassan, 10 September 1826 in Charles Beckett (ed.), The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1899), pp. xvii–xx; Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys, pp. 216–17. 44 Mirza Abul Hassan, A Persian at the Court of King George 1809–10: The Journal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans. M.M. Cloake (London, 1988), p. 63. 45 Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Jem also wrote The Mirza (1841) and Misselmah: A Persian Tale (1848). None of these novels captured the public mind in the same way as the Hajji Baba tales, which were so successful that Jem added later installments to the story where Hajji Baba returns to England to find that parliamentary reform has only strengthened Britain, not diminished it in any way: Bentley’s Magazine, 2 August 1837, pp. 174–5. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of An

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Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China; Cursory Observations Made, and Information Obtained, in Travelling through that Ancient Empire, and a Small Part of Chinese Tartary. Together with a Relation of the Voyage undertaken on the Occasion, by HM Ship the Lion, and the Ship Hindostan, in the East India Company’s Service, to the Yellow Sea, and Gulf of Pekin; as Well as of Their Return to Europe, 2 vols (1797) i. pp. 12–13. David, like Jem, also tried his hand at fiction in the form of Photo the Suliote: A Tale of Modern Greece, 3 vols (1857) while Stratford wrote a second religious tract entitled The Greatest of Miracles (1876). Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, pp. 81–6; Rose, Scriptural Researches (1832), ch. 17. Rose, Scriptural Researches (1832), pp. v–vi, lx, xvii–xviii, 184–92, 200; Ralph Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican evangelicalism: the radical legacy of Edward Irving’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), 675–704. Ibid., pp. xv, 3–6, 92–4, 175, 189–200, 202–3, 422. Morier, What Has Religion to Do with Politics? The Question Considered, in Letters to His Son (1848), pp. 16, 26, 51–2. Ibid., pp. 33, 36, 80–92, 97–8, 102, 115. Ibid., pp. 125, 133–6. The dangers to the western world posed by speculative French political philosophy was stated more forcefully in Photo the Suliote, i. pp. 193–4; ii, p. 121. Canning, Why I Am a Christian (1873), pp. 4, 15–16. Ibid., pp. 66–7. John M. Robson, ‘The fiat and finger of God; the Bridgewater treatises’ and George Levine, ‘Scientific discourse as an alternative to faith’, in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth Century Religious Belief (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 71–125 and 225–61. Canning, The Greatest of Miracles (1876), pp. 3–4, 65; Rose, Scriptural Researches, p. 376. Canning, Why I Am a Christian, pp. 125, 133–6.

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Conclusion: Diplomacy transformed?

In 1830, British diplomacy was still an occupational sub-culture of genteel public service rather than anything resembling a professional bureaucracy. Like other branches of the European foreign service, it would remain the preserve of the landed and wealthy throughout the nineteenth century.1 Having said this, the British corps had changed in its mentalities over the second half of the eighteenth century in response to new domestic expectations of public service and private identity. What it meant to be British was thereby more sharply defined, whether in intellectual, social or cultural terms, both for and against Europe. While the experience of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had given Britons a strong sense of their ties to the Continent through the socio-politics of counter-revolution, their comparative isolation from 1801 to 1813 also strengthened the country’s sense of separation from the continent. This coincided with an increased attention to colonial concerns that would eventually affect all the nineteenth-century great powers. This is not to say that Britons ever shed their European identities, whether as private individuals or public servants, nor that English exceptionalism, as it is fashionable to argue these days, was about an increasing preoccupation with the empire.2 What made the British European was in fact visible in the often informal stratagems they employed for imposing control over their overseas possessions after 1783, whether in what Christopher Bayly has called the rituals of viceregality in Ireland or the proconsular despotisms of military occupations in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars.3 These regimes, like Napoleon’s First Empire, owed a good deal of their legitimacy to the beliefs and trappings of baroque political culture despite their frequent justification through the employment of pragmatic or Enlightenment notions of trade, defence, politics or economics. 4 Even at home, the governments of the 1790s and 1800s sought to bolster loyalty through attempts to fan the flames of xenophobia and, to some extent, resacralize

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the monarchy.5 The British, like the French, invented new traditions and governing styles of their own. Ritual should not, however, be seen in simple terms as either a site of contest or mechanism of subordination. It was also, in an ideal world, supposed to foster community. Civility in the European corps diplomatique and, by extension, high society – or so it would seem from the performance expectations about which men and women complained – was in general terms less about formal and competitive external appearances over time and more about informal and collegial sociability. So too ultimately was the notion of equilibrium based on harmony and a mutual recognition of rights that, as Schroeder tells us, replaced the concept of an inherently self-regulating balance at the Congress of Vienna.6 Herein lies one explanation for the denigrations of etiquette to be found in all diplomatic practice manuals of the later eighteenth century. In general, these changes in European manners were consistent with what was taking place in Britain though differences in emphasis and degree, of course, existed. Britons therefore found diplomacy trying: be it the ‘obsequious’ ceremonies of the court or the warmth of the hospitality expected from their embassies. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two often confused them. How is one to read the expressions of jingoistic nationalism often to be found in the official sources? In passing judgment upon other peoples, cultures and societies, particularly at the beginning of missions or marriages, diplomats were re-affirming their private attachments to Britain. Comments made by retirees are also revealing. If a repatriated man had, in Malmesbury’s words, ‘no real mind’, it suggests that the part of the mind rejected as ‘false’ had once acknowledged the merits of others.7 How deep or prolonged this experience of liminality had been can be sensed from the remarks made by diplomats about travellers, the majority of whom never became European. Although tourists should have been cultivating easy manners and an open-minded courtesy to others, it should be remembered that some diplomats, like Philip Stanhope, never succeeded in doing so either. To what extent this was desirable at home was also, by 1770, questionable for men. Since women were invested with the duty of maintaining a happy home, they carried more – literally speaking – of Britain abroad in their hearts and minds than men. Some women, like Catherine Hamilton, made no effort to become cosmopolitan while others, most notably Harriet Granville, struggled not to sacrifice too much of herself to the demands of other cultures and society. Emma Hamilton’s experience suggests that women, like men, were best trained young. Reintegration into British society upon retirement may therefore have been more difficult

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for men than for women. As Malmesbury’s words suggest, Britishness, as an identity for men, was something that, if lost, had to be regained. Permanent transformation from one state to another was, if the prescriptive literature on the Grand Tour is to be believed, increasingly forbidden. Other loyalties, most notably alternative ethnicity within the British Isles, were also in seemingly decreasing conflict with this hegemonic polite and commercial nationalism from 1770 onwards.8 There are few signs of resistance to the triumphal march of Englishness. Nothing of the Jacobites can be found in Keith junior’s correspondence after the death of Lord Marischal in 1778 and Henry Watkin Williams Wynn, though proud to be Welsh, saw no tensions between his Celtic birth and English state employment.9 The Anglo-Irish constitute a complex sub-set of Britishness in the eighteenth-century service. Since the colonial mentality and ethnic identity of Ascendancy families as governors of Ireland was, on the whole, only strengthened by state service, diplomacy is not the place to look for evidence of what Roy Foster has called an emerging Irish identity. This is not to say that Anglo-Irish diplomats were uncritical of their ancestors: in an Account of Ireland produced after a stint in Dublin as Chief Secretary, Macartney had depicted the seventeenth-century conquest in harsh terms. He also believed that the native Irish were like the French: ‘nothing but Despotism can govern them’, wrote he in the wake of the 1798 insurrection. Conservatives like Wellington and Clanwilliam would have agreed.10 Augustus Foster, who supported Catholic Emancipation, also saw it as his duty to settle on his estates in Ireland ‘whenever I can afford to retire’, thereby departing from the tradition of Anglo-Irish absenteeism.11 Foster comes the closest to something resembling the self-identifying Ascendancy Irishman. Priscilla Wellesley-Pole, the only Anglo-Irish woman in this book, was born and raised in London, as a result of which she looked upon England as her primary ‘home’.12 The gendered division of labour that became apparent in British diplomacy after 1780 has parallels, one suspects, in Europe. To what extent changing ideas about gender at home raised standards of public service for men and women deserves examination. Stronger expectations of companionate marriage can clearly be seen at work. Harriet Harris did not leave her husband in 1787, one suspects in part on account of the damage that a separation would have done to his career and in 1819, Castlereagh’s half-brother married again to improve the image of his Vienna embassy. In so doing, he was following in the footsteps of Charles Stuart at Paris. In 1816, when Stewart took up the Vienna embassy, he wrote to Castlereagh that, as a man of the world, he was unfit for marriage. ‘You will admit yourself a long absence from English Society &

