by Alan Palmer
Alexander’s emissary was courteously received in London. He spent much of November and most of January in discussion with Pitt and with the outgoing Foreign Secretary (Lord Harrowby) and his successor, Lord Mulgrave.21 Novosiltsov’s vanity and arrogance of manner left a bad impression and it was tactless of him to hold long and frequent conversations with Pitt’s domestic enemies, the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox and Lord Moira. But Pitt made allowances for Novosiltsov’s inexperience and youthful enthusiasm: he was more interested in him as the spokesman for Russia’s idealistic sovereign than for himself. There was much which Pitt found totally incomprehensible in the Russian proposals, especially the suggestion that the two governments would find it easy to agree on a common policy over the Ottoman Empire. Pitt respected Alexander’s desire for a comprehensive statement of war aims but he had no wish to transform a war against France into a crusade for ill-defined ‘sacred rights’ in which he did not himself believe. He rejected out of hand all talk of revising maritime law and he made it clear that Britain was unwilling, at this stage of the war with France, to be drawn into the intricacies of the Eastern Question. All this fell far short of Novosiltsov’s hopes. But at heart Pitt was as eager as Czartoryski and Alexander to build up another coalition to challenge France. It seemed to him, however, unlikely that the Tsar’s proposals would be acceptable to either of the other great European Powers, Austria and Prussia; and he was therefore prepared to counter Alexander’s design for peace with a programme of his own. This he discussed at length, not only with Mulgrave, but with other members of his cabinet.22
Although the British counter-proposals of January 1805 avoided precise commitments they sought to bring Alexander’s idealism down to earth.23 Pitt wanted the establishment of a ‘system of public law’ among the European nations, whereby the governments of all states on the mainland of Europe would pledge themselves to uphold the settlement, which would also remain under the special protective guarantee of the two Great Powers on the fringe of the continent, Britain and Russia. The assumption that Britain would continue to have a European policy after the restoration of peace was a revolutionary concept and clearly showed Pitt’s desire to please the Tsar. But detailed proposals conveyed to Novosiltsov and Simon Vorontsov showed a marked divergence of interests between the British and Russian governments, especially over the future of Germany and Italy and the frontiers of France in the east and the north. When, early in February 1805, the despatches from London reached St Petersburg it was obvious that, as yet, the two countries were not ready to conclude a binding alliance.24
Czartoryski, however, was not prepared to admit that the Novosiltsov mission was a failure. The news from London came at a bad moment for him. By now his opponents at Court had rallied after the shocks of the previous spring: the conservative Senatorial party warned Alexander that Czartoryski was pro-British and anti-Prussian; and Marie Feodorovna urged him not to stake the future of Russia on a policy determined by the son of a Polish rebel. Alexander, too, was having second thoughts: were not the British potentially more serious rivals to Russian interests on the Black Sea and at Constantinople than the French? If Czartoryski was to retain his sovereign’s confidence he had to convince Alexander that their friend, Novosiltsov, had charmed the English into support for the Tsar’s Grand Design, for nothing so pleased Alexander as the thought that he was respected as a philosopher-king with a mission.
Fortunately for Czartoryski, Pitt’s counter-proposals began with the slightly surprising statement that King George III was ‘happy to perceive that the views and sentiments of the Emperor … correspond so entirely with his own’.25 It was therefore possible for Czartoryski to maintain to Alexander that the distinctions between British and Russian policy were slight and that they could be overcome by negotiations in St Petersburg with the British ambassador. There followed two months of confused discussion with both the Austrian and British representatives in the Russian capital before it was agreed to submit a draft treaty to Napoleon as a virtual ultimatum. The French were to be informed that they must withdraw their troops behind the line of the Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine and Moselle, that a new arrangement must be made for the future of Italy, and that Britain, as a gesture of goodwill, would hand over Malta to be protected henceforth by a Russian garrison; and the treaty also stipulated that there should be a congress summoned to ‘settle the public law in Europe’. It was Alexander’s intention that Novosiltsov should be sent to Paris in order to present Napoleon with the Allied terms.26
The Tsar so misunderstood the British point of view that he genuinely believed Pitt would accept these proposals and endorse the decision to present them to the French. But Pitt refused outright to approve, and he regarded the suggestion that Malta should be left in the custody of a Russian garrison as a remarkable piece of diplomatic chicanery.27 To Alexander’s dismay the British insisted that, under such conditions, it would be impossible for them to collaborate with Russia and her allies in seeking to impose armed mediation on Napoleon. It now seemed unlikely that there would be any agreement over the grand strategy of a Third Coalition, let alone over its war aims.
