LITMIR.BIZ

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October he suggested that he should himself be put in charge of promoting the project. He backed this up by declaring that Metternich had complete confidence in him, as did Nesselrode, who ‘though not very wise himself, has the most perfect contempt for Cathcart, and frequently expresses it’. And for good measure he added that Nesselrode had told him that ‘it is impossible to communicate with such an idiot’.²²

      Castlereagh’s frustration at his three envoys’ lack of progress shines through his frequent letters on the subject. But there was little they could do. The conditions of a rapid campaign in foul weather had defeated their efforts until now, and matters did not improve when allied headquarters came to rest in Frankfurt. Castlereagh had attempted to smooth Aberdeen’s ruffled feathers by telling him that he was now to play the most important role and to be ‘the labouring oar’ in the scheme. ‘If you succeed in placing the Key Stone in the arch which is to sustain us hereafter, you will not feel that your labour has been thrown away,’ he wrote. A couple of days after his arrival, Alexander invited Aberdeen to dine with himself and Nesselrode, but all that came of it was flattery of Aberdeen and complaints against Cathcart: the Russians were evidently trying to play the British ministers off against each other.²³

      On 23 November Stewart wrote to Castlereagh with the news that Prussia would be prepared to sign the ‘grand alliance’. Two days later Aberdeen proudly reported back that he had persuaded Metternich, who in turn promised to persuade Alexander of the necessity of adopting Castlereagh’s project, and three days after that he assured Castlereagh that ‘The Treaty of general Alliance will positively be made forthwith.’ But on 5 December Stewart wrote saying that Alexander had refused to sign, and four days later Nesselrode and Metternich told Aberdeen that they had not the slightest intention of doing so either.²⁴

      Failing to see why anyone could possibly object to signing such an alliance, Castlereagh was anxious. All three of his envoys were, in Stewart’s words, ‘down in the mouth’, and two of them wanted to come home. They were on worse terms than ever with each other, and out of their depth in the ocean of intrigue that had engulfed allied headquarters and submerged it deeper with every day it remained in Frankfurt. Their inability to show a united front undermined their position so far that the other ministers were treating them less and less seriously, referring to them dismissively as ‘the English Trinity’ or ‘the Three Englands’.

      Castlereagh was being disingenuous in his failure to understand why Metternich and Alexander did not wish to bind themselves by his proposed alliance. He himself was pursuing a policy dictated solely by British interests quite independently of them, in the Netherlands, where he was hoping to create a fait accompli. Through Aberdeen, he was paying out cash to assist the Dutch patriots who had raised the banner of revolt against the French on 15 November, and he was exasperated by Bernadotte, who launched a unilateral attack on Denmark instead of marching to their support, for which he had taken British subsidies. He meant the liberation to embrace Belgium, so he could have Antwerp and the Scheldt estuary well in hand.²⁵

      Not surprisingly, Castlereagh was alarmed at the report, sent in by Aberdeen at the end of November, of intelligence that the Russians were nurturing a plan to marry Alexander’s sister the Grand Duchess Catherine to the Emperor Francis’s brother Archduke Charles, and to place them on the Dutch throne. He was beginning to see conspiracy everywhere.²⁶

      Aberdeen tried to reassure him, gently chiding him on his ignorance: ‘my dear Castlereagh, with all your wisdom, judgment and experience, which are as great as possible, and which I respect sincerely, I think you have so much of the Englishman as not quite to be aware of the real value of Foreign modes of acting’.²⁷

      ‘The successes of the allies are beyond all belief,’ Metternich wrote to one of his diplomats on 19 November. ‘We are masters of the whole of Germany and of Italy soon as well.’ He shed his modesty and the use of the collective noun when writing to Wilhelmina. ‘It is all my work,’ he declared, ‘mine and mine alone.’ There was much truth in this assertion, as he had been the helmsman of the coalition over the past months and had prevented it from striking many a shoal.²⁸

      He had been particularly skilful in handling Alexander. ‘Throughout the military operations, I would spend the evenings with His Imperial Majesty,’ he later reminisced. ‘From 8 or 9 o’clock in the evenings until midnight, we would be quite alone, conversing with the greatest familiarity. We would speak of the most diverse subjects, of private matters as well as of the great moral or political questions of the day. We would exchange ideas on all these things with the greatest abandon, and this absence of any constraint lent a particular charm to this intercourse.’ Alexander had come to trust Metternich, as did Nesselrode, and as a result the Austrian Foreign Minister often did not bother to consult Hardenberg or Humboldt. A greater problem was that he began to take his ascendancy for granted. ‘The good Empr. is so infatuated with what he calls my way of seeing big that he does nothing without consulting me,’ he wrote to his wife on 1 December. Such hubris was alarming, and was about to lead Metternich into a major blunder.²⁹

      Despite the misgivings about crossing the Rhine and invading France itself, a plan for the next stage of the allied advance had been agreed on 19 November. Devised by Schwarzenberg, it reflected Metternich’s caution. The invasion was to be undertaken by three forces: in the north Blücher’s Prussians were to cross the Rhine between Mainz and Cologne and sweep into Lorraine; in the south the Austrians were to push Prince Eugène out of Italy, march over the Simplon and advance on Lyon; and in the centre Schwarzenberg with the main Austro-Russian forces was to cross into France between Mannheim and Bâle (Basel), occupy the Vosges and deploy on the plateau of Langres. Once those three objectives had been achieved, the allies would pause and take stock. It seemed unlikely that Napoleon would not have made peace by then – negotiations had been decided upon, and it was only the venue that still needed to be fixed.

      In order to shore up their own position in moral terms and further undermine Napoleon’s, the allies issued a declaration to the French people, on 1 December, to the effect that they were not making war on France, but only on French ‘preponderance’. ‘The allied Sovereigns desire that France should be great, strong and contented,’ it went on, and held out a powerful bribe, stating that they wanted her to be more extensive territorially than she had been before the Revolution.³⁰

      The allied plan involved marching through Swiss territory, which posed a nice political problem for the allies, since the Swiss had declared their neutrality. Alexander solemnly promised that the allies would respect this, and backed it up by declaring that he would regard any violation as a declaration of war on himself. Failing to appreciate the depth or the personal nature of this commitment, Metternich was about to do just that.

      The Swiss Confederation, as recognised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, had been an association of thirteen cantons and a number of smaller units, ruled variously by either absolute despots, local oligarchies or some form of democratic assembly. Their inherent differences and jealousies were exacerbated by religious divisions and the rival influences of neighbouring powers, particularly Austria and France.

      The French had invaded Switzerland in 1798. Geneva became part of France, and the Valtelline was later incorporated into the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy. The remainder became a Helvetic Republic consisting of twenty-three cantons and rationalised in the spirit of the age. Napoleon, who declared himself ‘Mediator’, suppressed the baillages, or feudal tribunals, liberated Vaud and Aargau from the dominance of Berne, and swept away a myriad medieval hangovers. Every citizen was made free and equal before the law. Although this delighted many, it upset local feeling by breaking age-old traditions.

      The old and formerly dominant cantons, headed by Berne, resented

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