When he came to the throne in 1801, Alexander had been determined to reform Russia according to the principles instilled in him by his tutor La Harpe. With the support of a small group of friends, he initiated a complete overhaul of the state, setting up ministries and implementing reforms. He soon came up against a stumbling block which impeded any further progress, institutional, economic or social: nine out of ten of his subjects were effectively slaves, belonging either to the state, the Church or noble landowners, and to free them would arouse violent protest, or worse, from the entire nobility. This had been growing increasingly hostile to his reforms, and in 1812, with Napoleon marching on Moscow, Alexander had been obliged to abandon them as the price for its support. He never forgave the nobility, which he despised for its backwardness and feared for other reasons – his father and grandfather had both been murdered by nobles.1
Once Napoleon had been defeated, Alexander turned his thoughts to Russia once more, and made no secret of his intention to reform the country and free the serfs. ‘The peace of the world and the civilising of Russia, these are my ambitions, these are the goals of my policy, and let lightning strike me if I ever renege on these holy principles!’ he declared. The generation of Russian nobility born in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the first to come into close contact with European civilisation, as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars and the occupation of France, and this made them acutely aware of the backwardness of Russia. Visiting England in 1814, Colonel Aleksandr Benckendorff marvelled at ‘the plenty, the wealth, refinement, freedom, which seemed to me the height of human happiness’, and reflected gloomily on the fact that ‘many generations would have to pass’ before anything of the sort could be achieved in Russia. As they returned to their homeland, many young officers dreamed of supporting their monarch in his work of transforming it.2
Their more conservative parents, the clergy and ideologues such as the historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, felt that the tsar’s intentions went against the grain of Russia’s traditions, its essence as a political and social entity, its spiritual base, and its destiny. Many had seen the French march on Moscow of 1812 not just as a military invasion but also as a spiritual assault. Admiral Shishkov believed that French influences should be extirpated and all Frenchmen exterminated, while the former governor of Moscow Count Rostopchin argued that young Russians who had fallen for the charms of French culture and thought should be ‘destroyed’.3
Alexander was caught in an impasse, and lost heart. But while he could do little to bring about change at home, he pursued his dream of a better world. On Christmas Day 1815 he had published the text of the Holy Alliance, much to the annoyance of the other signatories, who considered it silly at best and potentially subversive. On 1 January 1816 he issued a proclamation thanking his army and his people for their contribution to the victory over what he represented as the Devil’s latest attempt to take over the world, a victory which could only be safeguarded if all rulers took to heart the principles embodied in the Holy Alliance. In March he wrote to Castlereagh proposing a process of multilateral disarmament, arguing that the maintenance of large standing armies did not accord with the spirit of the peace they had made (Castlereagh suggested he make the first move).4
Metternich had always viewed the tsar’s liberal enthusiasms with distaste, and his tendency to bring religion into public affairs with misgiving. ‘Since 1815, he has left behind Jacobinism, only to throw himself into mysticism,’ Metternich wrote to Francis at the end of August 1817. ‘And since his proclivities are fundamentally revolutionary, his religious feelings are as well.’ Later that year, Alexander bore this out by granting a constitution, the most liberal in Europe, to the kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of his crown. In his closing address to the first session of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, delivered on 15 March 1818, he announced that Poland was a testing-ground, and that he intended to extend the same constitution to all his dominions, urging the Poles to demonstrate the validity of the model. ‘Prove to your contemporaries that liberal institutions, whose eternally sacred principles are being confused with the subversive doctrines which have in our time threatened the social order with dreadful catastrophe, are not dangerous,’ he exhorted them. He commissioned Nikolai Nikolaievich Novosiltsev and Prince Petr AndreevichViazemsky to prepare a draft constitution for the Russian empire, and announced his intention of reuniting with Poland the western provinces of Russia, taken from it in the 1770s, thereby extending the Polish constitution to a large part of his realm.5
