RITES of PEACE
The Fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna
ADAM ZAMOYSKI

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

1: The Lion at Bay

2: The Saviour of Europe

3: The Peacemakers

4: A War for Peace

5: Intimate Congress

6: Farce in Prague

7: The Play for Germany

8: The First Waltzes

9: A Finger in the Pie

10: Battlefield Diplomacy

11: Paris Triumph

12: Peace

13: The London Round

14: Just Settlements

15: Setting the Stage

16: Points of Order

17: Notes and Balls

18: Kings’ Holiday

19: A Festival of Peace

20: Guerre de Plume

21: Political Carrousel

22: Explosive Diplomacy

23: Dance of War

24: War and Peace

25: The Saxon Deal

26: Unfinished Business

27: The Flight of the Eagle

28: The Hundred Days

29: The Road to Waterloo

30: Wellington’s Victory

31: The Punishment of France

32: Last Rites

33: Discordant Concert

34: The Arrest of Europe

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Notes

By the Same Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The reconstruction of Europe at the Congress of Vienna is probably the most seminal episode in modern history. Not only did the congress redraw the map entirely. It determined which nations were to have a political existence over the next hundred years and which were not. It imposed an ideology on the whole Continent, derived from the interests of four great powers. It attempted to set in stone the agreement between those powers, with the result that their expansionist urges were deflected into Africa and southern Asia. It entirely transformed the conduct of international affairs. Its consequences, direct and indirect, include all that has taken place in Europe since, including aggressive nationalism, Bolshevism, fascism, the two world wars and, ultimately, the creation of the European Union.

The action was played out in a dramatic series of shifts of fortune, by some of the most fascinating characters of European history. At its heart stood Napoleon, fighting desperately for his throne, yet undermining his chances with every move he made and seeming to court disaster with apparent abandon. On the other side, Tsar Alexander of Russia, by now convinced of a divine calling to save the world, could not see that he posed a threat to it in the eyes of everyone else. The consummate political puppeteer Metternich excelled himself as he cajoled and manipulated in order to mould events to his own vision of a safe world. The vulpine Talleyrand weaved about in a desperate attempt to save something for France, and himself, from the wreckage of Napoleon’s empire. The eminently likeable Castlereagh, a thoroughly decent man in every respect, found himself cutting up nations and trading souls as ruthlessly as any practitioner of realpolitik. A host of other characters took their places in this great carnival at one time or another, including the Duke of Wellington, who revealed himself to be as good a statesman as he was a general, and a fascinating array of women, who played on the passions and frustrated ambitions of the great men of Europe, leading to moments of high tragedy and low farce. From gore-spattered battlefield and roadside hovel to the gilded boudoirs and ballrooms of Vienna, the scene of the action is eminently worthy of the grandeur and the squalor of the proceedings. And history has passed down an image of courtly elegance and waltzing frivolity familiar to most educated people.

Yet when I typed the words ‘Congress of Vienna’ into the British Library catalogue, I was rewarded with a list of books on: the First International Meteorological Congress, the Congress on the Biochemical Problems of Lipids, the European Regional Science Association Congress, on congresses statistical, sexual and philatelistic, on the congresses of Applied Chemistry, of Bibliophiles, of Dermatology, of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences, Varicose Veins, Exfoliative Cytology, Birth Defects, Hepatitis B, Electroencephalography, Clinical Neurophysiology, and many, many more, all held in Vienna over the past century or so. Buried amongst these enticing titles were no more than half a dozen which related to the events of 1814–15.

Further searches revealed that literature on the subject is indeed elusive. It is also extremely one-sided and subjective. The voluminous and dense German studies, mostly produced during the nineteenth-century unification of Germany or during the period of Nazi rule, respond to a demanding agenda. The latest French contribution is entitled ‘Le Congrès de Vienne. L’Europe Contre la France’, which sums up a viewpoint characteristic of much French writing on the subject. British studies are marked by an ineffable condescension, based on ignorance of conditions in Europe and a conviction that Britain was a disinterested, and therefore impartial and benign, party. Whatever their provenance, most existing books on the congress are superficial in nature, and the best ones are, ironically, those that honestly set out to cover only the social and sexual side of the proceedings. In short, there is no satisfactory general study of the episode, and as a result most people know little about it, aside from the fact that a great deal of dancing took place.

The reasons for this became clear as I began to grapple with the complexities of the subject. The first is that the Congress of Vienna never actually took place in any formal sense. Just as ‘Yalta’ stands for negotiations and agreements from 1943 to 1945 and even beyond, ‘the Congress of Vienna’ is a blanket term for a process that began in the summer of 1812 and did not end until ten years later. As usual in such a long-drawn-out process, it is the minor details left unresolved in the very early stages of the negotiations that come to dominate and distort the proceedings at the crucial final stages. There is therefore no way of producing a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the episode without covering a very long period, which involves a great deal of work and dictates a more complex book than many a historian would wish to embark on.

Another, equally important, factor is the need for anyone intending to approach this subject to have a command of as many European languages as possible. The negotiations of 1812–15 can be likened to a game of poker, and as in poker, the course of the game only becomes comprehensible if one can see what cards each of the players holds and how he plays them. In addition, and this is an aspect that has probably been most difficult for historians brought up in other times to deal with, it is necessary to be able to empathise with the desires and the fears of every player, otherwise their moves and reactions make no sense. The reason it nearly came to war several times during the Congress of Vienna was not that Prussia was being gratuitously aggressive, Russia perverse, or Austria devious, but that each was in dread of being outmanoeuvred by the others.

In writing this book, I set out to give as full an account as possible of the negotiations that led to the peace settlement, in the hope that the succession of events will add up to some explanation of how it was reached. I have tried to present the hopes and fears of each side as dispassionately, but with as much sympathy, as possible, in the firm conviction that there were no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ players, merely frightened ones.

The scope of the brief I set myself did not permit me to dwell as long as I would have liked on the politics of the Bourbon restorations, the complex mix of forces attending the resolution of the problem of Italy, let alone the complexities of the German question. One of the most important, if not the most important, elements in what we term the Congress of Vienna is the territorial and constitutional reorganisation of Germany, and I have certainly not devoted as much space to this subject as one ought; but I make no apology. It is a story of such layered intricacy that only a seasoned scholar of German history could attempt to do it justice, and only one scarcely less well versed would be able to follow the resulting account. In order to arrive at a comprehensible picture of the congress in its essentials it is necessary to leave aside many contingent issues, however fascinating they might be.

Similarly, in order to make the account easier to follow, I have focused on the principal players and avoided naming some of their second-rank collaborators or antagonists. The numbers of people joining in this great scramble for land, power and influence were so great that many an interesting sub-plot has had to be dropped.

If there is a dearth of good books on the congress, there is no lack of published first-hand evidence, making it virtually unnecessary to delve into archival sources. Not only the acts and treaties, but also the memoranda, notes verbales, proclamations, démarches and other tools of negotiation have been printed, as have the correspondence of the principal protagonists, their diaries and memoirs. Those of dozens of other participants and onlookers have also been published, as have some of the reports of the Austrian secret police. I did nevertheless make use of some archival sources, partly out of a wish to penetrate closer the workings of the process – there is nothing like holding an original document in one’s hand for understanding the form a relationship or a negotiation took. And when I did explore archives I became aware of the fact that some of the printed primary sources are not as reliable as one would wish, and that the decisions taken at a given meeting were not always recorded the same way by all the parties. I therefore resorted to archival sources for some of the more crucial moments in the negotiations.

On the vexed question of place names, consistency is difficult to achieve considering the areas covered by the action. I have tended to use the names which were in current use at the time, with the modern names in brackets after the first mention. I have, therefore, kept to the ubiquitous German spelling when referring to the Treaty of Kalisch, even though the town was then formally in the grand duchy of Warsaw and therefore known as Kalisz. But in the case of capitals and larger cities I have used the modern English form. Thus I refer to Frankfurt in that form, even though the city was universally referred to as Frankfort at the time.

In the interests of readability, I have given no more than one source reference per paragraph, and placed it at the end. The order in which the sources are listed accords with the order of facts or quotations in the text.

I would like to thank Aleksandr Sapozhnikov of the National Library of Russia’s manuscript department for his help in providing me with the diaries of Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, and Galina Babkova for obtaining copies of other documents and articles from Russia. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ole Villumsen Krog, Director of the Royal Silver Room in Copenhagen, for his help and his kindness in making available his invaluable work on the Congress of Vienna, and my researcher in matters Danish, Marie-Louise Møller Lange. Also to Barbara Prout of the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève for sending me copies of manuscripts in that library, and Jennifer Irwin for her searches at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Angelica von Hase was enormously helpful in penetrating the German literature on the congress and in providing translations of some sources. I am indebted to Barbara de Nicolay for guiding me through the intricacies of the dispute over the duchy of Bouillon. I am grateful to Professor Isabel de Madariaga, Emmanuel de Waresquiel and Dr Philip Mansel for their helpful advice, to Shervie Price for reading the typescript and Richard Foreman for his invaluable advice on titles. I greatly appreciate the reassuring support I received from Richard Johnson, and his forbearance on the subject of deadlines. Robert Lacey has been an exemplary editor and, once again, saved me from making an ass of myself. Perhaps the most noteworthy contribution came from Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, who suggested the subject to me in the first place. And, this time too, my wife Emma has stopped me from going mad, and made life worth living throughout.

Adam Zamoyski

London, January 2007

1 The Lion at Bay

The clock of the Tuileries had begun striking the last quarter before midnight when a mud-spattered carriage of the ungainly kind known as a chaise de poste, drawn at the gallop by four tired horses, swung onto the parade ground in front of the palace. Ignorant of court etiquette, the coachman drove under the central span of the triumphal arch of the Carrousel, reserved exclusively for the Emperor, before the drowsy sentries had time to bar his way. ‘That is a good omen,’ exclaimed one of the two men sitting inside the carriage, a plump man in a voluminous pelisse with a fur bonnet hiding much of his face.

