King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies reached Laibach on 8 January 1821. Metternich had arrived four days earlier and, as usual, provided himself with ‘a pleasant office, a good bedroom and an enfilade of drawing rooms’, as he informed Dorothea Lieven. The Emperor Francis arrived two days later, and the King of Prussia two days after that, followed by Tsar Alexander. Lord Charles Stewart was to act as Britain’s observer, and the comte de Blacas represented France in a similarly passive role. Alexander had wanted to invite Ferdinand VII of Spain in order to reinforce his case for military intervention there, but Metternich, who saw no Austrian interests at stake in the Iberian peninsula, managed to persuade him that it would impede the other business of the congress. He had also put off a request for participation from King John of Portugal, by suggesting that he turn to his British ally for support.1
The congress, which opened on 11 January, was no more than window-dressing. Ferdinand was to publicly disown his adherence to the revolution and the oaths he had sworn to stand by the constitution, to denounce everything that had taken place in Naples the previous summer, and to appeal for help to his brother monarchs. But dealing with Ferdinand was not easy, as Gentz pointed out. ‘He has never had the slightest taste for work, and he has so far lost the habit of it that it is difficult to make him read a despatch if it is more than a page long. Although he is physically extremely well preserved, age and misfortune have contributed to dulling his spirit, and since he remarried three years ago Madame Parthana, who now bears the title of Duchess of Floridia (and who is expected here at any moment), he has lapsed into complete idleness.’2
The problem was resolved by appointing as Ferdinand’s plenipotentiary his ambassador to Vienna, Prince Alvaro Ruffo, a devoted admirer of Metternich. Metternich and Gentz provided Ruffo with the texts of the letters the king was to send to his son the vicar general and the government in Naples, along with that of his appeal to the allies. Gentz was then to compose a manifesto from the three allied courts to the effect that Austria was, with the full support of its allies, sending an army into the kingdom of the Two Sicilies to assist its king in recovering his throne. The document, which was made public before the representatives of either of those powers had had sight of it, slyly implied that Austria, Russia and Prussia had the approval of Britain and France.
Stewart protested, and Castlereagh was so indignant that on 19 January he issued a public circular in which he distanced Britain from the other powers, stressing that while Austria did, through its treaty with the King of the Two Sicilies, have a right to intervene, the Alliance did not. The circular recalled that Britain had already, in 1815, in 1818 and in 1820, protested against the tendency of the Alliance to act as the policeman of Europe. This caused dismay at Laibach. ‘England is dead so far as the Continent is concerned,’ Metternich lamented.3
Castlereagh’s circular may have delighted liberals in Italy and elsewhere, but it did not shield Liverpool’s ministry from strong criticism in the British press and attack in Parliament for associating itself with what were seen as the despotic actions of Austria and Russia. The reports of the debates frightened Gentz ‘more than all the revolutions in Italy’, and he concluded that Britain had ‘adhered to an entirely different political and moral order’. ‘Revolution must be fought with flesh and blood,’ he had come to believe. ‘Moral weapons are manifestly powerless … With cannons and Cossacks on the one side, and firebrands and volunteers on the other, both systems must in the end fight a life-and-death struggle, and to him who remains standing belongs the world.’ Those who disagreed were ‘dogs’. He had come a long way since his euphoric praise for the French Revolution in 1789. Although Castlereagh vigorously defended in the House of Commons Austria’s right to intervene in Naples, there was no disguising the discord at the heart of the Alliance. Richelieu believed Metternich was making a mistake, and that his policy would lead, sooner or later, to a ‘terrible reaction’ which would undermine Austria’s already weakening influence in Italy. He also warned that the allies’ declarations and protocols, which were intended to demonstrate their unity, by lumping together everything they did not like had the unwanted effect of creating the illusion of unity among very disparate and disunited enemies. Doctrinaire statements produced doctrinaire reactions and forced the lukewarm into extreme positions, he warned.4
On 6 February an Austrian army of 60,000 crossed the river Po to enter the Papal States and begin its march on Naples, ‘in peaceful and amicable intent’. Metternich then settled down to dictate to Ruffo his blueprint for the reorganisation of the government of Naples. On 20 February Ruffo duly presented these proposals to the allied sovereigns, who graciously approved them. Metternich asked the envoys of the other states of Italy, whom he had invited to Laibach for the purpose, to consider adopting them as well. He also lectured them on the desirability of establishing a ‘centre of information’ at Milan, which would serve the same purpose for Italy as the commission in Mainz did for Germany, and provide the basis for ‘moral action’ against the forces of the Parisian comité directeur.5