The tsar’s address, delivered in French and published in that language and in Russian, caused a stir throughout Europe, nowhere more than in Germany: according to resolutions reached at the Congress of Vienna, the rulers of the various German states, Prussia included, were to introduce constitutions, but most of them were dragging their feet. The address aroused even greater alarm in Vienna. Both Francis and Metternich viewed constitutions as the first step on the road to revolution. To them, Alexander’s assertion that, ‘applied in good faith and, most importantly, directed with purity of intention towards a conservative goal useful to humanity, they are perfectly compatible with order, and produce with common accord the true prosperity of nations’ was little short of heresy.6
Metternich was greatly preoccupied by heresy: in June 1817 he noted with concern ‘the progression of certain maladies of the mind, which show all the symptoms of veritable epidemics’, in which he included Methodism. He feared this might find fertile ground in central Europe and particularly Germany, where increasing numbers of people were falling prey to mysticism. In Württemberg and Baden large numbers of people were, according to him, ‘fanaticised to the point of abandoning all the things of this world to seek an existence and salvation in holy places’. It is unclear whether he made the connection between this rejection of the material and the famine sweeping Germany as a consequence of the apocalyptic harvest failure in 1816, when the Rhine and Neckar valleys had been washed out by rain. But he was convinced that there was a political threat lurking behind it. ‘Some of these sectarians do have a purely and exclusively moral and religious motive; yet in others one can distinguish strong nuances of a political malady,’ he went on. He was much exercised by Baroness Krüdener, who had sold her jewels and mortgaged her estate in order to distribute alms to the famine victims and was wandering through Germany and Switzerland preaching a primitive Christian message of love which, he claimed, was aimed at ‘inciting the indigent classes against property-owners’. She also issued an appeal to all the monarchs of Europe to make a public confession and proclaim ‘The Rights of God’ as a riposte to the doctrine of the Rights of Man. The idea that he and his master the emperor should submit to some kind of spiritual scrutiny struck Metternich as not only preposterous but insidiously subversive. In his view, ‘the repose of society and the tranquillity of States’ was at stake, and ‘the major Courts should waste no time in considering the means of hindering the plans of these mongers of a new kind of revolution’. He urged the rulers of Germany to move the baroness on, which most of them did, with unnecessary brutality.7
A wave of religious revivalism of one sort or another was also sweeping through the higher echelons of Russian society, with many conversions to Catholicism and other faiths. Alexander was ecumenical in attitude, and in March 1817 he relaxed restrictions, opening the door to a flood of refugees from famine and religious persecution in Germany. Metternich warned him that that the instincts which drove such people towards extreme religious beliefs would end up turning them into Jacobins.8
Alexander’s ‘mysticism’ annoyed Metternich only marginally less than his interest in foreign affairs. Not only would he not demobilise his huge army, his agents were active in several parts of Italy, Corfu and Montenegro, and Russian diplomats at various courts were promoting the idea of intervention by the European powers in Central and South America to assist Spain in recovering her colonies there. These had taken advantage of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807 to break free, and many feared that the emergence of independent republics in their place would spread republicanism from the New to the Old World. Metternich also suspected that underlying this Russian diplomatic activity was a strategy to build an alliance between Russia and the Bourbon courts of France, Naples and Spain. Alexander’s ambassador in Madrid, Dmitri Pavlovich Tatishchev, was negotiating the sale of redundant Russian warships to replace those lost by Spain at Trafalgar, to be paid for by the cession of the island of Minorca – Russia had for decades been seeking a naval base in the Mediterranean. This worried the British cabinet even more than it did Metternich.9
Britain had been Spain’s chief ally in 1807 when Napoleon invaded and installed his brother Joseph as king. When Ferdinand VII recovered his throne in 1814, he asked for British military assistance in bringing to order his South American colonies. Britain refused to get involved, but did sign a treaty promising to remain neutral, not to assist the rebels in any way, and not to permit the shipment of arms to them. Many disbanded British soldiers did nevertheless go to South America to fight for Bolívar and other rebels. Their cause was glorified by the Romantic zeitgeist, their leaders depicted as heroes. More to the point, the end of Spanish dominion had opened its former colonies to British trade. At Spain’s request, in 1817 Castlereagh proclaimed Britain’s opposition to armed intervention in South America by any power other than Spain, and eventually, in 1819, passed the Foreign Enlistment Act, which forbade the rebels recruiting in Britain. But Britain continued to trade with them.