The vehicle came to a stop at the main doorway, under the clock, and its occupants clambered down. The first, who was the taller of the two, had unbuttoned his greatcoat, revealing a chest covered in gold braid, so the sentries let him and his companion through unchallenged, assuming them to be senior officers bearing urgent despatches.

The two men walked briskly down to the end of the vaulted passage and knocked at a large door. After a while, the concierge appeared in his nightshirt, holding a lantern. The taller of the two men identified himself as the Imperial Master of the Horse, but the concierge and his sleepy wife, who had joined him, took some convincing that the man standing before them was indeed General de Caulaincourt. The uniform was right, but the man’s hair was long and unkempt, his face was weatherbeaten and covered with a two-weeks’ growth of stubble, and he looked more like a stage bandit than a senior dignitary of the imperial court.

The concierge’s wife opened the door, saying that the Empress had just retired for the night, while her husband went off to summon the duty footmen so they could show in the newcomers. Yawning and rubbing her eyes, she shifted her attention to the other man. Although the flickering lantern lit up only a small part of his face, between the high collar of the pelisse and the fur bonnet pressed over his brow, she thought she recognised the Emperor. That seemed impossible. Only two days before, Paris had been stunned by the twenty-ninth Bulletin de la Grande Armée, which announced that he was struggling through the snows of Russia with his beleaguered army.

The two men were led down a gallery, open to the gardens on the right, and turned left into the Empress’s apartments. They came in just as her ladies-in-waiting were emerging from her private apartment, having attended her to bed. The ladies started with fright at the sight of the bearded man in his dirty greatcoat, but when he announced that he was the bearer of news from the Emperor they recognised Caulaincourt, and one of them went back into the Empress’s apartment to announce the Master of the Horse.

Unable to control his impatience, the shorter of the two men brushed past his companion and made for the door to the Empress’s apartment. His pelisse had fallen open, revealing the uniform of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard, and as he marched confidently across the room there was no mistaking the Emperor Napoleon. ‘Good night, Caulaincourt,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You also need rest.’¹

It was something of an understatement. The General had not slept in a bed for over eight weeks, and had hardly lain down in the past two; he had travelled over 3,000 kilometres in unspeakable conditions, often under fire, all the way from Moscow. Before that he had taken part in the gruelling advance into Russia, which wasted the finest army in Europe, and seen his adored younger brother killed at the battle of Borodino. He had watched Moscow burn. He had borne the hardships and witnessed the horrors of the disastrous retreat, which had brought the death toll to over half a million French and allied soldiers.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to bear for the thirty-nine-year-old General Armand de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, an accomplished soldier and diplomat, was that he had been obliged to watch all his worst prophecies come true. As Napoleon’s ambassador to Russia from 1807 to 1811 he had done everything in his power to keep the two empires from conflict. He had repeatedly begged Napoleon not to make war on Russia, warning him that it was impossible to win against such an opponent. He had continued to make his case as they travelled across Europe to join the army massing against Russia. Once the campaign had begun he had attempted time and again to persuade Napoleon to cut his losses – while remaining utterly loyal, Caulaincourt was never afraid to speak his mind. All to no avail.

On 5 December 1812, as the remnants of his army struggled along the last leg of the retreat, Napoleon had decided to leave it and race back to Paris. He handed over command to his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples, with firm instructions to rally the Grande Armée at Vilna (Vilnius) in Lithuania, which was well stocked with supplies and reinforcements, and to hold that at all costs.

He had set off with Caulaincourt in his travelling coupé, which was followed by two other carriages bearing three generals and a couple of valets. They were escorted by a squadron of Chasseurs and another of Polish Chevau-Légers of the Old Guard, and briefly by some Neapolitan cavalry. At one point the convoy narrowly missed being intercepted by marauding Russian cossacks. Napoleon had a pair of loaded pistols placed in his coupé and instructed his companions to kill him if he failed to do so himself in the event of capture.²

Caulaincourt remained constantly at his side, even when they left their escort and companions behind, changing from carriage to improvised sleigh to carriage and to sleigh once again, breaking axles and running half a dozen vehicles into the ground as they flew from Vilna to Warsaw, Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Erfurt, Mainz and eventually to Paris, which they reached in the last minutes of 18 December.

But before he could go home to bed, Caulaincourt had to perform one last duty. He went to the house of the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, Jean Jacques de Cambacérès, and, after waking him up with the astonishing news of the Emperor’s return, instructed him to make the necessary arrangements for the regular imperial lever to take place in the morning. Napoleon wanted an immediate resumption of everyday normality.

When on campaign, Napoleon would publish Bulletins de la Grande Armée at regular intervals to keep his subjects informed of his actions and to present a heroic picture of his doings. In the twenty-ninth Bulletin, published on 16 December, they had for the first time read less than glorious news. It informed them that he had been obliged to abandon Moscow and that his army had suffered terrible losses as a result of the winter weather. Reading between the lines, they could detect a major disaster. But the Bulletin ended with the words: ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’ His intention was that, two days after hearing the worst, the citizens of France should be able to recover their confidence, with the knowledge that their master was back and in control.

Napoleon’s principal reason for abandoning his army and returning to Paris was to muster fresh forces with which to march out and reinforce it in the spring. But there were other motives. One was that he preferred to have his less than reliable Austrian and German allies in front of him rather than at his back. Another, more weighty, was the urgent need he felt to reassert his authority at home. He had been away from his capital for over seven months, and during that time had conducted the affairs of state from his headquarters. This had worked remarkably well, and he had continued to invigilate and order everything from foreign policy to the repertoire of the Paris theatres.

But on the night of 23 October, while he was beginning his retreat from Moscow, an obscure General by the name of Malet and a handful of other officers had attempted to seize power in Paris, claiming that the Emperor was dead. They came very close to success, and although Malet and his accomplices were tried and shot before Napoleon even came to hear of the attempted coup, it had disturbed him profoundly when he did. It revealed to him the frailty of the foundations of his throne, and gave him much food for thought.

On the morning of 19 December the cannon of the Invalides delivered a salute that announced to the astonished citizens of Paris that the Emperor was back in the capital. They were still stunned by the news of his failure in Russia, and eager for further details and some kind of explanation. The sense of anticipation was particularly keen among the officials and courtiers who hurried to the lever. But they were disappointed. The Emperor was stern and uncommunicative, and quickly disappeared into his study, to which he summoned his principal ministers.

He was in no mood to give explanations, but rather to demand them, as the representatives of the legislative and administrative bodies discovered when they called on him the following day to pay their respects. He brought up the matter of the Malet conspiracy to show them up as weak, cowardly and ineffectual. What had touched a particularly raw nerve was that the news of his death in Russia, announced by Malet, had led those who believed it to consider a change of regime, instead of making them proclaim the succession of his son, the King of Rome. ‘Our forefathers rallied to the cry: “The King is dead, long live the King!”’ he reminded them, adding that ‘These few words encompass the principal advantages of monarchy.’ That they had not been uttered on the night of 23 October revealed to him that for all its trappings, the monarchy he had created lacked consistency, and he was still just a general who had seized power, a parvenu with no title to rule beyond his ability to hold on to it. He felt this setback personally, and the sense of insecurity it induced would have a profound effect on how he behaved over the next two years, making him more aggressive and less amenable, and leading inexorably to his downfall.³

Before he embarked on his fatal Russian campaign, in the summer of 1812, Napoleon had been the undisputed master of Europe, wielding greater power than any Roman Emperor. The French Empire and its direct dependencies included the whole of Belgium, Holland and the North Sea coast up to Hamburg, the Rhineland, the whole of Switzerland, Piedmont and Liguria, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria (present-day Slovenia and Croatia) and Catalonia as well as France. All the minor states of Germany, including the kingdoms of Saxony, Westphalia, Bavaria and Württemberg, had been incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine, the Rheinbund, which was an entirely subservient ally of France, as were the grand duchy of Warsaw, the kingdom of Italy, the kingdom of Naples and Spain. Several of these were ruled by Napoleon’s siblings or relatives, or connected to him through dynastic marriages. Denmark and Russia were locked into more or less permanent alliance with France, Austria and Prussia were unlikely allies, and in Continental Europe only Sweden remained outside the Napoleonic system.

While there were many who resented this French stranglehold, others either welcomed or at least accepted it. The only open challenge Napoleon faced was from Britain, but while she was supreme on the seas, her only foothold on the Continent was in Spain, where General Wellington’s army was operating alongside Spanish regular and guerrilla forces opposed to the rule of Napoleon’s brother Joseph. But Britain was also engaged in a difficult and costly war with the United States of America, which restricted her military potential.

The disasters of the Russian campaign had changed all this, but not as profoundly as one might think. Although he was now at war with Russia and had lost an army trying to cow her into submission, Napoleon’s overall position had not altered. His system and his alliances were still in place, and the situation in Spain had actually improved, with the setbacks of the summer reversed and the British and Spanish forces under Wellington repulsed.

The only possible threat to his system at this stage could come from Germany, whose many rulers, beginning with Frederick William of Prussia, found his alliance increasingly onerous, and whose people burned with resentment of their French allies. But Prussia had been reduced to a minor power and bled economically by France over the past few years, while the other monarchs were too weak and too mistrustful of each other to present a credible challenge, and Austria was in no position to make war after her crushing defeat in 1809. Any who still dreamt of throwing off the French hegemony had to take into account the remains of the Grande Armée in Poland and a string of French garrisons in fortresses across Germany.

