Castlereagh was not at Troppau, Britain being represented only by her ambassador to Vienna, Sir Charles Stewart. Knowing how much his government opposed intervention, he refused to sign the protocol. In London, Castlereagh objected that Britain could not belong to an alliance 'with the moral responsibility of administering a general European police'. For he always saw the alliance purely as a mechanism for ensuring harmonious relations between the nations of Europe. In any case, historically he was in no position to commit Great Britain to upholding dynastic legitimacy, that keystone of Metternichian foreign policy; as he pointed out, 'the House of Hanover could not well maintain the principles upon which the House of Stuart forfeited the throne.' Nevertheless, Castlereagh did not anticipate Britain abandoning the Concert of Five; rather, he forecast that the new triple alliance would drift away from Britain.
No stickler for the truth himself, Metternich clung to the belief that Castlereagh's objection to intervention was a political ploy, a sop to British public opinion. He cannot be blamed for thinking that secretly Castlereagh supported him when he was assured that this was so by the Austrian ambassador in London, when the Duke of Wellington had said he should invade Naples. And he was right in supposing that Castlereagh had no wish to destroy the rapport built up over the last eight years.
Despite British disapproval, the Congress of Troppau was one of Metternich's greatest achievements. Not only did he get what he wanted in Italy, but he established an extraordinary psychological ascendancy over the Tsar. The latter's conversion—one historian calls it seduction—from liberal sympathies was in part due to a 'Confession of Faith' which Metternich drafted in the evenings at Troppau and presented to Alexander at the end of the congress. Poorly written, verbose, it is often dismissed; the claim that middle class 'presumption' is the root cause of revolution attracts ridicule. Yet Metternich identified just the same dichotomy in democracy that Talmon was to do a century later in The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy. Metternich wrote:
The enemy is divided into two sharply distinct parties. One is the Levellers, the other the Doctrinaires. . . . Among Levellers one finds strong-willed, determined men. Doctrinaires have no-one like this. But if the former are more to be feared during a revolution, the latter are more dangerous in the period of deceptive calm which precedes it.
In his view Girondin must inevitably give way to Jacobin, plebeian liberal to plebeian tyrant. However, the real purpose of the 'Confession' was not so much to write political philosophy as to frighten and win over the Tsar. Metternich struck exactly the right note of apocalyptic indignation:
Drag through the mud the name of God and the powers instituted by His divine decrees, and the revolution will be prepared! Speak of a social contract and the revolution is accomplished. The revolution was already completed in the palaces of Kings, in the drawing-rooms and boudoirs of certain cities, when among the great mass of the people it was still only in a state of preparation.
Shaken by the mutiny of his favourite regiment, Alexander had already blurted out, 'In the year 1820 I would not do what I did in 1813 for anything in the world. You have not changed but I have!' Metternich had noted complacently. ' "As is the master, so is the servant" I said to myself. Now we will wait. Nesselrode is to come.'
Metternich had also destroyed any chance of a Franco-Russian alignment. The French had hoped to revive the Bourbon family pact. Encouraged discreetly by Metternich, their envoy the Marquis de Caraman offered to mediate between the Neapolitan government and King Ferdinand. Recognition of the regime infuriated the Tsar—as everyone had known it would. The French angered him even more by refusing to sign the Preliminary Protocol. Still hoping fatuously to mediate, they then joined in inviting Ferdinand to come to Laibach and seek their help, upsetting Britain as well.
The Austrian foreign minister's summing up on 11 December was, 'We have come to the end of the first act of the play.'
The King of Naples was expected at Laibach (Ljubljana) in January 1821. All the other Italian sovereigns came too. Metternich drove from Troppau along icy roads, spending New Year's Day with his family in Vienna. He was pleased with his accommodation, even if 'the mistress of the house is as ugly as the seven deadly sins, and has seven children who each resemble one of the said sins'. There was a theatre where he could hear Rossini's latest operas. The congress was a success before it opened officially on 11 January. On the previous day he had written 'we have won the battle', implying that Tsar Alexander's cooperation was working wonders—'Here again tea makes its astonishing power felt.' Prince Ruffo, the ambassador of Naples at Vienna, read aloud on his King's behalf speeches drafted by Gentz and Metternich in which Ferdinand bemoaned his subjects' wickedness. The Austrian foreign minister assured the King that his oath to uphold the Neapolitan constitution was invalid, since it had been taken under duress. Ferdinand sent a letter to the Neapolitans—written for him by Gentz—to say that he was coming home with a large Austrian army and warning them not to resist. Even the normally pessimistic Gentz confided in a friend, 'Really, things aren't going badly.'
