There seemed a still greater danger in allowing Prussia to swallow a sovereign German State. In the ambition of the Prussians to unite northern Germany Talleyrand saw a threat to the future. If Germany was ever to be united and given nationhood, it must be under the aegis of a civilised, not of a barbaric, Power. For all her show of Lutheran piety, Prussia was a heathen State which recognised neither the Roman law nor the Roman morality. "No scruples stop her," Talleyrand wrote, "convenience constitutes her only right." If she were to impose her predatory, barrack-room conception of the State on the union of Germans which Napoleon had begun in the Rhine-land and Westphalia, it might one day lay civilisation open to a worse menace than Napoleon.
Elderly and hedonistic cynic though he was, Talleyrand therefore turned to the statesmen of England and Austria to safeguard the ideal common to them all—a stable and tranquil Europe. He took advantage of the British Foreign Minister's presence in Paris in August to propose that Britain and France should support one another at the approaching Peace Congress. But Castlereagh, though bitterly disappointed by his failure to reach an agreement with the Czar on the future of eastern Europe, refused to treat with France behind his allies' back. Only six months before he had pledged his country to act with Russia, Prussia and Austria against French aggression, and he still regarded that alliance as the guarantee of European peace. He hoped that when the victors met that autumn at Vienna, wiser counsels would prevail, and that Russia would be prepared, like England, to make sacrifices for the common good. He pinned his hopes on the influence of Austria, the most civilised of the victor Powers, and in particular on the Austrian Chancellor,
Metternich. He, therefore, continued his journey to Vienna without committing himself.
Between Castlereagh and Metternich there was a natural affinity. Polished, courtly and handsome, the one forty-five and the other forty-four, both had consistently opposed the Revolution and the subversive violence which since their youth had threatened the world into which they had been born. Both, after prolonged perils and high courage, had seen their cause triumph. There the resemblance ceased. Castlereagh was a man of scrupulous integrity, incapable of deceit, simple, unaffected, home-loving and, by Metternich's standards, almost bourgeois in the propriety of his domestic life. His strength, like that of his country, lay not in intellect or adroitness, but in character. He dominated any society he entered not by graceful accomplishments but by his calm command of himself. Champion of a united Christendom though he had made himself, his boyish shyness, his awful French,1 the long, stiff legs which he never knew where to put, his apparent constancy to his complacent-eyed, chattering wife, all proclaimed his insularity. Like every rosbiffe was at bottom a provincial. Yet there was nothing vulgar in his provincialism. 'Ma foi" exclaimed Talleyrand after their first meeting, "comme il a l’air distingue" With his tall, stately presence and frank gaze he personified the independence and assurance of the open-air ruling class of England.
Prince Metternich was as brilliant and accomplished as Castlereagh was reticent and patient. He was the doyen of a dancing capital. He prided himself as much on his beaux yeux and fascinating manners as on his cleverness. As great an intriguant in the boudoir as in the cabinet, he made his skill in the one serve his ends in the other. The wits called him "le ministre papillon." He was the complete international character, equally at home in German, French, Italian, English and Russian. Although a great upholder of the structure of Christian society, truth was alien to his nature; he sought the same ends as Castlereagh, but loved to achieve them by trickery. Napoleon, a connoisseur in such matters, remarked that he lied always and that this was too much. This, however, was because Metternich had
1 "How he gets on in French I cannot imagine. He called out to the maitre d'hotel, 'A present, Monsieur, servez la diner.1 " Harriet Granville, I, 62-4. He once remarked of his allies that they were all "dans le meme potage."
proved the more successful liar of the two. Unlike the islander, Castlereagh, who had never had to fawn to the Revolution, he was an unconscious puppet of the lawless force he had set himself to destroy. Under a sincere show of principle, he was politically a trickster. He even out-tricked Napoleon.
