The Age of Elegance (31 page)

In this his aims were akin to those of the British Foreign Secretary. "It is not the business of England," Castlereagh wrote, "to collect trophies but to restore Europe to peaceful habits." For this he w^s prepared to sacrifice almost everything: revenge for wrongs done, the victors' spoils,
¹
the logic of abstract justice, the isolation so dear to some of his countrymen and the crusading liberalism so dear to others. His objective was a system in which international differences could be settled without bloodshed. "He cared for nationality not at all," wrote his disciple, Lord Salisbury, "for the theoretic perfection of political institutions very little, for the realities of freedom a great deal, and for the peace and social order and freedom from the manifold curses of disturbance which can alone give to the humbler masses of mankind any chance of tasting their scanty share of human joys— for the sake of this he was ready to forgo all the rest."

It was not that Castlereagh was indifferent to his country's interests. Like his master, Pitt, he was a patriot. But, like Pitt, he

¹
"It will be hard," wrote his henchman, Edward Cooke, "if France is to pay nothing for the destruction of Europe and we are to pay for saving it." Castlereagh's mind rose above such considerations: his plea was for "mildness and indulgence even to offending States." See Webster,
'Castlereagh,
I, 207-8, 273-4.

believed that England's first interest was the peace and stability of Europe. He fought strenuously to maintain her rights of search at sea, and insisted on placing outside the reach of future French
aggression
the naval base of Antwerp which would otherwise have entailed the charge of a perpetual war establishment. He sought this by the creation of a new Middle Power, a union of Holland and Belgium under the House of Orange. To give it stability he not only subsidised it from an overburdened British Treasury, but restored to it Java and the former Dutch East Indies—prizes ardently coveted by British traders.
¹
And for the same end he restored to France and her former satellites the greater part of England's overseas conquests— the rewards of her many sacrifices.

Yet the conquests which Britain retained enabled her to play a wider part than ever before in guiding the world's destinies and preserving peace. Little thought of by Continental statesmen, who regarded a few square miles in Hanover as more important than a thousand in Canada or the Antipodes, they not only brought wealth and power to Britain but enabled her to insulate and localise every war for a hundred years. St. Lucia, Tobago, Trinidad, Demerara, Essequibo and Guiana on the western shores of the Atlantic, Mauritius and Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, the Cape of Good Hope at the junction of the two oceans, Malta and the Ionian Islands Protectorate in the Mediterranean, joined to her existing possessions, gave to her fleets an untrammelled command of the world's seaways. So long as she enjoyed this, it was impossible for any military power to conquer the world or even, while her statesmen and people maintained a sufficient deterrent strength, to embroil it. For pacific Britain's Navy made the waters that divided the land-masses of the earth corridors of peace.

It did more. In retaining a part of the gains won for her by Nelson and his contemporaries, Britain unconsciously signposted the human future. Alone in her consistent refusal to accept the Revolutionary thesis at the cannon's mouth, she yet secured and opened channels along which its ideas could flow. Her trans-oceanic possessions, unimportant as they seemed to European despots, were to witness, under her tolerant tutelage, the peaceful application of the very principles against whose armed enforcement she had fought. Even

¹
And by British humanitarians too. It was one of Raffles' dreams to emancipate the Malays from the unsympathetic and, as he deemed, degrading rule of the Dutch
.

her claim to the "Freedom of the Seas"—
anglice,
the right of search of neutral merchantmen in time of war—was to contribute to the expansion of the democratic belief. No one resented that claim more bitterly than the republicans of the United States who in 1812 had gone to war to challenge it. Yet it was the Royal Navy's grip on the Atlantic that enabled the infant Republic to consolidate a new libertarian order in the Western Hemisphere and to develop its immense resources without interference from the Old World. Nor was this service of England to her offspring entirely unintentional. At the very moment that victory in Europe freed her fleets and armies for major operations beyond the Atlantic, she showed her goodwill by seeking a settlement with the young democracy of the West. In the Treaty of Ghent she acknowledged its full territorial integrity in return only for a similar recognition of Canada's
¹
—another potential democracy of poor men founded on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.

In like spirit England, lighted by the flame of Wilberforce's conscience, strove to secure the universal abolition of the Slave Trade, sacrificing territory and money to her allies and even her enemies to establish this fundamental canon of human equality. To those who did not understand the law of her being, the abolition of the Slave Trade—from which so many of her individual traders had profited in the past—appeared only as the hobby-horse of a little coterie of humanitarian cranks. Yet it was fought for as strenuously by British statesmen in Paris and Vienna as by the "saints" of Clapham and Kensington Gore, and was supported by the entire public opinion of the country.
²
The repudiation by mankind of what Wilberforce described as the "traffic in the person of our fellow-creatures" was the one trophy which all Englishmen insisted their representatives should bring back from the Congress. On February 8th, 1815, before leaving Vienna, Castlereagh obtained a joint declaration, signed by the eight convening Powers, condemning the Trade as repugnant to the principles of civilisation and morality, and calling for its universal abolition at the earliest possible moment.

