The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  Talleyrand's opportunity had come. He had gone to Vienna with two convictions: that an alliance of the great Powers from which a defeated France was excluded would produce not stability but instability, and that the westward expansion of Russia must be halted if civilisation was to recover. As a Polish nation could only be recreated with safety to Europe if given the strength to preserve its

  1 Walter Scott used to repeat, as an illustration of his courageous temper, a tale he had heard Castlereagh tell of how, approached by a giant spectre in a lonely Irish house, he had sprung from his bed and faced the spectre in an attitude of defiance, following it step by step across die room until it vanished. Lockhart, V, 213-14. See for his demeanour in the presence of a mob, Gronow, I, 221.

  independence, and as this was impossible, there was only one thing to be done: to return to the status quo and leave Poland divided between the original partitioning Powers. By throwing the weight of France into the scales to ensure this, Talleyrand could align her beside Britain and Austria and so end her isolation.

  He had carefully prepared the way. The Peace of Paris, which referred questions affecting Europe as a whole to a conference of all the belligerent nations, had imposed on defeated France a secret article by which the four main victor Powers reserved to themselves the disposal of the non-French territories they had reconquered. This clause had never been communicated to the smaller Powers, who, being equally concerned in such general territorial dispositions, were bound to resent it. Relying on this, Talleyrand at an informal discussion on conference procedure inquired why the other signatories to the Treaty of Paris were not present as convening Powers, why, having pledged themselves to call an all-European Congress, the big Powers were setting up a council of four only, and why, five months after the restoration of the Bourbons, they were still using the invidious word, Allies. As by international law all sovereign States were equal, it was hard for those who were setting themselves up as the champions of public law to traverse this argument. The cunning Frenchman had thus been able to secure a reluctant admission that all eight signatories of the Treaty of Paris, including France, had a right to attend preliminary discussions on conference procedure. The only alternative answer was that might was right: the one argument which he knew Great Britain and Austria were determined to avoid.

  Having gained France's admission on equal terms to the preliminary discussions, Talleyrand had put forward his own formula for the solution of the Congress's problems. It was that which the Allies had already, at his instance, applied to his own country. "I ask for nothing," he told them, "but I bring something very important —the sacred principle of Legitimacy." Based on the theory of government to which every hereditary Sovereign at the Congress owed his crown, it was almost impossible for them to reject. Yet it conflicted with vital dispositions the victors were trying to make. It involved both the restoration of the imprisoned King of Saxony, and the rejection of Austria's protege, Joachim Murat of Naples.

  Talleyrand had put the victors in a cleft stick. To break up the quadruple Alliance and align France with Britain and Austria he now sacrificed the interests of the French West Indian planters and agreed to the British demand that the Slave Trade should be forbidden at once everywhere north of Cape Formosa. He proposed, too, that a committee of the Congress should consider its universal abolition. Having won the goodwill of the British, he obliged Metternich by opposing the Spanish delegate's proposal for a European committee on Italy and so left Austria free to deal with that peninsula piecemeal. At the same time he ordered the partial mobilisation of the French Army.

  Thus armed, he offered his country's support to Great Britain and Austria at the very moment that Russia and Prussia were threatening to enforce their claims to Poland and Saxony by arms. Proclaiming that the dethronement of the Saxon King and the annexation of his dominions would undermine the whole principle of Legitimacy, he organised a collective protest by the lesser German States against the lawless liquidation of one of their members. To the Czar's rejoinder that the King of Saxony had forfeited his throne by treachery to the "common cause," he replied that that was merely a question of dates.

  This intervention by their country's hated enemy so enraged the Prussians that they threatened war unless their claim to Saxony was allowed. The effect on Castlereagh was immediate. If such a temper prevailed, he told the Prussian Chancellor, the Congress was no longer in a state of independence and had better be dissolved. At the same time he accepted Talleyrand's offer. Fortified by the news that a peace had been agreed by the British and American plenipotentiaries at Ghent, he signed on January 3rd, 1815, a secret treaty with Austria and France by which the three countries agreed to stand by one another in the event of an attack on any of them arising from the Peace Conference proposals. Austria and France were each to provide 150,000 troops and Great Britain an equivalent either in money or mercenaries. Bavaria, Hanover, Hesse-Darmstadt and Piedmont were to be invited to join this western bloc against Russian and Prussian blackmail.

