administrative reform, and the fall of Turgot was fatal to the idea of economic progress. The chances of a peaceful policy prevailing at Versailles were diminished in proportion. The war party, headed by Marshal de Castries and supported by D'Aranda the Spanish Ambassador, held up its head, elated by recent success and ambitious of further glory;[1] while Vergennes, though too able a Minister to conceal from himself that peace was necessary to his country, was determined to keep his place, and knew, that in order to do so, he could not afford to scout the traditions of Choiseul, which had borne him as their representative into power.
At the moment accordingly that negotiations were set on foot, there seemed but little hope of finding the Court of France peaceably inclined. Fox, alone among the Ministers, though strongly opposed to a French alliance, inclined to a contrary opinion, and imagined that the independence of America once recognized, no further demands would be made upon England. It was therefore his wish to recognize that independence immediately, and by a rapid negotiation to insure the conclusion of what he believed would prove a favourable peace. Shelburne, on the contrary, believed that further concessions would be asked by France, and that the best chance England possessed of obtaining honourable terms was to reserve the recognition of independence as part of the valuable consideration to be offered to the Colonies for favourable terms, and to use the points where the interests of France, Spain, and the Colonies were inconsistent, as the means of negotiating, if necessary, a separate peace with each of the belligerents, as opportunity might offer.
The circumstances of the time favoured the design. Vergennes had not gone to war for the sake of American independence, but in order to humiliate England. He not only did not intend to continue the war a day longer than was necessary, in order to establish a rival power on
- ↑ Don Abarca de Bolea, Count d'Aranda, born in 1719; was Ambassador to France from 1766 to 1784. He was Prime Minister for a short time in 1791. He died in 1799.