In August 1816 Metternich sent a new ambassador to St Petersburg. For this mission he chose Baron Louis-Joseph Lebzeltern, the Lisbon-born son of an Austrian diplomat, who had followed Metternich to Paris in 1809. Lebzeltern was an amiable, joyful individual who livened up a party, fond of money and the luxuries it could buy, but hard-working and thorough. A curious combination of cynicism and candour, he was a devout Catholic, and it may have been this spiritual side that had helped him win the trust and affection of Alexander when he was sent to St Petersburg back in 1810. He had accompanied Alexander on the march to Paris, and then been posted to Rome. In his instructions, Metternich enjoined Lebzeltern to ‘put a leash on the ambitious projects’ of the Russian ruler, who was showing a tendency ‘to interfere in every business in Europe’ and ‘to assume the role of arbiter in all discussions between various states’. Lebzeltern made a good start – received on arrival literally with open arms by the tsar, who embraced him and called him an old friend. Alexander denied any involvement in Italy, and explained that he had not demobilised out of fear of Prussia, which he felt was on the brink of revolution.10
He was also concerned at the profoundly ‘gangrened’ condition of France, and alarming developments in the neighbouring Belgian province of the kingdom of Holland. He had reason to believe that French and other exiles congregated in Brussels were planning an insurrection in France. In this he was not alone. According to the British minister at The Hague, Lord Clancarty, Brussels had become a magnet for ‘jacobinical refugees’, coordinating subversion in various countries. In a letter written in February 1817 congratulating the British cabinet on their robust reaction to ‘the scenes of Spafields’, Metternich warned Wellington that ‘the kingdom of the Netherlands is today one of the centres, and perhaps the most active centre of disorder of every kind’. Lord Kinnaird had been heard ‘taking extreme pleasure in speaking about a universal republic’ there. In a memorandum he circulated to the allied courts in March 1817, Alexander called on them to prevent the wanderings of political refugees, who were ‘the representatives, the organs of the revolutionary spirit which hovers over Europe, and perhaps over the two hemispheres of the globe’. Brussels was too close for comfort to France, which was still the focus of the allies’ concern.11
After Waterloo, they had decided to leave an army of occupation consisting of 150,000 men in France, at her expense, for a period of five years. The arrangement was to be reviewed after three, and as this term drew near it seemed clear that the troops were serving no useful purpose. Their presence was tainting the Bourbon regime with their unpopularity, and the expense of keeping them there was crippling the country economically. ‘The resentment of the people and the difficulty of paying for [the occupation forces] make the evacuation of foreign troops from the country essential,’ Pozzo di Borgo wrote to the Russian foreign minister Count Nesselrode in December 1817. He argued that France was by now quite stable, and that an early withdrawal would assist a return to normality.12
Alexander feared that his ambassador had allowed himself to get too close to see clearly. Britain and Austria also had their doubts: both Metternich and Wellington found themselves wondering whether the Russian’s advocacy of an allied withdrawal was not part of a rapprochement between his country and France, something each viewed with suspicion, for reasons of his own. Metternich mistrusted Pozzo di Borgo, and through the Austrian ambassador in Paris, Baron Nicolas Charles de Vincent, kept a suspicious eye on him. He was not convinced that France could be trusted to govern itself. He did not think much of the French minister of the interior Decazes, whose lowly origins probably irked him less than his evident lack of competence, and his contempt shines through the curled-lip prose of his letters to the Frenchman. He thought his attempts at intelligence-gathering ‘utterly ridiculous’, and when Napoleon’s ex-police chief Savary assured him during a secret rendezvous in Trieste that Decazes was deliberately destabilising the situation in France in order to bring down the Bourbon dynasty, Metternich no longer knew what to believe. ‘Is M. Decazes safe?’ he asked Wellington on 19 February 1818. The question weighed heavily in the light of the proposed troop withdrawals, which were to be discussed at a meeting at the end of September that year. As the date drew near, the Ultras in France stepped up their efforts to persuade and frighten the allies into keeping the troops there.13
The conference was originally meant to involve only the principal ministers of the great powers, but Alexander, to the annoyance of Castlereagh and Metternich, had insisted on being present, which turned it into a full-blown congress. The venue was Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), chosen because it was conveniently close to but not in France, a spa town with plenty of good accommodation and the facilities necessary to receive a large influx of people. These would include the tsar, the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William of Prussia, with their foreign ministers and attendants, and the less showy British delegation of Lord Castlereagh, supported by his secretary Lord Clanwilliam and his ambassadors in the allied capitals, as well as the Duke of Wellington. They also included ambassadors of the various courts, a number of journalists and other interested parties, and a bevy of bankers. These were needed to provide loans to France so that it could pay off the remaining indemnities to the allies. One of them, Baron Trenck, was sent there by Sedlnitzky to spy rather than to lend: Aix was crawling with Prussian and Austrian spies.14