Despite his love of pleasure, Metternich took himself very seriously. He saw Austria—a Christian and multi-racial State—as the microcosm of Europe. He sought to give the latter the stability enjoyed by the former. His political aim was to stop the hand of time. He did not believe it could be stopped for ever, only that by his own prescience and cleverness it could be stopped for his lifetime. Au fond he was a pessimist, for he believed that all change must be for the bad. He saw before the civilisation he loved a long period of inevitable decline. Having witnessed in his lifetime so much violence, treachery, horror and bloodshed, he appeared to have grounds for his belief. Meanwhile he meant to constitute Austria—and himself— a rock of order in a troubled world.
The State whose councils this conservative statesman guided had an even stronger interest in European stability than Great Britain. Austria was not a trading empire like Britain, but she was composed of many races. Before the war her hereditary ruler's domains had included Belgian and part of Western Germany, and his titles the great though nebulous office of Holy Roman or German Emperor. Since the conquest of Belgium by the Revolutionary armies and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon, she had turned southwards and eastwards and, abandoning the role of guardian of Germany against France—one which had proved beyond her military capacity1—had sought to fill the more profitable vacuum, created by the receding tide of Turkish imperialism and the extinction of the Venetian Republic. The Habsburg Francis II ruled not only a Teuton Austria, a Magyar Hungary and a Czech Bohemia, but over Italians in Lombardy and Venetia, Croats and Serbs in Illyria, and Poles and Ruthenes in Galicia. Such an empire was subject to every disturbing opinion and new idea. Being without natural frontiers, it was excessively vulnerable. Since 1796 its capital had been four times at the mercy of the French.
1 "No reverses can correct, no experience instruct them." Benjamin Bathurst, H. M. C. Bathurst, 175. "Whatever their defects may have been, they bore their misfortunes with wonderful gaiety. Returning to Vienna after the battle of Austerlitz, Madame Pungstall heard the Emperor say: 'Well! here we are; well beaten.' " Broughton, I, 61.
It was natural, therefore, for an Austrian Government to wish to avoid war and preserve the status quo. It was a police State presided over by a paternal dynasty and a rigid, well-meaning and rather bovine bureaucracy. It was not actively oppressive, but perpetually apprehensive and, therefore, meddling. Everything was censored, particularly newspapers and books. In Lombardy even excessive applause at the theatre was forbidden lest it should arouse national feeling. The imperial officials—mostly Teutons—drove the quicker-witted Latins, especially the Italians, almost frantic by their clumsy, rule-of-thumb pedantry. At Mantua, to get permission to leave the town, it was necessary to apply first to the officer of the Guard, thence to the Douane, thence to the Police, and, after half a dozen other officers, to the general commandant himself. When the latter's aides-de-camp had leisure to attend to the matter and had graciously issued a passport, the would-be traveller, retracing his steps, had to present it in turn to all these officers again. Such a system fostered neither commerce nor thought. It created—so long as men would tolerate it—a static society.
The supreme head of this far-flung State, the Emperor Francis, was a thin, dried-up, kindly little man, usually dressed in an old-fashioned and not over clean white uniform. Except when making toffee—his favourite relaxation—he was never so happy as when poring over police dossiers. He left questions of policy to his clever Chancellor and devoted himself to the ritual of the administrative priesthood of which he was the head. He was much loved by his Austrian subjects, a simple, pious folk who regarded him as their father and viewed his unceasing paternal concern for their affairs with grateful pride.1 His capital and the brilliant aristocracy which thronged it
made up for its lack of political responsibility by its intense love of music, dancing and the arts.
In their attitude to Russian and Prussian pretensions the advisers of this good monarch were somewhat divided. The Chancellor, Metternich, felt a strong distrust of Russia and an even stronger dislike for the Czar—a rival in love as well as diplomacy. The Commander-in-Chief, Prince Schwarzenberg, and Count Stadion, the Finance Minister, were more frightened of Prussia. One group feared the Russian threat to absorb Galicia, the other the Czar's proposal to
1 "To redeem mankind, God gave his only son," ran a Viennese illuminated inscription at the victory celebrations, "to save Europe Francis gave his daughter. Glory to the Father and the Daughter!" Hon. Frederick Lamb to Lord Castlereagh, 18th June, 1814. Castlereagh, X, 56-7.
hand over Saxony and, with it, the leadership of northern Germany to Berlin. The first would bring a neighbour of immense size and unpredictable ambition to the passes above the Hungarian plain; the second the hated martial State, which had seized Silesia from the Habsburgs, to the gates of Bohemia.