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English friends is detrimental to Habits of ever Domesticating at home.’ Marriage, thought the brothers, would give the embassy some warmth in the eyes of the Austrians, whom Stewart described as ‘naturally cold’.13 Elizabeth Stuart had, after all, won the hearts of the French despite the fact that her husband had a prickly personality. Whatever Stuart’s noctural ‘orgies’ may have been, Lady Elizabeth received nothing but public respect from her husband: ‘they walk arm & arm together frequently and in all Stuart’s Irregularities He does nothing in the glare of Day to offend or shock Morality’.14 Here lies evidence of those ‘bourgeois’ and companionate values that Boyd Hilton and Anna Clark have, in their different ways, seen as part of a new and emerging ethics of British public life from 1760 onwards.15 By the time that Stuart married Elizabeth Yorke, libertinage was increasingly frowned upon, both amongst men who sought public office and those who voted for or assessed their performance. These opinions were particularly strong amongst those of an evangelical disposition. Harriet Granville, like other women, rarely mentioned her husband as a direct influence upon her conduct, which begs the question how much training went into the making of an ambassadress. The struggles of gentlewomen to construct public identities for themselves suggest that there were few attractive female role models for this process at home or abroad. Women who learned their trade alongside inexperienced husbands had a good deal of agency. Eleanor Eden and Harriet Granville forged their own paths through cosmopolitan society while Caroline Warren did not. The situation is less clear for women who married into the trade. The regularity with which Harriet Harris and Henrietta Liston resorted to female family members for moral support suggests that input from these quarters was not insignificant. Elizabeth Stuart was fortunate in ready access to her mother. Only Emma Hamilton mentions her spouse much in her correspondence, though the level of intimacy that she reached with Maria Carolina was, as Sir William proudly noted, entirely her own achievement. In her affair with Nelson, Emma undertook a new role that transcended Hamilton’s training as a Greek heteira. In this she was arguably fortunate because she had never been under any obligation to uphold the standards of ladyhood that her colleagues struggled to maintain. What residence in Naples also gave Emma was a freedom denied to others, for negative gossip at home little affected her standing in the eyes of those card for: her mother, Sir William, Charles Greville, Maria Carolina or, later, Lord Nelson. She had a strong sense of self, and only cared about tattling tongues insofar as they might wound her family in some way. Gossip, as a medium of information exchange, had yet to become an

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215

entirely female-gendered activity in political, if not social, discourse.16 It would be naïve to think that men did not employ it for multiple purposes: the social police of the corps diplomatique, the dissemination of information and misinformation to discredit rivals or the relieving of anxiety about events. Rumour, rather than fact, served these intentions well. In the event that hearsay became ‘news’ in the pamphlet, periodical or newspaper press, it stood – as in the case of Marie Antoinette – to bolster or discredit a regime. Damage limitation therefore lay in regular attention to the mechanisms of censorship in absolutist states or the maintenance of good relations with editors, publishers and pamphleteers in ‘free’ countries. This was recognized long before George Canning made any overt appeals, whether rhetorical or literal, to the force of public opinion during the 1820s.17 Having said this, the press only enters the State Papers Foreign before 1815 during times of war, uncertainty or crisis. Diplomacy’s intersection with the world of print was not as sustained as it would later become. The court society and the public sphere should not, however, be seen as mutually opposing spaces. As Spanish diplomatic comments on the Marie Antoinette affair suggest, the former was regarded as the most important component of the latter, an opinion with which Joseph II, who as Tim Blanning tells us, died in 1790 having made himself ‘first servant of the state’, would have concurred.18 Public accountability, though constructions of the legitimate public might differ, was a matter of increasing concern to everyone before the French Revolution. By this date the diplomat too had to be more than a flunkey. To older readings of ceremonial and sociability were added the ‘new’ political skills and activities of Yorke, Stormont, Malmesbury and Auckland, all of whom worried about a public domain of coffeehouses, theatre riots, salons, libels, lobby groups, gazettes and pamphlets. The engagement of diplomats with a wider public domain long predates the nineteenth century. Britain’s domestic response to the French Revolution would have only strengthened the sensitivity of diplomats to public opinion in its various manifestations, a message that emerges clearly from the post-war military memoirs produced by Londonderry and Burghersh. To say that diplomats loathed the French Revolution and its principles in their entirely would be untrue for those of middling sort extraction. The principles of meritocracy and accountability were important to men like Liston, Merry, Werry and the Moriers, all of whom were ill-equipped to succeed in a world of patronage and privilege. Werry’s descent into insanity was in part a product of obsession over his grievances, real and imagined, though others dealt with bad treatment too. Liston received anonymous letters commenting on his humble birth and

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the Moriers were the targets of slights upon their origins as merchants and foreigners.19 Their frustration was expressed in many ways, not least Jem’s description of Hajji Baba’s rise to fame and fortune, a tale of social mobility with no parallels in the British service. Diplomacy nonetheless ‘made’ better gentlemen of all these men, familiarizing them with new people, ideas and realms. Liston is the most exceptional of the non-elite diplomats, having been the only commoner to reach ambassadorial rank in the eighteenth-century service. He had been extremely fortunate in the strength of his Scottish patrons, and set himself up as an armigerous country gentleman after retirement, complete with estate. So did Charles Richard Vaughan, the son of a doctor, while Merry retired to the country house his wife had acquired through her first marriage.20 Merry was very lucky to have been chargé d’affaires of the Madrid embassy during a diplomatic crisis that proved his abilities as a negotiator and dispatch writer. He and Liston were also willing to undertake unpopular jobs and stations, most notably the Amiens peace commission and the American embassy. Service, in addition to merit, therefore counted for something in the eighteenth-century service, given a sufficient supply of posts for the patient and comparatively little competition. This was not the scenario that faced Werry and the Moriers during the 1810s. Men possessed the most agency in the realm of self-fashioning and expression outside Europe, an experience best illuminated by personal letters and embassy memoirs. Jem’s struggles to define himself as a gentleman and diplomat are documented as much in the text of the two Journeys to Persia as in his letters to David. Macartney and Porter, in their turn, used tales of Turkey and China to articulate visions of themselves as men of science and letters. As social, political and ethnic marginals, ‘new’ identities as scientist-diplomats, connoisseur-diplomats and author-diplomats conferred status, particularly outside Britain – where normative social conventions were not in full operation – through the command of knowledge as cultural capital. Hamilton, Strange and Worsley, whose tastes had been set before they entered the service, bear testimony to this. It is little wonder that the authoring of books or collection of art and antiquities should be undertaken by early nineteenthcentury men on the make in the consular services.21 Diplomats from non-landed backgrounds shared much in common during this period with men on the edge of empire for both were undergoing integration into an expanding British elite that was using the more accessible trappings of status to denote achievement. Without wishing to deny or downplay the contributions of real and would-be subject peoples to the formation of a ‘new’ British imperialism,

