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The nation state … is not a quaint and anachronistic holdover but a compromise written in blood that just about managed in the second half of the last century to bind the demons that attend power to a peaceful and progressive policy.

Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)

Wellington might have been exasperated by the bureaucratic and penny-pinching procedures of the Foreign Service. But the hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815, while ending in the diplomatic failure of the First World War, were European diplomacy’s finest century.

Only with the continent at peace could European powers expand their global reach and build their empires. Armies provided the blood that established the era of the nation state. Diplomats provided the compromises. Less of a sacrifice, but no less important.

As ever, technological innovation spurred diplomatic changes. A Frenchman, Claude Chappe, had invented the semaphore in 1791. In 1819, the first steamship crossed the Atlantic. In 1837, Brits William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone invented the telegraph (using just twenty letters, which must have been awkward for diplomats in Quebec or Yugoslavia). All were to play their part in the evolution of statecraft.

This was the period in which the word ‘diplomacy’, from the Greek term for a twice-folded document, began to be used more frequently. This reminds us that there was a sense of purpose to diplomacy. It was not just about a discussion, relationship management or information-gathering, but about an outcome – the ‘diploma’ on which an agreement was written, or what we now often call the ‘deliverable’. Diplomacy had a point.

When backed up by force, diplomacy could deliver even quicker results than in the past – the British government could ‘change the balance of the Eastern question by sending a few frigates to Besika Bay’.1 Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston ordered the British fleet to blockade a Greek port in 1850 because a British subject, Don Pacifico, had been insufficiently compensated for his imprisonment. Defending his actions in Parliament, Palmerston claimed that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong’.2 Modern consular support is less dramatic, and our resources less intimidating, but the principle still applies.

This willingness to project power helped Europe become the centre of international gravity in this period. Diplomatic procedures and standards were developed and exported. Negotiation became more constant, not just based on a division of the spoils after each war. The habits of diplomacy – more frequent conferences and summits, more exchanges of envoys – took root. The great powers used statecraft and diplomatic craft as they jostled for mastery in Europe.

Political change once again increased the need for new rules to govern diplomats and diplomatic interactions. Diplomats started to take themselves even more seriously, and grant themselves new titles.

Diplomacy has retained many of the titles of this era. I frequently observed the frisson which some fellow Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (to give them their full title, as some prefer to do) felt when addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. Very few who rely so heavily on the title are particularly excellent. Indeed, my standard rule is that the more a colleague tells people of their excellence, the less excellent they are likely to be. When in Downing Street, I dropped the practice of including the full titles of ambassadors (e.g. Sir Crispian Penfold-Thwaite-Penfold GCMG*) on standard records and minutes of meetings, halving the length of the average distribution list but pricking the vanity of some grander and more impressively titled colleagues.

The Civil Service still retains more confusing job titles from the nineteenth century than most. Hence the mix-up over my role as the prime minister’s intimate typist. I once tried to explain the title ‘Permanent Undersecretary’, the head of the Foreign Office, when introducing the last incumbent, Sir Simon Fraser, to a reception in Beirut. It was the least accurate title I could imagine – Simon was neither permanent, nor under anyone, nor indeed a secretary. Increasingly, we will discover that overdoing the titles acts as a further barrier to communication with those we represent, and therefore to our continued usefulness and relevance.

Once again, Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey bursts the balloon when explaining to his new minister the job titles in his ministry: ‘Briefly, sir, I am the Permanent Undersecretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I, too, have a Principal Private Secretary, and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, eighty-seven Undersecretaries and two hundred and nineteen assistant secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are Plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Undersecretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.’ ‘Can they all type?’ asks his mystified minister. ‘None of us can type, Minister,’ replies Sir Humphrey, ‘Mrs McKay types – she is your secretary.’

The demands of nineteenth-century diplomacy also meant that protocol was further codified, and treaties became longer. Rules were even needed to keep the diplomats apart. Foreign Secretary George Canning duelled with his Cabinet rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, making today’s National Security Council debates seem somewhat tame. A gifted poet, songwriter and speechwriter, Canning had also shown himself an accomplished warmaker, whose belief that ‘we are hated throughout Europe, and that hate must be cured by fear’ would gladden the hearts of many modern Eurosceptics.3 Napoleon had also been happy to ignore the gentlemanly codes of diplomatic immunity and throw British envoys in jail for espionage. But after his fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established a more robust system, for the first time regulating a profession of diplomacy that was distinct from politics and statecraft.