In the months running up to the congress Alexander had revived his South American plans. Through a special envoy to Vienna, Count Golovkin, he put the case that as the revolts in the Spanish colonies were part of the same evil they were fighting on the European Continent, the Alliance must help the Spanish monarchy reassert its rule. But Metternich and Castlereagh would not allow the matter to be placed on the agenda, and Britain’s opposition was significant given its dominance of the seas. When Alexander arrived on 16 September, he found that Metternich and Castlereagh had already set the agenda.15
Metternich had been the first to arrive at Aix-la-Chapelle. He was in cheerful mood, which only improved as he drove into the little town with his carriages, attendants and servants: he was mistaken for the Emperor Francis, and cheered wildly. ‘The position of Aix, of which I only had a vague memory dating from twenty-six years ago, is very picturesque,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘The countryside is rolling and the vegetation very abundant. The weather is magnificent and perfect for walking. We are all comfortably accommodated, and the measures to prevent the mass of diplomats from getting to us mean that we are quite apart.’ It all began convivially enough, with Metternich accompanying Alexander and the King of Prussia on a visit to the cathedral, where they were shown the relics deposited there by Charlemagne, including the sheet in which Herodias carried away the head of St John the Baptist, a dress belonging to the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ’s childhood tunic and the loincloth He wore on the Cross. The congress attracted renowned musicians and players, and Goethe put in an appearance when one of his plays was staged. The painter Thomas Lawrence arrived with a commission from the prince regent to paint the monarchs and foremost ministers present at the congress for the Long Gallery at Windsor Castle. A specially designed wooden house with a studio was being shipped from England, but it arrived too late, and Lawrence had to set up his studio in the town hall.16
Alexander appeared to be in a good mood, and all seemed to be going well, so much so that Metternich reported to his wife that it was promising to be ‘un joli petit Congrès’. The delegates soon settled down to a relaxed routine, spending their evenings at informal gatherings. The uxorious Castlereagh was the only one of the major figures to have brought along his wife, who had already been the butt of much ridicule for her lack of savoir-faire at the Congress of Vienna. ‘At first we would congregate at Lady Castlereagh’s, but I do not know what inconceivable atmosphere of boredom has come over that house,’ wrote Metternich. ‘By common accord, we renounced the charms of milady and moved to my drawing room.’17
Lady Castlereagh’s soirées were, it appears, not always dull, as Lord Clanwilliam reported after having had a difference of opinion with Lord Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s half-brother and the British ambassador in Vienna. ‘He and I had a “jaw” one night at Lady C.’s supper-table, ladies present,’ recalled Clanwilliam. ‘In a sort of angry joke, he shied a large potato at me, which splashed against the wall. I lost my temper, and when he took up another potato, in horse-play, I lifted a bottle by the neck, and threatened to break his head. He saw I was dangerous and stopped.’18
The tsar had not abandoned his dream of bringing about a new age in international affairs: in a handwritten note he set out the main aims of the congress to be first the evacuation of France, and second a reconfiguration of the relationship between the powers. Further points covered means of containing the ‘gangrenous’ moral ‘contagion’ spreading from France. His suspicions were confirmed when he surveyed the condition of the regiments he had left there: a number of parades were held during the congress to review the allied troops about to be withdrawn, and the bearing of the Russian units struck him unfavourably. On 8 October he produced a memorandum urging the powers to pass a resolution that the existing territorial arrangements should be regarded as immovable, and binding themselves not only to intervene militarily in order to preserve them, but also to intervene against revolt in any country. He made repeated appeals to his brother monarchs to embrace the principles set out in the Holy Alliance, and renewed his attempts to bring South America onto the agenda.19
