Chapter XIII
Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy, England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and privilege--Schmalz's Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines to repression--Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.
[Concert of Europe regarding France.]
For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure. The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle, their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the nation.
[Action of the Powers outside France.]
In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris, however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare. Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the Courts were at one.
[Alexander.]
Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander. Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution, which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf. [251] Animated by hopes like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side; he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by supporting national hopes in Italy; [252] and he hoped to create some counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.
[Metternich.]
[Metternich's policy in Germany.]
[In Italy.]
In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria, Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own. Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do, for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves; [253] but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but, having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution, he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit. Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents, and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever; if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the Spielberg. [254]
[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]
On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria, should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces. [255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have drawn from treaties. [256]
[Spirit of England's foreign policy.]
The part played by the British Government at this epoch has been severely judged not only by the later opinion of England itself, but by the historical writers of almost every nation in Europe. It is perhaps fortunate for the fame of Pitt that he did not live to witness the accomplishment of the work in which he had laboured for thirteen years. The glory of a just and courageous struggle against Napoleon's tyranny remains with Pitt; the opprobrium of a settlement hostile to liberty has fallen on his successors. Yet there is no good ground for believing that Pitt would have attached a higher value to the rights or inclinations of individual communities than his successors did in re-adjusting the balance of power; on the contrary, he himself first proposed to destroy the Republic of Genoa, and to place Catholic Belgium under the Protestant Crown of Holland; nor was any principle dearer to him than that of aggrandising the House of Austria as a counterpoise to the power of France. [257] The Ministry of 1815 was indeed but too faithfully walking in the path into which Pitt had been driven by the King and the nation in 1793. Resistance to France had become the one absorbing care, the beginning and end of English statesmanship. Government at home had sunk to a narrow and unfeeling opposition to the attempts made from time to time to humanise the mass of the people, to reform an atrocious criminal law, to mitigate the civil wrongs inflicted in the name and the interest of a State-religion. No one in the Cabinet doubted that authority, as such, must be wiser than inexperienced popular desire, least of all the statesman who now, in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington, controlled the policy of Great Britain upon the Continent. Lord Castlereagh had no sympathy with cruelty or oppression in Continental rulers; he had just as little belief in the value of free institutions to their subjects. [258] The nature of his influence, which has been drawn sometimes in too dark colours, may be fairly gathered from the course of action which he followed in regard to Sicily and to Spain.
[In Sicily.]
In Sicily the representative of Great Britain, Lord William Bentinck, had forced King Ferdinand, who could not have maintained himself for an hour without the arms and money of England, to establish in 1813 a Parliament framed on the model of our own. The Parliament had not proved a wise or a capable body, but its faults were certainly not equal to those of King Ferdinand, and its re-construction under England's auspices would have been an affair of no great difficulty. Ferdinand, however, had always detested free institutions, and as soon as he regained the throne of Naples he determined to have done with the Sicilian Parliament. A correspondence on the intended change took place between Lord Castlereagh and A'Court, the Ambassador who had now succeeded Lord William Bentinck. [259] That the British Government, which had protected the Sicilian Crown against Napoleon at the height of his power, could have protected the Sicilian Constitution against King Ferdinand's edicts without detaching a single man-of-war's boat, is not open to doubt. Castlereagh, however, who for years past had been paying, stimulating, or rebuking every Government in Europe, and who had actually sent the British fleet to make the Norwegians submit to Bernadotte, now suddenly adopted the principle of non-intervention, and declared that, so long as Ferdinand did not persecute the Sicilians who at the invitation of England had taken part in political life, or reduce the privileges of Sicily below those which had existed prior to 1813, Great Britain would not interfere with his action. These stipulations were inserted in order to satisfy the House of Commons, and to avert the charge that England had not only abandoned the Sicilian Constitution, but consented to a change which left the Sicilians in a worse condition than if England had never intervened in their affairs. Lord Castlereagh shut his eyes to the confession involved, that he was leaving the Sicilians to a ruler who, but for such restraint, might be expected to destroy every vestige of public right, and to take the same bloody and unscrupulous revenge upon his subjects which he had taken when Nelson restored him to power in 1799.
[Action of England in Spain.]
The action of the British Government in Spain showed an equal readiness to commit the future to the wisdom of Courts. Lord Castlereagh was made acquainted with the Spanish Ferdinand's design of abolishing the Constitution on his return in the year 1814. "So far," he replied, "as the mere existence of the Constitution is at stake, it is impossible to believe that any change tranquilly effected can well be worse." [260] In this case the interposition of England would perhaps not have availed against a reactionary clergy and nation: Castlereagh, was, moreover, deceived by Ferdinand's professions that he had no desire to restore absolute government. He credited the King with the same kind of moderation which had led Louis XVIII. to accept the Charta in France, and looked forward to the maintenance of a constitutional régime, though under conditions more favourable to the executive power and to the influence of the great landed proprietors and clergy. [261] Events soon proved what value was to be attached to the word of the King; the flood of reaction and vengeance broke over the country; and from this time the British Government, half confessing and half excusing Ferdinand's misdeeds, exerted itself to check the outrages of despotism, and to mitigate the lot of those who were now its victims. In the interest of the restored monarchies themselves, as much as from a regard to the public opinion of Great Britain, the Ambassadors of England urged moderation upon all the Bourbon Courts. This, however, was also done by Metternich, who neither took pleasure in cruelty, nor desired to see new revolutions produced by the extravagances of priests and emigrants. It was not altogether without cause that the belief arose that there was little to choose, in reference to the constitutional liberties of other States, between the sentiments of Austria and those of the Ministers of free England. A difference, however, did exist. Metternich actually prohibited the Sovereigns over whom his influence extended from granting their subjects liberty: England, believing the Sovereigns to be more liberal than they were, did not interfere to preserve constitutions from destruction.
[Outrages of the Royalists in the south of France, June-August.]
Such was the general character of the influence now exercised by the three leading Powers of Europe. Prussia, which had neither a fleet like England, an Italian connection like Austria, nor an ambitious Sovereign like Russia, concerned itself little with distant States, and limited its direct action to the affairs of France, in which it possessed a substantial interest, inasmuch as the indemnities due from Louis XVIII. had yet to be paid. The possibility of recovering these sums depended upon the maintenance of peace and order in France; and from the first it was recognised by every Government in Europe that the principal danger to peace and order arose from the conduct of the Count of Artois and his friends, the party of reaction. The counterrevolutionary movement began in mere riot and outrage. No sooner had the news of the battle of Waterloo reached the south of France than the Royalist mob of Marseilles drove the garrison out of the town, and attacked the quarter inhabited by the Mameluke families whom Napoleon had brought from Egypt. Thirteen of these unfortunate persons, and about as many Bonapartist citizens, were murdered. [262] A few weeks later Nismes was given over to anarchy and pillage. Religious fanaticism here stimulated the passion of political revenge. The middle class in Nismes itself and a portion of the surrounding population were Protestant, and had hailed Napoleon's return from Elba as a deliverance from the ascendancy of priests, and from the threatened revival of the persecutions which they had suffered under the old Bourbon monarchy. The Catholics, who were much more numerous, included the lowest class in the town, the larger landed proprietors of the district, and above half of the peasantry. Bands of volunteers had been formed by the Duke of Angoulême at the beginning of the Hundred Days, in the hope of sustaining a civil war against Napoleon. After capitulating to the Emperor's generals, some companies had been attacked by villagers and hunted down like wild beasts. The bands now reassembled and entered Nismes. The garrison, after firing upon them, were forced to give up their arms, and in this defenceless state a considerable number of the soldiers were shot down (July 17). On the next day the leaders of the armed mob began to use their victory. For several weeks murder and outrage, deliberately planned and publicly announced, kept not only Nismes itself, but a wide extent of the surrounding country in constant terror. The Government acted slowly and feebly; the local authorities were intimidated; and, in spite of the remonstrances of Wellington and the Russian Ambassador, security was not restored until the Allies took the matter into their own hands, and a detachment of Austrian troops occupied the Department of the Gard. Other districts in the south of France witnessed the same outbreaks of Royalist ferocity. Avignon was disgraced by the murder of Marshal Brune, conqueror of the Russians and English in the Dutch campaign of 1799, an honest soldier, who after suffering Napoleon's neglect in the time of prosperity, had undertaken the heavy task of governing Marseilles during the Hundred Days. At Toulouse, General Ramel, himself a Royalist, was mortally wounded by a band of assassins, and savagely mutilated while lying disabled and expiring.
[Elections of 1815.]
Crimes like these were the counterpart of the September massacres of 1792; and the terrorism exercised by the Royalists in 1815 has been compared, as a whole, with the Republican Reign of Terror twenty-two years earlier. But the comparison does little credit to the historical sense of those who suggested it. The barbarities of 1815 were strictly local: shocking as they were, they scarcely amounted in all to an average day's work of Carrier or Fouché in 1794; and the action of the established Government, though culpably weak, was not itself criminal. A second and more dangerous stage of reaction began, however, when the work of popular vengeance closed. Elections for a new Chamber of Deputies were held at the end of August. The Liberals and the adherents of Napoleon, paralysed by the disasters of France and the invaders' presence, gave up all as lost: the Ministers of Louis XVIII. abstained from the usual electoral manoeuvres, Talleyrand through carelessness, Fouché from a desire to see parties evenly balanced: the ultra-Royalists alone had extended their organisation over France, and threw themselves into the contest with the utmost passion and energy. Numerically weak, they had the immense forces of the local administration on their side. The Préfets had gone over heart and soul to the cause of the Count of Artois, who indeed represented to them that he was acting under the King's own directions. The result was that an Assembly was elected to which France has seen only one parallel since, namely in the Parliament of 1871, elected when invaders again occupied the country, and the despotism of a second Bonaparte had ended in the same immeasurable calamity. The bulk of the candidates returned were country gentlemen whose names had never been heard of in public life since 1789, men who had resigned themselves to inaction and obscurity under the Republic and the Empire, and whose one political idea was to reverse the injuries done by the Revolution to their caste and to their Church. They were Royalists because a Bourbon monarchy alone could satisfy their claims: they called themselves ultra-Royalists, but they were so only in the sense that they required the monarchy to recognise no ally but themselves. They had already shown before Napoleon's return that their real chief was the Count of Artois, not the King; in what form their ultra-Royalism would exhibit itself in case the King should not submit to be their instrument remained to be proved.
[Fall of Talleyrand and Fouché.]
[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept., 1815.]
The first result of the elections was the downfall of Talleyrand's Liberal Ministry. The Count of Artois and the courtiers, who had been glad enough to secure Fouché's services while their own triumph was doubtful, now joined in the outcry of the country gentlemen again this monster of iniquity. Talleyrand promptly disencumbered himself of his old friend, and prepared to meet the new Parliament as an ultra-Royalist; but in the eyes of the victorious party Talleyrand himself, the married priest and the reputed accomplice in the murder of the Duke of Enghien, was little better than his regicide colleague; and before the Assembly met he was forced to retire from power.
[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept. 1815.]
His successor, the Duc de Richelieu, was recommended to Louis XVIII. by the Czar. Richelieu had quitted France early in the Revolution, and, unlike most of the emigrants, had played a distinguished part in the country which gave him refuge. Winning his first laurels in the siege of Ismail under Suvaroff, he had subsequently been made Governor of the Euxine provinces of Russia, and the flourishing town of Odessa had sprung up under his rule. His reputation as an administrator was high; his personal character singularly noble and disinterested. Though the English Government looked at first with apprehension upon a Minister so closely connected with the Czar of Russia, Richelieu's honesty and truthfulness soon gained him the respect of every foreign Court. His relation to Alexander proved of great service to France in lightening the burden of the army of occupation; his equity, his acquaintance with the real ends of monarchical government, made him, though no lover of liberty, a valuable Minister in face of an Assembly which represented nothing but the passions and the ideas of a reactionary class. But Richelieu had been too long absent from France to grasp the details of administration with a steady hand. The men, the parties of 1815, were new to him: it is said that he was not acquainted by sight with most of his colleagues when he appointed them to their posts. The Ministry in consequence was not at unity within itself. Some of its members, like Decazes, were more liberal than their chief; others, like Clarke and Vaublanc, old servants of Napoleon now turned ultra-Royalists, were eager to make themselves the instruments of the Count of Artois, and to carry into the work of government the enthusiasm of revenge which had already found voice in the elections.