The congress took place against an inauspicious backdrop. Russian Cossacks were on the Champs-Élysées, trying to prevent Napoleon from making another comeback. His reckless ambitions had shattered borders and destroyed institutions. Europe was threatened by decades of conflict and uncertainty, so the powers that had defeated him – Russia, Great Britain, Austria and Prussia – invited the other states of Europe to send their representatives to Vienna. All despatched heavyweight statesmen, the titan diplomats of their age who had spent, or were to spend, decades at the top of the international system.

Austria fielded Prince Klemens von Metternich, a former ambassador to Prussia and France. By this stage diplomacy was firmly established as a sound profession for the upwardly mobile nobility – Metternich’s father and son were also in the family business. Metternich’s relationship with Napoleon must have been complex – he had arranged Napoleon’s marriage to an Austrian princess, but also made the career-threatening mistake of publicly arguing with him at Napoleon’s thirty-ninth birthday party. He also numbered Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat among his numerous lovers, their trysts taking place in what is now the British ambassador’s Residence in Paris, then home of her more scandalous sister Pauline.† Metternich had previously entered a bizarre agreement barring him from diplomacy while his father-in-law was alive. I suspect this is unique among pre-nuptial deals. Like many diplomats of the age, he spoke better French than his native language, and left illegitimate offspring in most of the capitals in which he served.

Britain sent Lord Castlereagh (who had wounded Canning in the thigh in their duel, but escaped unscathed himself). His destructive tendencies were not limited to Cabinet colleagues – he would slice his own throat several years later, after suffering from a mental breakdown and gout. Castlereagh was a principal architect of the system of rolling congresses agreed at Vienna. He divided people in death as in life, prompting Lord Byron to pen the poisonous epitaph ‘Posterity will ne’er survey, A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh, Stop, traveller, and piss.’

Prussia sent Karl August von Hardenberg, a former chancellor, more austere perhaps than some of the other rogues around the table, and seen by his contemporaries as too regularly outfoxed by Metternich. Tsar Alexander I, a manipulative autocrat who had succeeded his assassinated father at the age of twenty-three, represented Russia himself, not trusting anyone else to defend his corner. Like George W. Bush almost 200 years later, he would hold prayer meetings with his foreign policy advisers before taking key decisions.

France, the defeated power, sent Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was to be the star of the show. A former bishop with a justified reputation as a womaniser, he had been prevented from taking his family birthright because of the social embarrassment of a deformed leg. Instead he turned his restless talents to statecraft, with zeal. He had managed by hook or by crook to serve Napoleon and the regime he had deposed, making him ideally suited to the intrigue and drama of the congress. At Vienna, through diplomatic cunning, he prevented the partition of France and repositioned himself in French politics as the saviour of his country.

Talleyrand also saw commercial and personal opportunity – he demanded payment from other states for his services, employed the celebrity chefs of his day, and ate and drank prodigiously. He used to hold meetings in his bedroom so that he could press the advantage of his warm bed over his cold, standing interlocutors. Through guile and skill he turned a weak hand into an advantage. When the king of Saxony challenged France as ‘one of those who have betrayed the cause of Europe’, Talleyrand countered with panache, ‘That, sire, is a question of dates.’

This eclectic array of characters gathered at the end of summer 1814 to reorganise the internal boundaries of Europe, and establish a common position on the abolition of the slave trade, the role of royal families across the continent, navigation of rivers and a new German confederation. A massive agenda, by any standards. There cannot ever have been such a colourful and scandalous cast list at any international conference in history, until perhaps the Big Three summits that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt bestrode at the end of the Second World War. Few could have survived the media spotlight of the twenty-first century. They make modern diplomatic events seem particularly lame, austere and genteel.