Castlereagh challenged Alexander on all these points, with the support of Metternich and the more discreet back-up of the Prussian prime minister Prince Hardenberg, whose master, Frederick William, was in thrall to the tsar. The British foreign secretary pointed out that Alexander’s suggestion that the Alliance guarantee the status quo in every existing state would mean that no country could ever bring about any change in its form of government without fear of invasion by others. He went on to argue that until ‘a system of administering Europe by a general Alliance of all its States can be reduced to some practical form, all notions of general and unqualified guarantee must be abandoned, and States must be left to rely for their security upon the justice and wisdom of their respective systems’. He even opposed Alexander’s suggestion that they at least agree that a revolution in France should automatically provoke an allied intervention.20
Metternich and Castlereagh expressed unease about the size of the Russian army. Alexander assured them that he had as much territory as he craved and more than he could manage, and that his only ambition was to make his people happy. ‘I consider my Army as the Army of Europe and as such alone shall it be employed,’ he told Castlereagh. This was little comfort. Hardenberg floated the idea of a European army to be based in Brussels to prevent France from attacking Prussia’s Rhenish provinces. But the others would not countenance the idea: such a force would almost certainly end up being made up predominantly of Russian troops. One of the few things all did agree to was that their security organs should keep a vigilant eye on all members of the Bonaparte family.21
Whatever their differences, as far as the public was concerned the allies did agree on essentials, and the congress had reaffirmed their commitment to the joint preservation of the status quo in Europe, which was a matter of grave importance, as Metternich’s right-hand man and secretary of the congress Friedrich von Gentz explained. ‘The domestic scene in every European country, without exception, is prey to a burning fever, companion or precursor of the most violent convulsions the civilised world has experienced since the fall of the Roman Empire,’ he wrote. ‘It is the struggle, the war of life or death between the old and the new principles, between the old and the new social order … All classes are in a state of fermentation, all the powers are threatened with the loss of equilibrium; the most solid institutions are shaken to their very foundations, like the buildings of a city attacked by the first tremors of an earthquake which in a few moments will destroy everything.’ The European sovereigns could, in his view, only survive by standing shoulder to shoulder, and if one of them were to break ranks they would all be swept away by the torrent.22
Gentz was a remarkable man. He had lived his epoch to the full, studying under Kant in Königsberg, indulging in both sentimental and highly sensual affairs, often concurrently, leading the life of the classic eighteenth-century rake while discussing utopias with the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, experiencing the enthusiasms of the French Revolution, being acclaimed as a writer, fathering bastards and spying for Britain before settling into his role as amanuensis and foil to Metternich. During the Congress of Vienna, to which he had acted as secretary, he had built up a unique position on the European diplomatic scene, and he had used his influence to the full at Aix. ‘I can view this congress as the high point of my life,’ he wrote to one friend. ‘Never have the laurels been heaped on my head as this time,’ he wrote to another. More to the point, he had made a huge amount of money. It was customary on such occasions for the various monarchs and ministers to give the secretary a handsome tip, in the shape of a bejewelled snuffbox, a high decoration studded with diamonds and sometimes some cash, but on this occasion he had managed to milk all the bankers as well. They included Labouchère and Baring from London, Hope from Amsterdam, David Rothschild from Paris, and Solomon and Carl Rothschild, whom Gentz referred to as ‘vulgar, ignorant Jews’, but whose judgement he trusted.23
Aleksandr Ivanovich Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, one of Alexander’s aides-de-camp, noted that the functioning of the congress had been much smoother and more efficient than had been the case at Vienna, and he ascribed this to the absence of women, who had played such an insidious role in the events there. This was true up to a point, but while there were no balls and nothing like the amorous madness of Vienna, a number of Parisian ladies had gravitated to Aix, including the celebrated literary hostess Madame Récamier, who had been rolled out to entertain the sovereigns to tea. And one of the ladies present did manage to make a stir, and to cause havoc with Metternich’s feelings.24
Alexander had summoned his ambassador to London, Count Kristof Andreevich Lieven, to join him at the congress, and the ambassador had brought his wife. Dorothea Lieven was an extraordinary woman: neither beautiful nor particularly intelligent, she captivated some of the greatest figures of her age, and positioned herself at the centre of political affairs wherever she went. A couple of months short of her thirty-third birthday when she came to Aix, she was looking forward to her first opportunity to play a role on the international stage.