[Violence of the Chamber of 1815.]
The session opened on the 7th of October. Twenty-nine of the peers, who had joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days, were excluded from the House, and replaced by adherents of the Bourbons; nevertheless the peers as a body opposed themselves to extreme reaction, and, in spite of Chateaubriand's sanguinary harangues, supported the moderate policy of Richelieu against the majority of the Lower House. The first demand of the Chamber of Deputies was for retribution upon traitors; [263] their first conflict with the Government of Louis XVIII. arose upon the measures which were brought forward by the Ministry for the preservation of public security and the punishment of seditious acts. The Ministers were attacked, not because their measures were too severe, but because they were not severe enough. While taking power to imprison all suspected persons without trial, or to expel them from their homes, Decazes, the Police-Minister, proposed to punish incitements to sedition by fines and terms of imprisonment varying according to the gravity of the offence. So mild a penalty excited the wrath of men whose fathers and brothers had perished on the guillotine. Some cried out for death, others for banishment to Cayenne. When it was pointed out that the infliction of capital punishment for the mere attempt at sedition would place this on a level with armed rebellion, it was answered that a distinction might be maintained by adding in the latter case the ancient punishment of parricide, the amputation of the hand. Extravagances like this belonged rather to the individuals than to a party; but the vehemence of the Chamber forced the Government to submit to a revision of its measure. Transportation to Cayenne, but not death, was ultimately included among the penalties for seditious acts. The Minister of Justice, M. Barbé-Marbois, who had himself been transported to Cayenne by the Jacobins in 1797, was able to satisfy the Chamber from his own experience that they were not erring on the side of mercy. [264]
[Ney executed, Dec. 7.]
It was in the midst of these heated debates that Marshal Ney was brought to trial for high treason. A so-called Edict of Amnesty had been published by the King on the 24th of July, containing the names of nineteen persons who were to be tried by courts-martial on capital charges, and of thirty-eight others who were to be either exiled or brought to justice, as the Chamber might determine. Ney was included in the first category. Opportunities for escape had been given to him by the Government, as indeed they had to almost every other person on the list. King Louis XVIII. well understood that his Government was not likely to be permanently strengthened by the execution of some of the most distinguished men in France; the emigrants, however, and especially the Duchess of Angoulême, were merciless, and the English Government acted a deplorable part. "One can never feel that the King is secure on his throne," wrote Lord Liverpool, "until he has dared to spill traitors' blood." It is not that many examples would be necessary; but the daring to make a few will alone manifest any strength in the Government. [265] Labédoyère had already been executed. On the 9th of November Ney was brought before a court-martial, at which Castlereagh and his wife had the bad taste to be present. The court-martial, headed by Ney's old comrade Jourdan, declared itself incompetent to judge a peer of France accused of high treason, [266] Ney was accordingly tried before the House of Peers. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and indeed the legal guilt of the Marshal could hardly be denied. Had the men who sat in judgment upon him been a body of Vendean peasants who had braved fire and sword for the Bourbon cause, the sentence of death might have been pronounced with pure, though stern lips: it remains a deep disgrace to France that among the peers who voted not only for Ney's condemnation but for his death, there were some who had themselves accepted office and pay from Napoleon during the Hundred Days. A word from Wellington would still have saved the Marshal's life, but in interceding for Ney the Duke would have placed himself in direct opposition to the action of his own Government. When the Premier had dug the grave, it was not for Wellington to rescue the prisoner. It is permissible to hope that he, who had so vehemently reproached Blücher for his intention to put Napoleon to death if he should fall into his hands, would have asked clemency for Ney had he considered himself at liberty to obey the promptings of his own nature. The responsibility for Marshal Ney's death rests, more than upon any other individual, upon Lord Liverpool.
On the 7th of December the sentence was executed. Ney was shot at early morning in an unfrequented spot, and the Government congratulated itself that it had escaped the dangers of a popular demonstration and heard the last of a disagreeable business. Never was there a greater mistake. No crime committed in the Reign of Terror attached a deeper popular opprobrium to its authors than the execution of Ney did to the Bourbon family. The victim, a brave but rough half-German soldier, [267] rose in popular legend almost to the height of the Emperor himself. His heroism in the retreat from Moscow became, and with justice, a more glorious memory than Davoust's victory at Jena or Moreau's at Hohenlinden. Side by side with the thought that the Bourbons had been brought back by foreign arms, the remembrance sank deep into the heart of the French people that this family had put to death "the bravest of the brave." It would have been no common good fortune for Louis XVIII. to have pardoned or visited with light punishment a great soldier whose political feebleness had led him to an act of treason, condoned by the nation at large. Exile would not have made the transgressor a martyr. But the common sense of mankind condemns Ney's execution: the public opinion of France has never forgiven it.
[Amnesty Bill, Dec 8.]
On the day after the great example was made, Richelieu brought forward the Amnesty Bill of the Government in the House of Representatives. The King, while claiming full right of pardon, desired that the Chamber should be associated with him in its exercise, and submitted a project of law securing from prosecution all persons not included in the list published on July 24th. Measures of a very different character had already been introduced under the same title into the Chamber. Though the initiative in legislation belonged by virtue of the Charta to the Crown, resolutions might be moved by members in the shape of petition or address, and under this form the leaders of the majority had drawn up schemes for the wholesale proscription of Napoleon's adherents. It was proposed by M. la Bourdonnaye to bring to trial all the great civil and military officers who, during the Hundred Days, had constituted the Government of the usurper; all generals, préfets, and commanders of garrisons, who had obeyed Napoleon before a certain day, to be named by the Assembly; and all voters for the death of Louis XVI. who had recognised Napoleon by signing the Acte Additionnel. The language in which these prosecutions were urged was the echo of that which had justified the bloodshed of 1793; its violence was due partly to the fancy that Napoleon's return was no sudden and unexpected act, but the work of a set of conspirators in high places, who were still plotting the overthrow of the monarchy. [268]
[Persecution of suspected persons over all France.]
It was in vain that Richelieu intervened with the expression of the King's own wishes, and recalled the example of forgiveness shown in the testament of Louis XVI. The committee which was appointed to report on the projects of amnesty brought up a scheme little different from that of La Bourdonnaye, and added to it the iniquitous proposal that civil actions should be brought against all condemned persons for the damages sustained by the State through Napoleon's return. This was to make a mock of the clause in the Charta which abolished confiscation. The report of the committee caused the utmost dismay both in France itself and among the representatives of foreign Powers at Paris. The conflict between the men of reaction and the Government had openly broken out; Richelieu's Ministry, the guarantee of peace, seemed to be on the point of falling. On the 2nd of January, 1816, the Chamber proceeded to discuss the Bill of the Government and the amendments of the committee. The debate lasted four days; it was only by the repeated use of the King's own name that the Ministers succeeded in gaining a majority of nine votes against the two principal categories of exception appended to the amnesty by their opponents. The proposal to restore confiscation under the form of civil actions was rejected by a much greater majority, but on the vote affecting the regicides the Government was defeated. This indeed was considered of no great moment. Richelieu, content with having averted measures which would have exposed several hundred persons to death, exile, or pecuniary ruin, consented to banish from France the regicides who had acknowledged Napoleon, along with the thirty-eight persons named in the second list of July 24th. Among other well-known men, Carnot, who had rendered such great services to his country, went to die in exile. Of the seventeen companions of Ney and Labédoyère in the first list of July 24th, most had escaped from France; one alone suffered death. [269] But the persons originally excluded from the amnesty and the regicides exiled by the Assembly formed but a small part of those on whom the vengeance of the Royalists fell; for it was provided that the amnesty-law should apply to no one against whom proceedings had been taken before the formal promulgation of the law. The prisons were already crowded with accused persons, who thus remained exposed to punishment; and after the law had actually passed the Chamber, telegraph-signals were sent over the country by Clarke, the Minister of War, ordering the immediate accusation of several others. One distinguished soldier at least, General Travot, was sentenced to death on proceedings thus instituted between the passing and the promulgation of the law of amnesty. [270] Executions, however, were not numerous except in the south of France, but an enormous number of persons were imprisoned or driven from their homes, some by judgment of the law-courts, some by the exercise of the powers conferred on the administration by the law of Public Security. [271] The central government indeed had less part in this species of persecution than the Préfets and other local authorities, though within their own departments Clarke and Vaublanc set an example which others were not slow to follow. Royalist committees were formed all over the country, and assumed the same kind of irregular control over the officials of their districts as had been practised by the Jacobin committees of 1793. Thousands of persons employed in all grades of the public service, in schools and colleges as well as in the civil administration, in the law-courts as well as in the army and navy, were dismissed from their posts. The new-comers were professed agents of the reaction; those who were permitted to retain their offices strove to outdo their colleagues in their renegade zeal for the new order. It was seen again, as it had been seen under the Republic and under the Empire, that if virtue has limits, servility has none. The same men who had hunted down the peasant for sheltering his children from Napoleon's conscription now hunted down those who were stigmatised as Bonapartists. The clergy threw in their lot with the victorious party, and denounced to the magistrates their parishioners who treated them with disrespect. [272] Darker pages exist in French history than the reaction of 1815, none more contemptible. It is the deepest condemnation of the violence of the Republic and the despotism of the Empire that the generation formed by it should have produced the class who could exhibit, and the public who could tolerate, the prodigies of baseness which attended the second Bourbon restoration.
[The reactionists adopt Parliamentary theory.]
Within the Chamber of Deputies the Ultra-Royalist majority had gained Parliamentary experience in the debates on the Amnesty Bill and the Law of Public Security: their own policy now took a definite shape, and to outbursts of passion there succeeded the attempt to realise ideas. Hatred of the Revolution and all its works was still the dominant impulse of the Assembly; but whatever may have been the earlier desire of the Ultra-Royalist noblesse, it was no longer their intention to restore the political system that existed before 1789. They would in that case have desired to restore absolute monarchy, and to surrender the power which seemed at length to have fallen into the hands of their own class. With Artois on the throne this might have been possible, for Artois, though heir to the crown, was still what he had been in his youth, the chief of a party: with Louis XVIII. and Richelieu at the head of the State, the Ultra-Royalists became the adversaries of royal prerogative and the champions of the rights of Parliament. Before the Revolution the noblesse had possessed privileges; it had not possessed political power. The Constitution of 1814 had unexpectedly given it, under representative forms, the influence denied to it under the old monarchy. New political vistas opened; and the men who had hitherto made St. Louis and Henry IV. the subject of their declamations, now sought to extend the rights of Parliament to the utmost, and to perpetuate in succeeding assemblies the rule of the present majority. An electoral law favourable to the great landed proprietors was the first necessity. This indeed was but a means to an end; another and a greater end might be attained directly, the restoration of a landed Church, and of the civil and social ascendancy of the clergy.
[Ecclesiastical schemes of the reaction.]