The congress closed on 25 February, with the resolution to meet again in eighteen months, in September 1822, in order to review the situation in Italy and deal with any other matters demanding attention. Alexander made one last attempt to raise the question of Spain, where the situation had deteriorated further and the prospect of civil war loomed. But Richelieu ruled out French intervention, believing it would do for Louis XVIII what it had done for Napoleon, and nobody wanted to see Russian troops march across Europe.6
With the Austrian army on the march towards Naples, the monarchs stayed on at Laibach in case of unexpected developments. There was nothing for them to do. Alexander’s aide-de-camp Zakrevsky took advantage of an improvement in the weather to go hunting, and bagged two mountain goats, but the distraction was fleeting. ‘The boredom is so dreadful that in the evenings everyone falls into despair,’ he wrote to a friend. Metternich held a ball, but as there was only one lady present it was not much of a success, and with the weather continuing cold there was nothing to allay the tedium.7
This was dispelled by the arrival from Paris of the sensational news that there had been an explosion in the Tuileries. As the news travelled, it was embellished to include multiple royal casualties and ascribed variously to the Illuminati and the comité directeur. In effect, the ‘bomb’, hidden behind a laundry basket on a servants’ staircase and detonated at four o’clock on the afternoon of 27 January, had been little more than a firework, almost certainly planted by some Ultras. Richelieu did what he could to reassure all and sundry that there was nothing to worry about, but he could not shake the general conviction that it had been an attempt to bring down the monarchy. ‘That the ramifications of this sect are spreading and consolidating every day is demonstrated by only too real evidence,’ Nesselrode wrote to Richelieu, enclosing a note intercepted by the police in St Petersburg which he believed had been sent by one of the conspirators to an associate in Russia, and urging him to heighten his vigilance. In reply, Richelieu remarked that the police were generally a blunt tool. Even Napoleon’s supposedly efficient police had failed to prevent assassination attempts, he reminded Nesselrode, and there had been no fewer than thirteen against the most popular of French monarchs, Henri IV. He assured Nesselrode that ‘neither the life of the king nor that of any other member of the royal family had been at any risk from this explosion’. That reassured neither Nesselrode nor Alexander, who was in apocalyptic mood.8
‘Are we not bound by our duty as Christians to struggle against this enemy and its infernal works with all our strength and by every means that Divine providence has placed in our hands?’ the tsar wrote to Aleksandr Galitzine from Laibach on 15 February. After alluding liberally to Judith and Holofernes, Nebuchadnezzar and other biblical monsters, he went on: ‘For, make no mistake about it, there is a general conspiracy of all these societies: they communicate and coordinate, I have in my possession certain proof of this.’ He argued that since the Christian faith had become ‘the fundamental basis of the principles’ which the Alliance stood by, ‘all these sects, which are anti-Christian and which are founded on the principle of the so-called philosophy of Voltaire and others similar, have vowed the most determined vengeance on all governments. We have seen attempts in France, in England, in Prussia, while in Spain, Naples and Portugal they have already succeeded in overthrowing governments. Their motto is to kill the Inf … [l’Infame: Voltaire’s shorthand for the Catholic Church] I do not even dare to write out this horrible blasphemy …’ The letter, which was written intermittently over the space of a week, reveals the extent of the paranoia gripping Alexander, who was feeling let down and betrayed, believing that ‘hell is let loose against us’, and quoting liberally from St Paul and the Book of Revelations. Only a couple of weeks later news would reach Laibach that confirmed him not just in his conviction of the existence of the international conspiracy, but of its devilish efficiency and perfidy.9
On 10 March came tidings of the first successes achieved by the Austrian army. As soon as it had become known in Naples that it was on the march, the heroics died down, people began to shed their uniforms and make excuses. General Pepe marched out to meet the advancing Austrians with an hourly dwindling army which was duly routed at Rieti on 7 March. But on the morning of 14 March Metternich was woken by a courier with the news that revolution had broken out in Piedmont. He immediately went into conference with Francis and Alexander, and they agreed that the comité directeur must have ordered the Piedmontese rebels to create a diversion in the rear of the Austrian army marching on Naples. It was also clear to them that with two kingdoms on either side of France in a state of revolution, there were ideal conditions for one to break out in Paris – where the news from Turin had caused panic: ‘The bourse was obstructed with the carriages of the nobility of the court who were coming in person to sell their government stocks at any price,’ noted Richelieu.10