Yet at this point, in June 1805, Napoleon inadvertently healed the rift between Britain and Russia. For some months he had been strengthening his grip on northern Italy, a process which reached a dramatic climax in the third week of May when he crowned himself ‘King of All-Italy’ in Milan, nominating his stepson Eugene Beauharnais as Viceroy; but on 6 June he went even further and annexed Genoa and the Ligurian coast to metropolitan France. Alexander was now convinced that the terms he had proposed to offer Napoleon would be treated with contempt. There was no sense in quarrelling with Britain over the hypothetical disposal of Malta or the future of the Italian peninsula when the real master of Italy was encroaching further and further to the south. The Tsar accordingly countermanded his order to Novosiltsov and summoned him back to St Petersburg. The Anglo-Russian Alliance, long under discussion and already drafted in April, was at last ratified on 28 July. The British promised an annual subsidy of £1½ million for every hundred thousand men Russia put into the field, but the controversial questions of Italy and Malta were omitted from the final treaty.28 Twelve days later the Austrians, even more alarmed than the Russians or the British at French activity in the Italian peninsula, added their signatures to the alliance. The Third Coalition was at last in being: but what had started out as an elaborate attempt by the Tsar to inspire an ideological challenge to Bonapartism became, in the end, a mere hurried instrument for waging a particular campaign.
Alexander’s first sustained diplomatic initiative thus reflected small credit either on his sense of what was practicable or on his understanding of European affairs. Clearly Czartoryski was to blame for much of the confusion and vacillation in Russian policy; but the Tsar associated himself so closely with his Polish friend’s programme of action that the final responsibility was unquestionably his own. He had wished to impress Europe with a sense of mission: he succeeded only in winning a reputation for insincerity and dissimulation. His handling of diplomatic questions was all too frequently a response to an emotional instinct rather than the product of careful reasoning or reflection. Unfortunately, in the months ahead, this tendency to allow his decisions to be determined by personal impressions and sympathies became more and more marked. These are not the qualities which fill either allies or subordinates with confidence in a war leader.
Military Plans and the Polish Question
Although the diplomatic preparations for the war of the Third Coalition had dragged on unconscionably long, agreement was speedily reached on a plan of operations.29 On paper it seemed masterly. Napoleon’s Empire was to be attacked from the east, the north and the south. The Austrians would begin hostilities by a thrust into southern Germany and would be supported by a Russian advance force, with the main body of men to follow within a few weeks. The British undertook to send 26,000 men to the mouth of the Weser and link up with a joint Russo-Swedish expeditiona
ry corps which would strike into Hanover and march westwards to the old battlefields of the Netherlands. Finally the whole French position in Italy would be threatened by a massive pincer movement: an Austrian attack upon Venetia and Lombardy in the north; and a joint Russo-British invasion of Naples from the south, using the much disputed bases of Malta and Corfu and relying upon pledges of support from the army of the Kingdom of Naples, which numbered some 40,000 men.
There remained, however, one weak point in the plan. No one in St Petersburg, London or Vienna could be sure what part the Prussians would play in any campaign; and in each of these capitals it was suspected, with good reason, that equal uncertainty prevailed in Berlin itself.30 Personal sympathies linked Frederick William III, Queen Louise and Tsar Alexander in an indissoluble bond of friendship, but political necessity was at times cruelly unsentimental and many of the Prussian King’s advisers felt more might be gained from collaboration with Napoleon than with his enemies. There was a marked repugnance to support any enterprise which depended upon maintaining Swedish forces in Pomerania or which invited the Elector of Hanover to land troops on the Weser, for these were territories which every good Prussian coveted for the Hohenzollern Crown. Frederick William himself possessed a laudable desire to keep war away from northern Germany and saw nothing contradictory in giving assurances to the Russians one week and to the French the next. But a neutral Prussia, potentially hostile to the allies, straddling northern Germany was a serious military obstacle to the operational plan agreed in London and St Petersburg. As early as March 1805 the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave, had sent a fiery despatch to the ambassador in St Petersburg complaining of ‘the crooked policy of the Court of Berlin’ and suggesting that the Tsar might be invited to mobilize an army along the Prussian frontier in Poland which would force Frederick William to decide whether to resist the allies or march with them against the Corsican usurper.31
Mulgrave’s despatch delighted Czartoryski but confounded Russian preparations for war in a way which its author had failed to foresee. For Czartoryski used the doubts over Prussia’s attitude as an excuse for inviting Alexander to assume the leadership of the Polish national cause. The plan which he outlined to the Tsar was ingenious.32 Assuming that Frederick William remained recalcitrant, a Russian army corps would advance across the frontier from Brest and occupy Warsaw, then the administrative centre of what was known in Berlin as ‘Southern Prussia’. With Warsaw in Russian hands, the Polish nobility would offer Alexander the crown of a Polish State to exist henceforth in dynastic union with the Russian Empire. Subsequently it was anticipated that the Austrians might cede the former Polish lands in Galicia in return for compensation elsewhere, probably in Silesia. The Polish people, grateful to the Russians as liberators, would rise against the Tsar’s enemies and supplement the allied armies in their march to the West. Czartoryski made contact with the Polish patriots outside the Russian Empire and received approval for his plan from national leaders normally hostile to Russian pretensions.33 In particular Czartoryski was given assurances of support in Warsaw from Prince Poniatowski, a nephew of the last Polish King and his own cousin, who was later to serve Napoleon and die a Marshal of France at the battle of Leipzig. Never before or after was there such enthusiasm among the Polish aristocracy for a ruler of Russia as in this summer of 1805; but it is extremely doubtful if Russia’s Austrian ally was prepared to accept a reopening of the Polish Question at such a time.
