The Age of Elegance (29 page)

He suffered, too, like all autocrats, from the fact that no one in his entourage could safely contradict him. He was unused to opposition. When he encountered it from his equals, he reacted violently. This unsuited him for diplomacy. The events of the past eighteen months had greatly aggravated this unsuitability. Once he had taken the

¹
Havelock, 142.

heroic decision to burn his capital and fight on, Alexander had marched from victory to victory. His natural irresolution and melancholy had been succeeded by a new decision and confidence; he who had been found sobbing after Austerlitz and had feared dethronement during the retreat to Moscow had become the arbiter of Europe's destinies, the prop, as he loved to be told, on which mankind leant. With God's miraculous aid he had ridden at the head of his armies into Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfort and Paris. His shining eyes were raised to Heaven, his high and noble forehead was crowned as with a halo. Tall, magnanimous and dedicated to the service of God, he brought the jubilee. He could not be expected to give way over Poland.

Those responsible for British foreign policy failed at first to appreciate these factors. They knew the Czar as a man of high Christian faith and liberal sympathies who, after an unfortunate spell of collaboration, had helped them to liberate Europe and who now wished, with them, to pacify it. Like everyone in England they deplored the treacherous aggression that had led to the extinction of Poland twenty years before and would have liked to have seen its independence restored. But they knew that, strategically speaking, it was far beyond their power to challenge that twenty-year-old
fait accompli.
And after a generation of war a crusade by Britain against her allies was unthinkable. Her statesmen, as practical men, saw that
the
status quo
of partition was the only way of avoiding disturbing and dangerous changes elsewhere.

When, therefore, during the preliminary discussions in London the Czar showed himself set on a solution of the Polish problem incompatible with inter-allied agreement and international law, they were much disappointed. They did not object to his proposal to revive a Polish state under his own sovereignty in the parts of Poland which had long been incorporated in Russia; on the contrary, they welcomed it as an instalment, however incomplete, of the restitution due to the Poles. Nor had they any objection to a reasonable expansion of Prussia in western Europe. Now that Austria had abandoned her old outpost in the Netherlands and withdrawn beyond the Rhine, it seemed wise to strengthen the only other German Power capable of resisting French aggression. For this reason the British were ready to overlook Prussia's seizure of Hanover during the earlier stages of the war. They remembered only that she was an old ally who had fought valiantly at the end and led the movement for German liberation.

But the Czar's unilateral claim to almost all Poland and his proposal to compensate Prussia with the entire domain of the King of Saxony struck at the whole system of European equilibrium and at that common action by the victor Powers on which Castlereagh and his colleagues believed that peace depended. To preserve the latter they tried hard to find a compromise that would satisfy the Czar. Being British, they hoped that good would somehow come out of evil. But the Czar, being an autocrat, disapproved of compromise. When the islanders attempted to reason with him, he replied that he had
120,000
troops in Poland and that no one could turn him out.

Such an argument awoke old suspicions which were difficult to still. Russian insistence on expansion in one direction implied Russian expansion in others. Britain, with her minute base and her roots in the ocean, had always been jealous of any Continental Power that sought ascendancy outside Europe. She had fought Spain, Holland and France in turn on that score. Paramount herself in India and southern Asia, she saw in Russia a greater Asiatic Power stretching out tentacles towards every sea. What if, having occupied Finland, Bessarabia and Poland, the northern colossus should now strike southwards across the central Asian deserts to the Indian Ocean? During their collaboration with Napoleon, its rulers had twice planned such a project. Now once again came reports from remote British consuls of Russian intrigue and infiltration; with the defeat of Napoleon the star of Muscovy was in the ascendant throughout the East.
¹
It could be seen by the agents of the British East India Company as they rode in the vale of the Indus or were borne in their palanquins towards the Hindu Kush. They transmitted their fears to London.

Talleyrand also distrusted the Russians. A French eighteenth-century bishop was not to be fooled by a windy ideologue from the Neva. He knew when the Czar talked of the re-establishment of Poland, he was not thinking of giving up what he possessed of it but

¹
"It seems to be the object of the Emperor of Russia to establish a predominant influence throughout Europe and particularly in those courts where Great Britain, by the assistance which she afforded to them during the war, has acquired a just influen
ce." Sir Henry Wellesley, Castle
reagh, X, 180. See
idem,
75.

merely of acquiring those parts which he did not possess. And if Talleyrand did not wish to see Cossacks on the Oder, he had still less wish to see a predominant Prussia. He did not share the English view of Prussians. He had twice seen them in his country, with their stupid, swashbuckling officers, their grab and jackboot culture, their plundering, bullying ways. Their State—the Sparta of Europe —was built, like Napoleon's, round an army; their destiny, writ large across their brief, bloodstained history, to conquer or cringe. Talleyrand knew that if Prussia's population was increased from five millions to ten, it would merely increase her capacity for aggression. For it would double the size of her army.

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 nat
ionhood, it must be under the ae
gis 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
rosbiff
e
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'ho
tel,
'A
pre
sent, Monsieur, servez la diner.
¹
" Harriet Granville, I, 62-4. He once remarked of his allies that they were all
"dans le me
me 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 capacity
¹
—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 somewh
at divided. The Chancellor, Met
ternich, 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!" Ho
n. Frederick Lamb to Lord Castlereagh, 18th June, 1814. Castl
ereagh, X, 56-7.