Horn, David Bayne

2018-09-13T16:01:19Z

2018-09-13T16:01:19Z

1929

The subject of this work was originally suggested to me a short time before I graduated. At first my intention was to collect material for a biography of Williams,. but I abandoned this idea almost immediately, and decided to confine my attention to the diplomatic side of his activities. This was the only aspect of his career which really interested me, and there was, as I soon discovered, ample material for its study in the Public Record Office and the MS. Department of the British Museum, where I worked during the first of my postgraduate years.

The material collected there during that first year and many later visits to London, after the perusal of hundreds of volumes of letters, despatches, and other private and official papers, forms the basis of this work. It has, however, been supplemented to a considerable extent by the results of two visits to the Archives de la Ministére des Affaires Etrangeres at Paris, and of a visit to the Newport (Mon.) Public Library, which possesses a MS. collection including, so far as can be ascertained, practically all Williams's official papers as a British minister, as well as the private diary which he kept at Berlin and some other private papers. Permission to examine another part of Williams's papers, which is at present in the possession of Mr T.F. Fenwick, Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, was refused.

As my knowledge of the authorities and the scope of this study in European diplomacy gradually widened, Williams inevitably ceased to be the central figure, and was merged in the European background. I would gladly dismiss him altogether from my work, but his career is the only thread on which my account of Britain's diplomatic relations with certain continental states can be hung. No one can be more conscious than I of the obvious weakness of the method of treatment which circumstances have forced me to adopt in PartI. As Williams moves about from Dresden to Berlin, Warsaw, Grodno, and Vienna the chapters are necessarily disconnected in their subject matter. This difficulty is not present to the same extent after Williams has settled down at Petersburg, and Part II deals with a single theme - the action and reaction between Petersburg and Europe during the Diplomatic Revolution and the opening of the Seven Years war.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/32440

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2018 Block 20

Sir Charles Hanbury Williams and European diplomacy (1747-58)

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

DLitt Doctor of Letters