Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

Given the differences of opinion on every question, from whether to continue the advance, to how to dispose of the Polish territories, reorganise Germany and settle a myriad minor matters, and given the deep-rooted antipathies and jealousies running through it at every level, the coalition was at risk of falling apart at any moment. Stewart complained of the continuous ‘political chicane, finesse and tracasserie of every kind’ that he was being subjected to. ‘In short, in proportion as we have success,’ he reported to Castlereagh on 23 November, ‘separate interests become every day more and more in play, and one cannot look satisfactorily at present to a happy termination, when there is at the head of all this a Machiavellian spirit of political intrigue.’

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Castlereagh’s ‘grand design’, to bind all the allies together and commit them to a set of specific goals, had got nowhere. Cathcart had tried again and again to corner Alexander in order to present the project to him, but military matters had always intervened and the audiences had been cancelled. It was not until 26 October that he had managed to have a talk with the Tsar alone. According to Cathcart, Alexander ‘did not seem in any shape averse to what is proposed’, but he had asked which colonies Britain was prepared to put on the negotiating table, a subject he knew would raise British hackles. It was his way of brushing off Castlereagh’s proposal.

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Aberdeen, who felt slighted by Castlereagh entrusting the project to Cathcart rather than to him, and who also felt that it had been a mistake not to make the proposal to Metternich first rather than to Alexander, criticised Cathcart’s slowness and lack of energy in pressing the matter. In a letter to Castlereagh dated 29 October he suggested that he should himself be put in charge of promoting the project. He backed this up by declaring that Metternich had complete confidence in him, as did Nesselrode, who ‘though not very wise himself, has the most perfect contempt for Cathcart, and frequently expresses it’. And for good measure he added that Nesselrode had told him that ‘it is impossible to communicate with such an idiot’.

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Castlereagh’s frustration at his three envoys’ lack of progress shines through his frequent letters on the subject. But there was little they could do. The conditions of a rapid campaign in foul weather had defeated their efforts until now, and matters did not improve when allied headquarters came to rest in Frankfurt. Castlereagh had attempted to smooth Aberdeen’s ruffled feathers by telling him that he was now to play the most important role and to be ‘the labouring oar’ in the scheme. ‘If you succeed in placing the Key Stone in the arch which is to sustain us hereafter, you will not feel that your labour has been thrown away,’ he wrote. A couple of days after his arrival, Alexander invited Aberdeen to dine with himself and Nesselrode, but all that came of it was flattery of Aberdeen and complaints against Cathcart: the Russians were evidently trying to play the British ministers off against each other.

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On 23 November Stewart wrote to Castlereagh with the news that Prussia would be prepared to sign the ‘grand alliance’. Two days later Aberdeen proudly reported back that he had persuaded Metternich, who in turn promised to persuade Alexander of the necessity of adopting Castlereagh’s project, and three days after that he assured Castlereagh that ‘The Treaty of general Alliance will positively be made forthwith.’ But on 5 December Stewart wrote saying that Alexander had refused to sign, and four days later Nesselrode and Metternich told Aberdeen that they had not the slightest intention of doing so either.

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Failing to see why anyone could possibly object to signing such an alliance, Castlereagh was anxious. All three of his envoys were, in Stewart’s words, ‘down in the mouth’, and two of them wanted to come home. They were on worse terms than ever with each other, and out of their depth in the ocean of intrigue that had engulfed allied headquarters and submerged it deeper with every day it remained in Frankfurt. Their inability to show a united front undermined their position so far that the other ministers were treating them less and less seriously, referring to them dismissively as ‘the English Trinity’ or ‘the Three Englands’.

Castlereagh was being disingenuous in his failure to understand why Metternich and Alexander did not wish to bind themselves by his proposed alliance. He himself was pursuing a policy dictated solely by British interests quite independently of them, in the Netherlands, where he was hoping to create a fait accompli. Through Aberdeen, he was paying out cash to assist the Dutch patriots who had raised the banner of revolt against the French on 15 November, and he was exasperated by Bernadotte, who launched a unilateral attack on Denmark instead of marching to their support, for which he had taken British subsidies. He meant the liberation to embrace Belgium, so he could have Antwerp and the Scheldt estuary well in hand.

