IV. Macartney in Russia, 1765–67

Extract

Among the blithe adventurers of the eighteenth century, few sur-passed Macartney in the diversity and value of their public service, and none left a fairer name. Whether he was cajoling the Russian premier, or contending with republican patriots in the Irish Parliament, or defying a tenfold force of French in Grenada, or heartening Madras against Hyder Ali, or driving the Dutch from the coast of Coromandel, or facing the pistol of a soldier to whom as Governor of Bengal he had given the lie, or teaching the court of Pekin the merits of his country, or conspiring with Louis XVIII in Italy, or protecting our conquest at the Cape by threatening to blow up the mutinous Tremendous, he was always the same rare man, unflinching, versatile and incorruptible. When, as a gouty veteran of sixty-two, he turned his house at Chiswick into “the resort of every distinguished character,” the Latin verses in which he reviewed his wanderings contained no more mention of Russia than Europaeque plagas fere visimus omnes. Yet he lived to see the work that he had done there contribute, and that perhaps in no small degree, to the fate of Napoleon and of Europe. In 1806, when he died, the dependent empire had not yet made its most conspicuous effort to dispense with British commercial aid. Tilsit had yet to point the way to Borodino. But the fate of Paul I had already hinted at the attitude of the Russian gentry towards a Tsar who challenged the system which Macartney's treaty had confirmed. One great cause of the retreat from Moscow may be discovered in the Anglo-Russian commercial bargain of 1766.