Napoleon’s self-confidence had not been seriously shaken by the events of 1812. He had blundered politically and militarily, and he had lost a fine army. But he knew – and so, despite the Russian propaganda, did most of the experienced commanders of Europe – that he had been victorious in battle throughout. ‘My losses are substantial, but the enemy can take no credit for them,’ as he put it in a letter to the King of Denmark. And he could always raise a new army.⁴

France was still the most powerful state on the Continent. Russia had no comparable reserves of power or wealth, and had suffered greatly from the devastations of war in the previous year. With the benefit of hindsight Napoleon’s reputation and the basis of his power had been damaged beyond repair, but at the time it was clear to all that his position remained unassailable as long as he kept his nerve and consolidated his resources. And that is what he set about doing.

At Warsaw, on his way back to Paris, he had stopped just long enough to assure the Polish ministers that the situation was under control and that he would be back in the spring with a new army. At Dresden a few days later, he reassured his ally the King of Saxony and urged him to raise more troops. From there he also wrote to his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, saying that everything was under control and asking him to double the contingent of Austrian troops operating alongside the Grande Armée to 60,000. He also asked him to send an ambassador to Paris, so that they might communicate more easily.⁵

On his return to Paris he set to work at rebuilding his forces. Before leaving he had given orders for the call-up of the age group which should have been liable to conscription in 1814, and this had yielded 140,000 young men who were already being put through their paces in depots. He also had at his disposal 100,000 men of the National Guard which he had set up as a home defence force before leaving for Russia. Mindful of the political situation in France, he now created a new force, the Gardes d’Honneur, made up from the young scions of aristocratic families and those opposed to his rule, drawn from the depths of the most royalist provinces. The improved situation in Spain allowed him to withdraw four Guard regiments, the mounted gendarmerie and some Polish cavalry from the peninsula. And he instructed his other allies in Germany to raise more troops to support him.

Europe at the end of 1812

Central Europe at the beginning of 1813

According to his calculations he still had 150,000 men holding the eastern wall of his imperium, with at least 60,000 under Murat at Vilna, 25,000 under Macdonald to the north, 30,000 Austrian allies to the south under Schwarzenberg, Poniatowski’s Polish corps and the remainder of the Saxon contingent under Reynier covering Warsaw, and over 25,000 men in reserve depots or fortresses from Danzig (Gdansk) on the Baltic down to Zamosc. He was therefore confident that he would be able to take the field in Germany with some 350,000 men in the spring.⁶

But less than a week after his return to Paris, on Christmas Eve, bad news came in from Lithuania. As the remnants of the Grande Armée straggled into what they thought was the safe haven of Vilna, the men’s endurance had given way to the need for rest. Murat had failed to organise an adequate defence, and the advancing Russians were able to overrun the city with ease. The confusion and panic had prevented an orderly evacuation even by those units still capable of action, and a couple of days later not many more than 10,000 men crossed the river Niemen out of Russia. Napoleon was devastated by the news. He bitterly regretted having left Murat in charge, and dreaded the propaganda value of the event. But within a day or two he put it behind him, assuring Caulaincourt that it was an unimportant setback.⁷

He was certainly not going to allow it to alter his plans or dent his confidence. The requested ambassador of Emperor Francis of Austria had arrived in Paris. He was General Count Ferdinand Bubna, a distinguished soldier whom Napoleon knew well and liked. In the course of their first interview, on the evening of 31 December, Bubna delivered an offer on the part of Austria to help negotiate a peace between France and Russia. Napoleon dismissed it.

He certainly wanted peace, probably more fervently than any of his enemies. He was forty-three years old. ‘I am growing heavy and too fat not to like rest, not to need it, not to regard the displacements and activity demanded by war as a great fatigue,’ he confessed to Caulaincourt. His only reason for making war on Russia in 1812 had been to oblige Tsar Alexander to enforce a blockade that he believed would bring Britain to the negotiating table.⁸

With nothing better to do during their long drive from Lithuania to Paris, Napoleon had delivered himself, copiously and unstoppably, of his thoughts, occasionally pinching the cheek or pulling the ear of his travelling companion, as was his wont. Fortunately for posterity, Caulaincourt listened carefully and jotted down these ramblings whenever the Emperor fell into a doze or they stopped to change horses. Napoleon again and again asserted that he longed only for peace and stability in Europe, and that the other Continental powers were blind not to see that their real enemy was Britain, with her monopoly on maritime power and trade. Any peace that did not include Britain was of no value, and Britain was not prepared to envisage a peace on terms acceptable to France. She needed to be forced into compromise.

Three days after dismissing the Austrian offer of mediation Napoleon held a conference with his senior advisers on foreign affairs. The main question discussed was whether it would be better to try to strike a deal directly with Russia, over the heads and possibly at the expense of Austria and Prussia, or to bank on Austria as the principal ally and potential negotiator. The Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès, the former Foreign Minister Talleyrand and Caulaincourt advised the first course of action, the actual Foreign Minister Maret and the others opted for the second. As usual during such conferences, Napoleon listened without committing himself to either course. There would be plenty of time to decide, as he did not intend to negotiate from anything but a position of strength. He would be in that position when he reappeared in Germany at the head of a fresh army, and in the meantime he must concentrate on mustering one.⁹

This was proceeding well. ‘Everything is in motion,’ he wrote to his chief of staff Marshal Berthier on 9 January 1813. ‘There is nothing lacking, neither men, nor money, nor good will.’ The only things that were in short supply, he admitted, were officers and a backbone of tried soldiers, but he was confident he would find these among the remains of the Grande Armée, since it was officers and NCOs who generally made up the majority of the survivors. But that very evening, as he returned from a performance at the Théâtre Français, he received an unwelcome piece of news and one with alarming implications.¹⁰

Prussia had been forced into alliance with France and had contributed an army corps to the invasion of Russia. But popular resentment of France was strong, particularly in northern and eastern parts of the country. It was also strong in the army. On 30 December 1812 General Yorck von Wartemburg, commander of the Prussian corps in the Grande Armée, detached it from the French units and effectively signed his own alliance with Russia. As well as making it impossible to hold the line of defence the French had taken up, forcing them to fall back to the Vistula, this development also raised questions about Prussia’s loyalty.

Following fast on this news came the assurance that the King of Prussia, Frederick William III, had denounced the move and issued orders dismissing Yorck from his command. Napoleon’s ambassador in Berlin, the comte de Saint-Marsan, sent reassuring reports of Prussia’s loyalty, and on 12 January the news that Frederick William was entertaining the thought of marrying his son the Crown Prince to a princess of the Bonaparte family to cement the alliance between the two courts. A few days later, Frederick William’s special envoy Prince Hatzfeldt arrived in Paris.¹¹

Napoleon was receiving similarly encouraging reports from Vienna. He did not for a moment doubt that his father-in-law the Emperor Francis would stand by him to the end: he was so besotted by his wife Marie-Louise and his son the King of Rome that he assumed Francis must share those feelings for his daughter and grandson. But Francis did not make policy on his own. ‘Our alliance with France is so necessary that if you were to break it off today, we would propose to re-establish it tomorrow on the very same conditions,’ the Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich had told Napoleon’s ambassador in Vienna, Count Otto. Napoleon nevertheless remained on his guard, and decided to replace Otto with someone who could take a fresh look at the situation in Vienna. For this role he chose the comte de Narbonne.¹²

While his recruits were being uniformed and trained, Napoleon attended to the everyday business of government, and relaxed by going hunting at Fontainebleau. He took the opportunity to visit Pope Pius VII, who had been living there as his prisoner following the French occupation of the Papal States in 1809. After some brisk bargaining, Napoleon signed a new concordat with him. This was expedient, as his treatment of the Pope had needlessly antagonised Catholics not only in France, but in the domains of his south German and Austrian allies. But the terms of the agreement were so humiliating that they failed to placate them.

On 14 February he attended the opening of the Legislative Assembly, and made a speech in which he announced that he ardently desired peace. He would do everything to further it, but warned that he would never sign a treaty that would dishonour France. He painted a reassuring picture of the state of international affairs, declaring that the Bonaparte dynasty was secure in Spain, and that there was nothing to fear from the situation in Germany. ‘I am satisfied with the conduct of all my allies,’ he stated. ‘I will not abandon any of them; I shall defend the integrity of their possessions. The Russians will be forced back into their horrible climate.’¹³

2 The Saviour of Europe

‘Gentlemen, you have saved not only Russia, you have saved Europe,’ Tsar Alexander had declared to his generals in Vilna on 12 December 1812, shortly after the last French stragglers had left the city. The truth of both assertions is questionable, but it hardly mattered. Thirty-four years old, personable and chivalrous, Alexander was widely perceived as the beau idéal of monarchy. His refusal to be cowed by Napoleon and his stalwart defence of his country had inspired universal respect. Although he was almost entirely German, the curious mix of exoticism and spirituality with which European opinion endowed most things Russian lent him an aura of glamour and righteousness, and he was seen as a champion by all those who believed that Europe needed salvation.¹

But while he felt a consuming urge not to disappoint them, he had no clear idea of how that salvation was to be brought about. His intentions were certainly admirable. ‘He wished that all men could help each other like brothers, assisting one another in their mutual needs, and that free commerce could be the underlying bond of society,’ according to a young lady to whom he opened his heart at this crucial moment. But he lacked the necessary conviction and determination. ‘I sometimes want to hit my head against the wall,’ he told her, ‘and if I could honourably change my condition, I would willingly do so, for there is none more difficult than mine, and I have no vocation for the throne.’²

There was much truth in this. Although kind and generous by temperament, Alexander was quick to take umbrage. Being both weak in character and stubborn, he was easy to influence but difficult to manage. The progressive upbringing to which he had been subjected had destroyed his self-confidence, while his education had been entirely incompatible with his predicament as absolute monarch of the most theocratic and traditionalist power in Europe. They had left him pathetically eager to please, yet determined to prove himself a strong ruler.