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Not surprisingly, Castlereagh was alarmed at the report, sent in by Aberdeen at the end of November, of intelligence that the Russians were nurturing a plan to marry Alexander’s sister the Grand Duchess Catherine to the Emperor Francis’s brother Archduke Charles, and to place them on the Dutch throne. He was beginning to see conspiracy everywhere.

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Aberdeen tried to reassure him, gently chiding him on his ignorance: ‘my dear Castlereagh, with all your wisdom, judgment and experience, which are as great as possible, and which I respect sincerely, I think you have so much of the Englishman as not quite to be aware of the real value of Foreign modes of acting’.

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‘The successes of the allies are beyond all belief,’ Metternich wrote to one of his diplomats on 19 November. ‘We are masters of the whole of Germany and of Italy soon as well.’ He shed his modesty and the use of the collective noun when writing to Wilhelmina. ‘It is all my work,’ he declared, ‘mine and mine alone.’ There was much truth in this assertion, as he had been the helmsman of the coalition over the past months and had prevented it from striking many a shoal.

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He had been particularly skilful in handling Alexander. ‘Throughout the military operations, I would spend the evenings with His Imperial Majesty,’ he later reminisced. ‘From 8 or 9 o’clock in the evenings until midnight, we would be quite alone, conversing with the greatest familiarity. We would speak of the most diverse subjects, of private matters as well as of the great moral or political questions of the day. We would exchange ideas on all these things with the greatest abandon, and this absence of any constraint lent a particular charm to this intercourse.’ Alexander had come to trust Metternich, as did Nesselrode, and as a result the Austrian Foreign Minister often did not bother to consult Hardenberg or Humboldt. A greater problem was that he began to take his ascendancy for granted. ‘The good Empr. is so infatuated with what he calls my way of seeing big that he does nothing without consulting me,’ he wrote to his wife on 1 December. Such hubris was alarming, and was about to lead Metternich into a major blunder.

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Despite the misgivings about crossing the Rhine and invading France itself, a plan for the next stage of the allied advance had been agreed on 19 November. Devised by Schwarzenberg, it reflected Metternich’s caution. The invasion was to be undertaken by three forces: in the north Blücher’s Prussians were to cross the Rhine between Mainz and Cologne and sweep into Lorraine; in the south the Austrians were to push Prince Eugène out of Italy, march over the Simplon and advance on Lyon; and in the centre Schwarzenberg with the main Austro-Russian forces was to cross into France between Mannheim and Bâle (Basel), occupy the Vosges and deploy on the plateau of Langres. Once those three objectives had been achieved, the allies would pause and take stock. It seemed unlikely that Napoleon would not have made peace by then – negotiations had been decided upon, and it was only the venue that still needed to be fixed.

In order to shore up their own position in moral terms and further undermine Napoleon’s, the allies issued a declaration to the French people, on 1 December, to the effect that they were not making war on France, but only on French ‘preponderance’. ‘The allied Sovereigns desire that France should be great, strong and contented,’ it went on, and held out a powerful bribe, stating that they wanted her to be more extensive territorially than she had been before the Revolution.

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The allied plan involved marching through Swiss territory, which posed a nice political problem for the allies, since the Swiss had declared their neutrality. Alexander solemnly promised that the allies would respect this, and backed it up by declaring that he would regard any violation as a declaration of war on himself. Failing to appreciate the depth or the personal nature of this commitment, Metternich was about to do just that.

The Swiss Confederation, as recognised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, had been an association of thirteen cantons and a number of smaller units, ruled variously by either absolute despots, local oligarchies or some form of democratic assembly. Their inherent differences and jealousies were exacerbated by religious divisions and the rival influences of neighbouring powers, particularly Austria and France.

The French had invaded Switzerland in 1798. Geneva became part of France, and the Valtelline was later incorporated into the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy. The remainder became a Helvetic Republic consisting of twenty-three cantons and rationalised in the spirit of the age. Napoleon, who declared himself ‘Mediator’, suppressed the baillages, or feudal tribunals, liberated Vaud and Aargau from the dominance of Berne, and swept away a myriad medieval hangovers. Every citizen was made free and equal before the law. Although this delighted many, it upset local feeling by breaking age-old traditions.