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217

it should be recognized that the scientific tools of empire, not to mention its rhetoric of benevolence in the name of deism, were forged as much in Europe as the wider world. This is illustrated by the careers and publications of Hamilton, Worsley, Porter and Strange. Bayly’s ‘British Empire in Europe’ began to shape, nonetheless, long before the loss of America. Its intellectual and cultural foundations began to be laid in embassies and travel accounts by soldiers, sailors, merchants, diplomats and tourists in all parts of Europe from Russia and Turkey to Iberia. These both fed and were fed by culture contact narratives from the wider world: by 1800, a racialist discourse was visible in Grand Tour diaries dealing with Europe, while the post-war confidence inspired by Britain’s leading role in the military and diplomatic affairs of the continent would inform its subjects’ views about the colonies for the rest of the nineteenth century.22 As such, diplomats’ accounts of war and travel mark what could be called Britain’s second arrival as a great power in 1815. This pride, married to an increasing set of investments in the empire, would play an important role in Britain’s increasing sense of separation from Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Notes 1 T.G. Otte, ‘“Outdoor relief for the aristocracy?” European nobility and diplomacy, 1850–1914’ in Mossland and Riotte (eds), The Diplomat’s World, pp. 23–57. 2 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003) and A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004). 3 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 102–3, 170–1, 196–7. 4 Ibid., p. 36; Black, America or Europe: British Foreign Policy, 1739–63 (London, 1998); Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, p. 672. 5 Colley, ‘Whose nation? Class and national consciousness in Britain, 1750– 1830’, P&P, 113 (1986), 97–117; Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven, 1998), ch. 3; Timothy Jenks, Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 2006). 6 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, pp. 576–81. 7 Malmesbury Diaries, i. Malmesbury to Viscount Fitzharris, 1800, p. x. 8 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 53–4, 89. 9 PRONI D.2433/D/1/78, Baron Stotch to Robert Murray Keith, 19 March 1777, f. 231; Wynn Correspondence, Henry Watkin Williams Wynn to Charlotte Wynn, 2 September 1798, 36–7. 10 Macartney, ‘Extract from account of Ireland in 1773, by a late chief secretary

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11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22

Conclusion

of that kingdom’, in Public Life, ii. pp. 107, 116–123, Bod MS Eng misc. f. 534, Commonplace Book 1798, ff. 10, 26. PRONI D.3044/F/4/1, Clanwilliam to Wellington, 1 March 1829, ff. 511–16; Augustus John Foster Papers, Box 5, Foster to Elizabeth Devonshire, 18 March 1820, n.f. Letters of Lady Burghersh, Priscilla Burghersh to Katharine Wellesley Pole, 18 October 1813, 24. DRO D/Lo/C21(2)(i–iv), Stewart to Castlereagh, January 1816; D/Lo/ C48(19)(i-iii), Stewart to Frederick Lamb, 14 December 1816. DRO D/Lo/C23(4)(i–iv), Stewart to Castlereagh, 4 August 1819, n.f. Hilton, Age of Atonement, ch. 6; Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, 2004), ch. 9. OED Online, entry for ‘gossip’, 3 and 4; B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). Nicolson, Diplomacy, p. 23; Temperley, Foreign Policy of Canning, pp. 470–5. Hunt, ‘The many bodies of Marie Antoinette’, pp. 108–9; Blanning, Culture of Power, pp. 430–1. NLS MS 5539, Anon. to Liston, 1783, f. 145. The Liston estate was not always trouble free. NLS MS 5643, Henrietta Liston to Dick Ramage, 3 October 1815, ff. 38–9; Vaughan Papers, Reel 9, D15/31, n.f. Richard Hamblyn, ‘Private cabinets and popular geology: the British audiences for volcanoes in the eighteenth century’, in C. Chard and H. Langton (eds), Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven, 1996), pp. 183–5; Jasanoff, ‘Collectors of empire: objects, conquests and imperial self-fashioning’, P&P, 184 (2004), 109–35. Charles Richard Vaughan, Journal of Travels from Malta to Constantinople, 1804, Vaughan Papers, Reel 24, K2/11, 2 March 1804, n.f.

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DOB

1763

1767

1723

Name/ethnicity

Adair, Robert (E)

Arbuthnot, Charles (E)

Buckinghamshire, John (E)

Westminster, U. of Gottingen Westminster, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Westminster, Christ’s, Cantab.

Education

1806, Envoy Extra, Austria (43) 1783, Precis Writer (16) 1762, Ambassador Russia (39)

Rank/first posting

1805, Angelique d’Hazincourt (42) 1) 1799, Marcia Clapcott Lisle (32) 1761, Mary Anne Drury (38)

Marriage/ mistresses

1836, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Prussia 1807, Ambassador, Turkey 1765, Ambassador, Russia

Retirement/rank

Every man mentioned in the text of this book has been included in this database, a total of 69 men. Asterisks identify the central cast of 35 in this book. Complete staff lists can be found in the two volumes of British Diplomatic Representatives, 1689–1789 and 1789–1852 published by the Camden Society (1932 and 1934). Ethnicity is designated by birth: E = English, S = Scottish, W = Welsh, AI = Anglo or Scots Irish, H = Huguenot. Ages for each diplomat at first posting and marriage are displayed in brackets. Peers are listed by their titles rather than their family names. ch. ch. = Christ Church.

Appendix A Male diplomats, 1750–1830

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1745

1730

1752

Dutens, Louis* (H)

Eden, Morton* (E)

1755

Dorset, John (E)

1721

Cathcart, Charles Schaw (S) Cathcart, William Schaw (S)

1795

Eton, Russia, U. of Dresden, U. of Glasgow Vienna, Eton

1786

Canning, Stratford* (E)

Clanwilliam, Richard* (AI)

Unknown, Army

1735

Burnet, Alexander* (S)

Eton, Ch. Ch., Oxon.

Unknown

Westminster

Private, U. of Leyden Eton, King’s, Cantab.

Harrow, Trinity, Cantab.

1759

Burghersh, John (E)

Education

DOB

Name/ethnicity

Table (continued)

1814, Attaché, Congress of Vienna (19) 1783, Ambassador, France (38) 1758, Chaplain Turin (28) 1776, Envoy Extra,& Plenipo., Bavaria (24)

1768, Ambassador, Russia (47) 1812, Ambassador, Russia (57)

1814, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Florence (39) 1756, Private Sec. Prussia (55) 1807, Precis Writer (21)

Rank/first posting

1783, Elizabeth Henley (31)

1789, Ambassador, France 1783, Chaplain, Turin 1799, Ambassador, Vienna

1827, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Prussia

1830, Elizabeth Herbert (35) 1790, Arabella Cope (45) Unmarried

1772, Ambassador, Russia 1820, Ambassador, Russia

1772, Sec. of Embassy Prussia 1857, Ambassador, Turkey

1855, Ambassador, Vienna

1811, Priscilla Wellesley-Pole (52) 1778, Christian Leslie (43) 1) 1816, Harriet Raikes (30) 2) 1825, Eliza Alexander (39) 1753, Jean Hamilton (32) 1779, Elizabeth Elliot (24)

Retirement/rank

Marriage/ mistresses

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1744

1766

1751

1752

1759

1753

1780

1791

1708

Eden, William* (E)

Elgin, Thomas* (S)

Elliot, Gilbert (S)

Elliot, Hugh* (S)

Ewart, Joseph (S)

Fitzherbert, Alleyne* (E)

Foster, Augustus* (AI)

Fox, Henry Stephen (E)

Goodricke, John (E)

Devonshire Ho., Drogheda, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Eton, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Private, Trinity, Cantab.,

Derby G.S., Eton, St John’s, Cantab.