There is no collective noun for diplomats, though people might think up a few when cities are clogged by motorcades, or in Vienna’s case cavalcades. Inevitably, matters of diplomatic precedence and protocol featured heavily in their deliberations. Seating plans alone were feverishly contested, as the leaders competed for influence and power. Hundreds of representatives, and a supporting cast of mistresses and flunkies, were lavishly entertained for months in the capital. To complicate their task, Napoleon escaped from his exile in spring 1815 to retake the French throne, and the powers had to break off their deliberations in order to defeat him again and despatch the vanquished autocrat to distant St Helena.

The negotiations were tortuous. The British wanted to retain the ‘balance of power’ of the preceding century, to ensure future Napoleons could not disturb the equilibrium, and to protect their domination of the seas. Prussia wanted more territory. Austria needed to play off the allies against each other, in order to contain the Russian threat. Russia wanted to use religion to bolster the positions of the continent’s monarchs and to keep the Turkish sultan in check.

Coming to decisions in this context was hard work. Voting was out of the question, given the belief of most royal participants that they had a divine right to be there, and that there could be no question of sharing sovereignty. In reality, as with so many conferences, the key players had stitched up the process in advance. Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to form an inner circle of negotiations, with other players consulted when necessary, and ideally not at all. Talleyrand saw the danger, and put himself vociferously at the head of those excluded, managing to delay the start of the conference with his histrionic protests of injustice. All four of the big players calculated that they could use France as a counterbalance to their opponents within the inner circle, and so expanded their core group to include the wily Frenchman. Once in the gang, Talleyrand dropped all his demands for issues to be tackled in a larger group, and converted elegantly to the concept of a great-powers deal. This was realpolitik at its most brazen and effective.

Recognising the advantage of being pen-holder, much treasured to this day in the British and French missions to the United Nations and European Union, Castlereagh drafted the most important clause, a mutual-support pact in the face of revolution. Through a conference that lasted months, a new European order was born, with key business now to be managed by the five great powers – Great Britain, Russia, France, Prussia and Austria. This big-power stitch-up was the forefather of the modern United Nations Security Council, where China and the United States have replaced Prussia and Austria.

Unlike previous peace conferences, the architects of the 1815 congress were less concerned with punishing the transgressor – in this case France – than setting in place structures to manage the status quo and reduce the potential for further military conflict. It was a recognition by the monarchies of Europe, shocked by the French Revolution and the insurgent rise of Napoleon, that united they stood, divided they would fall. It was also a response to Napoleon’s abuse of the existing and unnecessarily complex diplomatic procedures to filibuster the Congress of Prague a year earlier.

In many ways the outcomes of the Congress of Vienna were backward-looking – the shoring up of a status quo of elites, reactionary regimes and monarchs. But the diplomatic process that underpinned the decisions was ingenious and creative, and created a system of interdependence that prevented continent-wide conflict for a century. Given its context, it was a supreme act of diplomacy.

The congress also laid the basis for the fastest expansion of diplomacy in history. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, she had permanent ambassadors only in Paris, Constantinople and St Petersburg; by the end, she had almost a hundred.

This was the era of aristocratic diplomacy, ‘outdoor relief for the upper classes’.4 Looking back in the second edition of his guide to diplomacy in 1922, Ernest Satow wrote that ‘a good diplomat must in short be an English gentleman. The higher the grade the greater the need for private income.’5 Some of those gentlemen, such as Sir Richard Burton, would disappear for months on end, charging around unexplored territories on camel or horseback. Their snug-trousered portraits stare down disapprovingly from the Foreign Office’s walls at today’s diplomats as they complete their risk assessments.

To add to the theatre, diplomatic uniforms were adopted – Lord Curzon later gave meticulous thought to the outfit in which he would call on the emir of Afghanistan, including wellingtons, fake medals, spurs, a cocked hat, and, deliciously, ‘the most gigantic and swashbuckling sword I could find’. He would not have got through the door of today’s diplomatic assessment and recruitment centres, which tend to frown on swashbuckling swords. But such swaggering Flashman diplomats set out to study, adventure and conquer.

The Industrial Revolution was the engine for this Western expansion, giving Europe another surge forward. British entrepreneurs unleashed the power of steam and coal. Factories and gunboats, then later computers and nukes, allowed them to build economic muscle, project power and influence, and strike out.