By the aristocratic and Catholic standards of Austria both Russia and Prussia were barbaric and upstart Powers. The Austrian nobility, who had been the guardians of Christendom from the Turk for two centuries, understood far better than the English how thin was the civilised veneer on which the values of the West depended. They knew how quickly it vanished as one moved eastwards into the plains and forests where Rome had never penetrated. It had been this fear of eastern barbarism that had caused the Emperor Francis to hesitate before dethroning his son-in-law, Napoleon. There seemed little advantage in exchanging the yoke of a Corsican brigand for that of a Calmuck chief.
Behind the Czar and his European Ministers lay Russia with her boundless territories and population. Her dramatic defeat of Napoleon had struck the imagination of Europe; her armies, triumphant on the Seine, stood revealed as the force of the future. It seemed a strange thing for eighteenth-century gentlemen to see "a Bashkir Tartar with the Phrygian cap and bow" gazing about him from his ragged horse in a Paris street. The inscrutable, smiling barbarism of Russia both fascinated and repelled the West. Beneath the glitter of its elegant, Europeanised aristocracy, its people were still the savage, elemental creatures that ancient travellers had found beyond the Polish marches. When they spilled into Europe out of the remote plains and impenetrable forests from which Napoleon had roused them, they behaved like beings of a different species. They cut off the heads of their prisoners, drank the oil out of street lamps and performed their natural functions in parlours. At one moment they would be standing like automata on parade, ready to be struck down by their officers if they moved a muscle, at another singing in unison in emotion-charged ranks before their incense-swinging priests; or capering about in dirty slovenly grey coats like herds of intoxicated animals. In all they did beauty and savagery were strangely mingled. To human life and the rights of the individual they seemed utterly indifferent; even a General whose men failed to keep their mechanical alignment at a review was punished with instantaneous imprisonment. Yet their fierce rhythm and sense of colour haunted the imagination of those who saw them. A British officer recorded his impressions of a Russian equipage in a Paris street: the bearded coachman with the brow and neck of a Jupiter, the beautiful boy outrider with flaming caftan and flowing elf-locks, the little, wild, long-maned horses that at a shake of the whip and a cry were off like the wind.1
A Power so impulsive and barbaric, with standards so different from those of the West, could not be allowed to dictate to Europe. Yet, having liberated the Continent from the Jacobin, it had become its strongest part. Both Castlereagh and Metternich saw that the preservation of peace depended on the maintenance of a common front by the victors. It was not by opposing Russia but by influencing her that European equilibrium must be established. And, as no one had been more insistent on the idea of an international order than the Czar, it was the task of western statesmanship to win him from his selfish insistence on purely Russian ends and recall him to the measures necessary to restore the balance and unity of Christendom.
Castlereagh's attempt to reason with Alexander, however, proved no more successful in Vienna than in London. When reminded that his proposal to publish a liberal Constitution for all Poles would not only put his allies, Austria and Prussia, in an invidious position but vex his own subjects who enjoyed no such Constitution, Alexander replied that the Constitution was the handiwork of a British liberal, Jeremy Bentham, and that by opposing it the British Foreign Secretary was flouting the conscience of his countrymen. This was awkward, for it was true. When Castlereagh went on to inform, the Czar's Minister, Nesselrode, that it was not the resurrection of a free Poland that Britain opposed but of a puppet one under Russian control, he was curtly informed that Russia, already in occupation of Poland, possessed an army of 600,000 men.