U. of Edinburgh

Eton, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Harrow, Westminster, U. of St Andrews Private, Fontainebleu, U. of Edinburgh, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Private, Fontainebleu, U. of Edinburgh, Ch. Ch., Oxon.

1814, Attaché, Naples (23) 1758, Min. Resident, Sweden (50)

1782, Private Sec., Berlin (23) 1777, Min. Resident, Brussels (24) 1802, Sec. Leg., Naples (22)

1774, Envoy Extra, Bavaria (22)

1786, Trade Comm., Paris (42) 1791, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Vienna (25) 1799, Ambassador, Vienna (48)

1731, Mary Benson (35)

Unmarried

1815, Albinia Hobart (35)

1843, Envoy Extra, United States 1773, Min. Resident, Sweden

1840, Envoy Extra& Plenipo., Turin

1791, Envoy Extra, Prussia 1803, Ambassador, Russia

1806, Envoy Extra, Naples

1801, Ambassador, Vienna

1777, Anna Maria Amyand (26)

1) 1779, Charlotte Kraut (27) 2) c. 1790, Margaret Jones (38) 1785, Anna Wontesleben (26) Unmarried

1793, Ambassador Hague 1803, Ambassador, Constantinople

1776, Eleanor Elliot (32) 1799, Mary Nisbet (33)

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1770

Jackson, Francis* (E)

1746

Hanbury-Williams, Charles* (W) Harris, James (E)

1701

1708

Hammond, George (E)

1718

Winchester, Merton, Oxon., Westminster, Trinity, Cantab. Private, Army

1763

Hamilton, William* (S)

Holdernesse, Robert (E) Hyndford, John (E)

Eton

1731

Hailes, Daniel (E)

Private

Merton, Oxon.

Westminster, Army

???

Clare, Cantab.

c. 1708 1751

Gray, James (E)

Education

DOB

Name/ethnicity

Table (continued)

1787, Private Sec., Utd Provinces (17)

1788, Sec. Emb., Austria (25) 1746, Envoy Extra, Dresden (38) 1768, Sec. Emb. Spain (22) 1744, Ambassador, Venice (26) 1741, Envoy Extra, Prussia (40)

1744, Private Sec., Venice (36) 1784, Sec Emb., France (33) 1763, Envoy Extra, Naples (32)

Rank/first posting

1) 1758, Catherine Barlow (27) 2) 1791, Emma Hart (60) 1793, Margaret Allen (30) 1732, Frances Coningsby (24) 1777, Harriet Amyand (31) 1743, Mary Doublet (25) 1) 1732, Elizabeth Shovell (31) 2) 1756, Jean Vigor (55) 1805, Elizabeth Dorville (35)

Unmarried, 2 illegitimate children ???

Marriage/ mistresses

1811, Min. Plenipo., United States

1818, Arbitration Commissioner, Paris 1757, Ambassador, Russia 1797, Peace Comm., Lille 1761, Sec. of State Northern Dept 1764, Minister, Austria

1769, Ambassador, Spain 1801, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Sweden 1800, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Naples

Retirement/rank

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c. 1697 1730

Keith, Robert* (S)

Eton, Clare, Cantab. Private, Trade

1706

1756

1708

Merry, Anthony* (E)

Mitchell, Andrew* (S)

Edinburgh U., Leyden

Leixlip Sch., TCD

Edinburgh U.

Westminster, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Private, Ch. Ch., Oxon.

1737

1742

1773

1758

Edinburgh H.S. Army Eton, Glasgow Trinity, Cantab.

Unknown

East India Co.

Private

Macartney, George* (AI) Mann, Horace* (E)

Leveson Gower, George (E) Leveson Gower, Granville Leveson* (E) Liston, Robert* (S)

1782

1764

Jones, Harford (W)

Keith, Robert-Murray* (S) Lamb, Frederick (E)

1785

Jackson, George* (E)

1774, Private Bavaria (37) 1764, Ambassador, Russia (27) 1738, Private Sec., Utd Provinces (32) 1783, Consul, Majorca (27) 1752, Trade Comm., Brussels (44)

1807, Ambassador, Persia (43) 1748, Envoy Extra, Vienna (51) 1769, Envoy Extra, Dresden (39) 1815, Envoy Extra & Plenipo, Munich (33) 1790, Ambassador, France (32) 1796, Private Sec., Lille (23)

1801, Private Sec., Paris (16)

1803, Elizabeth Leathes (47) 1722, Barbara Forbes (14), Mistresses

1796, Henrietta Sec, Marchant (54) 1768, Jane Stuart (31) Mistresses

Mistresses, 1841, Alexandrina von Maltzahn (59) 1785, Elizabeth Sutherland (27) 1809, Henrietta Cavendish (36)

c. 1730, Margaret Cunningham (33) Unmarried

Unmarried

1812, Cordelia Smith (27)

1821, Ambassador, Constantinople 1793, Ambassador, Peking 1786, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Florence 1809, Minister, Sweden 1771, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Prussia

1792, Ambassador, France 1841, Ambassador, France

1859, Slave Trade, Commissioner, St Paul de Loando 1811, Ambassador, Persia 1763, Ambassador, Russia 1790, Ambassador Austria 1841, Ambassador Austria

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1784

1744

1771

1710

1695

1717

1770

Morier, David Richard* (E) Morier, James Justinian* (E) Morier, John Philip* (E) Mountstuart, John (S)

Paget, Arthur* (W)

Porter, James* (AI)

Robinson, Thomas (E) Elder Robinson, Thomas (E) Younger Rochford, William (E)

Rose, George Henry (E)

1738

1778

1782

DOB

Name/ethnicity

Table (continued)

Geneva, St John’s Cantab.

Westminster, Trinity, Cantab. Westminster, Christ’s, Cantab. Private

Varied schools, Trade Varied schools, Trade Varied schools, Trade Harrow, Winchester Westminster, Ch. Ch., Oxon. Private, Trade

Education 1804, Private Sec., Albania (20) 1806, Private Sec., Persia (24) 1799, Private Sec., Turkey (21) 1779, Envoy Extra, Turin (35) 1791, Private Sec., Prussia (20) 1741, Trade Comm., Austria (31) 1724, Sec of Emb., France (29) 1771, Ambassador, Spain (33) 1749, Envoy Extra & Plenipo, Turin (32) 1792, Sec of Emb., Utd Provinces (22)

Rank/first posting

1796, Frances Duncombe (26)

1737, Frances Worsley (42) 1780, Mary Jemima York (42) 1742, Lucy Younge (25)

1815, Anna Jones (31) 1820, Harriet Greville (38) 1814, Horatia Seymour (36) 1766, Charlotte Jane Windsor (22) 1808, Augusta Parker (37) 1766, Clarissa Hochepied (56)

Marriage/ mistresses

1818, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Prussia

1765, Sec of State, Southern Dept 1779, Ambassador, Spain 1771, Sec. of State Southern Dept

1847, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Switzerland 1826, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Mexico 1825, Envoy Extra, Saxony 1798, Ambassador, Spain 1809, Ambassador, Turkey 1765, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Brussels

Retirement/rank

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1694

1732

1778

1727

1732

1763

1779

1766

1727

1774

Stanhope, Philip (E) [Chesterfield]

Stanhope, Philip (E)

Stewart, Charles* (AI)

Stormont, David* (S)

Strange, John* (E)

Straton, Alexander (S)

Stuart, Charles* (S)

Thornton, Edward (E)

Udney, John (E)

Vaughan, Charles Richard* (E)

Rugby, Merton Oxon.

Eton, Ch. Ch., Oxon., Glasgow Christ’s Hospital, Pembroke, Cantab. ???

Private, Clare, Cantab. ???

Westminster, Ch. Ch., Oxon.

