Читать книгу Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 12

Napoleon struggled back towards the Rhine after his defeat at Leipzig ‘in a state of despondency difficult to describe but easy to comprehend’, in the words of the Paris Préfet baron Étienne Pasquier. Of the more than 300,000 men under his command three months earlier, only 40 to 50,000 were still with him, and they were for the most part ‘no more than a crowd marching without order and incapable of carrying out any vigorous operation’. They nevertheless managed to defeat their erstwhile Bavarian allies under General Wrede, who tried to cut off their retreat at Hanau.¹

The network of Napoleonic control over Germany that had been built up since 1806 unravelled. Napoleon’s brother Jérôme fled from his kingdom of Westphalia as the other rulers of the Rheinbund joined the allies. ‘I found him accompanied by his ministers of foreign affairs and war, and still surrounded by all the tattered trappings of royalty,’ wrote Beugnot, Napoleon’s minister in the grand duchy of Berg, who saw him pass through Düsseldorf. ‘The house he was occupying was full of lifeguards, whose theatrical uniforms heavy with gold were wonderfully inapposite to the situation; there were chamberlains on the stairs since there were no ante-chambers, and the whole thing resembled nothing so much as a troupe of players on tour rehearsing a tragedy.’²

Private scores were settled as the French regime imploded, and unruly troops bent on rapine added to the misery. The situation was rendered all the more tragic as a typhus epidemic swept through the Rhineland, turning the military hospitals into morgues, striking down exhausted and underfed stragglers and taking with it even healthy men such as the venerable comte de Narbonne, who had survived the retreat from Moscow with such stoicism.

The collapse of Napoleon’s power-structure in Germany meant that all the French troops still holding out in fortresses such as Danzig, Magdeburg, Modlin and Zamość were now utterly beyond his reach. They did not even represent a serious inconvenience to the allies, as they were easily contained by small forces of militia. And the retreat of Napoleonic power in Germany was replicated in Italy.

As soon as the armistice had expired in August, Austrian troops had invaded the Illyrian provinces, forcing the weak French garrisons to evacuate. Prince Eugène could do little to halt their advance, and fell back on Milan. In November he was approached on behalf of the allies by his father-in-law King Maximilian of Bavaria, who urged him to safeguard his future by changing sides, but he refused. His wife, Maximilian’s daughter, supported him in his resolve. ‘Courage, my friend,’ she wrote, ‘we do not merit our fate, yet our love and our clear conscience will be enough to sustain us, and in a simple cottage we will find the happiness that so many others seek fruitlessly on thrones. I say again to you, let us abandon everything, but never the path of virtue, and God will take care of us and of our poor children.’³

Virtue was not much in evidence further south, at Naples, whose King Joachim, Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat, was engaged in secret negotiations with the Austrians in the hope of keeping his throne. Napoleon had ordered his former chief of police Fouché to Naples with instructions to keep an eye on Murat and prevent him from defecting. But while Fouché had little time for Murat, he was even less interested in shoring up the Napoleonic empire, whose fall he was eagerly anticipating for reasons of his own. So he merely observed the game being played out before him, not so much by Murat as by his pushy and scheming wife, Napoleon’s beautiful sister Caroline, who had no intention of giving up the pleasures of royalty at the age of thirty.

Murat disposed of an army of not more than 20 to 25,000 men, magnificently uniformed but undisciplined, barely trained and poorly officered. Metternich, who may have been influenced by fond memories of the short but passionate affair he had enjoyed in Paris a couple of years before with Caroline, seems to have believed that Murat’s forces were stronger, and to have been impressed by his overblown military reputation. He therefore thought it prudent to detach Murat from Napoleon by offering him Austria’s recognition of his status and promising to obtain Britain’s as well. Castlereagh did not approve, but accepted that Metternich must be given freedom of action in this instance, on the understanding that Britain’s ally Ferdinand IV of Naples, now holed up in the Sicilian half of his kingdom, would be compensated with land elsewhere in Italy.⁴

Napoleon was back at Saint-Cloud on 10 November. The following day he held a council of state during which he complained that he had been betrayed by everyone, venting particular rage against King Maximilian and vowing vengeance. ‘Munich shall be burned!’ he ranted repeatedly. He gave orders for the raising of 300,000 soldiers, who were to be found by conscripting ever younger men and taking extra quotas from age groups which had not been heavily levied in the past. But as the area under his control shrank, so did his manpower pool, not to mention the number of uniform and munitions factories. The price of hiring a replacement soldier doubled to 4,000 francs. In Ghent, even a hundred seminarists preparing for the priesthood were packed off to fill the ranks of the artillery. Resistance to conscription increased commensurately. In November 1813 a young man who had been called up shot himself publicly in the main square of Cologne. As it became easier to escape from France and the administration in the country came under strain, the number evading conscription by fleeing or going into hiding rose drastically, and according to some estimates reached 100,000.⁵

On 9 December Napoleon presided over the opening of the Legislative Chambers and lectured them on the need for more men, more money and more determination. He set an example by acting as though nothing were amiss, and court life continued as usual. The receptions were as glittering and crowded as ever.