What had actually happened in Piedmont was a good deal less dramatic than was reported. A group of noblemen and artists in Turin, dissatisfied with the reactionary regime of the ageing King Victor Emmanuel I, wanted to force him to abdicate in favour of the heir to the throne, his brother’s son, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano, in the belief that he held similar views to theirs. These were a muddle of poetic visions of a united Italy and Romantic notions of ‘liberty’, shared by a number of bored and disgruntled army officers. While the nobles in Turin worked on Charles Albert, on the night of 9 March a group of officers raised the garrison of nearby Alessandria, hoisted the green, white and red tricolour Napoleon had designed for Italy back in the 1790s, and proclaimed the Spanish constitution of 1812. This had become a shibboleth standing for ill-defined freedoms in the eyes of politically illiterate liberals and for equally ill-defined subversion in those of conservatives. On 12 March the garrison of Turin came out in solidarity with their comrades in Alessandria, not only demanding the adoption of the constitution but also a declaration of war on Austria. Taken aback, the king abdicated in favour of his brother, Charles Felix. As the latter was out of the country, his son Charles Albert took on the role of regent and adopted the constitution.
After considering the options, Metternich, Alexander and Francis decided that the Austrian troops marching on Naples should carry on, while another force of 60,000 Austrians would be assembled to strike at Piedmont from Lombardy, to be joined if necessary by 90,000 Russians. ‘Piedmont has just been revolutionised after the model of Spain, Naples and Portugal, and by the same comité directeur of Paris which produced all the earlier upheavals …’ Alexander wrote to Galitzine. ‘I now understand why the Lord has kept me here until this moment!’ It was thanks to the Almighty that he was still with his allies and able to put in hand the necessary measures. It was at times like these that congresses of monarchs were invaluable, he argued. ‘At this moment we are fighting the kingdom of Satan; no ambassador can suffice: only those whom the Lord had placed at the head of Nations can, if He so wills, persevere in this struggle and not bow to this satanic power, growing ever greater and shedding its mask more and more.’ As he was writing these lines, the mask in this imagined scenario slipped off entirely.11
Back in 1814 a group of Greek residents of Odessa had founded an association, the Philiki Hetairia, which brought together like-minded compatriots scattered around Europe. It had a Masonic structure and a hazy goal of bringing about the ‘purification’ of the ‘Greek nation’, and, in the long term, the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule. It had fewer than a thousand members, most of them intellectuals or merchants operating from far-flung emporiums. Some of them had, on a number of occasions, approached Capodistrias and other Greeks in Russian service with a view to enlisting the support of Alexander in their cause. Capodistrias had consistently brushed them off; however much the tsar would have liked to lead a crusade for the liberation of his co-religionists, and expand his empire southwards – he and his brother had not been named Alexander and Constantine for nothing – he realised that it would have serious diplomatic consequences. He could not afford to be seen to promote any subversive cause against a recognised power, even the Porte.
In 1820 the Hetairia elected a new president in the person of Count Alexandros Ypsilantis, a former Russian officer and aide-de-camp to Alexander. After leaving Russian service he began to lay plans for a war for the liberation of Greece, assuming that once it had started the tsar would have no option but to come to the aid of the Greeks. That same year, Ali Pasha, the Turkish governor of the Greek province of Janina, hitherto a loyal vassal of the sultan, announced that he was a friend of the Greeks, joined the Hetairia, and declared his independence from Turkey. A Turkish army was despatched to bring him back to heel, and while it was occupied with this task Ypsilantis struck. On 6 March 1821 he led a motley force of some 4,500 expatriate Greeks into Turkish territory and called on his compatriots to rise up against their oppressors. This rag-tag army was effortlessly dispersed by the Turks, and Ypsilantis fled for the shelter of Austrian territory, where he hoped to find asylum; instead, he encountered the Austrian police and began a seven-year spell in gaol.
