respecting Prussian and Russian gains in the east, and Francis’s attempts to rid himself of the troublesome Austrian Netherlands by means of the so-called Bavarian exchange were consistently blocked. Indeed, far from getting anything herself, Austria found herself constantly being badgered to put still more into the allied cause in an attempt to get unreliable partners to fight harder, while at the same time being forced to watch Prussia being given a free hand in Poland and being paid large sums of money in exchange for doing almost nothing. Not until May 1795 was Austria finally offered a formal deal. In exchange for a loan of £4 6 million, whose terms, incidentally, were extremely demanding, she was to keep 170,000 men deployed against France. A second loan of £1 62 million was forthcoming in 1797, but this was still less than generous when set beside the terms that had been offered Prussia, which amounted to a subsidy of £1 6 million a year, with an additional £2 million in results-based bonuses, in exchange for an army of a mere 62,000 men. In addition, Vienna still could not get London to recognize its interests in Eastern Europe where the British were now chiefly interested in a deal with Russia, while insult was added to injury when in 1796 Pitt opened peace overtures with France without even consulting the Austrians. Nor did matters improve with the coming of the Second Coalition: Austria once again received no subsidy. She was expected to commit all her forces to the war, abandon all say in the Allies’ war aims and conduct of operations, and see both Russia and, still more annoyingly, Prussia offered the most generous of terms. At this, even observers connected to the British government expressed embarrassment. As William Windham confided to his diary on 8 November 1799, ‘Messenger from Vienna. Long report of a conversation with Thugut in which Thugut presses against us some facts in our conduct . . . which it does not seem easy to answer. One sees . . . that much of their conduct arises from the suspicion, not very ill founded, of our attempting with the aid of Russia to forcer la main à l’empereur.’4 To make matters worse, the British approach rested on a fundamental miscalculation of the assistance likely to be derived from the eastern powers. In the end, Prussian help could not be obtained at all nor Russian help retained, and in it finally looked as if Britain would have no option but to back Vienna to the hilt. The Austrian defeat at Marengo notwithstanding, on 23 June the British ambassador to Vienna, Lord Minto, signed a pact whereby Britain promised to pay Austria a subsidy of £2 million. Even then, however, only the first instalment - one third of the money - was authorized for payment immediately, the remainder being kept back for payment in two further tranches in September and December. No wonder, then, that Thugut responded to the news of the subsidy with ‘the greatest possible coldness in language and manner’.5
Underlying all this is a point that is well worth making when one considers Britain’s reputation in Europe in 1803. French propaganda, as we have seen, attributed all Europe’s travails since 1972 to ‘Pitt’s gold’. In reality, British foreign policy in the 1790s had not revolved around subsidies. They had been paid, certainly: between 1793 and 1802 £9 200,989 had gone in subsidies to eleven different states. But this was as nothing to the sums that were later disbursed: in 1812 the total was £4,441,963; in 1813, £5,308,679; and in 1814, £10,016,597. The fact is that in the Revolutionary War the British only used subsidies relatively sparingly, if only because, until Pitt’s reforms began to take effect from 1799 onwards, the British government simply could not afford to pay the massive bribes of legend. As the war was initially paid for in large part by increasing the national debt, there was a natural unwillingness to spend more money than was absolutely necessary, while the Bank of England was convinced that paper bills could not be issued unless their sum total was covered by the country