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

The culture of diplomacy

The culture of diplomacy

Britain in Europe, c. 1750–1830

Jennifer Mori

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.

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First published 2010

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Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction: More new diplomatic history

Part I The structure of a service

1 Why diplomacy?

2 Entrance, training and promotion

3 Family, sex and marriage

Part II Of cabbages and kings

4 Etiquette and ‘face’

5 Favourites and flunkeys

6 Gossips, networks and news

Part III Beyond the call of duty

7 The Grand Tour

8 From ancients to moderns

9 War, ethnography and religion

Conclusion: Diplomacy transformed?

Appendix A Male diplomats, 1750–1830

Appendix B Female diplomats, 1750–1830

Select primary source bibliography

Index

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

Abbreviations

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 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 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 policy-formation 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 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 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 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 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 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 eighteenth-century 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 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