Westminster, Private Eton, Army

Private, Trinity Hall, Cantab.

1773, Resident, Venice (41) 1781, Private Sec., Austria (18) 1801, Sec. Legation Austria (22) 1791, Private Sec., United States (25) 1761, Consul, Venice (34) 1810, Sec. Legation Spain (36)

1755, Envoy Extra, Poland (28)

1757, Resident Hamburg (25) 1813, Minister Prussia (35)

1728, Ambassador, Utd Provinces (34)

Unmarried

1816, Elizabeth Yorke (36) 1812, Wilhelmina Kohp (46) ???

1733, Petronilla von Schulenberg (39), Mistresses 1758, Eugenia Peters, (26) 1) 1804, Catherine Bligh, (26) 2) 1819, Frances Vane Tempest (41) 1) 1759, Henrietta van Berargaard (32) 2) 1776, Louisa Cathcart (44) 1760, Mary Anne Gould (28) Unmarried

1837, Special Emb. Turkey

1786, Resident, Venice 1806, Sect. of Leg., Turkey 1844, Ambassador, Russia 1824, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Portugal 1763, Consul, Venice

1782, Sec. of State, Northern Dept

1768, Resident, Dresden 1823, Ambassador, Austria

1746, Sec of State, Northern Dept

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Private, Trade Tonbridge, Army

1788

1752

Werry, Francis Peter* (E) Whitworth, Charles (E)

Winchester, Corpus, Oxon., Winchester, Trinity, Cantab. Private

1751

1717

1724

Wright, James (E)

Yorke, Joseph* (E)

1804, Precis Writer, Foreign Office (16) 1783, Envoy Extra, Poland (31) 1799, Clerk, Foreign Office (16) 1793, Envoy Extra, Venice (42) 1766, Minister, Venice (49) 1748, Peace Comm., Paris (24)

1791, Attaché, Utd Provinces (18)

Rank/first posting

1801, Arabella Sackville (49) 1813, Hester Smith (30) 1775, Dorothy Seymour (24) 1754, Catherine Stapleton (37) 1783, Christiana Boetzelaer (59)

1) 1803, Charlotte Sloane (30) 2) 1816, Georgiana Cecil (43) 1822, (34)

Marriage/ mistresses

1823, Sec. Leg. Dresden 1803, Ambassador, Paris 1853, Envoy Extra & Plenipo., Copenhagen 1797, Envoy Extra,Venice 1774, Minister, Venice 1784, Ambassador, Utd Provinces

1831, Ambassador, Vienna

Retirement/rank

Notes: Average age of entry to the service: 30.7 years. Average age of marriage: 34.2 years. English: 60.8%, Scots: 23.3%, Welsh: 5.8%, Anglo-Irish: 8.7%, Other: 1.4%.

Private, Harrow

1783

Williams-Wynn, Henry* (W) Worsley, Richard* (E)

Eton, Army

1773

Wellesley, Henry (AI)

Education

DOB

Name/ethnicity

Table (continued)

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(25), 1799 (18), 1811 (18), 1825 (27), 1816 (27), 1753

1774 1793 1807 1789 1726

Arbuthnot, Marcia (E) née Clapcott-Lisle Burghersh, Priscilla (AE) née Wellesley-Pole Canning, Eliza (E) Canning, Harriet (E) Cathcart, Jean (S) née Hamilton

Date of marriage

DOB

Name

4, 1 died 1, died 6

8

4

Children

Retirement, 1858 Death, 1817 Death, 1771

Retirement, 1855

Death, 1826

separation, or death

Date of retirement

33 1 3

43

27

Years in service

Last names given are those of the husband for ease of cross referencing to the male database. Ethnicity has been classified by birth rather than marriage. E = English, S = Scottish, W = Welsh, AI = Anglo-Irish, G = German, D = Dutch. In the event that spouses did not serve (i.e. married after their husbands retired, were left at home during wartime, divorced or separated), they have not been included in this list. The age of marriage is displayed in brackets. There are 46 women on this list.

Appendix B Female diplomats, 1750–1830

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Ewart, Margaret (G) née Wontesleben Foster, Albinia (E) née Hobart Leveson Gower, Elizabeth (S) née Sutherland Leveson-Gower, Harriet (E) née Cavendish Hamilton, Catherine (E) née Barlow Hamilton, Emma (E) née Lyons Hammond, Margaret (E) née Allen (27), 1815 (20), 1785 (24), 1809 (20), 1758 (26), 1791 (23), 1793

1788 1765 1785 1738 1765 1770

(20), c. 1790

1770 (20), 1785

(20), 1779

c. 1759

c. 1765

(25), 1777

1752

(21), 1799

1778

Elliot, Anna Maria (E) née Amyand Elliot, Charlotte (G) née Kraut Elliot, Margaret (G) née Jones

(18), 1776 (26), 1783

1758 1757

Eden, Eleanor (S) née Elliot Eden, Elizabeth (E) née Henley Elgin, Mary (S) née Nisbet

Date of marriage

DOB

Name

Table (continued)

5

0

0

5

3 4

3

9

1

7

2, 1 died

12 5, 1 died

Children

Date of retirement

Retirement, 1818

Retirement, 1800

Death, 1782

Retirement, 1841

Retirement, 1840 Retirement, 1792

Retirement, 1791

Retirement, 1806

Divorce, 1783

Retirement, 1804, divorce, 1808 Retirement, 1801

Retirement, 1793 Retirement, 1799

separation, or death

25

9

17

11

25 2

6

c. 16

4

2

5

15 16

Years in service

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Harris, Harriet (E) née Amyand Holdernesse, Mary (E) née Doublet Hyndford, Elizabeth (E) née Shovell Hyndford, Jean (E) née Vigor Jackson, Cordelia (E) née Smith Jackson, Elizabeth (G) née Dorville Keith, Margaret (S) née Cunningham Liston, Henrietta (S) née Marchant Merry, Elizabeth (E) née Death Mountstuart, Charlotte (E) née Windsor Morier, Anna (E) née Jones Morier, Harriet (E) née Greville Morier, Horatia (E) née Seymour

(17), 1777 (23), 1743 (40), 1732 (30), 1756 (27), 1812 (30), 1803 (26), c. 1726 (20), 1796 (35), 1803 (20), 1766 (22), 1815 (32), 1820 (36), 1814

1761 1720 1692 1726 1795 c. 1783 c. 1700 1776 c. 1768 1746 1793 1788 1778

7

5, 2 died 1

9, 3 died

0

0

3

???

0 ???

1, died

3, 2 died

4

Retirement, 1825

Retirement, 1847 Retirement, 1826

Retirement, 1798

Retirement, 1809

Retirement, 1821

Retirement, 1762

Retirement, 1811

Retirement, 1764 Death, 1853

Death, 1750

Retirement, 1765

Retirement, 1788

11

32 6

32

6

25

36

8

8 41

9

22

10

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(19), 1755 (21), 1737 (19), 1742 (22), 1796 (28), 1758 (19), 1819 (23), 1759 (18), 1776 (20), 1760 (27), 1816

c. 1736 1716 c. 1723 c. 1774 1730 1800 1736 1758 c. 1740 1789

Porter, Clarissa (D) née Hochepied Robinson, Frances (E) née Worsley Rochford, Lucy (E) née Younge Rose, Frances (E) née Duncombe Stanhope, Eugenia (AI) née Peters Stewart, Frances (E) née Vane Tempest Stormont, Henrietta (G) née Berargaard Stormont, Louisa (S) née Cathcart Strange, Mary (E) née Gould Stuart, Elizabeth (E) née Yorke

Date of marriage

DOB

Name

Table (continued)

0 2

4

2

7

2

10

0

8

5

Children

Date of retirement

Death, 1783 Retirement, 1844

Retirement, 1782

Death, 1766

Retirement, 1823

Retirement, 1768

Retirement, 1818

Death, 1773

Retirement, 1765

Retirement, 1765

separation, or death

10 28

6

7

3

10

22

31

28

10

Years in service

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(20), 1812 (30), 1816 (32), 1801 (20), 1813 (22), 1754

c. 1792 1786 1769 c. 1793 1732

2, 1 died

6

0

1

7

Notes: English: 65.5%, Scots: 13.3%, German: 13.1%, Dutch: 4.1%, Anglo-Irish: 4.3%.