On October 12th, therefore, Castlereagh addressed to the Czar a letter. After recalling that Britain could not condone a unilateral aggrandisement by an ally, he appealed to him to make the forthcoming Congress a blessing to mankind instead of "a scene of discordant intrigue and a lawless scramble for power." Simultaneously he sought common action with the other victor Powers to induce
1 Mercer, II, 229-30. See Gronow, II, 19-20; Stanley, 178; Brownlow, 151-4; Granville, II, 476; Paget Brothers, 262; Dr. Gray, Autobiography, II, 269; Haydon, I, 254, 257; Lady Shelley, I,
Russia to modify her claims. But his efforts broke down, not only on the King of Prussia's almost pathological subservience to the Czar but on the desire of Prussian statesmen for hegemony in northern Germany and their realisation that this might be achieved with Russian but never with Austrian aid. Castlereagh, true to the traditional policy of the Pitts, could see little objection to an enlargement of Prussia, especially on the left bank of the Rhine where she could keep watch on France. He shared the view common to most Englishmen who had grown up in the eighteenth century that the Prussians were natural allies; they might be bellicose, but they hated the French.1 But his proposal to give Prussia, in return for a stand against Russia, not only most of Saxony but the great southern German fortress of Mainz, was more than Vienna could stomach. She could not permit her rival to control the Main as well as the Elbe, Rhine and Oder.
Meanwhile Metternich too had become embroiled with the Czar. When informed by the complacent Rhinelander that Austria would welcome a free Poland re-established by Europe but not a puppet state made by Russia, Alexander became hysterical with rage, accused him of insubordination and threatened to force the Emperor Francis to dismiss him. He subsequently challenged him to a duel and, when this was prevented, declined to speak to him for three months. At the same time he made sure of the Prussians. On November 8th the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army of Occupation handed over Saxony to Berlin. A week later Alexander's brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, issued from Warsaw a proclamation calling on all Poles to unite and fight for their independence.
The eastern barbarians were thus aligned and the cloven hoof shown. If Castlereagh gave way Russia would not only secure a preponderance in eastern Europe so great as to overturn the balance of power, but would destroy the system of agreement between the Powers created at Chaumont. Yet not only was Austria by herself incapable of expelling the Russian and Prussian armies from Poland
1 "I know," he wrote to Wellington, "there may be objections to . . . placing a Power, peculiarly military and consequently somewhat encroaching, so extensively in contact with Holland and the Low Countries; but, as this is only a secondary danger, we should not sacrifice to it our first object." It was also widely believed—in England—that the Prussians loved the English. "Every Prussian is thoroughly attached to England, and all the young Prussian Princes are desperate when they talk of Russia." Duke of Cumberland to Prince Regent, 10th Jan., 1S15. George IV, Letters, II, 4.
and Saxony, but the British people were utterly weary of war and unable for the moment to think of anything but the export mark
et and the reduction of taxes. Such military force as they had chosen to retain was mostly on the other side of the Atlantic fighting the Americans, while the Opposition, heedless of geography and completely misled by the Czar's platitudes, was raising Cain over the Foreign Secretary's resistance to his benevolent plans for Poland's constitutional progress. The Cabinet, conscious of its weakness in Parliament, sent off dispatch after dispatch urging Castlereagh not to carry matters to extremities. Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, struggling with the demand for lower taxes, was particularly insistent on the need for appeasement. "We ought," he wrote, "to avoid irritating Russia by a pertinacious opposition which is unlikely to be successful."
But Castlereagh was unmoved. He had seen his country pouring out its blood and treasure for the ideal of international law for twenty years. He did not now intend to let that law be flouted with impunity by anyone, foe or ally. He would not allow a "Calmuck Prince" to dictate to Europe. "You must make up your mind to watch and resist him as another Bonaparte," he wrote to the Prime Minister. "You may rely upon it, my friend Van's philosophy is untrue as applied to him. Acquiescence will not keep him back nor will opposition accelerate his march."
Having chosen his course, Castlereagh did not shrink from the measure to implement it. It was his habit, when threatened, to face danger boldly.1 Having failed in his attempt to use the machinery of the quadruple alliance to restore European equilibrium, he called in an outside Power. For his ultimate objective was not the Grand Alliance, but the purpose for which the Grand Alliance had been created.
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