It had been admitted by King Louis XVIII. that the clause in the Charta relating to elections required modification, and on this point the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber were content to wait for the proposals of the Government. In their ecclesiastical policy they did not maintain the same reserve. Resolutions in favour of the State-Church were discussed in the form of petitions to be presented to the Crown. It was proposed to make the clergy, as they had been before the Revolution, the sole keepers of registers of birth and marriage; to double the annual payment made to them by the State; to permit property of all kinds to be acquired by the Church by gift or will; to restore all Church lands not yet sold by the State; and, finally, to abolish the University of France, and to place all schools and colleges throughout the country under the control of the Bishops. One central postulate not only passed the Chamber, but was accepted by the Government and became law. Divorce was absolutely abolished; and for two generations after 1816 no possible aggravation of wrong sufficed in France to release either husband or wife from the mockery of a marriage-tie. The power to accept donations or legacies was granted to the clergy, subject, however, in every case to the approval of the Crown. The allowance made to them out of the revenues of the State was increased by the amount of certain pensions as they should fall in, a concession which fell very far short of the demands of the Chamber. In all, the advantages won for the Church were scarcely proportioned to the zeal displayed in its cause. The most important question, the disposal of the unsold Church lands, remained to be determined when the Chamber should enter upon the discussion of the Budget.
[Electoral Bill, Dec. 18, 1815.]
The Electoral Bill of the Government, from which the Ultra-Royalists expected so much, was introduced at the end of the year 1815. It showed in a singular manner the confusion of ideas existing within the Ministry as to the nature of the Parliamentary liberty now supposed to belong to France. The ex-préfet Vaublanc, to whom the framing of the measure was entrusted, though he imagined himself purged from the traditions of Napoleonism, could conceive of no relation between the executive and the legislative power but that which exists between a substance and its shadow. It never entered his mind that the representative institutions granted by the Charta were intended to bring an independent force to bear upon the Government, or that the nation should be treated as more than a fringe round the compact and lasting body of the administration. The language in which Vaublanc introduced his measure was grotesquely candid. Montesquieu, he said, had pointed out that powers must be subordinate; therefore the electoral power must be controlled by the King's Government. [273] By the side of the electors in the Canton and the Department there was accordingly placed, in the Ministerial scheme, an array of officials numerous enough to carry the elections, if indeed they did not actually outnumber the private voters. The franchise was confined to the sixty richest persons in each Canton: these, with the officials of the district, were to elect the voters of the Department, who, with a similar contingent of officials, were to choose the Deputies. Re-affirming the principle laid down in the Constitution of 1795 and repeated in the Charta, Vaublanc proposed that a fifth part of the Assembly should retire each year.
[Counter-project of Villèle.]
If the Minister had intended to give the Ultra-Royalists the best possible means of exalting the peculiar policy of their class into something like a real defence of liberty, he could not have framed a more fitting measure. The creation of constituent bodies out of mayors, crown-advocates, and justices of the peace, was described, and with truth, as a mere Napoleonic juggle. The limitation of the franchise to a fixed number of rich persons was condemned as illiberal and contrary to the spirit of the Charta: the system of yearly renovation by fifths, which threatened to curtail the reign of the present majority, was attributed to the dread of any complete expression of public opinion. It was evident that the Bill of the Government would either be rejected or altered in such a manner as to give it a totally different character. In the Committee of the Chamber which undertook the task of drawing up amendments, the influence was first felt of a man who was soon to become the chief and guiding spirit of the Ultra-Royalist party. M. de Villèle, spokesman of the Committee, had in his youth been an officer in the navy of Louis XVI. On the dethronement of the King he had quitted the service, and settled in the Isle of Bourbon, where he gained some wealth and an acquaintance with details of business and finance rare among the French landed gentry. Returning to France under the Empire, he took up his abode near Toulouse, his native place, and was made Mayor of that city on Napoleon's second downfall. Villèle's politics gained a strong and original colour from his personal experience and the character of the province in which he lived. The south was the only part of France known to him. There the reactionary movement of 1815 had been a really popular one, and the chief difficulty of the Government, at the end of the Hundred Days, had been to protect the Bonapartists from violence. Villèle believed that throughout France the wealthier men among the peasantry were as ready to follow the priests and nobles as they were in Provence and La Vendée. His conception of the government of the future was the rule of a landed aristocracy, resting, in its struggle against monarchical centralisation and against the Liberalism of the middle class, on the conservative and religious instincts of the peasantry. Instead of excluding popular forces, Villèle welcomed them as allies. He proposed to lower the franchise to one-sixth of the sum named in the Charta, and, while retaining a system of double-election, to give a vote in the primary assemblies to every Frenchman paying annual taxes to the amount of fifty francs. In constituencies so large as to include all the more substantial peasantry, while sufficiently limited to exclude the ill-paid populace in towns, Villèle believed that the Church and the noblesse would on the whole control the elections. In the interest of the present majority he rejected the system of renovation by fifths proposed by the Government, and demanded that the present Chamber should continue unchanged until its dissolution, and the succeeding Chamber be elected entire.
[Result of debates on Electoral Bill.]
Villèle's scheme, if carried, would in all probability have failed at the first trial. The districts in which the reaction of 1815 was popular were not so large as he supposed: in the greater part of France the peasantry would not have obeyed the nobles except under intimidation. This was suspected by the majority, in spite of the confident language in which they spoke of the will of the nation as identical with their own. Villèle's boldness alarmed them: they anticipated that these great constituencies of peasants, if really left masters of the elections, would be more likely to return a body of Jacobins and Bonapartists than one of hereditary landlords. It was not necessary, however, to sacrifice the well-sounding principle of a low franchise, for the democratic vote at the first stage of the elections might effectively be neutralised by putting the second stage into the hands of the chief proprietors. The Assembly had in fact only to imitate the example of the Government, and to appoint a body of persons who should vote, as of right, by the side of the electors chosen in the primary assemblies. The Government in its own interest had designated a troop of officials as electors: the Assembly, on the contrary, resolved that in the Electoral College of each Department, numbering in all about 150 persons, the fifty principal landowners of the Department should be entitled to vote, whether they had been nominated by the primary constituencies or not. Modified by this proviso, the project of Villèle passed the Assembly. The Government saw that under the disguise of a series of amendments a measure directly antagonistic to their own had been carried. The franchise had been altered; the real control of the elections placed in the hands of the very party which was now in open opposition to the King and his Ministers. No compromise was possible between the law proposed by the Government and that passed by the Assembly. The Government appealed to the Chamber of Peers. The Peers threw out the amendments of the Lower House. A provisional measure was then introduced by Richelieu for the sake of providing France with at least some temporary rule for the conduct of elections. It failed; and the constitutional legislation of the country came to a dead-lock, while the Government and the Assembly stood face to face, and it became evident that one or the other must fall. The Ministers of the Great Powers at Paris, who watched over the restored dynasty, debated whether or not they should recommend the King to resort to the extreme measure of a dissolution.
[Contest on the Budget.]
[The Chambers prorogued, April 29.]
The Electoral Bill was not the only object of conflict between Richelieu's Ministry and the Chamber, nor indeed the principal one. The Budget excited fiercer passions, and raised greater issues. It was for no mere scheme of finance that the Government had to fight, but against a violation of public faith which would have left France insolvent and creditless in the face of the Powers who still held its territory in pledge. The debt incurred by the nation since 1813 was still unfunded. That part of it which had been raised before the summer of 1814 had been secured by law upon the unsold forests formerly belonging to the Church, and upon the Communal lands which Napoleon had made the property of the State: the remainder, which included the loans made during the Hundred Days, had no specified security. It was now proposed by the Government to place the whole of the unfunded debt upon the same level, and to provide for its payment by selling the so-called Church forests. The project excited the bitterest opposition on the side of the Count of Artois and his friends. If there was one object which the clerical and reactionary party pursued with religious fervour, it was the restoration of the Church lands: if there was one class which they had no scruple in impoverishing, it was the class that had lent money to Napoleon. Instead of paying the debts of the State, the Committee of the Chamber proposed to repeal the law of September, 1814, which pledged the Church forests, and to compel both the earlier and the later holders of the unfunded debt to accept stock in satisfaction of their claims, though the stock was worth less than two-thirds of its nominal value. The resolution was in fact one for the repudiation of a third part of the unfunded debt. Richelieu, seeing in what fashion his measure was about to be transformed, determined upon withdrawing it altogether: the majority in the Chamber, intent on executing its own policy and that of the Count of Artois, refused to recognise the withdrawal. Such a step was at once an insult and a usurpation of power. So great was the scandal and alarm caused by the scenes in the Chamber, that the Duke of Wellington, at the instance of the Ambassadors, presented a note to King Louis XVIII. requiring him in plain terms to put a stop to the machinations of his brother. [274] The interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour countenance of the Duchess of Angoulême more than he did Wellington's reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation. The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown; and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.
[Rising at Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]
It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of peasants took place at Grenoble. According to the report of General Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate fighting. "The corpses of the King's enemies," said the General in his despatch, "cover all the roads for a league round Grenoble." [275] It was soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too late the Government learnt that Donnadieu's narrative was a mass of the grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants, half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the General proceeded to establish a régime of military law soon brought him into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible. The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the reactionists--the dissolution of Parliament.
[Decazes.]
[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]
Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite. Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes and gossip much more congenial to the old man's taste than discussions on finance or constitutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English. The Minister's enemies said that he won the King's heart by taking private lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to read that he "ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever." At the same time the reports of Decazes' local agents proved that the Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution was laid before the Ministers and some of the King's confidants. Though the Ambassadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for its re-assembling.
[Electoral law, 1817.]
France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly agitated in the Assembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was passed, which, while it retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by making the elections direct. Though the constituent body of all France scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of the Church and the noblesse. The men who had made wealth by banking, commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly attached to the modern as against the old institutions of France, inasmuch as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic middle class and the landed noblesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with numbers. The electoral law, however, passed both Houses in the form in which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice, as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle class of Great Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the weight in the representation given to the middle class of France by the law of 1817.
[Establishment of financial credit.]
Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests; but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its real, not at its titular, value. The effect of this measure was at once evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan, which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following year.
[Character of the years 1816-18.]
Thus the dangers with which reactionary passion had threatened France appeared to be passing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months passed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There was no longer any doubt that the five years' occupation, contemplated when the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of Alexander, the friendliness of his Ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself, far from suffering from Napoleon's fall, regained something of the spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court: conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand, enforcing the principles of legal and constitutional liberty on behalf of a party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought and expression existed no more.
[Prussia after 1815.]
[Edict promising a Constitution, May 22, 1815.]
But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of internal liberty. They returned from the battle-fields of Saxony and France, knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.
[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]
But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792 and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism. Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the German present and the past.
[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]
The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July, 1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813, [277] attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then, passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz's pamphlet, which was written with a strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity, ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had acted. [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.
[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]
In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September. Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed, its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar, already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller, loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany, remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form. The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the days of Germany's humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.
[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]
On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther's Wartburg Castle; sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of Luther's dealing with the Pope's Bull, a quantity of what they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz's pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier's strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a corporal's cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were now being revived in Westphalia. [279] Insignificant as the whole affair was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts. Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out. The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.
[Alexander in 1818.]
Twelve months passed between the Wartburg festival and the beginning of the Conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle. In the interval a more important person than the King of Prussia went over to the side of reaction. Up to the summer of 1818, the Czar appeared to have abated nothing of his zeal for constitutional government. In the spring of that year, he summoned the Polish Diet; addressed them in a speech so enthusiastic as to alarm not only the Court of Vienna but all his own counsellors; and stated in the clearest possible language his intention of extending the benefits of a representative system to the whole Russian Empire. [280] At the close of the brief session he thanked the Polish Deputies for their boldness in throwing out a measure proposed by himself. Alexander's popular rhetoric at Warsaw might perhaps be not incompatible with a settled purpose to permit no encroachment on authority either there or elsewhere; but the change in his tone was so great when he appeared at Aix-la-Chapelle a few months afterwards, that some strange and sudden cause has been thought necessary to explain it. It is said that during the Czar's residence at Moscow, in June, 1818, the revelation was made to him of the existence of a mass of secret societies in the army, whose aim was the overthrow of his own Government. Alexander's father had died by the hands of murderers: his own temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator to the despot. But the evidence of what passed in his mind is wanting. Hearsay, conjecture, gossip, abound; [281] the one man who could have told all has left no word. This only is certain, that from the close of the year 1818, the future, hitherto bright with dreams of peaceful progress, became in Alexander's view a battle-field between the forces of order and anarchy. The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against the madness that was known as popular right.
[Conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, Oct., 1818.]
[France evacuated.]
[Proposed Quintuple Alliance.]
[Canning.]
At the end of September, 1818, the Sovereigns or Ministers of the Great Powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Conferences began. The first question to be decided was whether the Allied Army might safely be withdrawn from France; the second, in what form the concert of Europe should hereafter be maintained. On the first question there was no disagreement: the evacuation of France was resolved upon and promptly executed. The second question was a more difficult one. Richelieu, on behalf of King Louis XVIII., represented that France now stood on the same footing as any other European Power, and proposed that the Quadruple Alliance of 1815 should be converted into a genuine European federation by adding France to it as a fifth member. The plan had been communicated to the English Government, and would probably have received its assent but for the strong opposition raised by Canning within the Cabinet. Canning took a gloomy but a true view of the proposed concert of the Powers. He foresaw that it would really amount to a combination of governments against liberty. Therefore, while recognising the existing engagements of this country, he urged that England ought to join in no combination except that to which it had already pledged itself, namely, the combination made with the definite object of resisting French disturbance. To combine with three Powers to prevent Napoleon or the Jacobins from again becoming masters of France was a reasonable act of policy: to combine with all the Great Powers of Europe against nothing in particular was to place the country on the side of governments against peoples, and to involve England in any enterprise of repression which the Courts might think fit to undertake. Canning's warning opened the eyes of his colleagues to the view which was likely to be taken of such a general alliance by Parliament and by public opinion. Lord Castlereagh was forbidden to make this country a party to any abstract union of Governments. In memorable words the Prime Minister described the true grounds for the decision: "We must recollect in the whole of this business, and ought to make our Allies feel, that the general and European discussion of these questions will be in the British Parliament." [282] Fear of the rising voice of the nation, no longer forced by military necessities to sanction every measure of its rulers, compelled Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh to take account of scruples which were not their own. On the same grounds, while the Ministry agreed that Continental difficulties which might hereafter arise ought to be settled by a friendly discussion among the Great Powers, it declined to elevate this occasional deliberation into a system, and to assent to the periodical meeting of a Congress. Peace might or might not be promoted by the frequent gatherings of Sovereigns and statesmen; but a council so formed, if permanent in its nature, would necessarily extinguish the independence of every minor State, and hand over the government of all Europe to the Great Courts, if only they could agree with one another.
[Declarations and Secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.]
It was the refusal of England to enter into a general league that determined the form in which the results of the Conference of 1818 were embodied. In the first place the Quadruple Alliance against French revolution was renewed, and with such seriousness that the military centres were fixed, at which, in case of any outbreak, the troops of each of the Great Powers should assemble. [283] This Treaty, however, was kept secret, in order not to add to the difficulties of Richelieu. The published documents breathed another spirit. [284] Without announcing an actual alliance with King Louis XVIII., the Courts, including England, declared that through the restoration of legitimate and constitutional monarchy France had regained its place in the councils of Europe, and that it would hereafter co-operate in maintaining the general peace. For this end meetings of the sovereigns or their ministers might be necessary; such meetings would, however, be arranged by the ordinary modes of negotiation, nor would the affairs of any minor State be discussed by the Great Powers, except at the direct invitation of that State, whose representatives would then be admitted to the sittings. In these guarded words the intention of forming a permanent and organised Court of Control over Europe was disclaimed. A manifesto, addressed to the world at large, declared that the sovereigns of the five great States had no other object in their union than the maintenance of peace on the basis of existing treaties. They had formed no new political combinations; their rule was the observance of international law; their object the prosperity and moral welfare of their subjects.
[Repressive tone of the Conference.]
[Metternich and Austrian principles henceforth dominant.]
The earnestness with which the statesmen of 1818, while accepting the conditions laid down by England, persevered in the project of a joint regulation of European affairs may suggest the question whether the plan which they had at heart would not in truth have operated to the benefit of mankind. The answer is, that the value of any International Council depends firstly on the intelligence which it is likely to possess, and secondly on the degree in which it is really representative. Experience proved that the Congresses which followed 1818 possessed but a limited intelligence, and that they represented nothing at all but authority. The meeting at Aix-la-Chapelle was itself the turning-point in the constitutional history of Europe. Though no open declaration was made against constitutional forms, every Sovereign and every minister who attended the Conference left it with the resolution to draw the reins of government tighter. A note of alarm had been sounded. Conspiracies in Belgium, an attempt on the life of Wellington, rumours of a plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, combined with the outcry against the German Universities and the whispered tales from Moscow in filling the minds of statesmen with apprehensions. The change which had taken place in Alexander himself was of the most serious moment. Up to this time Metternich, the leader of European Conservatism, had felt that in the Czar there were sympathies with Liberalism and enlightenment which made the future of Europe doubtful. [285] To check the dissolution of existing power, to suppress all tendency to change, was the habitual object of Austria, and the Czar was the one person who had seemed likely to prevent the principles of Austria from becoming the law of Europe. Elsewhere Metternich had little to fear in the way of opposition. Hardenberg, broken in health and ill-supported by his King, had ceased to be a power. Yielding to the apprehensions of Frederick William, perhaps with the hope of dispelling them at some future time, he took his place among the alarmists of the day, and suffered the German policy of Prussia, to which so great a future lay open a few years before, to become the mere reflex of Austrian inaction and repression. [286] England, so long as it was represented on the Continent by Castlereagh and Wellington, scarcely counted for anything on the side of liberty. The sudden change in Alexander removed the one check that stood in Austria's way; and from this time Metternich exercised an authority in Europe such as few statesmen have ever possessed. His influence, overborne by that of the Czar during 1814 and 1815, struck root at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, maintained itself unimpaired during five eventful years, and sank only when the death of Lord Castlereagh allowed the real voice of England once more to be heard, and Canning, too late to forbid the work of repression in Italy and in Spain, inaugurated, after an interval of forced neutrality, that worthier concert which established the independence of Greece.
[Metternich's advice to Prussia, 1818.]
If it is the mark of a clever statesman to know where to press and where to give way, Metternich certainly proved himself one in 1818. Before the end of the Conference he delivered to Hardenberg and to the King of Prussia two papers containing a complete set of recommendations for the management of Prussian affairs. The contents of these documents were singular enough: it is still more singular that they form the history of what actually took place in Prussia during the succeeding years. Starting with the assumption that the party of revolution had found its lever in the promise of King Frederick William to create a Representative System, Metternich demonstrated in polite language to the very men who had made this promise, that any central Representation would inevitably overthrow the Prussian State; pointed out that the King's dominions consisted of seven Provinces; and recommended Frederick William to fulfil his promise only by giving to each Province a Diet for the discussion of its own local concerns. Having thus warned the King against creating a National Parliament, like that which had thrown France into revolution in 1789, Metternich exhibited the specific dangers of the moment and the means of overcoming them. These dangers were Universities, Gymnastic establishments, and the Press. "The revolutionists," he said, "despairing of effecting their aim themselves, have formed the settled plan of educating the next generation for revolution. The Gymnastic establishment is a preparatory school for University disorders. The University seizes the youth as he leaves boyhood, and gives him a revolutionary training. This mischief is common to all Germany, and must be checked by joint action of the Governments. Gymnasia, on the contrary, were invented at Berlin, and spring from Berlin. For these, palliative measures are no longer sufficient. It has become a duty of State for the King of Prussia to destroy the evil. The whole institution in every shape must be closed and uprooted." With regard to the abuse of the Press, Metternich contented himself with saying that a difference ought to be made between substantial books and mere pamphlets or journals; and that the regulation of the Press throughout Germany at large could only be effected by an agreement between Austria and Prussia. [287]
[Stourdza's pamphlet.]
With a million men under arms, the Sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon schoolboys' shoulders. The Emperor Francis, whose imagination had failed to rise to the glories of the Holy Alliance, alone seems to have had some suspicion of the absurdity of the present alarms. [288] The Czar distinguished himself by his zeal against the lecturers who were turning the world upside down. As if Metternich had not frightened the Congress enough already, the Czar distributed at Aix-la-Chapelle a pamphlet published by one Stourdza, a Moldavian, which described Germany as on the brink of revolution, and enumerated half a score of mortal disorders which racked that unfortunate country. The chief of all was the vicious system of the Universities, which instead of duly developing the vessel of the Christian State from the cradle of Moses, [289] brought up young men to be despisers of law and instruments of a licentious Press. The ingenious Moldavian, whose expressions in some places bear a singular resemblance to those of Alexander, while in others they are actually identical with reflections of Metternich's not then published, went on to enlighten the German Governments as to the best means of rescuing their subjects from their perilous condition. Certain fiscal and administrative changes were briefly suggested, but the main reform urged was exactly that propounded by Metternich, the enforcement of a better discipline and of a more rigidly-prescribed course of study at the Universities, along with the supervision of all journals and periodical literature.
[The murder of Kotzebue, March 23, 1819.]
Stourdza's pamphlet, in which loose reasoning was accompanied by the coarsest invective, would have gained little attention if it had depended on its own merits or on the reputation of its author: it became a different matter when it was known to represent the views of the Czar. A vehement but natural outcry arose at the Universities against this interference of the foreigner with German domestic affairs. National independence, it seemed, had been won in the deadly struggle against France only in order that internal liberty, the promised fruit of this independence, should be sacrificed at the bidding of Russia. The Czar himself was out of reach: the vengeance of outraged patriotism fell upon an insignificant person who had the misfortune to be regarded as his principal agent. A dramatic author then famous, now forgotten, August Kotzebue, held the office of Russian agent in Central Germany, and conducted a newspaper whose object was to throw ridicule on the national movement of the day, and especially on those associations of students where German enthusiasm reached its climax. Many circumstances embittered popular feeling against this man, and caused him to be regarded less as a legitimate enemy than as a traitor and an apostate. Kotzebue had himself been a student at Jena, and at one time had turned liberal sentiments to practical account in his plays. Literary jealousies and wounded vanity had subsequently alienated him from his country, and made him the willing and acrid hireling of a foreign Court. The reports which, as Russian agent, he sent to St. Petersburg were doubtless as offensive as the attacks on the Universities which he published in his journal; but it was an extravagant compliment to the man to imagine that he was the real author of the Czar's desertion from Liberalism to reaction. This, however, was the common belief, and it cost Kotzebue dear. A student from Erlangen, Carl Sand, who had accompanied the standard at the Wartburg festival, formed the silent resolve of sacrificing his own life in order to punish the enemy of his country. Sand was a man of pure and devout, though ill-balanced character. His earlier life marked him as one whose whole being was absorbed by what he considered a divine call. He thought of the Greeks who, even in their fallen estate, had so often died to free their country from Turkish oppression, and formed the deplorable conclusion that by murdering a decayed dramatist he could strike some great blow against the powers of evil. [290] He sought the unfortunate Kotzebue in the midst of his family, stabbed him to the heart, and then turned his weapon against himself. Recovering from his wounds, he was condemned to death, and perished, after a year's interval, on the scaffold, calling God to witness that he died for Germany to be free.
[Action of Metternich.]