Thornton, Wilhelmina (G) née Kohp Wellesley, Georgiana (E) née Cecil Whitworth, Arabella (E) née Cope Williams-Wynn, Hester (E) née Smith Wright, Catherine (E) née Stapleton

Retirement, 1774

Retirement, 1853

Retirement, 1803

Retirement, 1846

Retirement, 1824

8

31

2

30

12

Select primary source bibliography

Manuscript sources All Souls College, Oxford Charles Richard Vaughan Papers, Reels 3, 5–11, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30.

Balliol College, Oxford Morier MS Class A, Boxes 1–2. Isaac Morier Papers; Class C, Boxes 1–2. John Philip Morier Papers Class D, Boxes 1–2. James Justinian Morier Papers; Class E, Boxes 1–9 and Class F, Boxes 1–2. David Richard Morier Papers; Class G, Boxes 1–4, Box 8. Anna Burnet Morier Papers.

British Library BL Add MS 19309–15, 23729–30, 60537 and Egerton 1969, 2001–2. John Strange Papers; Add MS 4319. Letters to Thomas Birch; Add MS 33349. Letters to Thomas Martyn, Add MS 36593. Letters to Caleb Whitefoord Add MS 22358, Add MS 51389, 62665. George Macartney Papers Add MS 34048, 40714–16, 41198, 42069, 42071, 51315, 60391A and Egerton 2641. William Hamilton Papers Add MS 34412–34426. Auckland Papers Add MS 35354–72, 35385, 35433. Joseph Yorke Papers Add MS 35461–35495. Robert Keith Papers Add MS 42774A. George Rose Papers Add MS 46825. Francis Drake Papers Add MS 47565, 47594. Fox Papers Add MS 48291, 48383–48396, 48398–48416. Paget Papers Add MS 51389. Holland House Papers Add MS 57305–7. Edward Weston Papers Egerton 1615–1619. Emma Hamilton Papers. Correspondence with Queen Maria Carolina of Naples Egerton 2157. James Porter Papers; Add MS 32418–22, Letters to Caspar Wetstein Egerton 3404. Newcastle Papers Egerton 3414–15, 3455, 3463. Holdernesse Papers

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233

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Burnet of Kemnay Papers, Kemnay House, Aberdeen Bundles 22, 24, 25, 31, 36, 39, 55–58, 61, 64–6, 74, 76–78, 82–89, 71.

Durham Record Office, County Hall, Durham Londonderry Estate Papers, D/Lo/C3, 7, 9, 16, 18–19, 20–1, 23–24, 28, 38, 44–8, 55–9, 63, 100, 118, 120, 123, 125, 482, 493.

Elgin MS, Broomhall, Fife 59/29. Imprisonment in France 60/1. Diplomatic Correspondence and Intelligence Reports. Brussels, Vienna, Berlin 60/2. Berlin, Official & Private Correspondence 60/3. Family and Personal Correspondence 60/4. Marbles and Other Collections 60/11. Intelligence Reports from Turkey 60/16. Relations with the Porte 60/17. Official Correspondence – Turkey 60/22. General Administration – Turkey Sir Harry Wilson, ‘Eight chapters of the life of Lord Elgin’, unpublished MS (1921).

Library of Congress, Washington, DC Augustus John Foster Papers, vols 1–10 and 14

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234

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Charles Hanbury Williams Papers, vols 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 28, 30, 34, 35, 37, 39, 51–4, 56–8, 60–1, 63–4, 67, 71–3, 75–6. Edward Weston Papers W53, Reels 2–7, Vols 3, 5–6, 11–14, 21.

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Merton College, Oxford Malmesbury Papers F.3.3(1) - 3.3(3). Family and Personal Correspondence

National Archives, Kew FO 5/1–260. United States of America SP 78/234–308, FO 27/1–412. France SP 91/50–111, FO 65/1–185. Russia PRO 30/29/17/1. Harriet Granville Papers PRO 30/43/30/1–2 and 31/1. Malmesbury Papers

National Library of Scotland NLS MS Acc. 9769 72/1–3. Robert Murray Keith Papers NLS MS Dep 313/742. Sutherland Papers NLS 2968–9. Culloden Papers NLS MS 5510–5721. Robert and Henrietta Liston Papers NLS MS 6160–6246, 15386–15390, 21297, 21299. Charles Stuart de Rothsay Papers NLS MS 11084, 12954, 12959, 12960, 12963, 12965, 12966, 12969, 12979, 12980, 12982, 12983, 12984, 12963, 12966, 12969, 13018, 13019. Hugh Elliot Papers NLS MS 11084, 11104, 11105, 11106, 11108, 11130, 11792, 11196, 11249, 11267. Gilbert Elliot Papers NLS 11111–11119. Anna Maria Elliot Papers

National Library of Wales NLW MS 2787–97D, 2802–03D, 4816D. Henry Williams Wynn Papers

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland PRONI D.572/17, D.2225/2 and 5. George Macartney Papers PRONI D.2433/D/1. Robert Murray Keith Papers PRONI D.3618/A–C. Augustus John Foster Papers

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Index

Adair, Robert 31, 47, 49, 190, 219 Adams, John Quincy 100, 119, 136–7 alliances 88 Anglo-Prussian (1756) 112 Armed Neutrality (1780) 27, 112, 114–15, 132 Family Compact (1715) 7, 102 First Coalition (1793) 26, 117 Sixth Coalition (1813) 193 Triple Alliance (1668) 52 anthropology 6, 125–6, 215 Appony, Thèrese (née Nogarola) 75, 128 Arbuthnot, Charles 27, 219 archaeology 149, 167–70, 174, 179–80, 183, 200, 216 aristocracy 18, 22 see also class art 8, 36, 149, 158–9, 178, 183, 216 Auckland, Eleanor Eden (née Elliot) 69, 73, 74, 161, 214, 228 Auckland, William Eden (Baron) 28, 30–1, 33, 42, 69, 73, 7489, 92, 100, 126, 128, 130, 134, 168, 198, 215, 221 Austria 88, 128 balance of power 6, 87–8, 212 Boswell, James 1, 4, 22 Bourbons 87, 88, 102, 111,158 Britain 34, 88, 115, 134, 137, 140 Buckinghamshire, John Hobart (Earl) 23, 114, 219 Burghersh, John Fane (Earl) 183, 191–2, 215, 220

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Burghersh, Priscilla (née Wellesley-Pole) 63, 71, 79, 160, 213, 227 Burnet, Alexander 1, 50, 160, 220 cameralism 8, 188 Canada 7, 135, 139 Canning, George 32, 44, 49, 54, 74, 76, 142, 162, 215 Canning, Stratford 26, 32, 35, 36, 49, 202, 204–5, 220 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart (Viscount, later 2nd Marquess of Londonderry) 5, 32, 33, 43–4, 45–6, 47, 48, 49, 50–1, 63, 74, 76, 79, 102, 109, 120–1, 124, 139, 191 Cathcart, William Schaw (Earl) 45, 47, 48, 50, 220 Catherine II (of Russia) 27, 76, 106, 107, 113–15, 116, 168, 195 Charles II (of England) 52, 53, 189 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope (Earl) 18, 25, 28, 34, 55, 91, 106–7, 108–9, 111, 113, 124, 126, 132, 151, 153, 156, 225 Letters 18, 55, 106–7, 126–7, 189 China 23, 150, 197–9, 201, 203, 206, 216 Clanwilliam Richard Meade (Earl) 4, 140, 213, 220 class 3, 10, 18, 22, 44–50 passim, 194, 199, 215–16 see also aristocracy commercial issues 88–9, 197–9