‘He would willingly have consented to make everyone free, as long as everyone willingly did what he wanted,’ in the words of a close friend. He was in thrall to the ideals of the Enlightenment, and liked to project an image of himself as a benefactor of mankind, a tendency that developed with time into a sense of spiritual destiny which would take him very far from those ideals. ‘More than ever,’ he wrote to his friend Aleksandr Galitzine in January 1813, as he contemplated the salvation of Europe, ‘I resign myself to the will of God and submit blindly to His decrees.’³

Alexander had ascended the Russian throne in 1801 at the age of twenty-three, following the assassination of his father Paul I, an event in which he had been heavily implicated. He had promptly set up a ‘Secret Committee’ of close friends who thought like him to assist him in planning the fundamental reform of the Russian state. The one singled out to consider foreign policy was Prince Adam Czartoryski, who funnelled Alexander’s utopian urges into a grand project for a future ‘system’ to govern all international relations.

In common with a number of other European statesmen, Czartoryski believed that the old system of diplomacy, involving a neverending pursuit of parity based on achieving a necessarily elusive balance of power, was pointless as well as morally unacceptable. He came up with a blueprint for a supranational security system based on federations of smaller states, grouped according to linguistic or cultural affinities, which would lack both the desire for conquest and the cohesion to make war effectively except in self-defence. Alexander was greatly taken with this vision, which appeared to justify a deeply rooted Russian aspiration to extend dominion over all lands inhabited by Slavs.⁴

Neither Alexander nor his advisers saw expansion into Europe as being Russia’s destiny – that lay in Constantinople and the east. But Russia’s meteoric emergence as a major power over the past hundred years impelled her to take an interest in Europe, if only out of an instinct for self-defence. The powers that needed to be watched were, in the first place, Britain, whose maritime supremacy and eastern dominions were thought to constitute an obvious challenge; France, whose traditional alliance with Ottoman Turkey and interest in Egypt and points further east were a source of unease; and, to a lesser degree, Austria, whose possessions in the Balkans were at the very least an inconvenience. In the 1790s Russia had been drawn into war with France, but it was a conflict in which she had no actual interests at stake beyond the forlorn hope of establishing a maritime base in the western Mediterranean.

Alexander’s attitude to Napoleon was an ambiguous one. He could not help admiring his talents and energy, and envied the First Consul’s achievements as an efficient modern ruler who had put into effect many of the ideals of the Enlightenment. But he was outraged by his arbitrary brutality, and his distaste for the upstart Frenchman turned to disgust when Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor of the French in December 1804.

In October of that year, as Britain and other powers had contemplated the possibility of war with France, Alexander sent Nikolai Novosiltsov to London with a proposal drawn up by Czartoryski containing his vision of a new order in Europe based on liberal principles and ‘the sacred rights of humanity’. The British Prime Minister William Pitt was predictably sceptical, but responded with eagerness. He praised Alexander’s ‘wise, dignified and generous policy’, and singled out three of the points as the main aims of the proposed coalition against France: that France should be stripped of her conquests and reduced to her former limits; that those recovered territories should be safeguarded in such a way that they should never fall to French aggression again; and, most significantly, ‘To form, at the restoration of peace, a general agreement and Guarantee for the mutual protection and security of different Powers, and for re-establishing a general system of public law in Europe.’⁵

Nothing came of it, as the coalition which was to usher in this new age was shattered on the fields of Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Czartoryski was, reluctantly, dismissed by Alexander in 1806. Taciturn and reserved, he had few friends at court, and was the object of resentment and jealousy on account of his ascendancy over the Tsar. Also, he was a Pole. He had fought against Russia in 1792 in defence of his country, and he had arrived in St Petersburg as a hostage for the good behaviour of his family.

The kingdom of Poland had been wiped off the map in 1795 as a result of a series of agreements between Russia, Prussia and Austria. As well as taking the lion’s share of its territory, Alexander’s grandmother Catherine the Great had been the prime mover. In common with most enlightened opinion, Alexander condemned this partition of one of the ancient states of Europe, and he also felt a degree of personal guilt. These feelings were intensified by his friendship with Czartoryski, to whom he had vowed that he would restore Poland to freedom when he came to the throne. When the time came he was faced by the impossibility of doing anything quite so contrary to what were perceived as paramount Russian interests. But he never ceased to dream of one day redeeming those vows. This Polish conundrum epitomised the conflict in Alexander’s mind between his own ideals and Russian reasons of state, which clashed on many different planes.

Like many Polish patriots, Czartoryski realised that there was no possibility of his country recovering independence in the short term. The best he could hope for was the reunification of its severed portions. He had a vision of Poland as a more or less autonomous province of, possibly even a kingdom within, the Russian Empire, and he served that empire in good faith. But he would never dissipate the suspicions of the court and Russian society in general, which saw in him only a potential enemy. The situation was made no easier by the fact that he had been the lover of Alexander’s wife Elizabeth, who had had a child by him. He was a liability and he had to go.

Czartoryski’s fall from grace did not affect Alexander’s views on international affairs. Nor did it, as the dismissed minister’s patriotic Russian opponents had hoped, do away with what they saw as the Tsar’s lamentable obsession with Poland.

But it did affect Alexander’s attitude to Britain. Czartoryski considered the British to be unreliable and selfish, but nevertheless a necessary ally in the struggle against France. Alexander had his doubts. He was particularly irked by Britain’s insistence on the absolute and exclusive nature of what she termed her ‘maritime rights’, effectively to search every ship at will and to invigilate the high seas. He had accepted her as a necessary ally in 1804, but felt grievously let down in the winter of 1806–07, when he was left alone fighting Napoleon by Britain’s failure to support him by sending an expeditionary force into the Baltic.

Faced with the necessity to treat with Napoleon, Alexander not only made peace: he offered the French Emperor a partnership of the kind he had offered Pitt three years before. He fancied that the resulting alliance, sealed during their meetings at Tilsit in the summer of 1807, would permit him to regenerate his empire and add to it by incorporating Constantinople and other parts of the near east while exerting, in partnership with Napoleon, an enlightened and beneficent tutelage over the continent they dominated.

The débâcle of Austerlitz in December 1805, where Alexander had hoped to shine as a military hero only to have to flee the battlefield as his army disintegrated, and his final defeat at Friedland the following year had been personal humiliations. They had also weakened his position in political terms. While he was still widely loved by his people, they suspected him of weakness and feared his reformist tendencies. Ministers such as Czartoryski and the reforming Speransky were seen as conduits of French/Masonic/Polish/Jewish influence which would corrupt the purity of Russia, and he was obliged to dismiss them as well as to abandon cherished programmes. He found himself at odds with an increasingly eloquent public opinion which he could not ignore. While the Tsar of Russia was theoretically an autocrat with no limits on his power, the overwhelming majority of educated Russians concentrated in the army, the administration, at court, in St Petersburg or in Moscow represented the sole agency through which the state could function, and without its good will the autocrat was literally powerless.⁶

While it proved uncomfortable and humiliating in many ways, Alexander’s alliance with Napoleon between 1807 and 1812 had allowed him to invade and annex Finland and to acquire a couple of additional slices of Polish territory. He hoped to appropriate yet more, and to move into the Balkans. But none of this was enough. Russia’s self-respect demanded that he adopt a more defiant and even provocative policy towards France. This had led inexorably to Napoleon’s ill-conceived invasion, and as the Russian army followed the defeated remnants of the Grande Armée out of Russia in the last days of 1812, it was clear to all but the most naïve that Russian rule would be extended further west. The grand duchy of Warsaw was there for the taking, giving Alexander the opportunity to pay his debt of guilt towards the Poles by resurrecting the kingdom of Poland.

The establishment of an independent Polish state would preclude Russia making any territorial gains in the west. Worse, it would probably lead to her having to give back Polish provinces she had seized in the past. Alexander could therefore only contemplate establishing a Polish kingdom within the framework of the Russian Empire, with himself as King. This would, he hoped, allay the fears of Russian opinion. But as it would also extend the frontiers of his empire far to the west, it meant that he would have to have a hand in the arrangement of Germany.

Germany had been more profoundly affected than any other part of Europe by the French Revolution and subsequent interference by Napoleon. In 1789 the German lands had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, a bewildering patchwork of some three hundred independent sovereignties and thousands of lordships, abbeys and orders, whose forms of government ranged from absolutist monarchy, through ecclesiastical authority, to republican cities. The army of the empire was made up not only of regiments, but companies and even platoons composed of soldiers supplied by different states. The captain of a company might be commissioned by a sovereign count, the lieutenant by a free city and the second lieutenant by an abbess.

All this had been gradually swept away following French incursions into the Rhineland in 1792, and between 1801 and 1809 Napoleon thoroughly rearranged the area. His intention was to reduce and isolate Austria, to enlarge Prussia, which he hoped to keep in the French camp, and to create a number of secondary states such as Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg, whose gratified rulers would be devoted allies. By the Act of Mediatisation in 1803 he suppressed most of the sovereignties, and in 1806 he bound the remainder into the Confederation of the Rhine, the Rheinbund, of which he made himself protector. While he grouped them together in this way, his hold was based on playing them off against each other and keeping them in a state of dependence. And none of them was entirely master in his own house, as Napoleon had left a number of ‘mediatised’ counts and knights (Standesherren) within their realms who were subject not to them but to him.

The winners were not only the Electors of Bavaria, Württemberg and Saxony, who became Kings, or the other rulers who had seen their status raised, but also all those such as merchants liberated from archaic restrictive regulations, artisans who could throw off the shackles of the guilds, the Jews who were able to leave their ghettos, and countless others. The losers were the hundreds of dukes, princes, counts palatine, bishops, margraves, burgraves, landgraves, abbots, abbesses, grand masters and imperial knights who lost lands and prerogatives, as well as the free cities, which saw their independence abolished in the process.

The German state that had gained most was Prussia. By making common cause with France against the other German states in 1795, she had acquired valuable territories in the Rhineland, which she later exchanged for more extensive ones in central Germany. She took Hanover as the prize for supporting Napoleon against Austria in 1805. But in the following year Prussia had changed sides, and following his crushing victories over her at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, Napoleon had considered abolishing the Prussian state altogether.