The trump card was the Tsar. Full of a convert's zeal, he agreed to everything Metternich wanted as soon as he arrived. Delighted by the decision to invade Naples, Alexander wrote to Princess Mestcherski, 'Our purpose is to counteract the empire of evil, which is spreading rapidly through all the occult means at the disposal of the Satanic spirit which directs it.' He was finding much comfort in the Bible, especially in the stories of Nebuchadnezzar and of Judith and Holofernes. 'Capo d'Istria twists and turns like the Devil in Holy Water,' Metternich observed complacently. A month later he noted, 'The breach between Capo d'Istria and the Tsar grows steadily.'
The British were angered by attempts to associate them with the congress's decision to intervene. Stewart protested ineffectually, insisting it be put on record that Great Britain had not agreed. He reported to his brother how Troppau had created a 'Triple Alliance'—the three courts 'have now, I consider, hermetically sealed their treaty before Europe'. Yet he accepted Metternich's statement that 'he had conducted the Austrian monarchy, under the greatest peril with which it has ever been threatened, to a secure and creditable triumph'. In addition Castlereagh assured the three Allies that he respected the purity of their motives and believed profoundly in 'the cordiality and harmony of the Alliance'. He defended them vigorously in the House of Commons, arguing that if they had made mistakes they had been provoked by the Carbonari. As for the Alliance, 'I am far from being disposed to shrink from its defence.' He hoped it would 'long continue to cement the peace of Europe'. Few of his hearers shared his vision. Even so, as long as he lived, the British foreign secretary would do his best to save the European Alliance.
On 7 March at Rieti the Austrian army engaged the Neapolitan troops, who were unenthusiastic for their new government and badly led. 'Dress them in blue, in green or red, but whatever you do they always run,' their King observed of his soldiers. 'Our army has not lost one drop of blood,' Metternich recorded. 'They did not fire because their fire could not be returned.' On 23 March the Austrians entered Naples in triumph after a campaign of less than a fortnight. The Carbonari fled, the constitution was abolished and King Ferdinand was restored to his old powers. Russia had been ready to send in 90,000 troops, but there was no need.
'I am in the strangest position I have ever been in,' Metternich wrote on 3 April 1821. 'I have one revolution extinguished on my hands with two others blazing away.' When told on 12 March of the rising in Piedmont and how the garrisons at Turin and Alessandria had mutinied, he said that it was what he had been expecting. It was set off by Carbonari officers, who demanded a Spanish-style constitution. They found a leader in Prince Charles Albert, later to be a source of infinite vexation to Metternich. Eighty thousand Austrians marched down, brushed aside the rebel army at Novara on 8 April and restored the King.
The Piedmontese monarch, Victor Emanuel, King of Sardinia, was summoned to Laibach, where Metternich rebuked him to such effect that he abdi
cated in favour of his brother Charles Felix. Their young kinsman and ultimate heir, Charles Albert, received an equally fierce reprimand.
The third revolution was potentially the most dangerous. In February Prince Alexander Ypsilanti had crossed the Prut River, invading Moldavia with a handful of Greek nationalists and Christian Albanians. They intended to recruit a Romanian army and liberate Greece. News of the plan had been discovered by the Austrian secret police, who had warned the Sultan's government. On 1 May Metternich wrote:
What may happen in the East is incalculable. Perhaps it won't be so bad—three or four hundred thousand hanged, strangled or impaled beyond our Eastern frontier doesn't amount to much. Ypsilanti, that masked liberal, that Hellenist, is going to put me in a dilemma.
It was bound to arouse Russian sympathy, even if Alexander condemned it. The Turks made matters worse by hanging the Patriarch of Constantinople over the door of his own palace.