In 1500, Europe’s future imperial powers – Britain, France, Spain, Portugal – controlled 10% of the world’s territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which generated almost 80% of the wealth. While competition and scientific and technological advantage were key to success, the diplomats of the nineteenth century would have added another reason: the ability to spot opportunities, to negotiate a profitable peace, and to hold it together. They knew how to take that technology and turn it into raw power.

The job was still not of course without its dangers. British diplomat Alexander Burnes, a Hindi- and Persian-speaking Scot with a roving eye, was hacked to death by a mob of jealous husbands in Afghanistan in 1841. His colleague Charles Stoddart was imprisoned and executed for spying in Bukhara in 1842, following a failed mission to persuade the emir to free Russian slaves. Bertie Mitford, the grandfather of the famous sisters, was made to watch ritual disembowelment on arrival in Japan as ambassador in 1868 (perhaps it was this that prompted his granddaughter Nancy to ascribe to a character in one of her novels the opinion that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends’,6 a view shared by her father David – and some modern politicians). The entire diplomatic corps was placed under siege during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Diplomatic papers record seventeen deaths among the English ‘King’s Messengers’, who transported the diplomatic bag, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.

The expectation of diplomatic hospitality also created its own challenges – 14,000 Persian merchants took up uninvited residence at the British legation in Tehran in 1906 as part of their effort to secure constitutional reform. Earlier, 300 of the shah’s wives and eunuchs had made a similar request for sanctuary. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British representative, was, he reported to London, ‘somewhat staggered’.

New rules gave a sense of greater purpose and historical context to diplomats, who could now make war as well as peace at the stroke of a pen. The Prussian chancellor Bismarck famously edited out the diplomatic niceties from a telegram from his emperor Wilhelm I to Napoleon III, thereby leaving its recipient furious, and triggering the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Future diplomats who could spend days negotiating the positioning of a comma in the Maastricht Treaty would have cooed with admiration at Bismarck’s later drafting success, following days of negotiation, in establishing his master as ‘German emperor’ rather than Wilhelm’s preferred ‘emperor of Germany’.

Diplomats and their masters also began to have to take much greater account of public opinion. Advisers started to offer judgements to their leaders as to which of their mistakes the public could accept, and which were unforgivable. These were not always well received by capitals. In 1919, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon responded furiously to one such missive from his ambassador to Paris, saying, ‘I have always known you to be a cad, I now know you to be a liar.’7 It has never been easy for envoys to speak truth unto power.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new and increasingly influential player on the block. America began investing heavily in innovative naval technology. Steam-powered battleships with powerful armaments bought real-world diplomatic clout. They could also drag the new nation into war. When its battleship the USS Maine exploded for undetermined reasons in the harbour of Havana, the American press stoked war fever and blamed Spain. This gave a pretext for America to replace Spain as the dominant power in its own backyard, in countries such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. America had arrived as a global power to rival the European states that had entrenched their positions at the Congress of Vienna.

Yet America’s ambitions remained opaque. As president, Thomas Jefferson wanted it both ways, to ‘enjoy the fruits of power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise’.8 Or as John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in 1821, put it, America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’9 This dilemma at the heart of American foreign policy continues to this day.

The diplomatic system in 1815 – constructed with such care and swagger – looked robust enough on the eve of the First World War. Surveying regional tensions, diplomats assessed that there would need to be some accommodations to acknowledge shifts in power, but did not anticipate that conflict would shatter the genteel assumptions that underpinned their interactions. European diplomacy had got fat, entitled, and complacent.

So the British ambassador in Berlin continued his yachting expedition with the German kaiser even after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, triggering the Great War. The ambassador visited key ministers after the outbreak of conflict, and dined as usual that evening at his Residence in Berlin. When his meal was briefly disrupted by pesky protesters, his staff judged that the German emperor’s apology for the inconvenience was tardy. Having not arrived until ten the next morning, it ‘served to show what we had thought, that the emperor was not a gentleman’.10

After diplomacy’s finest century it was one thing to declare war, but quite another to misjudge diplomatic etiquette.

* Within the FCO, the honour of CMG is known as ‘Call Me God’, and KCMG is ‘Kindly Call Me God’. GCMG is of course ‘God Calls Me God’.

† Pauline’s breast cup, in which she offered drinks to suitors, is still on display in the ambassador’s Residence, thus prompting many an awkward silence at drinks receptions.