His remarkable show of confidence failed to inspire any in those around him. ‘The master was there as always, but the faces around him, the looks and the words were no longer the same,’ recorded one official who attended the imperial lever at the Tuileries. ‘There was something sad and tired about the very demeanour of the soldiers, and even of the courtiers.’ The mood in Paris was one of despondency. ‘People were anxious about everything, foreseeing only misfortune on all sides,’ wrote Pasquier. ‘People no longer had faith in anything, all illusions had been shattered.’⁶

As he contemplated the invasion of France itself, Napoleon did what he could to improve her defences by closing off potential points of entry. One of these was Switzerland, which he had refashioned in accordance with the spirit of the age into a Helvetic Republic, of which he was the Mediator. Following the battle of Leipzig, the head of the government, Landamann Reinhard, had called the Diet to Zürich. The Diet declared the country’s neutrality, without going so far as to recall the Swiss troops in Napoleon’s ranks. Unable to defend Switzerland and wishing to deny it to the allies, Napoleon withdrew his forces, renounced his role as Mediator and recognised Swiss neutrality.

He also freed King Ferdinand of Spain, a prisoner in France since 1807, on the promise that when he repossessed his throne he would expel Wellington’s army from Spanish soil. This would permit Napoleon to withdraw all his troops from Spain and south-western France. Such a ruse might conceivably have worked six months earlier, but was doomed to failure at this stage. Napoleon’s only real chance of survival now lay in direct negotiations which might allow him to divide the coalition enough to give him a reasonable peace, or at least buy him much-needed time.

In the first days of November, the allies reached Frankfurt on the Main. The liberation of Germany was complete, and they were now poised on the frontiers of France. For Metternich it was a moment of personal triumph. ‘It is I alone who has vanquished everything – hatred, prejudice, petty interest – to unite all the Germans under one and the same banner!’ he wrote to Wilhelmina on 5 November. The following evening he rode out to greet his sovereign and escort him into the city in which he had watched him being crowned Holy Roman Emperor twenty-one years earlier. ‘What cheering, what holy enthusiasm!’ he exclaimed, seeing in it a defining moment in the struggle between good and evil.⁷

For the diplomats and other civilians attending their sovereigns the principal merit of the place was that after having to sleep rough in squalid inns and farmhouses, they could at last set themselves up in some measure of comfort. Metternich informed his wife that he had found ‘a charming apartment’, and relished being able to give elegant dinners. He also went shopping for silk dress-material to send to her and his daughters.

For the soldiers, Frankfurt offered a welcome rest. There were theatres and other entertainments to take their minds off the war. ‘When I went into the Club,’ noted Admiral Shishkov, ‘I felt as though I were back in St Petersburg, as whichever room I went into was filled with Russian officers.’ The city provided those officers with an opportunity to swagger and to reap the gratitude of the liberated citizens.⁸

‘We have ladies here at Frankfurt,’ Stewart wrote to Castlereagh, assuring him that ‘you know me too well to think they occupy any portion of my precious time’. The consensus was that the nineteen-year-old Priscilla, Lady Burghersh, wife of the British Military Commissioner at Austrian headquarters, was the prettiest. But Alexander, who had begun to lose interest in Zinaida Volkonskaya, was drawn into the plump arms of the comely Dutch-born wife of one of the city’s most prominent bankers, Simon Moritz Bethmann. Metternich dismissively likened her to ‘a Dutch cow’. It was perhaps just as well, for had Alexander taken a shine to Priscilla Burghersh he might have been disappointed. She was one of the few women in Europe who failed to fall for the charm of the Tsar, who made a disagreeable impression on her when she met him at Frankfurt, and reminded her of her dentist. ‘He has certainly fine shoulders, but beyond that he is horribly ill-made,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘He holds himself bent quite forward, for which reason all his Court imitate him and bend too, and gird their waists like women! His countenance is not bad, and that is all I can say of him.’⁹

There were services of thanksgiving for the liberation of Germany, and balls given by the citizens in honour of the three allied sovereigns and their ministers. Alexander’s sisters the Grand Duchesses Catherine and Maria arrived in Frankfurt to grace the proceedings, as did a number of German ladies anxious to safeguard their future prospects. A carnival atmosphere reigned, and the proceedings were not always as decorous as they might have been. At one of the balls lack of familiarity with the waltz and an unevenness in the floor resulted in a collision and a pile-up, with one young lady falling so that ‘all her secrets were revealed to everyone’, as Metternich informed his daughter Marie.¹⁰

