Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace
Page 44
The Saxon settlement took longer to determine. Rather belatedly, the legitimate ruler of Saxony, Frederick Augustus, was brought to Pressburg (Bratislava) for consultation. After more than a year of virtual internment he proved less accommodating than the representatives of the Great Powers anticipated. By the end of February it was agreed by everyone except the King himself that he would receive back three-fifths of his territories (including the cities of Dresden and Leipzig) while the remaining two-fifths would be incorporated in Prussia. Diplomatic wrangling between the King and the Allies continued until the first week of April when Frederick Augustus, perceiving that none of the Great Powers was impressed by his protests, gave way and returned chastened to his capital. Alexander, for his part, had long since lost all interest in Saxony and refused to send a minister to Pressburg for talks with the King.44
Alexander’s Change of Heart
Participants in the Congress, and casual observers as well, were intrigued by the evident change of heart in Alexander during the second part of December and the first weeks of January. There was much speculation over what had caused him to modify his views. Metternich at first feared he had merely abandoned the struggle over Poland because of the growing influence of Capodistrias and the anti-Turks, who wished him to champion the Greek Christians and raise the problems of the Eastern Question at the Congress.45 Others said Alexander had lost his enthusiasm for the Poles because Czartoryski and the Empress Elizabeth had re-kindled the mutual enchantment which had drawn them to each other in the reign of Paul; but, although there is no doubt they experienced in Vienna a passionate resurrection of their old love, Alexander certainly did not lessen his political reliance upon the Polish Prince; nor does he appear to have resented his liaison with Elizabeth any more intensely than fifteen years previously.46 It is unlikely to have influenced Alexander’s policy in any respect.
The Austrian intelligence service tended to attribute his change of attitude to the influence of the Grand Duchess Catherine.47 This was a reasonable assumption. Catherine had made her presence felt in Vienna ever since her arrival in the city. Her command of languages, her knowledge of scientific matters, her determined views on war and soldiering, won respect among the great European aristocrats, who treated her in a very different manner from the Tories and Whigs of London. Who, the gossips wondered, would be her second husband? Until the beginning of December Catherine seemed still to favour the Archduke Charles, who was, after all, one of the most respected military commanders of his generation. It is, however, impossible to believe that two such masterful egotists would have lived happily together for more than a few weeks, and it would seem that one of them – probably the Archduke – was sensible enough to realize the absurdity of such a marriage. At all events by the middle of December one of Hager’s spies confidently reported that ‘the projected marriage between the Prince Royal of Württemberg and the Grand Duchess Catherine has been finally arranged’.48 There was a dramatic morning in which Catherine, between two fainting fits, managed to renounce Charles and declare herself for William; then all that remained was to determine the form of settlement and the date of marriage. Since the King of Württemberg was, at sixty, prematurely old and said to be ailing, there was a good prospect Catherine would find herself a Queen-Consort before many months had passed. In that case she had every reason for wishing Alexander to retain influence over the new German Confederation, which would be impossible if he continued to encourage the Prussians to annex Saxony. Once Catherine began to see herself as a good Württemberger she naturally sided with the anti-Prussian camp. Alexander, as ever, listened to her readily and with respect.
It would, however, be a mistake to credit Catherine exclusively with the conversion of Alexander. He experienced this December a deeper change of mood and behaviour. During the first ten or eleven weeks he spent in Vienna he continued to scandalize the prurient by a casual display of sensual indulgence on the grand scale. He amused himself, not only with the ladies of the Palais Palm, but with two Hungarian Countesses, three members of the German-Austrian aristocracy and a number of pretty Viennese girls of considerably lower social standing.49 But in the second week of December he suddenly began to discipline his habits. Significantly the printed police reports on his movements do not mention any private visits to ladies of fashion after 5 December, when he was said to have been taken ill while alone with Princess Bagration.50 In January a Madame Schwarz arrived in Vienna from St Petersburg with her husband, a banker. She was reputedly a former mistress of the Tsar but, though he visited her at the first opportunity, he saw to it that she was speedily encouraged to travel northwards to Berlin.51 Throughout the Christmas period and well into the New Year the Tsar took care to accept invitations to dine with the principal hostesses of Viennese Society only when he knew other men of rank would be among his fellow guests. Occasionally Elizabeth would accompany him, so that we catch a glimpse of them helping Marie Louise celebrate her first birthday since ceasing to be Empress of the French.52 It is as if Alexander had suddenly reverted to respectable domesticity after his wild burst of dissipation.
Hager’s agents had a simple explanation. The Tsar, they said, was suffering from venereal disease.53 They may well have been correct. But if so, it appears to have borne heavily upon his conscience. For, as Metternich noted later, during these crisis weeks of the Congress, Alexander underwent what the Prince termed ‘one of the periodic evolutions of the mind’ to which his psychology naturally inclined him.54 Suddenly his spirit became so mystically exalted that he despised the haggling and bargaining of peacemaking as an unworthy exercise for a sovereign blessed by Divine revelation. For the following two years, perhaps longer, he was inspired by that curious religious ecstasy which had uplifted him during the halcyon days of the campaign against Napoleon.