The effects of Sand's act were very great, and their real nature was at once recognised. Hardenberg, the moment that he heard of Kotzebue's death, exclaimed that a Prussian Constitution had now become impossible. Metternich, who had thought the Czar mad because he desired to found a peaceful alliance of Sovereigns on religious principles, was not likely to make allowance for a kind of piety that sent young rebels over the country on missions of murder. The Austrian statesman was in Rome when the news of Kotzebue's assassination reached him. He saw that the time had come for united action throughout Germany, and, without making any public utterance, drew up a scheme of repressive measures, and sent out proposals for a gathering of the Ministers of all the principal German Courts. In the summer he travelled slowly northwards, met the King of Prussia at Teplitz, in Bohemia, and shortly afterwards opened the intended Conference of Ministers in the neighbouring town of Carlsbad. A number of innocent persons had already, at his instigation, been arrested in Prussia and other States, under circumstances deeply discreditable to Government. Private papers were seized, and garbled extracts from them published in official prints as proof of guilt. [291] "By the help of God," Metternich wrote, "I hope to defeat the German Revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of the world. The revolutionists thought me far away, because I was five hundred leagues off. They deceived themselves; I have been in the midst of them, and now I am striking my blows." [292] Metternich's plan was to enforce throughout Germany, by means of legislation in the Federal Diet, the principle which he had already privately commended to the King of Prussia. There were two distinct objects of policy before him: the first, to prevent the formation in any German State of an assembly representing the whole community, like the English House of Commons or the French Chamber of Deputies; the second, to establish a general system of censorship over the Press and over the Universities, and to create a central authority, vested, as the representative of the Diet, with inquisitorial powers.
[The South-Western States become constitutional as Prussia relapses.]
[Bavarian Constitution, May 26, 1818.]
The first of these objects, the prevention of general assemblies, had been rendered more difficult by recent acts of the Governments of Bavaria and Baden. A singular change had taken place in the relation between Prussia and the Minor States which had formerly constituted the Federation of the Rhine. When, at the Congress of Vienna, Prussian statesmen had endeavoured to limit the arbitrary rule of petty sovereigns by charging the Diet with the protection of constitutional right over all Germany, the Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg had stoutly refused to part with sovereign power. To submit to a law of liberty, as it then seemed, was to lose their own separate existence, and to reduce themselves to dependence upon the Jacobins of Berlin. This apprehension governed the policy of the Minor Courts from 1813 to 1815. But since that time events had taken an unexpected turn. Prussia, which once threatened to excite popular movement over all Germany in its own interest, had now accepted Metternich's guidance, and made its representative in the Diet the mouthpiece of Austrian interest and policy. It was no longer from Berlin but from Vienna that the separate existence of the Minor States was threatened. The two great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to Metternich's direction, the Governments of the South-Western States familiarised themselves with the idea of a popular representation; and at the very time when the conservative programme was being drawn up for the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the King of Bavaria published a Constitution. Baden followed after a short interval, and in each of these States, although the Legislature was divided into two Chambers, the representation established was not merely provincial, according to Metternich's plan, or wholly on the principle of separate Estates or Orders, as before the Revolution, but to some extent on the type of England and France, where the Lower Chamber, in theory, represented the public at large. This was enough to make Metternich condemn the new Constitutions as radically bad and revolutionary. [293] He was, however, conscious of the difficulty of making a direct attack upon them. This task he reserved for a later time. His policy at present was to obtain a declaration from the Diet which should prevent any other Government within the League from following in the same path; while, by means of Press-laws, supervision of the Universities, and a central commission of inquiry, he expected to make the position of rebellious professors and agitators so desperate that the forces of disorder, themselves not deeply rooted in German nature, would presently disappear.
[Conference of Carlsbad, Aug., 1819.]
The Conference of Ministers at Carlsbad, which in the memory of the German people is justly associated with the suppression of their liberty for an entire generation, began and ended in the month of August, 1819. Though attended by the representatives of eight German Governments, it did little more than register the conclusions which Metternich had already formed. [294] The zeal with which the envoy of Prussia supported every repressive measure made it useless for the Ministers of the Minor Courts to offer an open opposition. Nothing more was required than that the Diet should formally sanction the propositions thus privately accepted by all the leading Ministers. On the 20th of September this sanction was given. The Diet, which had sat for three years without framing a single useful law, ratified all Metternich's oppressive enactments in as many hours. It was ordered that in every State within the Federation the Government should take measures for preventing the publication of any journal or pamphlet except after licence given, and each Government was declared responsible to the Federation at large for any objectionable writing published within its own territory. The Sovereigns were required to appoint civil commissioners at the Universities, whose duty it should be to enforce public order and to give a salutary direction to the teaching of the professors. They were also required to dismiss all professors who should overstep the bounds of their duty, and such dismissed persons were prohibited from being employed in any other State. It was enacted that within fifteen days of the passing of the decree an extraordinary Commission should assemble at Mainz to investigate the origin and extent of the secret revolutionary societies which threatened the safety of the Federation. The Commission was empowered to examine and, if necessary, to arrest any subject of any German State. All law-courts and other authorities were required to furnish it with information and with documents, and to undertake all inquiries which the Commission might order. The Commission, however, was not a law-court itself: its duty was to report to the Diet, which would then create such judicial machinery as might be necessary. [295]
[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]
These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary, character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815, which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of June, 1820. [296] The most important of its provisions was that which related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities, supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the Estates in certain definite acts of government. [297]
In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged itself with the duty of maintaining public order.
[The reaction in Prussia.]
From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Würtemberg, which received a Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected, thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid; dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his country's glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional State. [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation, was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.
[The Commission at Mainz.]
The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and after two years' labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went back to the time of Fichte's lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund in 1808, traced the progress of all the students' associations and other patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity, acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded. [299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands: and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with the scents from rich men's kitchens, [300] followed every stage of the political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of their own.
[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]
[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]
In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after the Minister's death, King Frederick William established the Provincial Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William, however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education, which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the execution of great public ends.
[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]
[Interest in France.]
But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,-- calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,--embittered many an honest mind against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working for the improvement of German public life were one after another extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods. Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being. [301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men, disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.
[France after 1818.]
[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]
We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back great numbers of Napoleon's old officers and soldiers to the army. Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events which took place in France during his absence, as well as the communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers, convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King's Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the conservative elements in the State. [302] While the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villèle, the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the real though not the nominal chief.
[Election of Grégoire, Sept., 1819.]
The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one. For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the Minister's own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions. Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment and alarm. The ex-bishop Grégoire, one of the authors of the destruction of the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Grégoire by no means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions, however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it: [303] his courageous adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal Church, which Grégoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for himself, Grégoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793. Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide Fouché a Minister, interpreted Grégoire's election by the people of Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his favourite Minister's worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the King's friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of 1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Grégoire could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched, designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed aristocracy. Grégoire's election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were dismissed from their posts.
[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]
[Reaction sets in.]
[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]
A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction. The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his two sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry. Angoulême was childless; the Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the Crown of France not descending to a female. [304] The circumstance which made Berry's life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner's victory over France. Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the 13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was, it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of Louvel's intention. But it was impossible that political passion should await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate rule.
[Progress of the reaction in France.]
[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]
[The Congregation.]
Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property. So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution. Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villèle and other Ultra-Royalists were invited to join Richelieu's Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villèle, the real head of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic opponents of Napoleon's despotism, now expanded into a great organism of government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole system of public education to the hands of the clergy?
[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]
In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively. But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be governed in perpetuity by what was called the Parti Prêtre. Twenty years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a whole, enjoyed greater happiness.
[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]
Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects, sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them, the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further, there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of Jacobinism.
There was also in the very fact that Europe had been restored to peace by the united efforts of all the governments something adverse to the success of a constitutional or a Liberal party in any State. Constitutional systems had indeed been much praised at the Congress of Vienna; but the group of men who actually controlled Europe in 1815, and who during the five succeeding years continued in correspondence and in close personal intercourse with one another, had, with one exception, passed their lives in the atmosphere of absolute government, and learnt to regard the conduct of all great affairs as the business of a small number of very eminent individuals. Castlereagh, the one Minister of a constitutional State, belonged to a party which, to a degree almost unequalled in Europe, identified political duty with the principle of hostility to change. It is indeed in the correspondence of the English Minister himself, and in relation to subjects of purely domestic government in England, that the community of thought which now existed between all the leading statesmen of Europe finds its most singular exhibition. Both Metternich and Hardenberg took as much interest in the suppression of Lancashire Radicalism, and in the measures of coercion which the British Government thought it necessary to pass in the year 1819, as in the chastisement of rebellious pamphleteers upon the Rhine, and in the dissolution of the students' clubs at Jena. It was indeed no very great matter for the English people, who were now close upon an era of reform, that Castlereagh received the congratulations of Vienna and Berlin for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and the right of public meeting, [305] or that Metternich believed that no one but himself knew the real import of the shouts with which the London mob greeted Sir Francis Burdett. [306] Neither the impending reform of the English Criminal Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future were so destitute of that strength which springs from connection with the past.
Chapter XIV
Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820--Spain from 1814 to 1820--The South American Colonies--The Army at Cadiz: Action of Quiroga and Riego--Movement at Corunna--Ferdinand accepts the Constitution of 1812--Naples from 1815 to 1820--The Court-party, the Muratists, the Carbonari--The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at Naples--Constitutional movement in Portugal--Alexander's proposal with regard to Spain--The Conference and Declaration of Troppau--Protest of England--Conference of Laibach--The Austrians invade Naples and restore absolute Monarchy-- Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails--Spain from 1820 to 1822--Death of Castlereagh--The Congress of Verona--Policy of England--The French invade Spain--Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and violence of the reaction-- England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence--Affairs in Portugal--Canning sends troops to Lisbon--The Policy of Canning--Estimate of his place in the history of Europe.
[The Mediterranean movements, beginning in 1820.]
When the guardians of Europe, at the end of the first three years of peace, scanned from their council-chamber at Aix-la-Chapelle that goodly heritage which, under Providence, their own parental care was henceforth to guard against the assaults of malice and revolution, they had fixed their gaze chiefly on France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the regions most threatened by the spirit of change. The forecast was not an accurate one. In each of these countries Government proved during the succeeding years to be much more than a match for its real or imaginary foes: it was in the Mediterranean States, which had excited comparatively little anxiety, that the first successful attack was made upon established power. Three movements arose successively in the three southern peninsulas, at the time when Metternich was enjoying the silence which he had imposed upon Germany, and the Ultra-Royalists of France were making good the advantage which the crime of an individual and the imprudence of a party had thrown into their hands. In Spain and in Italy a body of soldiers rose on behalf of constitutional government: in Greece a nation rose against the rule of the foreigner. In all three countries the issue of these movements was, after a longer or shorter interval, determined by the Northern Powers. All three movements were at first treated as identical in their character, and all alike condemned as the work of Jacobinism. But the course of events, and a change of persons in the government of one great State, brought about a truer view of the nature of the struggle in Greece. The ultimate action of Europe in the affairs of that country was different from its action in the affairs of Italy and Spain. It is now only remembered as an instance of political recklessness or stupidity that a conflict of race against race and of religion against religion should for a while have been confused by some of the leading Ministers of Europe with the attempt of a party to make the form of domestic government more liberal. The Hellenic rising had indeed no feature in common with the revolutions of Naples and Cadiz; and, although in order of time the opening of the Greek movement long preceded the close of the Spanish movement, the historian, who has neither the politician's motive for making a confusion, nor the protection of his excuse of ignorance, must in this case neglect the accidents of chronology, and treat the two as altogether apart.
[Spain between 1814 and 1820.]