The rise and fall of Prussia, 1700–1807

The kingdom of Prussia had only come into existence in 1701, when the Elector of Brandenburg unilaterally assumed the royal title. By 1750 it had grown territorially by over 50 per cent through the conquest of Silesia. It more than doubled in size between then and 1805, becoming a power of the first rank. But it was a curiously fragile one. Its greatest ruler, Frederick II, used to say that its arms should feature not the black eagle but rather a monkey, as all Prussia was good at was aping the great powers. It fielded six times as many soldiers relative to its population as Austria, and most of its resources were dedicated to supporting this vast army, the sole basis of its power.⁷

In the event, Napoleon did not abolish Prussia; he merely stripped her of most of the Polish provinces acquired over the past decades, which he turned into a French satellite under the name of the grand duchy of Warsaw. He thereby reduced Prussia’s population from almost nine to less than five million. What remained of Prussia had to accommodate French troops, who extorted money and fodder through officials who took every opportunity to humiliate the Prussians as they spoliated their country. Given the French Emperor’s well-known contempt for the Prussians, the existence of the state remained in question. The Prussian army had been reduced to a paltry 42,000, nearly 30,000 of whom would be obliged to take part in Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812.

Reaction had set in as soon as the shock of the 1806 defeat had worn off. The large numbers of cashiered Prussian officers joined patriotic intellectuals to wallow in sullen resentment of all things French. Many of the officers took service in the armies of Austria or Russia, while the patriots dreamed of a national resurgence and of revenge, and took heart from the example set by the guerrilleros of Spain.

Poets such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Heinrich von Kleist and Theodor Körner encouraged these feelings with patriotic verse and nationalist catechisms; philosophers and publicists argued about what form Germany should take in an ideal world. Young men came together in the Tugendbund, the League of Virtue, to discuss and prepare; others followed Friedrich Jahn in physical preparation for the forthcoming war through athletic exercise.

A number of senior officers devoted themselves to the cause in more practical ways. Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst, Gebhard Blücher, Leopold von Boyen and August Gneisenau worked at restructuring the army and instilling military virtues into the population as a whole. Others, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, took a hand to the educational system, or sought to reform the state itself. Foremost among these was a civil servant by the name of Karl Heinrich vom Stein, who was, like many of the other reformers, not actually a Prussian.

Stein had been born in Nassau, a Freiherr or imperial knight of the Holy Roman Empire. There was nothing in his origins or station that destined him to become a German patriot – indeed his younger brother Ludwig became an officer in the French army. After law studies at the university of Göttingen, he took service in Prussia, originally in the Directorate of Mines, where he made a name for himself as an energetic administrator, builder of roads and digger of canals.

Stein was a man of austere morals and strict principles who disapproved of all excesses, either political as in the case of the French Revolution or moral as in the case of the sexual licence he deplored in others. But he was more elastic when it came to politics.

Though deeply shocked by the treacherous manner in which, by the Treaty of Bâle (Basel) in 1795, Prussia acquired new lands along the Rhine, he nevertheless applied himself to their incorporation into the Prussian state. Any moral qualms he might have had gave way before his overriding instinct to tidy up the messy medieval legacy and rationalise the whole of Germany into one efficient state. In common with many patriots all over Germany, he had come to the conclusion that the only way to place their country and its culture beyond the reach of interference from France or any other power was to create a unified German state strong enough to exclude outside influence and resist military aggression.

The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was preaching that the nation was a spiritual as well as a physical entity, which embodied something of a higher order than any attachment to a state or a King, and there were many, particularly in the universities, who longed to see a German republic. However much they might have empathised with such views, to patriots such as Stein, Gneisenau and Humboldt it was evident that a united Germany could not be built out of nothing. They therefore served the one German state that appeared to be in a position to gradually engulf the others and bring about the same end – Prussia.

In 1804 Stein was called to a senior post in Berlin. He was horrified at the corruption and inefficiency he encountered there, and dismayed at the mediocrity of the monarch he was serving. He strongly disapproved of Frederick William’s alignment with France in 1805 and his consequent seizure of Hanover. Along with others, he persuaded the reluctant Frederick William to switch to the side of the coalition against Napoleon, and when this led to the disasters of Jena and Auerstadt he was dismissed in January 1807, with a string of imprecations from the King.

It was all the more galling for the unfortunate King that a few months later Napoleon, who had reduced Prussia to an entirely subservient condition, having heard that Stein was a good administrator but not that he was a German patriot, instructed Frederick William to nominate him as his principal minister. Stein took the opportunity provided by his new position to introduce an edict of emancipation which transformed Prussia from a feudal monarchy into a modern state, and followed this up with administrative, municipal and military reforms. Barely more than a year later an intercepted letter revealed to the French police the extent of Stein’s hatred of the French, and in consequence Napoleon had him dismissed and declared an outlaw. Rendered penniless at a stroke, Stein took refuge in Austrianruled Prague.

In 1812 Stein was summoned to Russia by Tsar Alexander. The two had met in Berlin in 1805 and been drawn to each other by the high-minded ideals – and, no doubt, by the priggishness – they shared. As the Grande Armée advanced into Russia, raising doubts as to the competence of Alexander and his generals, the Tsar suffered moments of self-doubt and emotional stress. In these circumstances Stein’s unshakeable belief in him as the champion of the universal anti-French cause proved invaluable as both solace and support. His influence over the Tsar grew in proportion.

He took over the direction of a German Committee set up by Alexander to coordinate pro-Russian sentiment throughout German lands, and turned it into an instrument for his own ends. On 18 September 1812, a couple of days after Napoleon had crushed the Russians’ last stand at Borodino outside Moscow, Stein produced a memorandum which sketched out his plan to create a unified German state. He was convinced that Russia would prevail in the end, and argued that having defeated the French she must carry the war into Germany and liberate Europe from their yoke.

When, three months later, the remnants of the Grande Armée straggled back across the frontier, the Russian commander Field Marshal Kutuzov and most of his senior officers argued against pursuing them further. Kutuzov would continue to beg Alexander to make peace and go home, and to advise against crossing the Elbe, until his very death, on 28 April 1813 at Bünzlau (Bolesławiec). Even the most ardent Russian patriots, such as his Minister of the Interior Admiral Shishkov and the Archimandrite Filaret, were against Alexander’s proposed liberation of Europe. The consensus was that Russia should help herself to East Prussia and much of Poland, providing herself with some territorial gain and a defensible western border, and leave it at that. But Alexander ignored them.⁸

When the Russian armies did advance, Alexander put Stein in charge of administering German territory in their rear, and he went to work setting up not only organs of local administration, but representative bodies as well. He recruited volunteers, called up reservists, formed a new militia, the Landwehr, to be supported by a home defence force, the Landsturm, all in the name of the King of Prussia but without his knowledge, let alone his authority.

Although Alexander’s behaviour encouraged Stein in the belief that he was going to be able to put into effect his dream of a united Germany, the Tsar stopped short of endorsing it. He wished to be the healer of past ills and the bringer of happiness to the Germans as well as the Poles, and indeed to all the inhabitants of the Continent. But while he enjoyed being the anticipated saviour, he had no fixed programme. He also needed to keep his options open. Nevertheless, the expectations he aroused introduced unaccountable new elements into what was already a volatile situation.

The first obliged to confront these was King Frederick William of Prussia, and he was a worried man in those early months of 1813. ‘Make use of the authority granted you by God to break the chains of your people!’ Stein exhorted him from St Petersburg at the end of December 1812. ‘May its blood no longer be spilt on behalf of the enemy of humanity.’ But the Prussian King was not a born hero.⁹

His innate weakness undermined the advantages of a kindly and God-fearing nature, and made him suspicious as he clung to power, while his sense of failure nourished a false pride and a mean streak. He had been forced to give up half of his kingdom only ten years after acceding to it, and had been gratuitously humiliated by Napoleon. The knowledge that everyone compared him with his famous predecessor and great-uncle Frederick the Great only compounded this sense of failure. The one light in his life had been his Queen, the beautiful and universally admired Louise, to whom he had been attached by a true and mutual love. But she had died in 1810. He hung on to the remains of his realm, seeing in a close association with Napoleon the only means of survival.

General Yorck’s defection from the French ranks raised the terrifying possibility of French retaliation. Frederick William therefore loudly denounced it as an act of mutiny and made great show of standing by his alliance with Napoleon. But his ally was far away in Paris mustering a new army, the Russians were flooding into his kingdom from the east, and public opinion was against him.

Frederick William should have had every reason to welcome the approach of the Russians. Back in 1805 when they had met for the first time in Berlin, he and Alexander had sworn eternal friendship at midnight over the tomb of Frederick the Great. That friendship had been only slightly marred by Frederick William’s forced contribution of troops to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the Prussian King knew that he had the sympathy of Alexander. Yet he viewed the approach of the Russian armies with misgivings and even fear.

Alexander’s appointment of Stein was, considering their past relationship, almost an insult. Stein’s disregard for Frederick William’s authority as he set about administering East Prussia was an open affront. It might signify that Alexander was preparing to detach that province from the Prussian kingdom. Stein’s calls for a pan-German war of national liberation were even more alarming. He made no secret of his views that all German rulers who had allied with Napoleon were ‘cowards who sold the blood of their people in order to prolong their miserable existence’. The prospect of his being let loose on Germany aroused legitimate fears of social upheaval and even revolution, which Frederick William would be in no position to oppose.¹⁰

He was in an unenviable position. The strong French garrison ensconced in the fortress of Spandau paraded through Berlin daily, reminding him that there were more French than Prussian troops in the country. The probability was that Napoleon would be back in the spring with a fresh army, with which he would crush the Russians. Even if he did not hope for a Russian defeat, Frederick William ardently desired the stability which only such a return could guarantee. What he dreaded above all was the possibility that Alexander and Napoleon might yet reach an accommodation, the principal victim of which would almost certainly be Prussia: an obvious solution would have been for Russia to take East Prussia and all Polish lands up to the Vistula as the price for continued French control of Germany.