This re-discovery of religious faith was assisted by the presence among Elizabeth’s attendant ladies of a young and devout Greek, Roxane Stourdza, whose brother acted as the Tsar’s private secretary. Roxane was a follower of a much-revered evangelical prophetess, Baroness Julie von Krüdener, a Latvian by birth.‡ The Baroness’s writings, and in particular her semi-autobiographical romance Valerie, had interested the Empress Elizabeth for some six or seven years, but not it would appear her husband.55 He began to take Baroness Julie seriously only because of the influence of Roxane Stourdza and her brother. While Roxane was in Vienna she received some remarkable letters from her friend which were so full of apocalyptic revelation that their content was passed on to Alexander, probably in the first instance by his secretary. It was comforting for the Tsar to learn, during the worst period of tension with the Austrians, that Madame von Krüdener knew him to be ‘one upon whom the Lord has conferred a much greater power than the World recognizes’. And if Alexander was indeed suffering from a socially humiliating disease, it was especially gratifying to be told that this strange and holy woman, technically one of his own subjects, was ‘quite familiar’ with ‘all the deep and striking beauties in the soul of the Emperor’.56
During the second half of December, the time in which foreign observers were amazed at the ‘serene cheerfulness’ of the Tsar’s disposition, he spent many free evenings visiting Roxane in the small room which she occupied on the fourth floor of the Hofburg.57 She was an attractive girl with a charmingly gentle smile and a pleasant voice, but there was never any suggestion that Alexander wished her to become his mistress. He looked upon Roxane as a religious, someone with whom he could discuss the simple problems of theology which troubled his mind. Neither Roxane nor the Tsar were, in any sense, profound thinkers; nor indeed were Roxane’s brother and her friend, Catherine Valouiev, who joined in their discussions from time to time. All four shared the characteristic Orthodox desire for religious contemplation without the spiritual training which would have assisted them to benefit from what Roxane herself later described as ‘the consolation of solitude’. Psychologically Alexander was experiencing a similar need to the inner calling which, in Lond
on, had awakened his interest in the Quakers. But the knowledge that in Germany there was a strange prophet, who had kept faith in his mission when he had forgotten it, gave to those meetings in the Hofburg an extraordinary sense of the mysterious, an exciting cerebral pleasure made doubly satisfying because of its secrecy. Not once did Hager’s spies pick up reports of Alexander’s visits to Roxane, nor, strangely enough, do they appear to have intercepted any of Julie von Krüdener’s Sibylline messages.
Napoleon’s Return from Elba and the Close of the Vienna Congress
One at least of the Krüdener letters would have interested any intelligence service. In the second week of November Roxane Stourdza received a letter which the Baroness had written in Strasbourg at the end of the previous month. It was, as usual, a medley of biblical prophecy and cryptic imprecision. ‘A storm is approaching’, it declared, which will mean that the Bourbon lilies of France ‘have appeared only to disappear’.58 Since everyone visiting Louis XVIII’s kingdom could see that his subjects remained unreconciled to the Bourbon restoration this prediction was not in itself especially significant; but the Baroness wrapped her warning in tempting mystery. She told Roxane that she had ‘tremendous things’ to say to Alexander, ‘him whom we are ordered by God Himself to love and respect’. There were at that moment in Vienna quite enough well-wishers eager to inform the Tsar of matters which interested them and, although Alexander was glad to have Madame von Krüdener’s messages conveyed to him by Roxane, he was disinclined to propose she might join the foreign visitors to the Congress. In February 1815 she tried again. Once more she declared to Roxane that she had ‘most important things to say to him’. Alexander politely instructed Roxane to let her know he would be pleased to make her acquaintance at a suitable moment, but he still showed no desire for her to come to Vienna.59 This is hardly surprising, for her presence would at once have excited comment and destroyed the privacy of his cherished hours of contemplative retreat.
On 7 March, however, news reached Vienna so staggering that for the moment it ruled out all prospect of further quiet evenings wrapt in spiritual introspection. At half-past seven that morning Metternich opened a despatch from his consul in Genoa and discovered that Napoleon had disappeared from Elba. Three-quarters of an hour later the Austrian minister was received in Alexander’s wing of the Hofburg for the first time in four months.60 The news placed Alexander in an embarrassing position; he was acutely conscious that it was on his initiative that Napoleon had been assigned the island of Elba during the negotiations at Paris. He agreed at once to order the Russian armies to be placed on a war footing: he went further, and offered to assume supreme command himself so as to scourge France once more of the Corsican. Tactfully this proposal was ignored, for no one outside Alexander’s immediate circle ever rated highly his abilities in the field, but it was gratifying to know that the Russians were prepared to assume their treaty responsibilities and help maintain the settlement in western Europe.