Although the congress ended on 28 February, the Austrians and Russians stayed on at Laibach until 2 May. As a Romantic, Metternich enjoyed the wild mountain scenery—'beautiful in the truest sense, with everything a lovely green and the tall snowy peaks of the Alps on the far horizon'. He went to good performances of Cenerentola and of a forgotten opera, Eduardo e Cristina, which he considered one of Rossini's best. He cultivated Nesselrode, showing him the mountains. Above all, he worked on the Tsar—'If ever anyone changed from black to white, he has.' He was sorry to leave Laibach on 21 May. 'We accomplished great good things.' The boast can best be understood in the light of Burke's dictum that a man has an interest in putting out the flames when the house next door is on fire. The Congress System seemed the best of fire engines.
Dominating the three congresses between 1818 and 1821 was as much a tour de force as outwitting Napoleon. Metternich captured each one, making it do exactly what he wanted, dictating the foreign policy of Russia and Prussia—whose rulers trusted him more than they did their own ministers. Britain and France might disagree with him, yet they did not abandon the Alliance. Europe would not see such unity again for a century. And Metternich was the mainspring.
12
The End of European Unity: The Congress of Verona, 1822
Things are getting back to a wholesome state again.
Every nation for itself, and God for us all!'
GEORGE CANNING
He has in common with most English ministers the defect of not appreciating the viewpoints and needs of Continental Powers.
METTERNICH on Lord Liverpool
Metternich saw George Canning as the destroyer of the first attempt at European unity. It can be argued that Canning took to its logical conclusion a policy mapped out by Castlereagh. Yet Castlereagh not only worked hard to maintain friendly relations with Austria, but he refused to despair of the Alliance; when he said that it might drift away from Britain, he meant that the Triple Alliance might do so over certain questions but never the full-scale Concert of European Powers. This is why Metternich was to be so appalled at Castlereagh's death in 1822 and replacement by Canning, who was a politician of the most insular sort, whom Castlereagh had described as 'a charlatan'.
For the Alliance was unpopular with those Englishmen who took an interest in politics, including Prime Minister Lord Liverpool. They disliked 'despotism' and were disinclined to interfere in other countries' politics; in any case, they had an instinctive, xenophobic, distrust of all foreigners. Unlike continental Europeans living in close proximity to one another under a perennial threat of war, the British were able to shelter behind their Channel. They believed, quite wrongly, that their country was in no danger of revolution.
Metternich could not understand their hostility. He thought that Austria was the happiest country in Europe. 'Of all the world's regimes, ours is the one which most respects rights and guarantees,' he told Darya Lieven. 'Individual freedom is complete, the equality of all classes before the law absolute; there are titles but no privileges.' In many ways it was a fairer society than was early nineteenth-century Britain, where a peer could only be tried by the House of Lords, where no Jew or Catholic might sit in the House of Lords. Nor were the Emperor and his ministers ever hooted in the street like George IV and his cabinet.
The 'Biedermeyer' epoch (so named later after a mythical Viennese burgher), which coincided with Metternich's heyday, was a period of great prosperity for many parts of the Monarchy, especially Austria, Bohemia and northern Italy. An industrial revolution began after 1814, machinery being imported from England and Englishmen engaged to build factories; Austria grew famous for cotton textiles, Bohemia for cloth. If the police were a little too much in evidence, the force was smaller than that established at London by Sir Robert Peel. Admittedly much of Hungary and Galicia was a barbarous waste, but no more so than the Scottish Highlands or Connacht.
When Metternich returned from Laibach, the Emperor appointed him Haus, Hof und Staatskanzler—chancellor for household, court and state. 'A bomb exploding over my head which I couldn't dodge' was his reaction. Despite an increased work load, he was far from displeased; hitherto only Kaunitz had been accorded such an honour. (In 1824 Francis would offer him in addition the post of lord chamberlain, which he would decline, commenting, 'Better die a natural death than be killed by pinpricks.') He was already so busy that he frequently compared himself to 'my friends the spiders whom I love because I have admired them so often'. He was forced by lack of power and resources to remain in the centre of his webs—'beautiful to behold, artfully spun and able to stand up to occasional shocks but not to a gust of wind'.