The tsar took the news personally, convinced as he was that the comité directeur in Paris had engineered the whole thing, in the knowledge that his every instinct would drive him to support the Greek cause, and thereby betray his allies and his principles. He admitted to his brother Constantine that ‘never before had a trap been set for him with more cunning, more skill and more perfidy’. It had been done, as he told the new British ambassador in St Petersburg Sir Charles Bagot, ‘with the sole object of distracting the attention of Russia from the affairs of the rest of Europe, and of placing him, as they unquestionably had done, in a very difficult position’. That it had been the work of the comité directeur was doubted by nobody. Even Castlereagh was convinced. ‘[The Greeks] form a branch of that organised spirit of insurrection which is systematically propagating itself throughout Europe,’ he wrote to Bagot, ‘and which explodes wherever the hand of the governing Power from whatever cause is enfeebled.’12
There could, in Alexander’s view, ‘be no doubt that the impulse for this insurrectionary movement was given by that same comité central directeur of Paris, in the hope of making a diversion in favour of Naples and preventing us from destroying one of those synagogues of Satan, established solely in order to defend and propagate his anti-Christian doctrine’. At moments such as these, they must all unite in defence of ‘the Faith of Our Saviour’. Greece was but a distraction. ‘The revolutionary comité central resides in Paris,’ he explained. ‘After having ignited all the fires it could outside the country, it is more than probable that it will try to set alight France itself, and in that way to link up with the revolutionaries of Spain and those of Piedmont.’ He was in the process of reading the Book of Job, and in the first four chapters found ‘an analogy with my own personal situation’.13
On 20 March an armistice was signed between the Austrian and Neapolitan commanders. ‘The world is on the eve of its salvation or at the threshold of the abyss which will engulf it,’ Metternich wrote to Austria’s finance minister Count Stadion, who had been complaining about the cost of his military intervention. A week later he received the news that his troops had made their triumphal entry into Naples, cheered as warmly as the Carbonari had been. ‘The hour of resurrection has struck!’ he exclaimed to one French diplomat. To his wife, he wrote that ‘the whole business will blow away like smoke, because it was, in fact, nothing but smoke’.14
On 12 April 1821 Francis once again wrote to the pope, asking him to excommunicate the Carbonari, or at least to issue a declaration of support, arguing that temporal power on its own could not accomplish the ‘salutary work’, and that ‘the source of the evil is in the domain of morality and religion’. Cardinal Consalvi was not to be rushed. The Carbonari in the Papal States had not risen in support of their Neapolitan good cousins or tried to prevent the Austrian troops from marching on Naples. But they were numerous enough to cause serious trouble, and since they made frequent protestations of support for the Church and the Catholic faith, there were no grounds for excommunicating them.15
By the beginning of April Metternich had so far regained his composure as to declare that ‘revolutions are rather out of date … I am not saying that there will be no more revolutions, but they will be without substance’. The latest one, in Piedmont, certainly appeared to have borne this out. No sooner had the hapless Prince of Carignano accepted the constitution than his father repudiated it. He found himself in a difficult position: moderates bickered with radicals in his entourage as he himself wavered. The Russian ambassador in Turin warned him of dire consequences if he did not quickly bow to the inevitable. The confused prince laid down his regency and left. The remaining rebels were defeated by loyal Piedmontese troops and Austrians at Novara on 18 April.16
On his return from Laibach at the end of May, Francis nominated Metternich chancellor, a post he had effectively been filling since 1809. This set the seal on what had, for Metternich, been a triumph. He had stamped out liberalism in the two largest Italian states, and cowed the others with his demonstration of military power. On 13 September 1821 the pope at last issued, in his breve Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo, the desired condemnation of the Carbonari, for ‘giving everyone the licence to create at will his own religion according to his own convictions’, because they ‘parody sacred rituals by their sacrilegious ceremonies’, and finally because ‘they plot to ruin the Apostolic See against which … they have a special hatred’. Having obtained this, Metternich put pressure on all the other Italian states to pass legislation outlawing members of the sect. By November 1821 he was boasting that he had destroyed the Carbonari. Perhaps most important, he had managed to ‘turn the Emperor Alexander away from the territory of liberalism’, as he put it to Esterházy.17
