d not take it
seriously had not the Foreign Office soon despatched Earl Spencer and
Mr. Thomas Grenville as special envoys to Vienna to propose very similar
plans, Austria being urged on by the prospect of acquiring the French
Barrier fortresses from Lille to Sedan.[356]

They aroused in Thugut a spirit of greed, not of honourable emulation.
In a private letter to Pitt, dated Vienna 16th August, Spencer warned
him that that Government was "neither possessed of sufficient energy and
vigour, nor sufficiently actuated by the true principles on which the
cause in which we are engaged ought to be conducted" to justify the
demands of Thugut. They included British subsidies for Austria, though
she could well support the war, and the sacrifice of British maritime
conquests at the general peace as a means of ensuring the recovery of
her losses on land. As to Belgium, added Spencer, Thugut looked on it
"as irrecoverably lost and not worth regaining, unless with the addition
of a very strong and extended barrier, composed of fortresses which he
to-day plainly told us he did not think there was the least chance of
taking in the course of the war, but that they must be obtained as
cessions from France at the peace."[357] Thus Thugut expected that, while
the Austrians were ignominiously evacuating the Netherlands, the
British fleet should win French colonies valuable enough to induce
France both to retire from Belgium, and to surrender to Austria her
northern fortresses from Lille to Sedan or Thionville.

The capture of Valenciennes and the slaughter of the _emigres_ in the
Austrian garrison was the retort of the French to these day-dreams (29th
August). The fall of Robespierre a month earlier, and the enhanced
authority now enjoyed by Carnot enabled the authorities at Paris to
press on the conquest of Belgium with an energy which set at defiance
the boyish miscalculations of Pitt and the wavering plans of the
Hapsburgs.

Towards the close of July Pitt and Grenville saw the need of abating the
rigour of their demands on Prussia. For of what use was it to move
60,000 Prussians more than 100 miles to defend West Flanders when that
province was lost? Malmesbury therefore was empowered to pay the monthly
subsidy of L50,000 on behalf of Great Britain and Holland, provided that
Moellendorf's army attacked the French about Treves, thus lessening the
pressure on Coburg's left wing. On 27th July he framed such an agreement
with Hardenberg.