ABSTRACT
One of the best-known documents in the history of British foreign policy is the dispatch written by William Pitt the Younger to the Russian ambassador, Count Simon Vorontsov, on 19 January 1805, stating Great Britain’s view of the goals of a third coalition. Henry Addington and the earl of Buckinghamshire were excluded; Lord Grenville would not join without Charles James Fox: there remained the duke of Portland without the Portland Whigs and Pitt’s ‘be-ribboned lumber.’ The appointment of someone so apparently undistinguished as Mulgrave to an important office at a crucial moment appears odd and appeared so to contemporaries. The Burgundian Circle had barred France from Germany and Italy: its annexation had been the foundation of Louis XIV’s empire. The proposals of both Grenville and Mulgrave were rooted firmly in eighteenth-century practice, in the quarrels between supporters of continental and colonial warfare.