The city also filled up with princes high and low from all over Germany with more serious things on their minds. Rheinbund rulers were desperate to ensure that they did not lose their realms. The smaller and the more vulnerable their states, the more they sought to reassure all and sundry that they had always detested Napoleon and longed to join the allied cause. Mediatised Standesherren, formerly sovereign princes who had exchanged their ancient bond with the Holy Roman Emperor for one with the Rheinbund ruler into whose realms their estates had been incorporated under the protection of Napoleon, came to denounce those rulers, in the hope of recovering their independence. Imperial knights, prelates and others who had lost their status as a result of Napoleon’s rearrangements came to demand reinstatement, brandishing ancient deeds and charters. All had powerful relatives or backers at one or other of the allied courts; they lined up to put their case to Metternich, Nesselrode and other ministers, and pestered anyone with influence.

In letters to his wife, Stein complained of a ‘deluge of princes and sovereigns’, a ‘princely canaille as ridiculous as it is contemptible and despised’. As far as short-term arrangements were concerned, he was the single most important man in Germany. He was in charge of the administration even in those states whose rulers had joined the allies, and they groaned at the numbers of men and horses he was requisitioning, the victuals he was seizing, and the taxes he was levying. Particularly unsettling was his setting-up of Landsturm recruitment districts that totally ignored existing state boundaries. Those who had lost everything thought he might prove sympathetic and take their part against the rulers, but he treated them with similar disdain. They could hardly expect better.¹¹

Stein, Metternich and Nesselrode had all three been sovereign nobles of the Holy Roman Empire, and they had lost their status too. They had successfully made new lives for themselves, realising that times had changed. They could not be expected to feel any sympathy for those who had made comfortable compromises with Napoleon or those who had not been able to come to terms with their loss.

Humboldt, who was also besieged by petitioners begging for his protection, found it ‘excellent sport’ being badgered by princesses who in other circumstances would never have noticed his existence. He developed a formula for dealing with them which consisted of speaking with feigned sympathy of members of the class of petitioner being oppressed by them: a Rheinbund Prince would have to listen to the woes of a mediatised noble, the mediatised noble to the complaints of a deposed prelate, and so on.¹²

Metternich had nevertheless managed to secure Austria’s position in southern Germany by signing up the more substantial states as allies. The King of Württemberg, who had been given his crown by Napoleon and grown fat on devouring mediatised states and Church lands, doubling the population of his realm in ten years, had much to lose from any change; he signed a treaty of alliance with Austria that guaranteed his continued sovereignty, within whatever arrangements were finally reached in Germany. He was followed by the Grand Duke of Hesse and the Grand Duke of Baden. The latter had also done well under French rule, marrying Napoleon’s adoptive daughter Stephanie de Beauharnais, whom he now repudiated. He tried to obtain outright recognition of his sovereignty by pleading with Alexander, who was his brother-in-law, but Alexander did not like him, and he too was guaranteed sovereignty only within the limits of the eventual German settlement.

When they had planned their campaign in August, the allies had concentrated on forcing Napoleon out of Germany, and their military commanders had only envisaged operations as far as the Rhine. Having reached that natural barrier, which was also the frontier of the French Empire, they hesitated. To carry the war into France would give their enterprise a different character.

Alexander was inclined to continue the advance, but his ministers, particularly the Russian ones, were violently opposed to this course. On 6 November Admiral Shishkov presented him with a long memorandum arguing that Russia had, by defending herself and defeating Napoleon, fulfilled her duty to herself. She had gone on to accomplish Alexander’s self-imposed goal of liberating Europe. There could, as a result, be no point or indeed justification for pursuing the war further. Shishkov pointed out that with France pushed back to the Rhine and Germany restored to vigour, Napoleon would never be able to threaten Europe, let alone Russia, again, particularly as she herself would have acquired a new defensible frontier. He also warned that taking the war into France might have the effect of galvanising the French nation in support of their Emperor and their motherland, and inflict defeat on the invaders.¹³

Alexander’s generals were of the same view, while his soldiers were keen to go home. The Russian army was down to some 50,000 men, and an anxious Aberdeen reported on 8 November that ‘The sentiments of the Russian army are more loudly expressed every day; from the highest to the lowest they are clamorous for peace.’ Stewart also warned that they wanted to ‘pull up’. The situation in the Prussian army was not much better. Gneisenau painted a dismal picture of its condition: the men were exhausted and short of arms. Most wanted to go into winter quarters at the very least.¹⁴

