LITMIR.BIZ

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which he had refashioned in accordance with the spirit of the age into a Helvetic Republic, of which he was the Mediator. Following the battle of Leipzig, the head of the government, Landamann Reinhard, had called the Diet to Zürich. The Diet declared the country’s neutrality, without going so far as to recall the Swiss troops in Napoleon’s ranks. Unable to defend Switzerland and wishing to deny it to the allies, Napoleon withdrew his forces, renounced his role as Mediator and recognised Swiss neutrality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Alexander was inclined to continue the advance, but his ministers, particularly the Russian ones, were violently opposed to this course. On 6 November Admiral Shishkov presented him with a long memorandum

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