King Ferdinand of Spain, after overthrowing the Constitution which he found in existence on his return to his country, had conducted himself as if his object had been to show to what lengths a legitimate monarch might abuse the fidelity of his subjects and defy the public opinion of Europe. The leaders of the Cortes, whom he had arrested in 1814, after being declared innocent by one tribunal after another were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment by an arbitrary decree of the King, without even the pretence of judicial forms. Men who had been conspicuous in the struggle of the nation against Napoleon were neglected or disgraced; many of the highest posts were filled by politicians who had played a double part, or had even served under the invader. Priests and courtiers intrigued for influence over the King; even when a capable Minister was placed in power through the pressure of the ambassadors, and the King's name was set to edicts of administrative reform, these edicts were made a dead letter by the powerful band who lived upon the corruption of the public service. Nothing was sacred except the interest of the clergy; this, however, was enough to keep the rural population on the King's side. The peasant, who knew that his house would not now be burnt by the French, and who heard that true religion had at length triumphed over its enemies, understood, and cared to understand, nothing more. Rumours of kingly misgovernment and oppression scarcely reached his ears. Ferdinand was still the child of Spain and of the Church; his return had been the return of peace; his rule was the victory of the Catholic faith.
[The nation satisfied: the officers discontented.]
But the acquiescence of the mass of the people was not shared by the officers of the army and the educated classes in the towns. The overthrow of the Constitution was from the first condemned by soldiers who had won distinction under the government of the Cortes; and a series of military rebellion, though isolated and on the smallest scale, showed that the course on which Ferdinand had entered was not altogether free from danger. The attempts of General Mina in 1814, and of Porlier and Lacy in succeeding years, to raise the soldiery on behalf of the Constitution, failed, through the indifference of the soldiery themselves, and the power which the priesthood exercised in garrison-towns. Discontent made its way in the army by slow degrees; and the ultimate declaration of a military party against the existing Government was due at least as much to Ferdinand's absurd system of favouritism, and to the wretched condition into which the army had been thrown, as to an attachment to the memory or the principles of constitutional rule. Misgovernment made the treasury bankrupt; soldiers and sailors received no pay for years together; and the hatred with which the Spanish people had now come to regard military service is curiously shown by an order of the Government that all the beggars in Madrid and other great towns should be seized on a certain night (July 23, 1816), and enrolled in the army. [307] But the very beggars were more than a match for Ferdinand's administration. They heard of the fate in store for them, and mysteriously disappeared, so frustrating a measure by which it had been calculated that Spain would gain sixty thousand warriors.
[Struggle of Spain with its colonies, 1810-1820.]
The military revolution which at length broke out in the year 1820 was closely connected with the struggle for independence now being made by the American colonies of Spain; and in its turn it affected the course of this struggle and its final result. The colonies had refused to accept the rule either of Joseph Bonaparte or of the Cortes of Cadiz when their legitimate sovereign was dispossessed by Napoleon. While acting for the most part in Ferdinand's name, they had engaged in a struggle with the National Government of Spain. They had tasted independence; and although after the restoration of Ferdinand they would probably have recognised the rights of the Spanish Crown if certain concessions had been made, they were not disposed to return to the condition of inferiority in which they had been held during the last century, or to submit to rulers who proved themselves as cruel and vindictive in moments of victory as they were incapable of understanding the needs of the time. The struggle accordingly continued. Regiment after regiment was sent from Spain, to perish of fever, of forced marches, or on the field. The Government of King Ferdinand, despairing of its own resources, looked around for help among the European Powers. England would have lent its mediation, and possibly even armed assistance, if the Court of Madrid would have granted a reasonable amount of freedom to the colonies, and have opened their ports to British commerce. This, however, was not in accordance with the views of Ferdinand's advisers. Strange as it may appear, the Spanish Government demanded that the alliance of Sovereigns, which had been framed for the purpose of resisting the principle of rebellion and disorder in Europe, should intervene against its revolted subjects on the other side of the Atlantic, and it implied that England, if acting at all, should act as the instrument of the Alliance. [308] Encouragement was given to the design by the Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. Whether a continent claimed its independence, or a German schoolboy wore a forbidden ribbon in his cap, the chiefs of the Holy Alliance now assumed the frown of offended Providence, and prepared to interpose their own superior power and wisdom to save a misguided world from the consequences of its own folly. Alexander had indeed for a time hoped that the means of subduing the colonies might be supplied by himself; and in his zeal to supplant England in the good graces of Ferdinand he sold the King a fleet of war on very moderate terms. To the scandal of Europe the ships, when they reached Cadiz, turned out to be thoroughly rotten and unseaworthy. As it was certain that the Czar's fleet and the Spanish soldiers, however holy their mission, would all go to the bottom together as soon as they encountered the waves of the Atlantic, the expedition was postponed, and the affairs of America were brought before the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The Envoys of Russia and France submitted a paper, in which, anticipating the storm-warnings of more recent times, they described the dangers to which monarchical Europe would be exposed from the growth of a federation of republics in America; and they suggested that Wellington, as "the man of Europe," should go to Madrid, to preside over a negotiation between the Court of Spain and all the ambassadors with reference to the terms to be offered to the Transatlantic States. [309] England, however, in spite of Lord Castlereagh's dread of revolutionary contagion, adhered to the principles which it had already laid down; and as the counsellors of King Ferdinand declined to change their policy, Spain was left to subdue its colonies by itself.
[Conspiracy in the Army of Cadiz.]
It was in the army assembled at Cadiz for embarkation in the summer of 1819 that the conspiracy against Ferdinand's Government found its leaders. Secret societies had now spread themselves over the principal Spanish towns, and looked to the soldiery on the coast for the signal of revolt. Abisbal, commander at Cadiz, intending to make himself safe against all contingencies, encouraged for awhile the plots of the discontented officers: then, foreseeing the failure of the movement, he arrested the principal men by a stratagem, and went off to Madrid, to reveal the conspiracy to the Court and to take credit for saving the King's crown (July, 1819). [310] If the army could have been immediately despatched to America, the danger would possibly have passed away. This, however, was prevented by an outbreak of yellow fever, which made it necessary to send the troops into cantonments for several months. The conspirators gained time to renew their plans. The common soldiers, who had hitherto been faithful to the Government, heard in their own squalor and inaction the fearful stories of the few sick and wounded who returned from beyond the seas, and learnt to regard the order of embarkation as a sentence of death. Several battalions were won over to the cause of constitutional liberty by their commanders. The leaders imprisoned a few months before were again in communication with their followers. After the treachery of Abisbal, it was agreed to carry out the revolt without the assistance of generals or grandees. The leaders chosen were two colonels, Quiroga and Riego, of whom the former was in nominal confinement in a monastery near Medina Sidonia, twenty miles east of Cadiz, while Riego was stationed at Cabezas, a few marches distant on the great road to Seville. The first day of the year 1820 was fixed for the insurrection. It was determined that Riego should descend upon the head-quarters, which were at Arcos, and arrest the generals before they could hear anything of the movement, while Quiroga, moving from the east, gathered up the battalions stationed on the road, and threw himself into Cadiz, there to await his colleague's approach.
[Action of Quiroga and Riego, Jan. 1820.]
The first step in the enterprise proved successful. Riego, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812, surprised the headquarters, seized the generals, and rallied several companies to his standard. Quiroga, however, though he gained possession of San Fernando, at the eastern end of the peninsula of Leon, on which Cadiz is situated, failed to make his entrance into Cadiz. The commandant, hearing of the capture of the head-quarters, had closed the city gates, and arrested the principal inhabitants whom he suspected of being concerned in the plot. The troops within the town showed no sign of mutiny. Riego, when he arrived at the peninsula of Leon, found that only five thousand men in all had joined the good cause, while Cadiz, with a considerable garrison and fortifications of great strength, stood hostile before him. He accordingly set off with a small force to visit and win over the other regiments which were lying in the neighbouring towns and villages. The commanders, however, while not venturing to attack the mutineers, drew off their troops to a distance, and prevented them from entering into any communication with Riego. The adventurous soldier, leaving Quiroga in the peninsula of Leon, then marched into the interior of Andalusia (January 27), endeavouring to raise the inhabitants of the towns. But the small numbers of his band, and the knowledge that Cadiz and the greater part of the army still held by the Government, prevented the inhabitants from joining the insurrection, even where they received Riego with kindness and supplied the wants of his soldiers. During week after week the little column traversed the country, now cut off from retreat, exhausted by forced marches in drenching rain, and harassed by far stronger forces sent in pursuit. The last town that Riego entered was Cordova. The enemy was close behind him. No halt was possible. He led his band, now numbering only two hundred men, into the mountains, and there bade them disperse (March 11).
[Corunna proclaims the Constitution Feb. 20.]
[Abisbal's defection March 4.]
With Quiroga lying inactive in the peninsula of Leon and Riego hunted from village to village, it seemed as if the insurrection which they had begun could only end in the ruin of its leaders. But the movement had in fact effected its object. While the courtiers around King Ferdinand, unwarned by the news from Cadiz, continued their intrigues against one another, the rumour of rebellion spread over the country. If no great success had been achieved by the rebels, it was also certain that no great blow had been struck by the Government. The example of bold action had been set; the shock given at one end of the peninsula was felt at the other; and a fortnight before Riego's band dispersed, the garrison and the citizens of Corunna together declared for the Constitution (February 20). From Corunna the revolutionary movement spread to Ferrol and to all the other coast-towns of Galicia. The news reached Madrid, terrifying the Government, and exciting the spirit of insurrection in the capital itself. The King summoned a council of the leading men around him. The wisest of them advised him to publish a moderate Constitution, and, by convoking a Parliament immediately, to stay the movement, which would otherwise result in the restoration of the Assembly and the Constitution of 1812. They also urged the King to abolish the Inquisition forthwith. Ferdinand's brother, Don Carlos, the head of the clerical party, succeeded in preventing both measures. Though the generals in all quarters of Spain wrote that they could not answer for the troops, there were still hopes of keeping down the country by force of arms. Abisbal, who was at Madrid, was ordered to move with reinforcements towards the army in the south. He set out, protesting to the King that he knew the way to deal with rebels. When he reached Ocaña he proclaimed the Constitution himself (March 4).
[Ferdinand accepts the Constitution 1812, March 9.]
It was now clear that the cause of absolute monarchy was lost. The ferment in Madrid increased. On the night of the 6th of March all the great bodies of State assembled for council in the King's palace, and early on the 7th Ferdinand published a proclamation, stating that he had determined to summon the Cortes immediately. This declaration satisfied no one, for the Cortes designed by the King might be the mere revival of a mediæval form, and the history of 1814 showed how little value was to be attached to Ferdinand's promises. Crowds gathered in the great squares of Madrid, crying for the Constitution of 1812. The statement of the Minister of War that the Guard was on the point of joining the people now overcame even the resistance of Don Carlos and the confessors; and after a day wasted in dispute, Ferdinand announced to his people that he was ready to take the oath to the Constitution which they desired. The next day was given up to public rejoicings; the book of the Constitution was carried in procession through the city with the honours paid to the Holy Sacrament, and all political prisoners were set at liberty. The prison of the Inquisition was sacked, the instruments of torture broken in pieces. On the 9th the leaders of the agitation took steps to make the King fulfil his promise. A mob invaded the court and threshold of the palace. At their demand the municipal council of 1814 was restored; its members were sent, in company with six deputies chosen by the populace, to receive the pledges of the King. Ferdinand, all smiles and bows, while he looked forward to the day when force or intrigue should make him again absolute master of Spain, and enable him to take vengeance upon the men who were humiliating, him, took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution of 1812. [311] New Ministers were immediately called to office, and a provisional Junta was placed by their side as the representative of the public until the new Cortes should be duly elected.
[Condition of Naples, 1815-1820.]