The old and formerly dominant cantons, headed by Berne, resented the new arrangements and longed for a return to the old days, while the newly formed ones, such as Aargau and Vaud, had benefited from French intervention and the protection of Napoleon. The old cantons had historic links with Austria, which had traditionally acted as their protector, and Metternich was hoping to use them to reassert Austrian influence and reintroduce the ancien régime into Switzerland as a whole.

One young native of Vaud, Frédéric César de La Harpe, had been persecuted in his youth by the patricians of Berne and been forced to flee. He had gone to Russia, where he had found employment as the tutor of the young Grand Duke Alexander, on whom he had exerted an enormous influence, which he continued to wield now that his pupil was Tsar. La Harpe had later gone to France, and had been instrumental in bringing about the French intervention that had liberated Vaud and Aargau from the domination of Berne and toppled the oligarchs who had ruled that city.

At the beginning of November, Alexander and Metternich had despatched two agents, Capodistrias and Lebzeltern, to Zürich with instructions to persuade the head of the Swiss government, Landamann Reinhard, to declare for the allies, or, failing that, to declare Switzerland’s neutrality. In the latter eventuality, they were to negotiate permission for allied troops to march through Swiss territory. The two envoys reached Zürich on 21 November only to find that the Swiss Diet was far from united, and many still felt loyalty to Napoleon. Napoleon’s renunciation of his role as Mediator of Switzerland resolved that issue and the Diet duly declared the country’s neutrality.

Unbeknown to Alexander, Metternich had also sent an agent to Berne with the aim of encouraging it to undermine the authority of the existing government and to call for a return to the ancien régime. The main body of allied troops due to march through Swiss territory were Austrian, which would assure them protection and Metternich a dominant influence in the affairs of Switzerland. By this time allied troops were on the move, and Schwarzenberg’s vanguard was about to enter Switzerland between Schaffhausen and Bâle. But, since the Zürich Diet had not produced the necessary authority for them to do so, and realising that this would constitute an infringement of Swiss neutrality, Alexander countermanded their orders.

Metternich could see no reason to disrupt the entire allied plan merely for the sake of Alexander’s sensibilities. He persuaded Francis to order Schwarzenberg to go ahead, and at 2 a.m. on 21 December the Austrians entered Bâle, whose garrison had capitulated. When news of this reached Alexander, he flew into a violent rage. ‘Metternich has behaved detestably in the Swiss question, and I am indignant about it,’ he wrote to his sister. He did not yet realise the full implications of Metternich’s actions, which were to be rich in consequence, but he felt personally betrayed and resented his reputation having been damaged. He never forgave him, and the incident poisoned relations between them forever.

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Stein was quick to take advantage. ‘There is every reason to fear that Count Metternich will bring to the ultimate arrangement of the affairs of Germany the same spirit of frivolity, of vanity, the same lack of respect for truth and principle which has already partly spoiled them and which he has just flourished with such harmful results in Switzerland,’ he wrote to Alexander.

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Metternich made light of the matter. But he had already come to realise that he would no longer be able to handle Alexander on his own, and neither Hardenberg, Nesselrode nor the ‘English Trinity’ were of much use. There was also the consideration that as they drew closer to a final settlement decisions would need to be made fast. And while the presence of the three sovereigns at headquarters meant that Russia, Prussia and Austria could agree anything on the spot, the absence of a representative of Britain endowed with decision-making powers meant that the coalition as a whole could not. The British constitution did not permit the head of state to leave the country, so there could be no question of the Prince Regent coming to allied headquarters, but things could not be allowed to go on as they were.

On receiving Napoleon’s letter accepting the ‘Frankfurt proposals’ as a basis for negotiation, on 5 December, Metternich informed Nesselrode and Hardenberg, and they resolved to send Pozzo di Borgo to London to talk to Castlereagh directly. Stewart got wind of this through clandestine access to Metternich’s papers, and communicated his sense of outrage to his colleagues. Aberdeen felt he had been tricked and charged Metternich to his face with disloyalty. ‘More chicane and manoeuvring have been, and still are, going on concerning this business than on any that has hitherto come within my experience,’ commented Jackson.