For with its free system and tradition of toleration England could

¹
The burning of the capital of Upper Canada in mid-winter by an undisciplined American army had led to the destruction of the uninhabited public buildings of Washington, though this retributory act—so stigmatised by a posterity which has forgotten its cause—was rightly deplored by many Englishmen, including the Prince Regent.

* "I believe," wrote Castlereagh, "there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it." Castlereagh, X, 73. See Webster,
Castlereagh,
I, 413-24.

not close the door on the human future. "It is impossible," wrote the conservative Castlereagh, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation." It was only his fear that the transition might be too sudden to ripen as yet "into anything likely to make the world better or happier," that caused him to mark time and align himself with the static Metternich. It was the essence of his country's politics that he could not commit her for long to such a policy. Already in Parliament and in the clubs and newspapers, English voices, though still only in a minority, were being raised in passionate protest against the settlement he had made. "Here we are," wrote Lord Byron, "retrograding to the full, stupid old system—balance of Europe—posing straws upon Kings' noses, instead of wringing them off." To him, as to other young Englishmen, the rulers of Austria, Russia and Prussia were "three stupid, legitimate old-dynasty boobies of regular-bred Sovereigns."
¹
Within a week of the Polish settlement the Leader of the Opposition was demanding that the Government should be arraigned for "public brigandage," while Sheridan, rousing himself from his vinous declension to the grave, spoke of crowned scoundrels cutting up Europe like carcass-butchers and England's conscience being silenced by the dirty bribe of a crown for Hanover. The transfer of Norway to Sweden, of the former Genoese Republic to Piedmont, of Saxons to Prussia and Poles to their former conquerors were all laid by British idealists at Castlereagh's door. So alarming did these parliamentary diatribes against him become that he had to hurry home in February to defend his policy in the Commons, leaving the Duke of Wellington to complete his work at Vienna.

With the general principles of a European settlement agreed between the Powers, the adjustment of frontiers was left to committees appointed by the convening States. The most important were the German Committee, and the Statistical Committee to ascertain the populations of the territories to be transferred. The former's duty was to draft a federal constitution to take the place of the defunct Holy Roman Empire and the French-controlled

¹
Just as when a male child was born, every woman in the house looked an inch higher
?
Lord Holland complained that, when a legitimate King was restored, every sprig of royalty in Europe became more insolent and insufferable.
Creevey Papers,
I, 206. See Moore,
Byron,
201, 216; Broughton, I, 206; Lord Coleridge, 243.

Confederations which had succeeded it. Consisting of representatives of Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Hanover—now elevated into a Kingdom—it was dominated from the start by t
he negative idealism of Mettern
ich
. Not wishing to unite Germany himself, he was determined that no one else should, neither a militarist Prussia nor a parliament of bourgeois doctrinaires—a class for which he had a high aristocratic disdain. He supported the separatist claims of the German sovereigns and ignored the rather heady patriotic fervour of their younger subjects. The Tugendbund had been well enough for recruiting a partisan army to overthrow Napoleon, but its windy aspirations could have no place in the Europe Metternich was seeking to restore. The Germany he loved was not the tribal Valhalla of nascent Teutonic legend, but the diversified and localised Christian polity of the Middle Ages, with princes and prelates in their castles and pious peasants toiling in the fields or chanting psalms as they rowed in Sabbath gala under the rocks of the Drachenfels. The wayside shrines and chapels which he loved to draw in the margin of his papers in committee were the symbols of that Germany.
¹
Unfortunately they were not the kind of symbols that guaranteed the bourgeoisie against the conquering, plundering armies of the French. For this, Prussian guns and bayonets were more appropriate.

The Committee's solution of a titular German Federal Diet composed of the representatives of seventeen loosely allied but completely independent sovereign States or groups, though it pleased the hereditary rulers, was a bitter disappointment to the young patriots who had taken arms to liberate their fatherland. It also disappointed the Prussian generals and bureaucrats, who had little use for intellectuals and visionaries but hoped to see Prussia the recruiting fulcrum of a centralised northern Germany. But it pleased England, whose ruler was a German sovereign and whose merchants required the pacification of their principal Continental market, and it was less displeasing to Talleyrand than a closer German union. Viewed as an essay in staying, if not putting back, the hand of time—the art in which Metternich excelled—it seemed an admirable expedient.