Born Dorothea Kristoforovna Benckendorff, the daughter of a Russian infantry general and a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Catherine, both of them of German Baltic nobility, she was herself placed as lady-in-waiting to Alexander’s mother the Empress Maria Feodorovna; in 1800, aged fourteen, she married General Lieven, another German Baltic nobleman. In 1810 he was appointed Russian ambassador in Berlin, and in 1812 posted to London. Her reception there was not favourable at first: she made the mistake of flirting with prominent Whigs and antagonising the prince regent. But within a couple of years she had made a position for herself in English society quite independent of her status as the wife of the Russian ambassador. She used this position to act as an informant for the Russian foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode, and to lobby for Russian policies, trying to persuade influential people to support Alexander’s suggested intervention in Spanish America.
Metternich was smitten at their first meeting, at Nesselrode’s lodgings on 22 October. As was usual with him, he let himself go with all the abandon of a teenager experiencing first love, spilling out in letters the feelings he did not have time to describe to her in their necessarily brief encounters, during which speech was sacrificed to passion. On 26 October the whole party went to Spa, and although Metternich had the pleasure of sitting next to her in the carriage, they were not alone. But the next day he spent an hour ‘at her feet’. A couple of days later she came to his box at the opera and, as he put it, ‘belonged to’ him. She was a busy woman, as, apart from her affair with Metternich, she ‘renewed’ what she called her ‘tender passages’ with Alexander’s younger brother the Grand Duke Constantine, with whom she had had a protracted liaison in 1805–07 while her husband was on campaign.25
Metternich was devastated when, in mid-November, Lieven’s presence no longer being needed, the couple left Aix. Letters followed her in a gushing torrent, telling her how much he missed her and how he would frequently walk down the street where she had lodged and remember their moments of bliss. He complained that his was ‘the most abominable of professions’, and that only by loving as deeply as he loved her could he gain some solace from harsh reality.26
In the second half of November, with the business of the congress over and Lawrence’s portraits completed, the monarchs and ministers went to Brussels, as Wellington was to give them a tour of the battlefield of Waterloo. Metternich was delighted, as the Lievens had stopped in Brussels on their way to London, and when he arrived on 23 November he looked forward to continuing his affair.
Alexander’s staff received intelligence that a group of former Napoleonic officers were intending to kidnap him as he left Aix, take him to France and force him to sign a proclamation to the effect that the allied powers had decided to bring Napoleon back from St Helena and make his son emperor. The tsar’s journey from Aix to Brussels was therefore meticulously prepared. All Dutch troops, many of whom had served under Napoleon, were to be kept well away, and he was to be guarded by Swiss mercenaries while hundreds of police were positioned along the way, some in plain clothes.27
In Brussels, Metternich did have a few intimate moments with Dorothea – she would send him a note every time her husband went out – but his one chance of a long tryst, when Wellington took the rest of the party off to Waterloo, was dashed when the duke insisted on his coming too. When she left, on 27 November, he sat down to write to her, but his tears smudged the ink. ‘My only happiness today is you,’ he wrote. ‘My heart, my soul, everything that is worth anything in me belongs to you.’ Two days later, after a particularly tedious meeting with Hardenberg, he wrote that public affairs no longer interested him.28
From Brussels, Alexander went back to Aix, and then via Frankfurt to Karlsruhe to see his wife. From there he travelled to Vienna. The proceedings at Aix had not made him happy, and his aide Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky recorded that he was impossible to deal with, suddenly flying into rages and insulting his attendants without apparent reason. He had been outmanoeuvred by Metternich on every subject close to his heart, and had not been allowed to enhance Russia’s prestige on the international scene. His sister Catherine had been warning him that Metternich and Castlereagh were active members of the ‘sect’ which was striving for ‘the overthrow of all thrones’. It is doubtful whether Alexander really believed her, but he certainly mistrusted Metternich – and he knew where to take his revenge.29
Alexander was the natural patron of those in Germany who resented the influence of Austria. His Warsaw address had marked him out as the champion of liberals, and, by extension, of German nationalists. He was closely related to the royal houses of Württemberg, Bavaria and Baden, which were often at odds with Metternich, and was seen by many as the natural leader and defender of the smaller states against ‘Austrian Tyranny’. He would not need to try hard to get his own back on ‘the Dalai Lama of Vienna’, as his ambassador to Austria referred to Metternich.30