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Congresses 120–1 of Laybach 47–8 of Vienna 49, 102 consuls 5, 44–6, 47, 49, 134, 158, 216 cosmopolitanism 3, 55–6, 151–2, 153, 155–8, 162 court 6, 34, 54, 138, 215 see also courtiership and favourites courtiership 76–8, 91–4, 95, 106–8, 113–18 passim, 125, 188–9 cultural diplomacy 8–9, 149–50, 188–206 passim Dorset, John Sackville (Duke) 43, 130, 162, 220 Dutch see United Provinces Dutens, Louis 152, 189, 220 East India Company 23, 30, 51, 198 Eden, Morton 27, 41, 42, 183, 221 Egypt 46, 180 Elgin, Mary (née Nisbet) 63, 71, 72, 79, 118, 161, 228 Elgin, Thomas Bruce (Earl) 35, 46–7, 63, 118, 162, 178–80, 181–2, 183, 220 Elliot, Charlotte (née Kraut) 68–9, 228 Elliot, Hugh 25, 27, 34, 35, 41–2, 52, 64, 68–9, 73, 92, 94–5, 127, 131, 155, 163, 183, 221 Elliot, Margaret (née Jones) 69–70, 228 embassies 17, 62–3, 74–5 Berlin 26, 46 Brussels 30 Constantinople 25, 30, 43, 48, 64 Dresden 22, 24, 32, 35, 48 Florence 24, 26 Geneva 31 Hague 24, 25, 26, 27, 43, 74 Madrid 22, 26, 43 Munich 42, 48 Naples 26, 65–7 Paris 9, 22, 24, 26, 27, 35, 43, 71, 74–5, 92, 95–6, 107 St Petersburg 22, 23, 26, 27, 43, 45, 72 Stockholm 31, 43

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Venice 9, 156, 158, 173 Vienna 9, 23, 25, 26, 30, 43, 44 Washington 31, 43, 48, 99–101 England 7, 96 Enlightenment 5, 8, 9, 127–8, 150, 183–4, 188, 193, 195, 199, 201–2, 211 ethnicity 3–4, 29–30, 213 etiquette 6, 53, 54–5, 91–103 passim, 212 Ewart, Joseph 41, 42, 221 favourites 65–6, 76–7, 111 Fitzherbert, Alleyne 100, 101, 221 Foreign Office 28, 33, 44, 47 Foster, Augustus John 4, 31, 48, 140, 142, 155, 157, 213, 221 Fox, Charles James 30–1, 190 Fox, Henry Stephen 31, 221 Foxites 4, 23 France 27, 31, 51, 55, 87, 88, 96–8, 128–9, 131, 134, 139, 140–2, 151, 157–8, 160, 194 ancien régime 7, 10, 22 Directory 96–8, 138 Empire 87, 211–12 Restoration 140–2 Revolution 8, 9, 10, 31, 36, 87, 94–8, 117, 133–8, 157, 192, 202, 215–16 Frederick II (of Prussia) 29, 30, 88, 112–13, 127 George III (of Britain) 26, 34, 65, 77, 88, 94, 96, 113, 115, 158 George IV (of Britain) 76, 77, 158 gender 3, 108–9, 213–15 femininity 65, 66–7, 74–5, 77–8, 102–3, 109–10, 160–1, 214 masculinity 17–18, 55–6, 93–4, 98, 102, 114, 151–2, 183, 216 Germany 22, 151 Gibbon, Edward 53, 196 Gower, Elizabeth (née Sutherland) 109, 133, 161, 228 Gower, George Granville Leveson (Lord) 94–5, 133–4, 154–5, 223

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Index Grantham, Thomas Robinson (1st Baron) 30, 92, 224 Grantham, Thomas Robinson (2nd Baron) 23, 68, 224 Granville, Granville Leveson (Earl) 35, 53, 68, 73–4, 101–2, 109, 110, 137, 163, 223 Granville, Harriet (née Cavendish) 73–6, 77–9, 103, 126, 161, 162, 212, 214, 223 Gray, James 26, 41, 170, 222 Greece 142, 157, 160, 178–9, 196 Grenvillites 23, 32 Hailes, Daniel 25, 43, 189, 222 Hamilton, Catherine (née Barlow) 33, 66, 161, 212, 228 Hamilton, Emma (née Lyons) 18, 65–7, 70, 72, 76–7, 116–18, 161, 212, 214, 228 Hamilton, William 9, 64, 65–7, 91, 107, 111, 117, 118, 127, 149, 153, 155, 158–9, 167–71, 172, 178, 179–80, 183, 214, 216, 217, 222 Campi Phlegraei 9, 172 Hamilton, William Richard 44, 47, 49, 51, 140, 163, 180, 182 Hammond, George 119, 134, 136, 138, 139, 222 Hanbury-Williams, Charles 4, 5, 29, 34, 63, 115, 153–4, 155, 222 Holdernesse, Robert Darcy (Earl) 34, 92, 111, 113, 130, 222 House of Orange 110, 112, 192–3 Hyndford, John Carmichael (Earl) 23, 222 India 7, 24, 198, 199 Ireland 4, 7, 23, 30, 211, 213 Italy 26, 28, 55, 139, 140, 151, 157–8, 160 Jackson, Francis 25, 26, 32, 42, 46, 62, 67, 98, 100, 101, 118, 137–8, 222 Jackson, George 25, 32, 46, 50, 62, 67–8, 69, 100, 106, 118–19, 137–8, 223

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Jacobites 1, 3–4, 18, 23, 28–9, 30, 160, 213 James II (of Britain) 30, 189 Jefferson, Thomas 99–100, 119, 120, 134, 135 Jones, Harford 4, 51, 199, 223 Joseph II (of Austria) 113, 215 Kaunitz, Prince Wenzel Anton von 111, 127, 130 Keith, Field Marshal (James) 28–9 Keith, Robert 24, 30, 70, 93, 110, 111, 130, 155, 223 Keith, Robert Murray 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 44, 50, 70, 72, 91, 92, 110, 113, 126, 127, 130–1, 155–6, 160, 163, 213, 223 Levant Company 30, 44, 46, 173 Leveson Gower, Granville see Granville, Earl Lieven, Princess Dorothea (née Beckendorf) 76, 128 Liston, Henrietta (née Marchant) 4, 70, 71, 76, 120, 136, 214, 229 Liston, Robert 25, 30, 36, 41, 42–3, 50, 52, 53, 64, 68, 70, 73, 94, 97, 100–1, 118, 120, 127, 133, 136–7, 139, 140, 152, 153, 183, 215–16, 223 Londonderry, Charles Stewart (3rd Marquess) 4, 25, 46, 109, 140, 190–3, 213–14, 215, 225 Londonderry, Frances Stewart (née Vane-Tempest) 73, 77, 230 Louis XV (of France) 29, 107 Louis XVI (of France) 95–6, 128 Louis XVIII (of France) 102, 141 Macartney, George 4, 9, 23–4, 32–3, 36, 63, 88–9, 93, 107, 113–14, 129, 150, 193–5, 197–9, 201, 206, 213, 216, 223 Journal of an Embassy to China 9, 150, 206 Madison, Dolly 99, 120 Madison, James 99, 101