  Meanwhile the wildest rumours circulated in Vienna and London. It was said that the Grand Alliance was dissolved, that the Russian army was on the march and that Prussia was to occupy the English King's hereditary domain of Hanover instead of Saxony—this an entirely baseless report of the Russian Ambassador's wife who invented, it to distract the amorous attentions of the Duke of Clarence in a coach. Even Napoleon joined in the clamour. "If the Russians succeed in uniting the Poles," he wrote from Elba, "the whole of Europe ought to dread them. It will be impossible to foresee or limit the consequences. Hordes of Cossacks and barbarians, having seen the riches of more civilised countries, will be eager to return. They will overrun Europe and some great change will probably result from it, as has been the case in former times from incursions of barbarians."

  During these days Castlereagh remained calm. "The climate of Russia," he wrote, "is often more serene after a good squall." He knew that the Czar would bluff and bluster from gain to gain so long as he thought that the West was pacific and divided. Yet he knew that he wanted war no more than anyone else, that his troops were homesick and his people war-weary, and that Russia was embarrassed by internal financial and social difficulties.1 He knew, too, that the Prussians, for all their threats, were anxious not to outrage Liberal German opinion which in the Catholic South and Rhineland was aligning itself with the forces of civilisation and public law. Above all, he understood the moral prestige that his country enjoyed: her reputation throughout the world, even among those who least loved her, her renown for constancy and tenacity, her prodigious resources and practical genius for achieving her ends. He therefore allowed the secret of his alliance with France and Austria to leak out discreetly. "The alarm of war," he wrote on January 5th, "is over."

  The Russian and Prussian negotiators had learnt the strength of Castlereagh's character. They knew that he was a man of his word and that the conscience of Europe was behind him. Like everyone else they had been impressed by the news that the American war was over, and that Britain's hands were free. With as little fuss as possible they began to climb down. On January 28th Metternich proposed that Austria and Prussia should agree to certain, though not sweeping, modifications of their pre-war frontiers in Russia's favour, and that part of Saxony should be given to Prussia in compensation, the remainder returning to its legitimate sovereign. Without a word the olive branch was accepted. The Concert of Europe was saved.

  1 H. M. C. Bathurst, 324; see Webster, 112-16; Webster, Castlereagh, I, 369, 370-1.

  Early in February, 1815, a settlement was reached of the Polish-Saxon question. Austria retained her share of the 1792 partition except for the town of Cracow, which was relinquished by the Russians and made a free city. Prussia, of her former Polish lands, regained Posen but abandoned Warsaw to Russia, receiving as compensation the Duchy of Westphalia, Swedish Pomerania, part of the left bank of the Rhine and about two-thirds of Saxony. The rest of the latter was reconstituted as an independent State under its legi
timate King. Russia kept three-quarters of Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw—about 127,000 square miles with rather over three million inhabitants. Austria recovered the Tyrol and received Salzburg, the Illyrian littoral of the Adriatic and a free hand in Italy. A statistical committee was appointed to work out the exact frontiers.

  "The territorial arrangements on this side of the Alps," wrote Castlereagh to Lord Liverpool, "are settled in all their essential features." With Talleyrand's and Metternich's help the British Foreign Secretary had achieved his object: a readjustment of frontiers by general agreement which allowed time for a new European generation to grow up in habits of peace. Whether that new generation would accept the settlement or, by repudiating it, plunge Europe into new revolutions and wars, remained to be seen. For, in the nature of things, Castlereagh's prescription for peace was based on the ideals of the past. After a quarter of a century in which force and expediency had ruled the world, it seemed to statesmen enough to return to a framework of principle and law. Almost inevitably that framework was a reproduction of what they had known rather than an anticipation of the hopes and beliefs of youth. The rough and ready work of governing mankind is not done by prophets or philosophers. The European settlement of 1814 was, indeed, a reaction from the disastrous consequences of their speculations.