Frederick William calculated that if he could negotiate better terms with Napoleon, he would be in a position to reassert his authority, control the hotheads in his dominions and face Russia on more level terms. It was, of necessity, the lesser of two evils. ‘By allying with France, the least that could be expected was a further degree of ruin for the kingdom, which would inevitably become the theatre of the war,’ wrote the Prussian chancellor, Baron August von Hardenberg, ‘but if one were to enter into alliance with Russia, how could one dare to confront once again the implacable vengeance of Napoleon?’¹¹

Frederick William therefore sent Prince Hatzfeldt to Paris with the proposal of an active alliance against Russia, on condition that France paid the ninety million francs she owed Prussia and agreed to the restitution of some of her former territory in Poland. The alliance was to be sealed by the marriage of the Prussian Crown Prince to a princess of the house of Bonaparte. Failing to get a response, in February 1813 he made two further such proposals to Napoleon.¹²

But Frederick William could not procrastinate much longer. In the absence of any encouraging signal from Napoleon, and in view of the fact that over two-thirds of his army was by then operating in defiance of him, he made a move. On 22 January 1813 he left Berlin, with its French garrison and swarms of French officials, for Breslau (Wrocław), the capital of his province of Silesia. Although the French ambassador Saint-Marsan accompanied him, the King felt less under surveillance there. While making repeated professions of loyalty to Napoleon, he sanctioned the formation of a volunteer corps of Jägers and the call-up of all men aged between twenty and thirty-four, ostensibly in order to be in a position to offer his ally Napoleon fresh troops in the spring.

On 9 February he sent Colonel Knesebeck to Alexander’s headquarters at Kalisch (Kalisz) to seek assurances that, provided he did not take Napoleon’s side in the forthcoming conflict, Prussia was not going to be pushed westwards and turned into some kind of buffer state. Alexander was not best pleased by Frederick William’s envoy. Knesebeck asked the Tsar to dismiss Stein and to promise that he would hand over Prussia’s old Polish provinces, incorporated into the grand duchy of Warsaw in 1807, which were now under Russian occupation. Alexander took this approach as an expression of a lack of faith in his magnanimity. Ignoring Knesebeck, he despatched Stein to Breslau with a letter to Frederick William and the draft of a treaty of alliance between them. Stein’s arrival on 25 February was most unwelcome to the King.

Time was running out, as the Russian armies covered ever greater areas of his kingdom, and the German patriots who marched with them incited his subjects to rise and fight regardless of their King. On 19 February Fichte had ended a lecture he was giving at the university in Berlin with the words: ‘This course will be suspended until the close of the campaign, when we will resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death.’ Young men from all over Germany flocked to join a Freikorps under Adolf von Lützow, dedicated to the liberation of Germany. A wave of excitement rippled across the country. ‘German spirit, German courage raised hopes of better days,’ wrote the patriotic salonière Caroline Pichler, noting that the voices of young men had a fresh, warlike ring.¹³

Frederick William was cornered, and on 27 February he signed the treaty brought by Stein. It was ratified and dated at Kalisch on 1 March. Frederick William set to work raising troops and, as a token of reconciliation with his wayward army, founded the Order of the Iron Cross. Two weeks later Alexander joined Frederick William at Breslau, and on 16 March Prussia declared war on France. Alexander and Frederick William were, for better or worse, allies.

The alliance placed Frederick William in a subservient position. The one promise that he had extracted from Alexander was that in a secret article of the treaty he solemnly undertook ‘not to lay down arms as long as Prussia will not be reconstituted in statistical, geographical and financial proportions equal to those she had before’ 1806. Since Alexander was already in possession of all the territory Prussia had lost then, Prussia could only wait for him to either give it back, which seemed unlikely, or to use his power to obtain a comparable tranche of land for her from future conquests elsewhere in Germany. The word used, ‘equivalents’, was harmless enough, but it left unanswered the question of where they were to be found, and who was to be dispossessed in order to provide them – every piece of land belonged to somebody.¹⁴

While people all over Europe who had grown tired of Napoleonic dominance saw Alexander as a liberator, few appreciated that he had assumed a right to play the decisive role in the future arrangement of Europe. It was not merely a question of his having triumphed over Napoleon. Over the past few years he had come to view his struggle with the French Emperor not only as a personal contest, or as a clash between two empires, but as a veritable Armageddon between good and evil.

The Tsar’s idealism coupled with his political disappointments and humiliations on the battlefield had led him towards mysticism. His close friends included followers of Saint-Martin, Swedenborg and Lavater, and he was conversant with the literature of mysticism and with German pietism. As he watched his country being invaded and ravaged in 1812, he had sought solace in resignation to the will of God, and when the fortunes of war swung back in his favour he saw it as a manifestation of that will. From there it was but a short step to seeing himself as its instrument. He interpreted the suffering his country and its people had endured over the previous year as a purifying preparatory ordeal, and saw in it a kind of moral capital that gave him an authority superior to that of any of the other monarchs of Europe.

Like Stein and many German patriots, he had come to see the war as a crusade, not so much against France as against what France stood for – revolution, moral depravity and the usurpation of power. It was this last, Napoleon’s almost careless trampling of the ancient rights of other monarchs and his brazen use of force to install and dismiss sovereigns, that offended most. As he prepared to embark on the next stage of his crusade, the liberation of Germany from the usurper, Alexander called on her legitimate princes to join it.

A proclamation issued on his behalf by Field Marshal Kutuzov stressed that the armies of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia were entering Germany with the sole aim of liberating her people and their princes and restoring to them their ‘imprescriptible rights’. ‘May every German worthy of the name join us with vigour and promptitude,’ it continued. ‘Let everyone, whether Prince or noble or from the ranks of the people, support with their wealth and their blood, with their body and their life, the liberating intentions of Russia and Prussia.’

The proclamation announced that the two monarchs had decreed the dissolution of the Rheinbund and intended to replace it with something modelled on ‘the ancient spirit of the German People’. And it contained a barely veiled threat to any who would not join them. ‘Their Majesties therefore demand a faithful and complete cooperation, particularly from each German Prince, and are pleased to hope in advance that there will not be found one among them who, wishing to betray the cause of Germany, will thereby deserve to be destroyed by the force of public opinion and by the power of the arms taken up so justly by them.’¹⁵

The convention signed by Russia and Prussia at Breslau on 19 March 1813 was more businesslike and precise. It stipulated that all ‘liberated’ territory would be divided into five districts and placed in the hands of a Central Administrative Council directed by Stein, which would take over the business of collecting taxes, marshalling resources and raising troops. It also restated that all the German rulers would be invited to join the cause, and made it clear that ‘any Prince who does not answer this call within a specified period will be threatened with the loss of his state’.¹⁶

It was a curious way to proclaim a crusade for legitimacy against the usurper, and Frederick William’s chancellor, Hardenberg, for one, was afraid that ‘this appeal to the passions of the day, even to democratic ideas, so unexpected on the lips of two absolute monarchs, could lead to grave problems in the future’. That was to prove something of an understatement. The two monarchs had in effect adopted the language of the French Revolution and the methods of Napoleon, thereby undermining their own credibility and robbing themselves of the only weapons they would be able to use against the unwonted passions they were arousing.¹⁷

3 The Peacemakers

Nobody was more alarmed by the new alliance between Russia and Prussia than the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Klemens Wenceslas Lothar von Metternich, and no power stood to lose more by radical developments in Germany than Austria. She was, in a different way from Prussia, possibly the most vulnerable political unit in Europe.

Her sovereign had been crowned in 1792 as the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Besides this prestigious but empty role, he had inherited the huge antiquated realm of the house of Habsburg, an accretion of centuries of conquest, diplomacy and dynastic marriage. It was not long before he had to start ceding outlying provinces of this to Revolutionary France – the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), Lombardy and the left bank of the Rhine in 1797; Venice and Illyria, as well as the Tyrol, given to France’s ally Bavaria, in 1805. The Holy Roman Empire itself was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, and its sovereign became Emperor Francis I of Austria.

In 1809 an ill-judged attempt to recover some of his provinces while Napoleon was busy fighting in Spain cost him Salzburg, the remains of his possessions along the Adriatic and part of his Polish provinces. He was also forced to seal the ensuing peace by giving Napoleon his favourite daughter Marie-Louise in marriage. He was then obliged to participate in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 with a 30,000-strong Austrian auxiliary corps under Prince Schwarzenberg. He was still, at the beginning of 1813, an ally of France.

Habsburg losses, 1792–1810

While both Francis and Metternich were eager to disengage Austria from this alliance and to see French troops and influence excluded from Germany, they also had much to fear from change of any kind. Francis’s much-reduced empire was strategically vulnerable, as it was open to attack from every direction. It had no national base, and included large numbers of Slavs, Magyars and other nationalities. The only cement binding this heterogeneous mass together was the monarchy itself, the house of Habsburg. This made it ideologically vulnerable as well. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic legacy brought into question everything that made up the monarchy: the execution of the French King Louis XVI in 1793 insulted the divine status of kingship so central to the Habsburg state; the idea of the sovereignty of the people undermined the paternal absolutism on which the monarchy was predicated; and the concept of nationhood put in question its territorial basis.

In the circumstances, the proclamations issuing from Russian headquarters were a cause for alarm in Vienna. They threatened to arouse revolutionary and nationalist passions that could produce reverberations within the Habsburg dominions. More ominously, they suggested Alexander’s intention of exerting an influence over the affairs of Germany, which were of vital interest to Austria. At the same time, the proclamations had a similar effect on all the greater and lesser rulers of the region, and this was likely to make them turn to Austria for protection and make common cause with her against Russia in determining the future of Germany.