Alexander alternately blew hot and cold over Czartoryski’s project. He was too cautious to approve his friend’s plans in their entirety; but he always held that the restoration of Poland, in a form acceptable to the leaders of both the Russian and the Polish nations, was one of his cherished ambitions and he was accordingly reluctant to neglect such an opportunity. On the other hand, Alexander was acutely sensitive of his commitments to make war on France. He continued to hope he could reach an agreement with Frederick William III which would allow Russian troops free passage across Germany, even if it did not bring Prussia into the Coalition as a belligerent. Sponsorship of Polish nationalism clearly ruled out such understanding. Czartoryski deceived himself into believing that Alexander had decided to give his support to the project: he wrote to Simon Vorontsov, in mid-August, ‘Once he has taken a great decision, he knows how to adhere to it with unshaken firmness.’34 But, whatever assurances he may have given in private conversation at the council table Alexander still shirked the ‘great decision’ on the Polish Question; and he continued to do so even after the armies were massed along the frontier.
By now the opposition at Court to Czartoryski had found a natural leader in Prince Peter Dolgoruky, descendant of a great boyar family and one of the few representatives of the old Russian conservative tradition on terms of personal friendship with Alexander (who was his exact contemporary). Dolgoruky, who had once been Arakcheev’s adjutant, had impressed Alexander during Paul’s reign by the efficiency with which, as a colonel, he had modernized the fortifications of Smolensk. After his accession Alexander appointed Dolgoruky a principal aide-de-camp and regarded him as a military expert. It was in this capacity that he attended meetings of the Council of State where, partly from genuine conviction, he was hostile to every proposal which came from the members of the old Secret Committee. He warmly supported the idea of Russian participation in a war against Napoleon but he thought little of the attempts to co-ordinate grand strategy with the British and preferred a continental league of Russia, Prussia and Austria. Although Dolgoruky did not know the full details of Czartoryski’s Polish projects, he suspected that they would commit the Tsar to military operations peripheral to the main campaign. There was a stormy occasion at the Winter Palace when Dolgoruky interrupted a detailed exposition by Czartoryski with the comment: ‘By your leave, Prince, may we have rather less of these Polish affairs? You are still in the service of the Tsar of Russia.’35 The point was not lost on Alexander.
One aspect of Dolgoruky’s reasoning especially appealed to Alexander; for the young Prince was convinced he could win Frederick William of Prussia over to the Allied cause, despite unfavourable reports from Novosiltsov, who was in Berlin at the beginning of July. On 7 August the Tsar sent a letter to Frederick William urging him to allow Russian troops to pass through Prussia and for the following nine weeks secret messages, highly charged with emotion, were exchanged between the two monarchs with Dolgoruky’s collaboration.36 Alexander also insisted on modifications in the original plan of operations, which delayed the concentration of the principal Russian army by more than a fortnight. The slowness of communications across Europe meant that the Austrians launched their initial offensive against the French positions in Bavaria on 2 September without realizing the confusion and hesitancy in the Russian High Command. General Kutuzov, with the Russian advance guard, did not begin to march westwards until 12 September: he was, even then, five hundred miles from the battle zone; and the main Russian armies were still trundling slowly towards the frontier, their commanders uncertain if they were to invade Prussia, cross Prussian territory as friends, or strike south-westwards (as Kutuzov had done) avoiding Prussia entirely. It was an inauspicious beginning to the campaign.
Alexander meanwhile was in a fever of excitement.37 Most of August he spent in St Petersburg, striking appropriately martial attitudes. Against the advice of Czartoryski and the diplomatic envoys of his Austrian ally, he had decided to follow his armies into the field and share their fortunes in battle. The prospect of war both thrilled and sobered him. He seems to have seen little of Countess Naryshkin and spent some happy weeks with Elizabeth in the Tauride Palace before leaving on his journey to the frontier. On his last full day in St Petersburg – Friday, 20 September – he consulted a much revered holy man, the hermit Sevastianov, who urged him not to be in haste to destroy ‘the accursed Frenchman’; and early on the Saturday morning he attended a service at the Cathedral, kneeling for a long time in silent prayer. By half-past eleven his carriage was moving slowly so
uth-westwards down the road that led to Vitebsk, Moghilev and the frontier at Brest; and back in the Tauride Palace Elizabeth was writing an almost incoherent letter to her mother, full of the proud sorrow with which she had watched her Emperor and husband set out for the wars.38
Alexander at Pulawy and Berlin (October-November 1805)
There followed anticlimax. Eight weeks separate Alexander’s departure from his capital and his arrival at the field headquarters of his army. During this period Napoleon checked the Austrian thrust into Bavaria and penetrated three hundred miles down the Danube to the outskirts of Vienna, which was in French hands long before Alexander saw the first flash of cannon-fire on the hills of Moravia. It is as if the Tsar had interpreted too literally the inspired advice he received from Sevastianov for, while the Emperor of the French was adding fresh lustre to his reputation, the Emperor of All the Russias lingered hesitantly among the fields and forests of his Polish lands.