The title 'chancellor' has given some historians an inflated idea of Metternich's role in the Monarchy. The office added very few substantial powers to the control of foreign affairs; it did not make him prime minister—he remained only one minister among many, even if he was Francis's favourite. 'There is a general impression, especially in foreign countries, that Prince Metternich had unlimited influence over the Emperor,' Count Hartig (his colleague for many years on the Minister-konferenz) recalled in 1849. 'Such an impression is completely without foundation since the prince's views were seldom heard in the government's home departments and he was deliberately kept at a distance from them.'
He still mourned for his dead daughters and, trying to forget them, sold his house at Baden outside Vienna, 'the place where I lost half my life'. He wished that it could be razed to the ground—'I want to see the entire site covered by tall grass and brambles like a wilderness, the only landscape which bears any resemblance to my heart.' Yet he could still joke. Visiting his mother, who lived not far from the capital, 'I got into my carriage at eight o'clock in the evening. By nine o'clock there were rumours that I had dashed off to meet Tsar Alexander. It was therefore assumed that a very grave crisis indeed was threatening, and by eleven o'clock that evening twenty-five of my closest friends had gathered at my house.'
In October 1821 he went to Hanover, where the King—otherwise George IV of England—his fat person crammed into an Austrian hussar uniform and covered in Austrian orders, welcomed Metternich as a dear friend. 'I don't remember ever being hugged so warmly or having such nice things said about me.' Indeed, the King sang the chancellor's praises so effusively that he embarrassed even Metternich. He went on to declare his devotion to the Emperor ('Our Emperor') before making violent personal attacks on the Tsar and Capo d'Istria, ending with 'a frightful explosion against his own ministers'. Castlereagh alone was excepted—'He understands you, he's your friend, and that says everything,' said the King.
More important, Castlereagh had come to Hanover with King George, he and the Austrian chancellor reforging their old partnership to their mutual satisfaction. 'Metternich's visit went off miraculously,' he wrote to his brother. 'We never understood each other so well. It was a great treat to me, I am convinced to both.' The reason for it being a great treat was that Britain was no less alarmed than Austria at the prospect of Russia invading Turkey, an invasion which could mean Russian control of
the Mediterranean and the Near East. For a time the British foreign secretary had even suspected Austria of planning to divide Turkey-in-Europe with Russia. Very relieved, he agreed with Metternich in seeing Capo d'Istria as a most dangerous man but, like the chancellor, felt confident that together they should be able to stop Tsar Alexander; all that was needed was to persuade the Sultan to treat his Christian subjects better and withdraw his troops from the Danubian principalities.
Castlereagh also accepted that the Alliance was 'actually existing in full force'. It seemed as though he was underwriting the concept of a European union, of a universal guarantee. He reported on 22 October 1821 that under no circumstances would the Tsar 'ever separate himself from the conservative principles of the Alliance . . . We believe that it would be sufficient, both in the general and in the particular interests of the Powers, to regard this basis as existing in fact.' A week later he wrote to the British ambassador at St Petersburg that the nature of Turkish power had been 'fully understood when the existing state of Europe, including that of Turkey, was placed under the provident care and anxious protection of the general Alliance'. This was the language of Metternich, and the same concept of European unity.
At the same time, no less than Metternich, the British foreign secretary saw the Jacobins as the ultimate enemy. When the uproar over Queen Caroline's divorce had subsided, he had written to Metternich on 6 May 1820, 'Your Highness will observe that, although we have made immense progress against Radicalism, the monster still lives, and shows himself in new shapes; but we do not despair of crushing him by time and perseverance.'
Darya Lieven was at Hanover too, by herself, so that she and her lover were able to resume their affair, if only for a week. Despite royal approval of his foreign secretary's politics, relations between King George and Castlereagh were cool; Lady Castlereagh had gravely insulted George's mistress, Lady Conyngham. 'We set to work together to restore his fortunes with the King,' Darya records. They succeeded so well that George IV wanted to make Castlereagh his prime minister. Should this happen, in Metternich's opinion, 'Our political situation would certainly benefit from England taking a more vigorous role in world affairs.' Castlereagh was the only man who might have overcome British insularity.
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