British Foreign Policy and International Affairs During Sir William Trumbull's Career
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BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DURING SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL'S CAREER JEREMY BLACK SIR William Trumbull served as envoy, and subsequently as Secretary of State, during a period of major change in Britain's international position. He was Ambassador Extraordinary to Louis XIV of France from 2 September 1685 to 12 October 1686, and then Resident Ambassador at Constantinople from November 1686 to October 1691.^ Although appointed to Constantinople in November 1686, Trumbull did not embark until 16 April 1687 and only arrived on 17 August 1687. He left on 31 July 1691. Trumbull was Secretary of State for the Northern Department from 3 May 1695 until I December 1697.^ When Trumbull left for Constantinople, England was ruled by the Cathohc James II and was at peace. When he returned, James had been removed as a result of the invasion in 1688 by his nephew and son-in-law, William III of Orange, and England was at war with Louis XIV, the Nine Years' War, otherwise known as the War of the League of Augsburg or King William's War. This shift has generally been seen as according with Britain's national interests: in a somewhat teleological account of foreign policy, conflict with France, a struggle for oceanic, colonial and commercial supremacy, have been seen as Britain's destiny. This interpretation was for long axiomatic. Indeed, it is necessary to turn back to the major works of the past in order to appreciate just how revolutionary modern 'revisionism' has been. Thus, Captain Montagu Burrows, R.N., Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, wrote in The History of the Foreign Policy of Creat Britain (London, 1895): Happily for the world... the Revolution of 1688 once more opened up the way to the resumption of the Tudor Foreign Policy... Not one vv^ord too much has been said in praise of the benefit conferred upon England and the world by the Revolution. From the 5th of November 1688 dates the return of England to her old place... The nation had long been aware of the evils of a departure from the principles entwined with its whole earlier history, and exemplified in chief by the great Elizabeth. Sir Adolphus Ward was less florid in his language, but, to him, the later Stuarts had depressed 'the English monarchy to the position of vassal state', while William III was 199 'one of the most far-sighted of great statesmen'.^ In such statements, historians were not only reflecting and sustaining the national historical myth, but also adopting a clear position on domestic history: the Glorious Revolution was seen as seminally good and necessary and thus the foreign policy changes that stemmed from it were likewise. On 17 November 1722 a leading newspaper, the London Journal, offered an assessment of the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. Designed to elicit support for the Protestant Succession, this account linked directly the international results of 1688, namely war with France, to the supposed domestic consequences had the Stuarts and France not been rejected in 1688: Without the Revolution there would have been no war with France, but then it is for this unhappy reason, because there could not have been one. But instead of it, there must have been a much greater evil; and that is, slavery to France, or to a government modeled and supported by it. I acknowledge that, without the Revolution, the expense of wars abroad, the lives of men fighting in defense of their country, and the effusion of much blood, had been saved. But instead of these, the writer argued, there would have been a bleak domestic prospect: arbitrary demands of taxes... Black Darkness - Deep Silence, never interrupted, unless by the groans of those who dare not any farther disturb it - the terrors of an Inquisition, or a High- Commission Court - one voice of bigots blaspheming, and of hypocrites affronting God - the profound quiet of slavery, in which all arts and sciences are by degrees sunk. The striking feature of this classic statement of Whig behefs was that in 1722 Britain was in alliance with France, an alliance negotiated in 1716 by George Fs Whig ministers and which had recently borne fruit in the French disclosure of Jacobite plans, the Atterbury Plot. Such a contrast poses a question mark against the attempt to present foreign policy as dominated by ideological considerations. In replacing socio-economic determinism with notions of cultural, ideological and linguistic hegemony, scholars have often failed to appreciate the limitations of the latter, both in describing what was generally a more diverse and divided situation, and as a means of explanation. This can be an acute problem in studies of foreign pohcy, where politicians can be presented as trapped by a set of ideas of their own, or, more generally, by the dominant notions of the political society of the period. Any close reading of Anglo-French relations in the late- seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries suggests that the staple foreign policy item of the Whig creed - political, religious, cultural and economic hostility to France - was not matched by any consistent government policy. This creed, however, had considerable weight in terms of domestic political debate, and has subsequently been important in influencing historical judgements. In terms of the former, the seizure and development of the anti-French case by particular groups of politicians was of growing significance in the last forty years of the seventeenth century as hostility to Spain and the United Provinces became less valid as a basis of foreign policy and less significant as a domestic political issue. In terms of historical judgement, hostility to France and the argument that the pre-Revolution monarchy had slavishly followed French interests were used to 200 brilliant effect by Whig propagandists in the half-century after the Revolution. The argument had, of course, also been used before the Revolution, most notably in much of the polemical Whig literature of the Exclusion period. It was William III who negotiated the two Partition Treaties with Louis XIV (1698, 1700) by which the French monarchy was promised substantial territorial gains, and it was William who sought to gain European support for this new settlement. In it, everything really depended on Louis's good faith. Between 1716 and 1731 Britain and France were allies, and together they fought Spain in 1719-20 and confronted Spain and Austria in 1725-9. During the War of the Polish Succession (1733-5) the Walpole ministry did not oppose Bourbon successes at the expense of Austria.* And yet, at the same time. Whig propagandists stressed the pro-French policies of Charles II and James II, using them, as much as Stuart Catholicism, to argue that the Jacobites were un- British. Religion and international policy could thus serve as definers of nationhood. On 2 September 1749 the Remembrancer, a London newspaper, claimed, 'on the ruins of King James the Second's government a new one was established which undertook not only to perpetuate the liberty of this country, but to restore the liberty of Europe.' One might ask what Whig propagandists would have said of Charles II and James II, had they signed treaties for the partition of the Spanish empire comparable to those of William III, or in the 1680s enjoyed an alliance with France as close as that of 1716-31. Indeed subsequent Tory writers were to point out that, having savaged the attempts of the Tory ministry of 1710-14 to improve relations with France, the Whigs were to do likewise. Thus, Smollett, in the Briton of 9 October 1762, defended the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 and wrote of the Tories, as soon as their adversaries had overwhelmed them with ruin, and established their own influence about the throne, beyond all possibility of reverse, the treaty of Utrecht, which they had branded as infamous and pernicious, they left unaltered and undisturbed; and instead of producing a fresh rupture in less than one year, it remained in full force very near thirty, a period of tranquillity almost unexampled in the annals of England, during which, she enjoyed, without interruption, every blessing which opulence and security could bestow. Smollett was correct to argue that the Whigs had stolen the Tories' 'Utrecht clothes'. More important, however, is the extent to which the Whig critique of Charles II and James II has been generally accepted by subsequent historians. Part of the problem lies in the notion of national interest. The idea that this lay in hostihty to France was one that was read backwards into the pre-Revolution period by those who witnessed and considered the wars between the two powers in the period 1689-1815. Thus, the apparent hostility to France represented by the Triple Alliance of 1668 with Sweden and the Dutch was seen as the natural path to follow, and Charles II was criticized for taking the opposite course. The notion of national interest as defined by hostility to France was also read forward from the Hundred Years War. Furthermore, nineteenth-century historians found it difficult to accept that England had acted as a second-rank power in the period 1660-88, had indeed received French subsidies for part of the period. This 201 was explained by reference to the wishes of Charles H and James H, wishes that were held to lie behind their policies. The actions of many of the German rulers of the period towards Louis XIV were similarly explained and condemned by nationalist German historians. Pusillanimity, treason to national interests and Catholic convictions were the only possible explanations. The very notion of national interests, however, is one that faces considerable difficulties.