In Metternich’s view, it was time to take stock and prepare for the future. ‘It has been revealed that a vast and dangerous conspiracy has since 1814 acquired enough force and means of action to have taken control of a great many branches of the administration in many countries,’ he summed up. ‘I saw the revolution, with its inevitable consequences, disorder, anarchy and death, where many others only saw enlightenment grappling with prejudice.’ The revolution had been able to grow because people had failed to heed his warnings. ‘The clear and precise goal of the seditious elements is one and uniform. It is that of the overthrow of all legally existing things … The principle with which the monarchs must oppose this plan of universal destruction is that of the conservation of all legally existing things. The only way of achieving this is that of no innovation … It has been proved that the seditious elements of all countries and of all hues have established a centre of information and of action … To this centre of information, we must oppose another.’18
People were still not listening to him. His proposal to create a pan-European intelligence-gathering and police centre was brushed aside even by Alexander. Richelieu even poured cold water on the theory of a comité directeur in Paris. ‘It is perhaps more convenient to attribute to an invisible power whose lever is in France and whose effects can be felt everywhere catastrophes whose real cause could more simply be found in the weakness and incompetence of those governments which a mere breath has been enough to overthrow,’ he wrote to Capodistrias on 9 May. Particularly disappointing for Metternich was the fact that he could no longer count on the support of Britain and France. He was beginning to write off Britain as an ally, baffled as he increasingly was by its seeming inability to maintain the kind of decorous ‘calm’ that was the mainstay of his own domestic policy. The country was now being convulsed with a further bout of trouble caused by Queen Caroline, this time from beyond the grave.19
Despite her extraordinary popularity in the previous year, her attempt to force admission to the coronation of her husband as George IV on 19 July 1821 ended in humiliating failure, and she was jeered as she drove away by the same crowds that had cheered her twelve months before. But following her unexpected death a few weeks later, they swung back to her side in the most spectacular way. Her funeral on 14 August 1821 became the focus for resentment against the government, just as the divorce proceedings had in the previous year. She had died in Hammersmith and had expressed the wish to be buried in Brunswick. As the authorities considered it dangerous to allow the funeral cortège to pass through central London on its way to embarkation at Harwich, a circuitous route was devised in secret. This inflamed those who had come out to pay their final respects or just watch, to such an extent that they confronted the considerable numbers of troops deployed and obliged the procession to pass through the centre of the city. The resulting battle between the crowd and the Guards cost a number of lives.20
In October, when George IV visited Hanover, accompanied by Castlereagh, Metternich went there to greet the king and took the opportunity to confer with the British foreign secretary. They were able to reaffirm their support for each other and to agree on common ground, principally on the need to prevent Alexander from marching his armies into Spain. Another opportunity provided by the trip to Hanover was that of seeing Dorothea Lieven, whose husband had accompanied the king. It was therefore as a happy man that Metternich contemplated the world in the autumn of 1821.
The tsar was in a very different frame of mind. He had gone to Troppau and Laibach meaning to redefine the Alliance, by laying down principles on the right of intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, and to bring peace to Spain by force of arms and to Naples by constitutional means. This would have extended Russia’s influence in the three Bourbon monarchies and outmanoeuvred Austria. In the event, it was he who had been outmanoeuvred. His constitutional schemes had been ignored, and Spain had been sidestepped. He had been obliged to repress all his instincts over the Greek rising, but had not reaped any benefit from it.
The issue loomed large when he returned to Russia. Although Ypsilantis’s foolhardy enterprise had been defeated by Turkish forces, a popular rising had broken out in the Morea, initiating a protracted war of unspeakable savagery on both sides. Russian society was traditionally Turkophobe, the Russians were Orthodox Christians like the Greeks, the Russian diplomatic and military services were liberally staffed with Greeks, and the army had built its reputation over the past half-century on a series of wars against the Porte. The stories filtering out of Greece of Turkish atrocities being carried out against their Orthodox Christian brothers were causing outrage in Russia, and people were seething with impatience to support their co-religionists and punish the Turks. The army, bored by inaction, was keen to show its mettle.