So, too, in Italy the old barriers, dynastic, military and economic, which divided Italian from Italian, were carefully re-erected by

¹
For a charming picture of this Germany as it still survived in 1814 see Stanley, 18
8: Brown
low, 139-40.

statesmen in powdered wigs and silk-covered calves who were now once more living—in their imaginations at least—in the mannered, candle-lit world of the eighteenth century. The music of an almost unceasing succession of balls, concerts,
tableaux vivants
and masques attended by princely delegates of every description and their lovely ladies—or other people's—was the
symphonie
fantastique
to which the
ancien regime
buried the still-born child of Italian nationalism. Sunk in dismal poverty, with flocks of famished sheep grazing off nettles in the Roman streets and verminous beggars swarming in every church and piazza, Italy with her beauty, sunshine and artistic, wealth was the mecca of European nations. All, esteeming her the cradle of their culture, felt a keen interest in making her conform to their purposes: Revolutionary France seeing her as a forcing-ground for cisalpine military republics, Britain as a market and an academy of taste for her wealthy dilettantes and sun-starved artists, Austria as a preserve for her solemn, well-meaning bureaucracy. Spain, which a century earlier had been the paramount Power in the peninsula, was no longer of importance; only in Naples, where a branch of the Spanish Bourbons still lingered, and in little Lucca did any link remain with the Iberian hegemony of the past.

When the young Bonaparte had crossed into Italy like another Caesar from Gaul, the ideal of Italian unity had seemed about to become a reality. But it had soon become clear that he regarded Italians like everyone else as persons to be exploited in the service of his destiny. He had fined, plundered and conscripted and, on occasion, shot them, with such vigour that their enthusiasm for him quickly waned. None the less, though the government of the French militarists was more oppressive than any that had gone before, it had shaken Italians out of their age-long apathy and subservience. For though Bonaparte might manure the Spanish sierras and Russian plains with their bodies, his very existence proved that the men of Italy could rule as well as cringe. Even the poorest began to feel the shame of seeing his country partitioned by alien princes; though Napoleon had carefully redivided the country between his jealous satraps, a new feeling of unity had been engendered, especially among die young. When the Germans rose against the French, many Englishmen believed that the Italians would follow suit; in the spring of 1814 the British Commander-in-Chief in Sicily, Lord William Bentinck, went so far as to proclaim a national rising. But, except for the hardy mountaineers of Piedmont, the Italians were a gentle race. They refused as yet to fight for their liberties.

It thus came about that with the fall of France, Italians, in Wordsworth's angry words, were "transferred to Austria, to the King of Sardinia and the rest of those vile tyrants."
¹
The hated
tedesci
re-occupied Lombardy, and transferred their patronage from the unreliable Murat to the exiled Bourbons on the understanding that when they returned to Naples they should look for guidance, not to London or Madrid, but to Vienna. The Austrian Emperor's daughter, Napoleon's grass-widow, received the Grand Duchy of Parma. Modena and Reggio went to an Austrian satellite; Tuscany returned to the mild rule of its former Dukes. Corsica remained French. The centre of the peninsula, including the capital, was restored to the Pope and the slothful, old-maidish despotism of the Roman priesthood. The extinguished republican oligarchies of Venice and Genoa, the only genuine Italian States of the recent past, were absorbed in Austria and Piedmont. Only in the mountainous north-west, where the House of Savoy ruled over martial Piedmont and Sardinia, was there a State which could be called wholly Italian.

There was one aspect of the Italian problem which everyone had forgotten. The diplomats overlooked, in their debates, the existence of the one great Italian of the age. While they had been talking and masquerading, the little Caesar at Elba kept a sharp eye on the Continent they were reshaping. His hope of a breach between them had been averted by Castlereagh; but Talleyrand's diplomatic victories in the drawing-room of Vienna had still to salve the vanity of defeated France. The wounds of her humiliation at the hands of her former victims were too deep: the spectacle of her inglorious Court could not be stomached by those who had so recently dictated to Europe. The possessors of national lands were scared by the foolish talk of the
emigres,
the State's creditors irritated by the petty economies of an empty Treasury, the Army angered by popinjays in white feathers and laced uniforms who barred the democratic road to promotion and slighted the pride of the veterans of Austerlitz and Jena. A few months before, Napoleon had been reviled as the cause of all France's defeats and sufferings. Now the old
moustache,
home in his native village, quaffed the ashes of the eagles and muttered bloodcurdling oaths against the fat
coquin
in the Tuileries and the foreigners who

¹
De Selincourt,
Middle Years,
650.