Tidings of the Spanish revolution passed rapidly over Europe, disquieting the courts and everywhere reviving the hopes of the friends of popular right. Before four months had passed, the constitutional movement begun in Cadiz was taken up in Southern Italy. The kingdom of Naples was one of those States which had profited the most by French conquest. During the nine years that its crown was held by Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, the laws and institutions which accompanied Napoleon's supremacy had rudely broken up the ancient fixity of confusions which passed for government, and had aroused no insignificant forces of new social life. The feudal tenure of land, and with it something of the feudal structure of society, had passed away: the monasteries had been dissolved; the French civil code, and a criminal code based upon that of France, had taken the place of a thousand conflicting customs and jurisdictions; taxation had been made, if not light, yet equitable and simple; justice was regular, and the same for baron and peasant; brigandage had been extinguished; and, for the first time in many centuries, the presence of a rational and uniform administration was felt over all the south of Italy. Nor on the restoration of King Ferdinand had any reaction been permitted to take place like that which in a moment destroyed the work of reform in Spain and in Westphalia. England and Austria insisted that there should be neither vengeance nor counterrevolution. Queen Marie Caroline, the principal agent in the cruelties of 1799, was dead; Ferdinand himself was old and indolent, and willing to leave affairs in the hands of Ministers more intelligent than himself. Hence the laws and the administrative system of Murat remained on the whole unchanged. [312] As in France, a Bourbon Sovereign placed himself at the head of a political order fashioned by Napoleon and the Revolution. Where changes in the law were made, or acts of State revoked, it was for the most part in consequence of an understanding with the Holy See. Thus, while no attempt was made to eject the purchasers of Church-lands, the lands not actually sold were given back to the Church; a considerable number of monasteries were restored; education was allowed to fall again into the hands of the clergy; the Jesuits were recalled, and the Church regained its jurisdiction in marriage-causes, as well as the right of suppressing writings at variance with the Catholic faith.
[Hostility between the Court party and the Muratists.]
But the legal and recognised changes which followed Ferdinand's return by no means expressed the whole change in the operation of government. If there were not two conflicting systems at work, there were two conflicting bodies of partisans in the State. Like the emigrants who returned with Louis XVIII., a multitude of Neapolitans, high and low, who had either accompanied the King in his exile to Sicily or fought for him on the mainland in 1799 and 1806, now expected their reward. In their interest the efficiency of the public service was sacrificed and the course of justice perverted. Men who had committed notorious crimes escaped punishment if they had been numbered among the King's friends; the generals and officials who had served under Murat, though not removed from their posts, were treated with discourtesy and suspicion. It was in the army most of all that the antagonism of the two parties was felt. A medal was struck for service in Sicily, and every year spent there in inaction was reckoned as two in computing seniority. Thus the younger officers of Murat found their way blocked by a troop of idlers, and at the same time their prospects suffered from the honest attempts made by Ministers to reduce the military expenditure. Discontent existed in every rank. The generals were familiar with the idea of political change, for during the last years of Murat's reign they had themselves thought of compelling him to grant a Constitution: the younger officers and the sergeants were in great part members of the secret society of the Carbonari, which in the course of the last few years had grown with the weakness of the Government, and had now become the principal power in the Neapolitan kingdom.
[The Carbonari.]
The origin of this society, which derived its name and its symbolism from the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder, is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after 1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year 1814 it was actively working for constitutional government in opposition to Murat, and receiving encouragement from Sicily, where Ferdinand was then playing the part of constitutional King. The maintenance of absolute government by the restored Bourbon Court severed the bond which for a time existed between legitimate monarchy and conspiracy; and the lodges of the Carbonari, now extending themselves over the country with great rapidity, became so many centres of agitation against despotic rule. By the year 1819 it was reckoned that one person out of every twenty-five in the kingdom of Naples had joined the society. Its members were drawn from all classes, most numerously perhaps from the middle class in the towns; but even priests had been initiated, and there was no branch of the public service that had not Carbonari in its ranks. The Government, apprehending danger from the extension of the sect, tried to counteract it by founding a rival society of Calderari, or Braziers, in which every miscreant who before 1815 had murdered and robbed in the name of King Ferdinand and the Catholic faith received a welcome. But though the number of such persons was not small, the growth of this fraternity remained far behind that of its model; and the chief result of the competition was that intrigue and mystery gained a greater charm than ever for the Italians, and that all confidence in Government perished, under the sense that there was a hidden power in the land which was only awaiting the due moment to put forth its strength in revolutionary action.
[Morelli's movement, July 2, 1820.]
After the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, an outbreak in the kingdom of Naples had become inevitable. The Carbonari of Salerno, where the sect had its headquarters, had intended to rise at the beginning of June; their action, however, was postponed for some months, and it was anticipated by the daring movement of a few sergeants belonging to a cavalry regiment stationed at Nola, and of a lieutenant, named Morelli, whom they had persuaded to place himself at their head. Leading out a squadron of a hundred and fifty men in the direction of Avellino on the morning of July 2nd, Morelli proclaimed the Constitution. One of the soldiers alone left the band; force or persuasion kept others to the Standard, though they disapproved of the enterprise. The inhabitants of the populous places that lie between Nola and Avellino welcomed the squadron, or at least offered it no opposition: the officer commanding at Avellino came himself to meet Morelli, and promised him assistance. The band encamped that night in a village; on the next day they entered Avellino, where the troops and townspeople, headed by the bishop and officers, declared in their favour. From Avellino the news of the movement spread quickly over the surrounding country. The Carbonari were everywhere prepared for revolt; and before the Government had taken a single step in its own defence, the Constitution had been joyfully and peacefully accepted, not only by the people but by the militia and the regular troops, throughout the greater part of the district that lies to the east of Naples.
[Affairs at Naples, July 2-7.]
The King was on board ship in the bay, when, in the afternoon of July 2nd, intelligence came of Morelli's revolt at Nola. Nothing was done by the Ministry on that day, although Morelli and his band might have been captured in a few hours if any resolute officer, with a few trustworthy troops, had been sent against them. On the next morning, when the garrison of Avellino had already joined the mutineers, and taken up a strong position commanding the road from Naples, General Carrascosa was sent, not to reduce the insurgents--for no troops were given to him--but to pardon, to bribe, and to coax them into submission. [313] Carrascosa failed to effect any good; other generals, who, during the following days, attempted to attack the mutineers, found that their troops would not follow them, and that the feeling of opposition to the Government, though it nowhere broke into lawlessness, was universal in the army as well as the nation. If the people generally understood little of politics, they had learnt enough to dislike arbitrary taxation and the power of arbitrary arrest. Not a single hand or voice was anywhere raised in defence of absolutism. Escaping from Naples, where he was watched by the Government, General Pepe, who was at once the chief man among the Carbonari and military commandant of the province in which Avellino lies, went to place himself at the head of the revolution. Naples itself had hitherto remained quiet, but on the night of July 6th a deputation from the Carbonari informed the King that they could no longer preserve tranquillity in the city unless a Constitution was granted. The King, without waiting for morning, published an edict declaring that a Constitution should be drawn up within eight days; immediately afterwards he appointed a new Ministry, and, feigning illness, committed the exercise of royal authority to his son, the Duke of Calabria.
[Ferdinand takes the Oath to the Spanish Constitution, July 13.]
Ferdinand's action was taken by the people as a stratagem. He had employed the device of a temporary abdication some years before in cajoling the Sicilians; and the delay of eight days seemed unnecessary to ardent souls who knew that a Spanish Constitution was in existence and did not know of its defects in practice. There was also on the side of the Carbonari the telling argument that Ferdinand, as a possible successor to his nephew, the childless King of Spain, actually had signed the Spanish Constitution in order to preserve his own contingent rights to that crown. What Ferdinand had accepted as Infante of Spain he might well accept as King of Naples. The cry was therefore for the immediate proclamation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The court yielded, and the Duke of Calabria, as viceroy, published an edict making this Constitution the law of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But the tumult continued, for deceit was still feared, until the edict appeared again, signed by the King himself. Then all was rejoicing. Pepe, at the head of a large body of troops, militia and Carbonari, made a triumphal entry into the city, and, in company with Morelli and other leaders of the military rebellion, was hypocritically thanked by the Viceroy for his services to the nation. On the 13th of July the King, a hale but venerable-looking man of seventy, took the oath to the Constitution before the altar in the royal chapel. The form of words had been written out for him; but Ferdinand was fond of theatrical acts of religion, and did not content himself with reading certain solemn phrases. Raising his eyes to the crucifix above the altar, he uttered aloud a prayer that if the oath was not sincerely taken the vengeance of God might fall upon his head. Then, after blessing and embracing his sons, the venerable monarch wrote to the Emperor of Austria, protesting that all that he did was done under constraint, and that his obligations were null and void. [314]
[Affairs in Portugal, 1807-1820.]
A month more passed, and in a third kingdom absolute government fell before the combined action of soldiers and people. The Court of Lisbon had migrated to Brazil in 1807, when the troops of Napoleon first appeared upon the Tagus, and Portugal had since then been governed by a Regency, acting in the name of the absent Sovereign. The events of the Peninsular War had reduced Portugal almost to the condition of a dependency of Great Britain. Marshal Beresford, the English commander-in-chief of its army, kept his post when the war was over, and with him there remained a great number of English officers who had led the Portuguese regiments in Wellington's campaigns. The presence of these English soldiers was unwelcome, and commercial rivalry embittered the natural feeling of impatience towards an ally who remained as master rather than guest. Up to the year 1807 the entire trade with Brazil had been confined by law to Portuguese merchants; when, however, the Court had established itself beyond the Atlantic, it had opened the ports of Brazil to British ships, in return for the assistance given by our own country against Napoleon. Both England and Brazil profited by the new commerce, but the Portuguese traders, who had of old had the monopoly, were ruined. The change in the seat of government was in fact seen to be nothing less than a reversal of the old relations between the European country and its colony. Hitherto Brazil had been governed in the interests of Portugal; but with a Sovereign fixed at Rio Janeiro, it was almost inevitable that Portugal should be governed in the interests of Brazil. Declining trade, the misery and impoverishment resulting from a long war, resentment against a Court which could not be induced to return to the kingdom and against a foreigner who could not be induced to quit it, filled the army and all classes in the nation with discontent. Conspiracies were discovered as early as 1817, and the conspirators punished with all the barbarous ferocity of the Middle Ages. Beresford, who had not sufficient tact to prevent the execution of a sentence ordering twelve persons to be strangled, beheaded, and then burnt in the streets of Lisbon, found, during the two succeeding years, that the state of the country was becoming worse and worse. In the spring of 1820, when the Spanish revolution had made some change in the neighbouring kingdom, either for good or evil, inevitable, Beresford set out for Rio Janeiro, intending to acquaint the King with the real condition of affairs, and to use his personal efforts in hastening the return of the Court to Lisbon. Before he could recross the Atlantic, the Government which he left behind him at Lisbon had fallen.
[Revolution at Oporto, August 1820.]
The grievances of the Portuguese army made it the natural centre of disaffection, but the military conspirators had their friends among all classes. On the 24th of August, 1820, the signal of revolt was given at Oporto. Priests and magistrates, as well as the town-population, united with officers of the army in declaring against the Regency, and in establishing a provisional Junta, charged with the duty of carrying on the government in the name of the King until the Cortes should assemble and frame a Constitution. No resistance was offered by any of the civil or military authorities at Oporto. The Junta entered upon its functions, and began by dismissing all English officers, and making up the arrears of pay due to the soldiers. As soon as the news of the revolt reached Lisbon, the Regency itself volunteered to summon the Cortes, and attempted to conciliate the remainder of the army by imitating the measures of the Junta of Oporto. [315] The troops, however, declined to act against their comrades, and on the 15th of September the Regency was deposed, and a provisional Junta installed in the capital. Beresford, who now returned from Brazil, was forbidden to set foot on Portuguese soil. The two rival governing-committees of Lisbon and Oporto coalesced; and after an interval of confusion the elections to the Cortes were held, resulting in the return of a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown was not impaired by their hostility to the Regency. The King, when the first tidings of the constitutional movement reached Brazil, gave a qualified consent to the summoning of the Cortes which was announced by the Regency, and promised to return to Europe. Beresford, continuing his voyage to England without landing at Lisbon, found that the Government of this country had no disposition to interfere with the domestic affairs of its ally.