People could not understand why the tsar refused to do the obvious thing and go to the aid of the Greeks. But Alexander felt powerless. ‘If we answer the Turks with war, the comité directeur in Paris will have triumphed,’ he explained to Capodistrias one evening at Tsarskoe Selo that August. He assured the French ambassador that he had firm evidence that Ypsilantis had been put up to it by the comité directeur, which had forced him to act in order to assist the Italian revolutionaries. The aim had been not only to place Alexander in the position of having to betray his principles, but also to divide Russia and Austria, thereby breaking up the Alliance. Any Russian military action against the Turks would have to take place in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, along the south-eastern border of the Austrian empire, in an area of such strategic sensitivity that any Russian move there threatened Austria.21
Alexander wrote to Metternich and Castlereagh, and appealed to Francis and George IV in an attempt to find a solution. He drew parallels between Austria’s need to intervene in Naples and Piedmont and the necessity of Russian action on behalf of the Greeks. Metternich was not having it, not only because the Greek insurgents were revolutionaries, and one could not support one kind of revolutionary while crushing others. Military intervention by Russia would inevitably lead to Russian territorial gains in an area of vital interest to Austria. Britain did not wish to see any expansion of Russia or its influence in that area, both because it lay in its interests to protect the Porte and because it brought one step closer a Russian foothold in the Aegean, which would lead to a naval presence in the Mediterranean. France was traditionally an ally of the Porte, and did not contemplate the possibility of a Russian navy operating off its southern shores with any greater relish than did Britain. Prussia remained passive, as Bernstorff did not wish to see it embroiled in any new international complications.22
Much to the embarrassment of the various governments, the Greek cause had caught the imagination of the public, and people all over the Continent were clamouring on behalf of the Greek rebels, who were represented, in paint and in print, as the ultimate Romantic freedom-fighters, wild but worthy descendants of the ancient Greeks. The rising elicited almost fanatical declarations of support from poets, intellectuals, artists and dreamers of every class and both sexes of every country in Europe, nowhere more than in its German heartland. As it did not challenge any aspect of the social structure in any of them, it also attracted the support of the most conservative elements of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.
Never slow to spot an opportunity, Metternich accused Capodistrias and Russian diplomats all over Europe of stoking up this enthusiasm and disseminating pro-Greek propaganda. Capodistrias denied these charges, but he was tainted by association, and soon found himself in an impossible situation. In order to avoid giving the impression that he was encouraging the Greeks in any way, the tsar distanced himself from his minister, who eventually had no option but to ask for extended leave, supposedly to take the waters in Germany. He then retired to Switzerland, while formally retaining his title in the Russian service, until 1827 (when he would be elected president of the newly founded Greek Republic, only to be assassinated by a compatriot in 1831). Metternich was delighted to have seen off a man he had all along regarded as a thorn in his side.
Metternich might have triumphed, but by forcing his own will upon it he had succeeded in splitting the Alliance. The two constitutional monarchies of Britain and France could not march in step with the three absolutist ones along the course he had mapped for them. He had also fatally undermined the Alliance’s moral credibility. The use of military force against the reasonable aspirations of the more enlightened sections of the Neapolitan nobility and middle class had made it clear to all but the most bigoted that it was not defending civilisation from barbarism. To many, the opposite seemed to be true.
‘The intellectual forces of nations are striving for the perfection of the social order,’ wrote baron Bignon, an experienced French diplomat and official, and a deputy of the French Chamber since 1817. ‘In opposition to this tendency, the cabinets have deployed all the means at their disposal, both intellectual and material, to halt this march of the nations, and even to make them turn back.’ He pointed out that the Holy Alliance now stood in the imagination of most thinking Europeans for an unholy cartel devoted to combating everything that frightened it or threatened its privileges. ‘Born of barbarism, and only to serve it, absolute power is now the master and judge of institutions intended for enlightened nations.’23