First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [51]
With the Carlisle Peace Commission presently in the Colonies making overtures to Congress, the prospect of America yielding and never becoming an independent trading partner was now feared, even by those who did not relish a victory of the Revolution. For some past indignity, Van Berckel nourished a hatred of Britain, and for personal reasons would be delighted to see the de Neufville treaty puncture their pride. Although de Neufville’s proposed treaty as an alliance with England’s enemies was supposed to be kept secret, the Grand Pensionary, Van Bleiswijk, quite properly consulted his sovereign, William V, who flew into a passion, declaring the treaty was equal to recognizing the Americans as an independent state. He would lay down the Stadtholdership and quit the country with his entire family, he informed the Duke of Brunswick, rather than accept anything of the kind. The Duke was able to calm him and persuade him to approve the secret discussion of the proposal. Meanwhile, Van Berckel advised the Amsterdam Council not to communicate the proposed treaty officially to the States General but to pave the way by informing the other town councils. As a result, the secret was soon known to several hundred people, and before the end of the year the Republic buzzed with rumors, and leaks appeared in the English papers. Van Berckel also authorized de Neufville to negotiate a draft treaty with the Americans intended to be kept secret until England had recognized American independence. For Yorke, the rumors were the culmination of a series of affronts extending from de Graaff’s salute to the adulation of John Paul Jones, and behind it all the constant nagging inability of the British to suppress the American rebellion. And now here was talk of a major power actually proposing to treat with the rebels.
He could see no answer but war. As an extension of policy, it was not in that era fearful to contemplate, but considered feasible and possibly advantageous. If prosecuted with proper energy and a sufficiency of arms and men, it offered British planners the opportunity to regain lost, or gain new, colonies to compensate public opinion for the failure in America up to now. The disadvantages—that Britain already had difficulty in making up a sufficiency of soldiers in America and, even more, that twenty additional enemy ships of the line would be added against Britain’s ships already too few for her needs—were, like most contraindications to a happy plan, thrust under a mental rug. Yorke, unworried, held a reproachful interview with the Prince of Orange, expressing his distress that William had not discussed the proposed treaty first with his English ally. On his dignity, the Prince, who did not possess the status of royalty in the Dutch Republic, a deficiency that greatly annoyed his royal kinsmen in England, replied that since it was a document of state, he was not obliged to discuss it with anyone whatsoever. Not hesitating to rebuke the sovereign, Yorke stated that a project of “three wretches,” meaning the American Commissioners in Paris, rebels against their King, could not be a state secret. As no action or further information was at hand, Yorke could not press his usual hot demands for “condign punishment” of the perpetrators; for the moment the matter was not pursued.
While the secret treaty smoldered quietly like a lighted fuse, a more importunate flame burned in the open. This was an international League of Armed Neutrality designed for common resistance to British assaults at sea and personally conceived and sponsored by a newcomer on the scene, Catherine II, Empress of Russia, an adventuress in power whom Voltaire