  Its defect was that it enthroned a principle no longer universally accepted. Its underlying belief—one going back to the Middle Ages —was that an established succession of "lawful" hereditary princes, bred from infancy to their functions, acknowledging the Christian ethic, and governing themselves by it in their relations with their subjects and one another, was alone calculated to preserve peace and foster the habits of social happiness. It afforded a foundation for stable government, justice—of a kind—and tranquillity. It was acclaimed by hereditary rulers of all kinds from emperors to village seigneurs, upheld by the priests of the Christian Faith, and accepted, without question, by the simple peasants of those lands to which an Allied victory had restored familiar ways and traditions in place of a foreign despotism imposed in the name of abstract equality. It was even acquiesced in, though without enthusiasm, by the middle classes, whose hopes of a more egalitarian and fluid society had been shaken by the massacres, plunderings, conscriptions, and commercial restrictions of the Revolutionary Wars, and by the moral inadequacy, especially in Germany, of some of the adventurers to whom in France's conquered provinces power had too often been entrusted.1

  Yet oppressive as Napoleon's bayonet rule had been, the ideas of the germinating Revolution he embodied were not dead. They had awakened men as well as scourged them. The static dream of centuries had been broken. The old Order could never again be accepted without question where men had seen the overthrow of the thrones and altars they had believed eternal. The success of ragged armies led by men who had had no place in the old order of things— poor sergeants, broken-down attorneys and innkeepers' sons—had started thoughts, formerly inconceivable, in the most submissive minds. For a whole generation, Figaro had ruled Europe: a Figaro who in the last decade had assumed an imperial grandeur and imposed a new order more impressive than anything known under the legitimate rulers of the past. However absurd it might seem to men of hereditary caste that clerks and tradesmen should be tricked out in plumes and titles by Jacobin invaders, it did not seem so to those who belonged to these classes. The drums of Napoleon's armies had set men's minds marching along new roads. They continued to follow them even after the Emperor's fall. The transition from the music of Mozart to that of Beethoven, whose Seventh Symphony was conducted by the composer before the assembled diplomats at Viemia, is a measure of the troubled journey man had made, across the fields of Austerlitz and Borodino, from the peasant's cot of the ancien regime.

  All this the peacemakers ignored. In their hour of triumph, like Napoleon himself, they treated what was unpalatable as though it

  1 For an amusing account of such a government see "Le Royawne de Westphalie—Jerome Buonaparte—sacour—ses favoris—et ses ministres." Par un temoin oculaire. Paris, 1820, reviewed in Quarterly, XXII, 481.

  did not exist. They tried to eliminate everything that had happened since 1789. Instead of making provision for the ideas of the young, they assumed that these had been discredited for ever by the crimes of Napoleon and the Jacobins. By refusing to compromise with the riew, they made its ultimate rebellion certain. They thus undermined the world order they so carefully restored and left it exposed to great, though as yet remote, perils. In recasting the frontiers they had no regard to the racial feelings which the glorification of one nation by its citizens had aroused in others. The people of Germany, whose young patriots, with a new-found unity, had risen in the rear of the French armies, were herded back into the little ring fences in which they had lived before the Revolution, or consigned, without a chance to express their preferences, to some new ruler in order to achieve an equilibrium between Europe's lawful sovereigns. Being himself without racial prejudice, Metternich—a Rhineland land owner in Habsburg service—thought only in terms of balancing the claims of princes so nicely that the hegemony of any one of them was impossible. So far as he sought to enlarge his master's dominions it was not in order that Austria should be strong, but that she should have the power to prevent anyone else from being so.