Metternich believed that a durable peace could only be achieved if the centre of Europe could be rid of the threat of foreign domination and placed under the twin protection of Prussia and Austria. While this required the exclusion of both French and Russian influence from Germany, it also required their preservation as checks on each other’s ambitions. Although he and his country were in an extremely dangerous position, he set out to engineer just such a peace. He did not believe the task to be beyond him.

The Austrian Foreign Minister’s most striking characteristic was his vanity. In the words of the eminent nineteenth-century historian Albert Sorel, ‘Metternich was in his own opinion the light of the world, and he blinded himself with the rays reflected in the mirror he held up continuously before his eyes. There was in him a chronic hypertrophy of the ego which developed relentlessly.’ He was in every sense the centre of his own universe. He would write endlessly about what he had thought, written and done, pointing out, sometimes only for his own benefit, how brilliantly these thoughts, writings and doings reflected on him. This egotism was buttressed by a monumental complacency that was proof against all experience.¹

Metternich was hard-working, honest and cultivated, and not devoid of humour, though of a somewhat ponderous kind. He was very cautious, with plenty of what he used to refer to as ‘tact’, by which he appeared to mean the ability never to get so far involved in anything as to be unable to pull out. This made him a perfect diplomat and a formidable negotiator. He knew how to make people believe they were getting their own way while he led them, at their own pace, towards the goal chosen by him. If not highly intelligent, he was very perceptive. Above all, he knew what he wanted, and pursued his aims with dogged consistency.

He was physically handsome, innately elegant and distinguished-looking, but slightly spoiled the effect by fussing too much over his hair and his clothes. Possessed of considerable charm, he was amiable and very sociable, which made him popular in any drawing room. He loved music, which often reduced him to tears. Though not exactly raffish, he had an eye for the ladies, and could be seductive when he wanted. During his lifetime he found his way into the bedrooms of some of the greatest beauties of the age. Having triumphed, he as often as not lapsed into the role of sentimental lover. He would pour out his feelings in mawkish letters and flaunt them in curiously adolescent ways – when he was having an affair with Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat in 1810 he ostentatiously wore a bracelet fashioned from her hair.

His career was meteoric. Born in the Rhineland in 1773, he studied at the universities of Strasbourg and Mainz. At Frankfurt in 1792, at the age of nineteen, he witnessed the coronation of Francis II as Holy Roman Emperor, an event that left a lasting impression. After brief trips to Vienna and London he married Leonore Kaunitz, the daughter of Maria-Theresa’s renowned chancellor, and in 1801 took up his first diplomatic post, as the Emperor’s minister to the Saxon court in Dresden.

From there he was sent as ambassador to Berlin, where he negotiated the treaty between Austria, Russia and Prussia in 1805, the foundation of the Third Coalition. When that had been defeated he was sent, at Napoleon’s request, to Paris as Austria’s ambassador. When war broke out between the two countries in 1809 he was first held hostage in Paris and then given the task of negotiating the peace, which included arranging the marriage of Marie-Louise to Napoleon. That same year he was made Austrian Foreign Minister, a post which he was to hold for the next thirty-nine years.

Metternich was in every sense a product of the ancien régime, believing in a natural order of things, based on established religion, monarchy and a defined hierarchy. He viewed any change as potentially revolutionary, and feared the middle classes, as they tended to nourish aspirations which they could not satisfy without displacing others or changing the rules and destroying existing institutions. The French Revolution he saw as the greatest catastrophe to afflict Europe, and he had a natural tendency to despise Napoleon as its product. Yet he admired him for his achievements and, more importantly, valued the fact that he was an effective source of authority who had contained the forces of chaos in France and might – if only he could be contained himself – be a useful partner in the preservation of the ‘natural order’ in Europe. Indeed, he rated Napoleon higher on this scale of usefulness than he did many legitimate monarchs.

‘The world is lost,’ Metternich had written to his friend Friedrich von Gentz back in 1806, after Napoleon had abolished the Holy Roman Empire. He could barely disguise his horror at the Frenchman’s doings and his abhorrence of his whole ‘system’. At the same time he came to appreciate the usefulness of the Rheinbund, with which Napoleon had replaced the Holy Roman Empire, as a basis for the emergence of a more independent Germany. And he did not subscribe to the view that Napoleon must be got rid of at any cost.²

Metternich hoped that the disasters of the Russian campaign would have sobered Napoleon enough for him to realise that his best option was to abandon his dream of a pan-European French Empire and make peace as soon as possible – a peace that Metternich would broker, with attendant advantages to Austria. In order to achieve this, and to keep his options open, he had to somehow extricate Austria from her alliance with France and adopt ‘a system of active neutrality’.³

Metternich feared the formation of a new coalition against France, as he foresaw that Russia would be its driving force and therefore its leader; and what he feared even more than a restoration of French hegemony over Europe was its replacement by a Russian one. At the same time, he realised that if Russia and France did come to negotiate directly, they might well end up dividing Europe between them, cutting Austria out of the deal.

In December 1812, through Bubna, he offered Napoleon Austria’s good services in helping France make peace with Russia. He held out the vision of a strong France retaining many of the gains she had made since 1792, a neutralised Germany watched over jointly by France and Austria, with Russia and Prussia held in check in the east. The future of French conquests in Italy was left vague, as Austria and France could settle that question between themselves at a later date.

Although Napoleon dismissed Bubna’s proposals with bluster about his intention to march out in the spring and beat his enemies into submission, Metternich did not despair of bringing him round. At the same time, he began to make preparations for all eventualities. The Treaty of Schönbrunn, which he had brokered himself between France and Austria in 1809, had limited the size of the Austrian army to 150,000. But, assuming that Austria would continue as his ally and expecting to need a larger auxiliary corps soon, Napoleon now encouraged its increase, and Metternich seized the opportunity to order rapid mobilisation of all available forces. He also continued to deepen his dialogue with Russia and other powers.

Metternich knew that Napoleon’s ultimate aim was a satisfactory settlement with Britain, and that without one no peace he made with any other powers could be considered final. He shared the opinion, common throughout Europe, that Britain was a self-interested power of marginal importance on the Continent, and he could not disguise a certain exasperation with her apparent arrogance, but he felt she must be brought into the proceedings in the interests of all. In February 1813 he sent an unofficial envoy, Count Wessenberg, to London to sound out the British cabinet on whether it would agree to enter into negotiations under Austrian mediation.⁴

The mission was doomed to failure. Since Marie-Louise’s marriage to Napoleon, the view from London was that Austria was a close ally of France and therefore not worth keeping up even unofficial links with. In that year the Foreign Office had stopped paying Friedrich von Gentz, one of its most reliable informants in Austria since 1802. Under the circumstances, the arrival of Wessenberg was seen in London as some kind of intrigue. In matters of foreign policy, the British cabinet was beset by outdated prejudices.⁵

The eighteenth-century view of France as a monstrous and diabolical arch-enemy bent on the destruction of England still prevailed. Another inherited perception was that Britain’s natural allies were Russia, Prussia and Sweden. This was based on the notion that Russia was, like Britain, an ‘unselfish’ power as far as Europe was concerned, and that there were no possible grounds for conflict between the two; that Sweden’s interests lay in making common cause with Britain; and that as a northern Protestant power and an erstwhile enemy of France, Prussia must be a sympathetic ally of Britain.

In point of fact, Russia resented Britain’s supremacy at sea and foresaw conflict of interest not only over the Balkans and Constantinople, but also in the Mediterranean and, more far-sightedly, over southern Asia. One of the reasons many within the Russian military and political establishment were unwilling to pursue the Grande Armée beyond Russia’s frontiers and bring about the total defeat of France was that they suspected Britain would end up as the main beneficiary. These considerations were backed up by economic rivalry and widespread ill-will stemming from a belief that Britain’s aggressive trading practices constituted an obstacle to the development of the Russian economy.

So while Britain saw Russia as a natural ally, Russia saw Britain as a rival. Her repeated offers to mediate a peace settlement between Britain and the United States were thinly-disguised attempts to shore up the position of the latter, particularly as a naval power that could act as a counterbalance to Britain on the seas, and in the process put in question Britain’s cherished ‘maritime rights’. And while Russia opened her ports to all when she broke away from Napoleon’s Continental System, she imposed cripplingly high duties on British traders.⁶

Sweden had not shown herself a reliable ally at any stage in the past two decades, and although her ships and ports did flout the Continental System and continued to trade with Britain, she had, in 1810, opportunistically elected the Napoleonic Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as Crown Prince and effective ruler. Prussia too had played a disappointing role. She had fought alongside the French more often than against them, and had perfidiously helped herself to Hanover, a possession of Britain’s royal house.

In 1812 Britain acquired a new Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. But he was not the man to take a different view or alter policy drastically. He had been born plain Robert Stewart, the son of an Ulster landowner of Scottish Presbyterian stock. His father had become a member of the Dublin Parliament, married well (twice) and made the most of his connections, becoming Baron Londonderry in 1789, Viscount Castlereagh in 1795, Earl of Londonderry in 1796, and would progress to Marquess of Londonderry in 1816.

Young Robert Stewart, who was born in the same year as Napoleon, was prone to all the enthusiasms of his age. He admired the American rebels who had thrown off English rule, he sympathised with the French Revolution, and entered Irish politics as an enthusiastic patriot, drinking toasts to ‘the Gallic Constitution’, to ‘the People’, and even on one occasion to ‘the rope that shall hang the King’. But trips to France and Belgium in 1792 and 1793 dampened his enthusiasm for things revolutionary, and as he grew up the dour pragmatism of his paternal forebears began to assert itself over the romantic attitudes derived from his aristocratic mother’s.