But Alexander was supported by people such as Pozzo di Borgo, who would never rest until he saw his enemy Napoleon destroyed; Anstett, who nurtured a similar vendetta; Stein, who wished to see France reduced further; and a number of others in his entourage, mostly non-Russians. They were seconded by Hardenberg and particularly Blücher, who longed to avenge the shame of Jena and the humiliations his country had suffered at the hands of Napoleon. He strongly urged an immediate advance, believing that if they denied Napoleon the opportunity to reorganise his forces, they could defeat him and take Paris within two months. Frederick William was a good deal less bellicose, and frequently expressed the fear that Napoleon’s military talents might yet produce a reversal of the situation.¹⁵

Francis was equally wary, while the Austrian military commanders were similarly respectful of Napoleon’s abilities. Metternich was opposed to further advance for other reasons. He did not wish to see France weakened further, as his view of a viable settlement in Europe included a strong France acting as a counterbalance to Russia. He therefore urged making peace proposals to Napoleon, pointing out, to appease Alexander, that they would probably not be accepted, and that this would only enhance the moral standing of the allies.

Conveniently enough, Napoleon’s minister at the court of Weimar, the baron de Saint-Aignan, had been captured in the allied advance and brought to Frankfurt. Before sending him on his way back to Paris, on 9 November, Metternich invited him to a meeting with himself and Nesselrode. He told the Frenchman that the allies would be prepared to make peace now. All France would have to do was give up her conquests in Italy, Spain and Germany, returning to her natural frontiers on the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, thereby keeping Belgium and Savoy as well as the whole left bank of the Rhine. The status of the rest of the Netherlands was left unspecified, and there was talk of negotiation on the subject of colonies and maritime matters.

The ‘historic’ and ‘natural’ borders of France

Metternich suggested that Saint-Aignan write this up in the form of an aide-mémoire, which he could present to Napoleon on his return to Paris, and led him into a neighbouring study for the purpose. While they were out of the room Aberdeen arrived, and when they emerged from the study Metternich asked Saint-Aignan to read the document out to the three of them, just to make sure he had listed the terms correctly.

Aberdeen had recently received letters from Castlereagh saying that the British cabinet was not inclined to negotiate with Napoleon, as public opinion in Britain wished to see him destroyed. He also knew that Castlereagh deplored Metternich’s ‘spirit of catching at everything that can be twisted into even the hope of a negotiation’. He therefore listened to the reading with detached scepticism, and appears not to have protested at the inclusion of the frontier on the Rhine.¹⁶

When Saint-Aignan came to the passage concerning Britain, Aberdeen asked him to repeat it, and then declared that the expression ‘freedom of the seas and of commerce’ was too vague. He stated that while Britain was prepared to return almost all the colonies she had taken in the cause of a durable peace, ‘she would never consent to anything that might impinge her maritime rights’. The next day he delivered a formal note to Nesselrode and Metternich reiterating that Britain would never take part in negotiations in which these conditions were to be discussed. Nevertheless, his very presence at the reading of the memorandum lent it a spurious authority.¹⁷

Saint-Aignan reached Paris with the so-called ‘Frankfurt proposals’ on 14 November, and was received by Napoleon the following day. Napoleon noted at once that, as they did not specify any of Britain’s war aims, the proposals could not serve as the basis for a final settlement. But he also realised that they opened up possibilities. Through Caulaincourt, with whom he had replaced Maret as Foreign Minister, he wrote to Metternich accepting the proposals, suggesting Mannheim as the venue for the congress.

He was by now prepared to make peace on the basis of France’s ‘natural frontiers’ and the return of most of her colonies. But this would only be possible if pressure were brought to bear on Britain to agree to France’s retention of Belgium, and the only way of bringing the allies to do this was by placing the entire onus for the continuation of the war on Britain. Thus the ‘Frankfurt proposals’ seemed to offer a chance of introducing a wedge with which to split the coalition.¹⁸

‘The Coalition is beginning to have the decrepitude of age,’ Aberdeen wrote to his father-in-law the Earl of Abercorn, ‘and the evils inherent in its very existence are felt daily.’ This is not surprising. Russia and Prussia were bound together by treaty, and each of them was bound by other treaties with Austria and with Britain. Austria had also concluded, on 3 October, the vaguest of preliminary treaties with Britain, alongside a treaty of subsidy. Austria had concluded unilateral agreements with Bavaria and a number of other minor powers, while Russia, Prussia and Britain had signed their own treaties with Sweden. All of these treaties were vague, many were contradictory or at least incompatible in spirit, and all of the contracting parties were mistrustful of all the others.¹⁹

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.’²⁰

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.²¹

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’.²²

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.²³

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.²⁴

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.²⁵

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.²⁶

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’.²⁷

‘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.²⁸

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.²⁹

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.³⁰

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.³¹

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.³²

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.³³

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.³⁴

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.³⁵

‘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.³⁶