  In this his aims were akin to those of the British Foreign Secretary. "It is not the business of England," Castlereagh wrote, "to collect trophies but to restore Europe to peaceful habits." For this he w^s prepared to sacrifice almost everything: revenge for wrongs done, the victors' spoils,1 the logic of abstract justice, the isolation so dear to some of his countrymen and the crusading liberalism so dear to others. His objective was a system in which international differences could be settled without bloodshed. "He cared for nationality not at all," wrote his disciple, Lord Salisbury, "for the theoretic perfection of political institutions very little, for the realities of freedom a great deal, and for the peace and social order and freedom from the manifold curses of disturbance which can alone give to the humbler masses of mankind any chance of tasting their scanty share of human joys— for the sake of this he was ready to forgo all the rest."

  It was not that Castlereagh was indifferent to his country's interests. Like his master, Pitt, he was a patriot. But, like Pitt, he

  1 "It will be hard," wrote his henchman, Edward Cooke, "if France is to pay nothing for the destruction of Europe and we are to pay for saving it." Castlereagh's mind rose above such considerations: his plea was for "mildness and indulgence even to offending States." See Webster, 'Castlereagh, I, 207-8, 273-4.

  believed that England's first interest was the peace and stability of Europe. He fought strenuously to maintain her rights of search at sea, and insisted on placing outside the reach of future French aggression the naval base of Antwerp which would otherwise have entailed the charge of a perpetual war establishment. He sought this by the creation of a new Middle Power, a union of Holland and Belgium under the House of Orange. To give it stability he not only subsidised it from an overburdened British Treasury, but restored to it Java and the former Dutch East Indies—prizes ardently coveted by British traders.1 And for the same end he restored to France and her former satellites the greater part of England's overseas conquests— the rewards of her many sacrifices.

  Yet the conquests which Britain retained enabled her to play a wider part than ever before in guiding the world's destinies and preserving peace. Little thought of by Continental statesmen, who regarded a few square miles in Hanover as more important than a thousand in Canada or the Antipodes, they not only brought wealth and power to Britain but enabled her to insulate and localise every war for a hundred years. St. Lucia, Tobago, Trinidad, Demerara, Essequibo and Guiana on the western shores of the Atlantic, Mauritius and Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, the Cape of Good Hope at the junction of the two oceans, Malta and the Ionian Islands Protectorate in the Mediterranean, joined to her existing possessions, gave to her fleets an untrammelled comman
d of the world's seaways. So long as she enjoyed this, it was impossible for any military power to conquer the world or even, while her statesmen and people maintained a sufficient deterrent strength, to embroil it. For pacific Britain's Navy made the waters that divided the land-masses of the earth corridors of peace.

  It did more. In retaining a part of the gains won for her by Nelson and his contemporaries, Britain unconsciously signposted the human future. Alone in her consistent refusal to accept the Revolutionary thesis at the cannon's mouth, she yet secured and opened channels along which its ideas could flow. Her trans-oceanic possessions, unimportant as they seemed to European despots, were to witness, under her tolerant tutelage, the peaceful application of the very principles against whose armed enforcement she had fought. Even

  1 And by British humanitarians too. It was one of Raffles' dreams to emancipate the Malays from the unsympathetic and, as he deemed, degrading rule of the Dutch.

  her claim to the "Freedom of the Seas"—anglice, the right of search of neutral merchantmen in time of war—was to contribute to the expansion of the democratic belief. No one resented that claim more bitterly than the republicans of the United States who in 1812 had gone to war to challenge it. Yet it was the Royal Navy's grip on the Atlantic that enabled the infant Republic to consolidate a new libertarian order in the Western Hemisphere and to develop its immense resources without interference from the Old World. Nor was this service of England to her offspring entirely unintentional. At the very moment that victory in Europe freed her fleets and armies for major operations beyond the Atlantic, she showed her goodwill by seeking a settlement with the young democracy of the West. In the Treaty of Ghent she acknowledged its full territorial integrity in return only for a similar recognition of Canada's1—another potential democracy of poor men founded on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.