In 1796 he not only inherited the title of Viscount Castlereagh, he also took command of five hundred men to oppose a threatened French landing at Bantry Bay which meant to liberate Ireland from the English yoke. Two years later, in 1798, he played an active part in suppressing the Irish rebellion, and he was one of the most determined architects of the Union with England of 1801, making liberal use of bribery in order to achieve it. He had betrayed all the fancies of his youth in favour of law and order, which he had come to see as the greatest benefit in public life. This was perhaps not surprising, as by now he had plenty to protect. In 1802 he was nominated President of the Board of Control of the East India Company, and in 1805 he became Secretary of State for War in William Pitt’s cabinet. He had arrived at the very heart of the British political establishment.

But it would be wrong to see Castlereagh’s change of heart as a self-interested volte-face. It stemmed from his acceptance of Pitt’s conviction that illegitimate revolution could never bring the kind of stability necessary for the development of civil society, and was reinforced by the common sense that came with age. Nor did it come without a struggle. There can be little doubt that Castlereagh worked hard at reining in the impetuous side of his nature, which occasionally revealed itself in heated words and, most spectacularly, in his challenging George Canning to a duel in 1809 over their political differences.

By his mid-thirties he had become a paragon of middle-class values. He was happily married, abstemious and ordered in his habits, drinking little and rising early, never happier than when he could leave London to spend time on his farm at Cray in Kent, where he indulged his love of gardening and animal husbandry. He enjoyed the company of children. He was kind to servants and generous to the poor. He was industrious and conscientious in his work. He took his ease with books and indulged himself with music, which he loved, playing the cello and singing whenever the opportunity presented itself.

His tenure at the War Office, which came to an end in 1809, had not been deemed a success. His one achievement was to bend rules in order to have General Arthur Wellesley appointed to command the expeditionary force being sent to the Iberian peninsula in 1808. But its benefits did not become apparent until a few years later when, as Lord Wellington, Wellesley won the first decisive British victories over the French. In 1812 Castlereagh became Foreign Secretary, a post altogether better suited to his talents.

Castlereagh was a very able man. He could grasp the complexities of a problem quickly, along with its possible ramifications, and he could write it up in clear, elegant prose. But he was not an original thinker. He knew nothing of European affairs, and lacked the imagination to see what was happening on the Continent. He had imbibed his views on foreign policy from his hero Pitt, and he would remain faithful to them.

When he took over at the Foreign Office Britain was entirely isolated, with no influence on the European mainland. His first actions were therefore aimed at finding allies on the Continent and building up a coalition against Napoleon. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812 played into his hands, and in July of that year Castlereagh concluded a treaty of alliance with Russia which bound the two countries to help each other in their attempts to bring about the defeat of France.

This was of little comfort to Russia, whose armies were fleeing before the triumphant Grande Armée, and who had to face up to the possibility of other enemies seizing the opportunity to recover lost lands. One such was Turkey, with whom Russia made a hurried peace. Another was Sweden, from which she had taken Finland only three years before, and which would almost certainly wish to recover it. Had Sweden invaded at that moment, Russia’s defences would probably have collapsed entirely.

Tsar Alexander opened negotiations with Bernadotte and arranged a personal meeting, at Åbo. In the course of the discussions Alexander managed to convince Bernadotte to let Russia keep Finland, in return for which he would help Sweden take Norway from Denmark, an ally of France. He also undertook to persuade Britain to give Sweden one of the colonies she had taken from France. He did everything to charm the renegade French Marshal, and in order to seal their entente he threw out another piece of bait, the prospect of Bernadotte’s ascending the throne of France once Napoleon had been defeated.

Shortly after, Castlereagh opened negotiations with Sweden, which culminated in the Treaty of Stockholm, signed on 3 March 1813. The terms were extraordinarily generous to Sweden. Britain undertook to assist her in taking possession of Norway, with military support if the King of Denmark were to prove recalcitrant, to cede her the former French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, and to pay her the sum of £1 million, in return for which Sweden promised to field 30,000 men against Napoleon.⁷

News of the signature of the Treaty of Kalisch between Russia and Prussia on 1 March 1813 was greeted with joy in London, but Castlereagh was less than thrilled. Britain had not been consulted on the subject of the projected treaty, which suggested that Russia felt she could act independently of her British ally. It also meant that Castlereagh had no idea what secret clauses the treaty might contain. And the fact that Britain, Russia, Sweden and Prussia were now aligned against France did not in itself amount to a coalition. Even were that so, experience taught that coalitions were vulnerable to the slightest reversal of fortune.

The first coalition against France had come together in 1793. It combined Austria, Russia, Prussia, Spain and a number of lesser powers. This formidable alliance proved ineffectual when faced with the élan of France’s revolutionary armies, and it fell apart in 1796. A second coalition, consisting of Britain, Russia, Austria and Turkey, was cobbled together in 1799, but this disintegrated after the French victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden. A third, painstakingly constructed by Castlereagh’s mentor William Pitt in 1805, combined Austria, Russia, Sweden and Prussia with Britain, but this too was shattered by Napoleon’s victories at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. The one allied victory, Trafalgar, had failed to affect the outcome.

By 1807, when he signed a far-reaching alliance with Russia, Napoleon controlled virtually the whole of Continental Europe, making it impossible for Britain to play any part in its affairs, except in Portugal, where a small expeditionary force hung on precariously. Although she was supreme on the seas, much of the advantage this gave her was negated by a tariff war with France. Napoleon’s Continental System excluded the British from trading with any part of Europe, and eventually led to the outbreak of war between Britain and the United States of America.

As he contemplated the possibility of the birth of a new coalition in the spring of 1813, Castlereagh was acutely aware of both the need to direct it and the lack of means at his disposal. Britain’s military capabilities were already stretched to breaking point by the double commitment of fighting one war with France in Spain and another with the United States of America across the Atlantic, so all he could contribute was money. And money could not buy sufficient influence to impose unity on a diverse set of allies.

Britain had always been concerned first and foremost with naval matters, and it was only when the armies of Revolutionary France advanced into the Austrian Netherlands in 1792 and threatened to take the estuary of the river Scheldt that a hitherto indifferent Britain felt impelled to go to war. The Scheldt estuary and the port of Antwerp had traditionally been viewed in Whitehall as the ideal base for an invasion of England, and the very thought of their falling into French hands was the stuff of nightmare. Provided the entire Netherlands could be kept in friendly or neutral hands, Britain had no interest in what form of government France saddled herself with. This divided Britain from her allies in the first coalition, who saw it as more of a monarchical crusade against revolution. In time, Britain’s views on the subject of France converged with those of her Continental allies, yet significant differences remained. And any coalition was vulnerable to underlying resentments and a distrust based on mutual incomprehension of each other’s strategic imperatives.

As an island and a sea power with no land army to speak of, Britain could only participate significantly in the fighting on the Continent through subsidies, which her allies used in order to raise and equip armies. Her naval victories over the French, even when they were on the scale of the battles of the Nile or Trafalgar, made no palpable difference to the situation on the European mainland. It therefore appeared that Britain was not pulling her weight or making the same sacrifices as her allies – the subsidies she contributed were, in their view, more than covered by the wealth of the French and Dutch colonies that fell into British hands and the riches confiscated on the high seas by her navy.

For a Continental power, a battle won brought no such advantages, while a battle lost often entailed the ravaging of its own territory and the necessity to sue for peace on any terms. The British, safe behind their watery defences, could not understand this predicament. They had no experience of foreign invasion and occupation, and bemoaned their allies’ lamentable tendency to sue for peace at the first setback. They tended to look upon any state that had been forced to do so as an enemy. Having no first-hand experience of fighting against Napoleon, the British were inclined to attribute his victories to the failings of their allies’ armies and the pusillanimity of their governments. This seemed to be borne out when the one Continental power as strategically invulnerable as Britain, Russia, submitted to Napoleon in 1807.

In the event, Russia had only done so because her Austrian ally had been defeated and forced to sue for peace, her Prussian ally had been shattered and reduced to nothing, and her British one was incapable of sending a single regiment to assist her. But Castlereagh, like Pitt before him, could not imagine what it was like to be left isolated facing a victorious Napoleon across a corpse-strewn battlefield. All he knew was that coalitions tended to fall apart, and he ascribed this principally to their not having a clearly defined purpose and a mechanism to ensure that all parties stuck to it until it was achieved.

As he watched events unfold on the Continent in the spring of 1813, Castlereagh determined that he must somehow ensure that the allies in this incipient coalition would make war together and peace together, on terms agreed mutually and properly defined. That was not going to be easy.

Britain’s diplomats had been excluded from a large part of the Continent for the past fifteen years and from the rest of it for the past three or four, so there was a dearth of knowledge in London as to what was going on in various countries and who the important players were. There was a corresponding lack of experienced diplomats, just at the moment when Castlereagh needed them. To Russia he had sent Lord Cathcart, an old soldier with scant diplomatic experience. To Prussian headquarters he now despatched his own half-brother, Sir Charles Stewart, another soldier, and not a particularly distinguished one at that. Stewart was thirty-five years old. He had served on Wellington’s staff in the peninsula, where he had displayed impetuous courage but none of the qualities requisite for a command – ‘A most gallant fellow, but perfectly mad,’ in the words of a brother officer. Stewart would probably have approved of that description. ‘My schemes are those of a Hussar at the Outposts,’ he wrote to the painter Thomas Lawrence before taking up his first diplomatic post. ‘Very short, very decided, and very prompt.’⁸

Castlereagh’s instructions to these two dealt mainly with the extent of the subsidies which Britain was to contribute to the allied cause. But they also sketched out the basis of a final settlement towards which they were to work, and expressed the desire to bring about a closer union that would bind the allies to achieving those goals – he did not want this coalition disintegrating like the others, and he did not want the allies making a separate peace once they had achieved their own objectives, leaving Britain out in the cold. He already saw himself in the role of guiding spirit of this budding coalition, and had ambitious plans for it. But he did not as yet contemplate extending it to embrace Austria, and his mistrust of Metternich was so great that he would not even listen to what the Austrian envoy Wessenberg had to say.

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