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Malmesbury, Harriet (née Amyand) 27, 63, 70, 71–2, 77, 78, 107–8, 109–10, 115, 161, 193, 213, 214, 229 Malmesbury, James Harris (Earl) 25, 26, 27, 30–1, 35, 41, 42, 55–6, 68, 70, 72, 94, 96–8, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114–15, 116, 118, 124, 127, 137, 152, 156, 189, 190, 193, 212–13, 215, 222 Mann, Horace 24, 32, 64, 131, 153, 158, 159, 223 Mansfield, Earl see Stormont Maria Carolina (of Naples) 65–6, 76–7, 116–18, 214 Marie Antoinette 128, 129, 215 Marischal, Lord (George Keith) 1, 28–9, 30, 213 marriage 1, 62–85 passim, 213–14 Merry, Anthony 24, 99–101, 118, 119, 216, 223 Merry, Elizabeth (née Death) 99–101, 102, 229 Metternich, Clemens Wenzel von 76, 121, 190 Minto, Anna Marie Elliot (née Amyand) 69, 72, 228 Minto, Gilbert Elliot (Earl) 23, 24, 31, 42, 43, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 118, 221 Mitchell, Andrew 1, 4, 30, 50, 63, 112–13, 127, 160, 223 monarchy 77, 211 absolutism 7, 22, 31, 87, 156, 157, 195, 199 constitutional 28, 32, 139, 142 enlightened despotism 113, 195 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat de 156, 195, 201 Mountstuart, John Stuart (Lord) 43, 224 Morier, Anna (née Jones) 49, 79, 229 Morier, David Richard 5, 35–6, 48–9, 50, 51, 54, 56, 199, 202–6 passim, 215, 224 Morier, Horatia (née Seymour) 48, 229

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Morier, James Justinian 5, 51, 54, 56, 150, 199–202, 206, 215–16, 224 Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England 54–5, 150, 200–1, 216 Morier, John Philip 5, 36, 46–8, 50, 51, 54, 56, 202, 203, 215–16, 224 Napoleon 51, 77, 98, 118–19, 120, 138, 180, 190 nationalism 9, 28, 29, 55–6, 108–9, 139–40, 151–2, 156–8, 188, 194, 198, 204–6, 211–17 passim Nelson, Horatio Nelson (Viscount) 118, 214 Netherlands see United Provinces Ottoman Empire see Turkey Paget, Arthur 4, 31–2, 35, 42, 49, 63, 64, 70–1, 118, 224 parliament 28, 32 Patriot Party (United Provinces) 132, 134, 136, 192 patronage 23, 25, 216 peace of Amiens 24, 98–9, 216 of Utrecht 28, 87 of Westphalia 5 peace talks Carlisle Peace Commission (1778) 73 of Lille (1797) 96–8 of Paris (1796) 96–8, 137 Persia 51–2, 199–202, 206 Pitt, William (the Elder) 24, 30 Pitt, William (the Younger) 31, 32, 128, 138, 161 political economy 51, 89, 157 Porter, James 9, 30, 34–5, 68, 69, 127, 130, 149, 173–5, 178, 183, 189, 195–6, 200, 201, 205, 206, 216, 217, 224 Observations on the Religion, Law, Government and Manners of the Turks 9, 195–6 press 8, 53, 95, 96, 120, 124, 128–9, 130–3, 135, 140–1, 142, 150, 152, 169–70, 175, 188–9, 215

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Index Prussia 26, 88, 139 public opinion 124, 132–8 passim, 141–2, 215 public sphere 6, 10, 124, 132, 215 religion 34–6, 140, 200–1 Anglicanism 34, 181–3, 202–6 Catholicism 7, 34, 98–9, 156, 157–8, 160, 196 Eastern Orthodoxy 196 Islam 34, 195–6 Jesuits 199 natural theology 34, 195, 205 Presbyterianism 34 Protestantism 28, 34–5, 87, 156 ritual 6, 53, 91–4, 96–7, 138, 197–8, 212 Rochford, William Nassau de Zuylestein (Earl) 23, 34, 92, 224 Rose, George Henry 36, 50–1, 56, 124, 202–3, 204, 205, 224 Russia 7, 26, 27, 51, 88, 151, 193–5 salons 9, 75, 76, 124, 127–8, 129, 138, 215 science 8, 34–5, 36, 127–8, 149–50, 170–8, 183, 197, 203, 205 Scotland 4, 7, 28–9, 127 Sicilies, Kingdom of Two 28, 139 Smith, Joseph 8, 158, 173 Spain 26, 54, 139, 140, 151, 193 Stanhope, Philip 55, 108, 124, 151, 212, 225 Staunton, George 199, 201, 202, 206 Stormont, David Murray (Earl) 9, 23, 24, 27, 29, 34, 42, 52, 68, 111, 127–8, 130, 131, 132, 153–4, 168, 215, 225 Strange, John 8, 127, 149, 158, 159, 161, 167, 168, 170–1, 173, 175–8, 183, 216, 217, 225 Stuart, Charles 71, 72, 78–9, 101–2, 140–1, 142, 157, 161–2, 163, 183, 213–14, 225 Stuart, Charles Francis Edward (Young Pretender) 29, 138

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Stuart, Elizabeth (née Yorke) 71, 74–5, 77–8, 79, 103, 161–2, 214, 230 Thirteen Colonies 27, 30–1, 73 Thornton, Edward 100, 101, 119, 139, 225 tourism 1, 22, 23, 26, 41, 55, 66, 149–63 passim, 172, 173, 194, 212–13 Toryism 28, 140 treaties Anglo-American commercial (also known as Jay’s, 1794) 136 Anglo-French free trade (also known as the Eden Treaty, 1786) 73 Franco-American, of Amity and Commerce (1778) 27 of Bucharest 26 of Sistovo 44 of Tehran 54 Turkey 24, 26, 30, 150, 151, 157, 178–9, 182, 195–6, 206, 216 Udney, John 158, 225 United Provinces 96, 131–2, 134, 139, 151 United States 7–8, 96, 99–101, 134–7, 216 Vaughan, Charles Richard 31, 71, 216, 225 Voltaire, François Arouet de 53, 113, 127 Walpole, Horace 53, 131 Walpole, Robert (first Earl Orford) 24–5 wars Anglo-Dutch 52 French Revolutionary 9, 42, 46–7, 96–7, 117–18, 134, 156, 160, 179, 182, 189, 211 French, of Religion 52 Napoleonic 24, 25, 28, 33, 42, 63–4, 118–19, 120, 139, 156, 160, 189, 191–3, 202, 211

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wars (cont.) of American Independence 7, 30–1, 42, 44, 112, 114, 116, 129, 131–2, 199 of Austrian Succession 24, 111–12 Peninsular 150, 191–2, 206 Seven Years 30, 88, 112–13 Washington, George 100, 119, 135 Wellesley, Henry 4, 226 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley (Duke) 76, 120, 142, 191, 213 Werry, Francis Peter 5, 35–6, 44–6, 50, 51, 54, 91, 203, 215–16, 226 Whiggery 87, 156, 190 Court 28, 87, 156 Country (or Vulgar) 31, 87–8, 139–40, 156

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Whitworth, Arabella 68, 231 Whitworth, Charles 41, 42, 68, 70, 98, 226 Williams-Wynn, Henry 4, 32, 42, 55, 67, 70, 76, 180, 213, 226 Worsley, Richard 8, 9, 64, 66, 127, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178, 216, 226 Wortley-Montagu, Mary (Lady) 72, 196–7, 206 Embassy Letters 72, 196–7 Yorke, Joseph 24, 27, 29, 32, 41, 62, 67, 68, 70, 71, 92, 93, 94, 110, 111–12, 124, 128, 130, 131–2, 189, 215, 226

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