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Metternich, who was mortified to discover that his chancellery had been ‘plundered’, was not in fact trying to trick anyone. He and his colleagues had merely come to the conclusion that ‘the Triumvirate we presently have at our headquarters is not fitted to advancing the cause’, and Pozzo di Borgo’s mission was to instruct the Russian, Prussian and Austrian ministers in London to ask the British cabinet to nominate one man to speak with authority in its name. They did not mention names, but it was clear whom they had in mind. ‘What bliss it would be to have Castlereagh here to put an end to this English Sanhedrin and the silliness of the good Stewart,’ Hardenberg noted in his diary on 8 December. Metternich had already written to Caulaincourt deferring the start of the negotiations, anticipating the arrival of Castlereagh.

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The British cabinet considered the request at its meeting on 20 December. Foreign Secretaries did not normally travel abroad in the pursuance of their duties. But the circumstances were exceptional. Britain had spent some £700,000,000 fighting the French over the past twenty years, which, according to some historians, represented a greater burden in terms of men and resources than the Great War of 1914–18 would impose. The country could not afford to carry on much longer at this rate, and if a peace settlement unfavourable to her were reached in Europe, she might find herself alone, at war with France and the United States, cut off from European markets, stranded and friendless. The cabinet decided that ‘the Government itself should repair to headquarters’, in the person of Castlereagh.

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‘Certainly, that is his only chance of having any finger in the pie,’ Lord Grenville wrote on hearing of Castlereagh’s departure, adding that if he did not make haste he would probably arrive too late.

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9 A Finger in the Pie (#ulink_173ce013-2cac-5b42-8d3a-49c4bda7a445)

A dense fog lay over the streets of London on the afternoon of 26 December 1813 as Castlereagh drove home to No. 18 St James’s Square. Although it was Boxing Day, Lord Liverpool’s cabinet had forgone their traditional country pursuits and spent the day around the table at No. 10 Downing Street discussing the fine points of his impending mission.

A few hours later, two heavily laden travelling carriages trundled out of the square bearing the Foreign Secretary off on his adventure. Loving husband that he was, Castlereagh could not envisage going anywhere without his wife Emily. She in turn insisted on taking along her young niece Lady Emma Sophia Edgcumbe and little nephew Viscount Valletort, whom she had more or less adopted when, seven years earlier, her sister had died. They set off ‘in a fog so intense’, according to Emma Sophia, ‘that the carriages went at a foot’s pace, with men holding flambeaux at the head of the horses’. After covering barely eight miles in this way, they stopped for the night at Romford. They rose early the next morning, paused at Colchester for breakfast, and then drove on to Harwich.

The next day they went aboard HMS Erebus, but soon after leaving harbour the vessel was becalmed, and they were obliged to spend the next three days anchored off Harwich. Apart from Lord and Lady Castlereagh, her bulldog Venom, Emma Sophia and her brother, and their tall and gangly cousin Alexander Stewart, the party included Castlereagh’s assistant Joseph Planta, his secretaries Frederick Robinson (who in 1827 would become Prime Minister as Lord Goderich) and William Montagu. They had been joined by Pozzo di Borgo, who entertained them with his stock of famously second-hand and oft-repeated anecdotes and bons mots.

The dead calm was shattered by a gale. They sailed for Holland in a blizzard, the ship heaving and pitching in the driving snow, with ‘the men tumbling about on deck’ according to Emma Sophia. When they at last sighted land, the captain informed them that as he did not know the Dutch coast well enough to negotiate it in a storm, they would have to drop anchor and wait for it to subside. So they spent another three days being tossed about on the waves until a pilot who had spotted them came out and guided them into the harbour of Helvoetsluys. The bedraggled and frozen party were met with cheering and gun salutes as they came ashore, and the following day they were speedily conducted to The Hague, to be greeted by the Prince of Orange. While the rest of the party recovered from the crossing, Castlereagh got down to work with the Prince and his ministers, for Holland was to be the linchpin of Britain’s rearrangement of Europe.

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