LITMIR.BIZ

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its discomforts. ‘What roads, my God!’ he wrote to Wilhelmina on 1 November. ‘I travelled along with 200 cannon, partly on horseback, partly on foot and partly in a carriage. I left in a carriage because it was pouring with rain. I was spilled, so I gave orders for my horses to follow and mounted the most reliable-looking one, but he collapsed, so I walked, and I fell.’ He was always chasing after Alexander, who insisted on playing the soldier rather than remaining at headquarters.¹⁹

      And if conditions were unfavourable to the conclusion of the ‘grand alliance’, the project itself betrayed Castlereagh’s ignorance of what was going on in Europe. Alexander, Metternich and Frederick William had far more important things on their minds than the question of whether or not to include Spain or Britain’s maritime rights in their treaties. They were more concerned at this juncture with what was happening in the crucial area of Germany, not in the Iberian peninsula or beyond the seas. It was what happened there that might split the coalition.

      In the course of September 1813, as it became increasingly likely that Napoleon would be in no position to defend them, most of the rulers within the Rheinbund began to look about nervously. The allied armies were drawing closer, and the stark choice that had faced Frederick William at the beginning of the year would soon be facing them. The prospects were anything but enticing.

      Alexander’s public image preceded the westward march of the allies, growing as it went, and all but the most pro-French public opinion hailed him from afar as a chivalrous liberator and divinely inspired righter of wrongs. But his advance was also accompanied by news of Stein’s activities, by a wave of subversive muttering and plotting amongst students, junior officers and malcontents of one sort or another, and by a shiver of hopeful truculence on the part of dispossessed imperial nobles who saw the possibility of revenge, all of which made the rulers who had made their accommodation with Napoleon highly apprehensive.

      Stein hoped to bring about the establishment of a strong unified German state on the back of a popular uprising fuelled by expectations of social reform as well as national rebirth. His wishful thinking was that a combination of Fichte’s lectures, Arndt’s poetry and Jahn’s gymnastics had produced a nation in the making ready to embrace this dream. His expectations on this score were unrealistic. But his agitation against ‘the thirty-six petty despots’, as he termed the Rheinbund princes, whom he saw as ‘ruinous for the civil liberty and moral fibre of the nation’, represented a very real challenge. The convention of 19 March, covering the administration of the occupied territories, had given Stein virtually unlimited powers, and he had established administrative organs answerable only to himself. As soon as he took control of liberated areas of Saxony he doubled the level of requisition imposed by Napoleon, introduced martial law and gave special powers to the police.²⁰

      Metternich had begun to view the Rheinbund as a useful structure that could be used to preserve Germany from Stein, which is why he dropped its dissolution from his demands to Napoleon during the Congress of Prague. Hardenberg, who viewed Stein’s doings with the same distaste as Metternich did, was nevertheless opposed to the preservation of the Rheinbund. He hoped to scoop as many frightened princes as possible into Prussia’s protective embrace, and repeatedly suggested to Metternich that they divide Germany along the river Main into a northern and a southern sphere in which they could impose their respective influence. But Metternich wished to preserve the integrity of Germany, and at the same time feared such an extension of Prussian and, by proxy, Russian power over it. As early as 5 April the Prussian minister at the court of Bavaria had tried to bully that power into joining the Russo-Prussian alliance, threatening dire consequences in the event of refusal. Bavaria’s immediate reaction had been to turn to Austria for protection, and Metternich had seized on the chance.²¹

      He began to negotiate not only with Bavaria. Through Gentz, he orchestrated a campaign in the German press to oppose Stein and to advocate some kind of federation which could accommodate the existing states and their rulers. Pragmatic as ever, he was even prepared to entertain the possibility of the survival as King of Westphalia of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, solely to keep that area out of Stein’s ambit.

      Alexander had also yielded to pragmatic considerations. After protests from Count Münster, the plenipotentiary of Britain’s Prince Regent for Hanover, he softened the original convention on the administration of liberated territories, thereby clipping Stein’s wings a little. It had dawned on him that the national revival Stein hoped for might not only create unstable conditions which would be difficult to control, but might even breed hostility to Russian influence in the future. Such influence could best be exerted through pressure applied discreetly to grateful German princes, and Alexander gradually began to see himself superseding Napoleon as their protector. This seemed particularly apt; through his Holstein-Gottorp grandmother, his Württemberg mother and his Baden wife, many of the German princes were close relatives, and he had begun to receive covert requests for protection. They assumed a certain urgency when two of his relatives, the Dukes of the two Mecklemburgs, who had been the first to desert Napoleon openly, confident that they would be welcomed with open arms, had been treated by Stein as conquered enemies, and had in consequence appealed to Metternich for protection. Stein was becoming a liability to Alexander. While he kept him in place as a useful bogeyman, he excluded him from what was developing into a straightforward scramble between Russia, Prussia and Austria for influence in Germany.

      These simplified family trees of the rulers of Russia, Austria, Württemberg and Baden only show the more important direct connections, and can therefore give only a very slight idea of the extraordinary degree to which all the rulers of central and eastern Europe were related by blood.

      The proclamation issued by Alexander and Frederick William in Kalisch had made clear that any German rulers who were still allies of Napoleon when their states were overrun by the allies would be likely to lose their thrones, leaving their territory free to be incorporated into some kind of new Germanic state of Stein’s or Alexander’s fancy. Metternich considered it essential to get all the princes of the Rheinbund to change sides and become allies of Austria before their states were overrun. This would not only prevent those states being made available to Stein, Prussia or Alexander, it would also have the pleasing effect of turning them into grateful clients, and therefore future supporters, of Austria.

      Metternich’s negotiations with the various princes had to be conducted in secret both by him, since they contravened Austria’s undertakings under the Treaty of Toeplitz not to enter into any talks with the enemy without mutual consultation, and by the princes, each of whom had a resident French minister looking over his shoulder. As their substance was betrayal, the negotiations were necessarily devious and unedifying.

      ‘My fate is bound to that of France, nothing could detach me from her; I will survive with her or perish with her, but I will never subscribe to any infamy,’ King Maximilian of Bavaria declared to the French minister at his court on 15 September, by which time negotiations had been going on with Austria for a couple of months and all essentials had been agreed. Although his own son the Crown Prince, most of the army and the majority of the population had been clamouring against the French for some time, Maximilian, who was a faithful ally of Napoleon and whose daughter was married to Napoleon’s stepson Prince Eugène, waited until the very last moment.²²

      Neither he nor any of the other princes was going to switch alliances without a reward, or at the very least a guarantee that they would not have to give up any of the gains they had made thanks to Napoleon. In the case of Bavaria, these were considerable. For one thing, her ruler, a mere Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, had been made a King by Napoleon in 1806. He had benefited from the process of mediatisation, acquiring a great deal of territory, and had done well out of the wars of 1805 and 1809 between France and Austria, relieving the latter of Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, the Inn and Hausrück districts, the Tyrol, Vorarlberg, Brixen, Trent and various smaller enclaves in Swabia.

      Metternich needed Bavaria. If Maximilian

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