By ten o’clock that same morning all the leading Allied statesmen were gathered in Metternich’s study. There was some doubt as to whether Napoleon would make for France or for Italy in the first instance. But as a precaution couriers were sent out from Vienna to the commanders of every Allied corps on the continent to make certain they placed their men on the alert. If Napoleon hoped to exploit the discord between his former enemies he was disappointed. ‘No peace with Bonaparte!’ Alexander declared as of old. ‘The first task must be to overthrow him.’61 A solemn proclamation branded ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ an outlaw for having ‘again appeared in France with projects of confusion and disorder’. At the end of March a renewed grand alliance bound the Austrians, British, Prussians and Russians to supply 150,000 men each to defend the contested frontiers of Europe against the menace which had broken out of Elba. By midsummer it was hoped that a million men would be on the march towards Paris once more, and this time the military commanders would give the disturber of world peace no quarter.62
The news of Napoleon’s return to France sobered the peacemakers in Vienna. They began to settle their business with as little delay as possible. The Russian ministers co-operated readily enough with the Austrians and the British, whose delegation had been led by the Duke of Wellington since Castlereagh’s return to London in February. The frontiers of the Netherlands and Poland were formally delineated; agreement was reached on the character of the new Swiss Confederation and on a proclamation calling for abolition of the slave trade (a question on which Alexander, like Wellington, felt deeply); measures were proposed for improving the position of the Jewish communities in Germany and for determining the precise status of diplomats in the capitals to which they were accredited; and a guarantee was prepared ensuring free navigation of the rivers Rhine and Meuse.63 From the middle of March onwards a special committee of thirty-three delegates and secretaries began drafting a Final Act, which would embody the decisions of the statesmen in a single document. It was harder to settle the form of confederation for Germany or the precise relationship of the states in the Italian peninsula to each other, and neither of these questions was satisfactorily resolved before the Tsar left Vienna. The difficulties, however, were caused either by internal confusion or by the suspicions of the smaller states rather than the Great Powers. Significantly after Napoleon’s recovery of his authority in France, Alexander did not once clash with Metternich over the political form of the new Germany. To Stein’s disgust the Tsar remained totally uninterested in the movement for German unity and declined to antagonize his allies by defending the champions of enlightened reform in their debates in the German Committee of the Congress. ‘I had influence over very imperfect human beings’, Stein complained bitterly in his diary at the end of March.64
There was, however, at least one moment that spring when it seemed as if the thin bonds of Austro-Russian friendship might snap. Napoleon, who had been amused to hear on Elba of the friction between Alexander and Metternich over Poland, sent a conciliatory message to the Tsar soon after his return to Paris and accompanied it with a copy of the secret alliance made by Talleyrand with the Austrians and British on 3 January, which had been found in the archives of the French Foreign Office. As Napoleon anticipated this revelation made Alexander angry, but it did not dispose him to respond to French blandishments. Since he had for several weeks suspected the existence of such a treaty, he was able to treat the whole affair magnanimously. Indeed, he seemed more irritated that such a mischievous document should have fallen into the restored Emperor’s hands than that the alliance was concluded in the first place. He sent for Metternich, who came at once to his apartments in the Hofburg, where Alexander presented him with the papers forwarded from Paris. The Tsar, savouring the advantage which Napoleon’s action had given him, enjoyed acting out an affecting scene of forgiveness and reconciliation in which Metternich, anxious to avoid diplomatic embarrassment, willingly participated. The two men embraced, assured each other that all would be forgotten, and pledged themselves to ‘attend to more serious matters’.65 What had seemed a document of top-secret importance in January was twelve weeks later yet another historic relic.
The main Russian army, with Barclay de Tolly still in command, was concentrated in Poland, with a few advanced garrisons in Silesia. It was therefore clear the Russians would not be in a position to chasten Napoleon for several months to come. Since the Austrians were engaged with pacifying Italy, it was agreed that the prime task of defending the threatened frontiers of the Netherlands should be left to the British and the Prussians. Meanwhile Schwarzenberg, as supreme Allied generalissimo, would concentrate an army on the right bank of the Rhine ready to invade France, in conjunction with Barclay de Tolly, at the height of the summer if Napoleon had not already been defeated. The British offered Wellington command of the Anglo-Dutch force gathering in Belgium and he was able to hold military talks with both Schwarzenberg and the Tsar before setting out from Vienna on 29 March. Alexander liked Wellington personally, far more than he did mos
t Englishmen, and he had always respected him as a soldier for his triumphs in Portugal and Spain. He had no doubt the Duke would be able to contain the new threat from France, perhaps even to destroy it with the help of Blücher’s Prussians. When Alexander bade Wellington farewell at the end of March he therefore placed his hand on the Duke’s shoulder and declared, ‘It is for you to save the World again.’66 The Tsar was too loyal a European to stop and think whether at that moment a decisive Anglo-Prussian victory, with no Russian regiments on the field of battle, would be in the best interests of his own Empire. By now, too, he was sufficiently experienced in war to hope that it would not be necessary for Russian blood to be shed once more.