[218] _Ibid._, Eden to Grenville, 30th March.
[219] The West India expedition was again and again deferred in favour of that to la Vendée or Toulon (Vivenot, iii, 383).
[220] Sybel, iii, 38-40; Häusser, i, 488, 489.
[221] Pretyman MSS. I have published the letter of 5th April 1793 almost in full in the "Eng. Hist. Rev." for April 1910.
[223] "F. O.," France, 42. I cannot agree with Sorel (iii, 405) in taking the French overtures seriously.
[224] "W. O.," 6 (10), Dundas to Murray (now secretary to the Duke of York).
[226] Calvert, ch. iii; Fortescue, iv, 111.
[230] "Mems. of Sir G. Elliot (Earl of Minto)," ii, 159.
[231] "W. O.," 6 (10), 1st August, to Sir J. Murray, which corrects the statement in Sybel (iii, 140), that England meant to keep Dunkirk.
[237] _Ibid._, 320, 321, 339, 379, 380; "Dropmore P.," ii, 470, 536. In the last passage Yarmouth accuses the King of Prussia of deliberately thwarting the action of the Austrian army under Wurmser.
Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary: Then fiery expedition be my wing, Jove's Mercury, and herald for a King. --SHAKESPEARE, _King Richard III_, act iv, sc. 3.
The enterprise destined to develop into the occupation of Toulon arose out of the negotiations for alliance with Austria, Sardinia, and Naples. By the first of these England pledged herself to send a considerable fleet into the Mediterranean, as an effective help to the military operations then going on in the Maritime Alps and the Genoese Riviera. Indeed, the Court of Vienna made this almost a _sine quâ non_ of its alliance. On its side the British Government gained assurances of military aid from Sardinia and Naples, the former of those States agreeing to furnish 20,000 troops in return for the annual subsidy of £200,000.
Here, then, were the foundations of a Mediterranean policy on which Pitt and his colleagues began to build in the years 1793-4, with the singular and unforeseen results at Toulon and in Corsica. Everything favoured some such design. The French marine was enfeebled by mutiny, and, as the spring of 1793 merged into summer, there came ominous signs of revolt in the South against the Jacobin faction supreme at Paris. Accordingly Grenville urged the Hapsburg Court, in return for British help in Flanders, to assist an expedition of the Allies to the coast of Provence. The conduct of the Austrian Chancellor, Thugut, was characteristic. Far from strengthening the Imperial forces in Italy, he prepared to withdraw some of them for the Rhenish campaign, now that a British fleet spread its covering wings over the Kingdom of Sardinia.[238]