[Alexander proposes joint action with regard to Spain, April, 1820.]
It was the boast of the Spanish and Italian Liberals that the revolutions effected in 1820 were undisgraced by the scenes of outrage which had followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism thirty years before. [316] The gentler character of these southern movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any excess of popular violence. The alarm was first sounded at St. Petersburg. As soon as the Czar heard of Riego's proceedings at Cadiz, he began to meditate intervention; and when it was known that Ferdinand had been forced to accept the Constitution of 1812, he ordered his ambassadors to propose that all the Great Powers, acting through their Ministers at Paris, should address a remonstrance to the representative of Spain, requiring the Cortes to disavow the crime of the 8th of March, by which they had been called into being, and to offer a pledge of obedience to their King by enacting the most rigorous laws against sedition and revolt. [317] In that case, and in that alone, the Czar desired to add, would the Powers maintain their relations of confidence and amity with Spain.
[England prevents joint diplomatic intervention.]
This Russian proposal was viewed with some suspicion at Vienna; it was answered with a direct and energetic negative from London. Canning was still in the Ministry. The words with which in 1818 he had protested against a league between England and autocracy were still ringing in the ears of his colleagues. Lord Liverpool's Government knew itself to be unpopular in the country; every consideration of policy as well as of self-interest bade it resist the beginnings of an intervention which, if confined to words, was certain to be useless, and, if supported by action, was likely to end in that alliance between France and Russia which had been the nightmare of English statesmen ever since 1814, and in a second occupation of Spain by the very generals whom Wellington had spent so many years in dislodging. Castlereagh replied to the Czar's note in terms which made it clear that England would never give its sanction to a collective interference with Spain. [318] Richelieu, the nominal head of the French Government, felt too little confidence in his position to act without the concurrence of Great Britain; and the crusade of absolutism against Spanish liberty was in consequence postponed until the victory of the Ultra-Royalists at Paris was complete, and the overthrow of Richelieu had brought to the head of the French State a group of men who felt no scruple in entering upon an aggressive war.
[Naples and the Great Powers.]
[Austria.]
[England admits Austrian but not joint intervention.]
But the shelter of circumstances which for a while protected Spain from the foreigner did not extend to Italy, when in its turn the Neapolitan revolution called a northern enemy into the field. Though the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was in itself much less important than Spain, the established order of the Continent was more directly threatened by a change in its government. No European State was exposed to the same danger from a revolution in Madrid as Austria from a revolution in Naples. The Czar had invoked the action of the Courts against Spain, not because his own dominions were in peril, but because the principle of monarchical right was violated: with Austria the danger pressed nearer home. The establishment of constitutional liberty in Naples was almost certain to be followed by an insurrection in the Papal States and a national uprising in the Venetian provinces; and among all the bad results of Austria's false position in Italy, one of the worst was that in self-defence it was bound to resist every step made towards political liberty beyond its own frontier. The dismay with which Metternich heard of the collapse of absolute government at Naples [319] was understood and even shared by the English Ministry, who at this moment were deprived of their best guide by Canning's withdrawal. Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand's power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. But the right to intervene in Italy belonged, according to Lord Castlereagh, to Austria alone. The Sovereigns of Europe had no more claim, as a body, to interfere with Naples than they had to interfere with Spain. Therefore, while the English Government sanctioned and even desired the intervention of Austria, as a State acting in protection of its own interests against revolution in a neighbouring country, it refused to sanction any joint intervention of the European Powers, and declared itself opposed to the meeting of a Congress where any such intervention might be discussed. [320]
[Conference at Troppau, Oct. 1820.]
Had Metternich been free to follow his own impulses, he would have thrown an army into Southern Italy as soon as soldiers and stores could be collected, and have made an end of King Ferdinand's troubles forthwith. It was, however, impossible for him to disregard the wishes of the Czar, and to abandon all at once the system of corporate action, which was supposed to have done such great things for Europe. [321] A meeting of sovereigns and Ministers was accordingly arranged, and at the end of October the Emperor of Austria received the Czar and King Frederick William in the little town of Troppau, in Moravia. France had itself first recommended the summoning of a Congress to deal with Neapolitan affairs, and it was believed for a while that England would be isolated in its resistance to a joint intervention. But before the Congress assembled, the firm language of the English Ministry had drawn Richelieu over to its side; [322] and although one of the two French envoys made himself the agent of the Ultra-Royalist faction, it was not possible for him to unite his country with the three Eastern Courts. France, through the weakness of its Government and the dissension between its representatives, counted for nothing at the Congress. England sent its ambassador from Vienna, but with instructions to act as an observer and little more; and in consequence the meeting at Troppau resolved itself into a gathering of the three Eastern autocrats and their Ministers. As Prussia had ceased to have any independent foreign policy whatever, Metternich needed only to make certain of the support of the Czar in order to range on his side the entire force of eastern and central Europe in the restoration of Neapolitan despotism.
[Contest between Metternich and Capodistrias.]
[Circular of Troppau, Dec. 8, 1820.]
[The principle of intervention laid down by three Courts.]
The plan of the Austrian statesman was not, however, to be realised without some effort. Alexander had watched with jealousy Metternich's recent assumption of a dictatorship over the minor German Courts; he had never admitted Austria's right to dominate in Italy; and even now some vestiges of his old attachment to liberal theories made him look for a better solution of the Neapolitan problem than in that restoration of despotism pure and simple which Austria desired. While condemning every attempt of a people to establish its own liberties, Alexander still believed that in some countries sovereigns would do well to make their subjects a grant of what he called sage and liberal institutions. It would have pleased him best if the Neapolitans could have been induced by peaceful means to abandon their Constitution, and to accept in return certain chartered rights as a gift from their King; and the concurrence of the two Western Powers might in this case possibly have been regained. This project of a compromise, by which Ferdinand would have been freed from his secret engagement with Austria, was exactly what Metternich desired to frustrate. He found himself matched, and not for the first time, against a statesman who was even more subtle than himself. This was Count Capodistrias, a Greek who from a private position had risen to be Foreign Minister of Russia, and was destined to become the first sovereign, in reality if not in title, of his native land. Capodistrias, the sympathetic partner of the Czar's earlier hopes, had not travelled so fast as his master along the reactionary road. He still represented what had been the Italian policy of Alexander some years before, and sought to prevent the re-establishment of absolute rule at Naples, at least by the armed intervention of Austria. Metternich's first object was to discredit the Minister in the eyes of his sovereign. It is said that he touched the Czar's keenest fears in a conversation relating to a mutiny that had just taken place among the troops at St. Petersburg, and so in one private interview cut the ground from under Capodistrias' feet; he also humoured the Czar by reviving that monarch's own favourite scheme for a mutual guarantee of all the Powers against revolution in any part of Europe. Alexander had proposed in 1818 that the Courts should declare resistance to authority in any country to be a violation of European peace, entitling the Allied Powers, if they should think fit, to suppress it by force of arms. This doctrine, which would have empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a coalition upon London if the Reform Bill had been carried by force, had hitherto failed to gain international acceptance owing to the opposition of Great Britain. It was now formally accepted by Austria and Prussia. Alexander saw the federative system of European monarchy, with its principle of collective intervention, recognised as an established fact by at least three of the great Powers; [323] and in return he permitted Metternich to lay down the lines which, in the case of Naples, this intervention should follow. It was determined to invite King Ferdinand to meet his brother-sovereigns at Laibach, in the Austrian province of Carniola, and through him to address a summons to the Neapolitan people, requiring them, in the name of the three Powers, and under threat of invasion, to abandon their Constitution. This determination was announced, as a settled matter, to the envoys of England and France; and a circular was issued from Troppau by the three Powers to all the Courts of Europe (Dec. 8), embodying the doctrine of federative intervention, and expressing a hope that England and France would approve its immediate application in the case of Naples. [324]
[Protest of England.]
There was no ground whatever for this hope with regard to England. On the contrary, in proportion as the three Courts strengthened their union and insisted on their claim to joint jurisdiction over Europe, they drove England away from them. Lord Castlereagh had at first promised the moral support of this country to Austria in its enterprise against Naples; but when this enterprise ceased to be the affair of Austria alone, and became part of the police-system of the three despotisms, it was no longer possible for the English Government to view it with approval or even with silence. The promise of a moral support was withdrawn: England declared that it stood strictly neutral with regard to Naples, and protested against the doctrine contained in the Troppau circular, that a change of government in any State gave the Allied Powers the right to intervene. [325]
France made no such protest; but it was still hoped at Paris that an Austrian invasion of Southern Italy, so irritating to French pride, might be averted. King Louis XVIII. endeavoured, but in vain, to act the part of mediator, and to reconcile the Neapolitan House of Bourbon at once with its own subjects and with the Northern Powers.
[Conference at Laibach, Jan., 1821.]
The summons went out from the Congress to King Ferdinand to appear at Laibach. It found him enjoying all the popularity of a constitutional King, surrounded by Ministers who had governed under Murat, exchanging compliments with a democratic Parliament, lavishing distinctions upon the men who had overthrown his authority, and swearing to everything that was set before him. As the Constitution prohibited the King from leaving the country without the consent of the Legislature, it was necessary for Ferdinand to communicate to Parliament the invitation which he had received from the Powers, and to take a vote of the Assembly on the subject of his journey. Ferdinand's Ministers possessed some political experience; they recognised that it would be impossible to maintain the existing Constitution against the hostility of three great States, and hoped that the Parliament would consent to Ferdinand's departure on condition that he pledged himself to uphold certain specified principles of free government. A message to the Assembly was accordingly made public, in which the King expressed his desire to mediate with the Powers on this basis. But the Ministers had not reckoned with the passions of the people. As soon as it became known that Ferdinand was about to set out, the leaders of the Carbonari mustered their bands. A host of violent men streamed into Naples from the surrounding country. The Parliament was intimidated, and Ferdinand was prohibited from leaving Naples until he had sworn to maintain the Constitution actually in force, that, namely, which Naples had borrowed from Spain. Ferdinand, whose only object was to escape from the country as quickly as possible, took the oath with his usual effusions of patriotism. He then set out for Leghorn, intending to cross from thence into Northern Italy. No sooner had he reached the Tuscan port than he addressed a letter to each of the five principal sovereigns of Europe, declaring that his last acts were just as much null and void as all his earlier ones. He made no attempt to justify, or to excuse, or even to explain his conduct; nor is there the least reason to suppose that he considered the perjuries of a prince to require a justification. "These sorry protests," wrote the secretary of the Congress of Troppau, "will happily remain secret. No Cabinet will be anxious to draw them from the sepulchre of its archives. Till then there is not much harm done."
[Ferdinand at Laibach.]
[Demands of the Allies on Naples.]
Ferdinand reached Laibach, where the Czar rewarded him for the fatigues of his journey by a present of some Russian bears. His arrival was peculiarly agreeable to Metternich, whose intentions corresponded exactly with his own; and the fact that he had been compelled to swear to maintain the Spanish Constitution at Naples acted favourably for the Austrian Minister, inasmuch as it enabled him to say to all the world that negotiation was now out of the question. [326] Capodistrias, brought face to face with failure, twisted about, according to his rival's expression, like a devil in holy water, but all in vain. It was decided that Ferdinand should be restored as absolute monarch by an Austrian army, and that, whether the Neapolitans resisted or submitted, their country should be occupied by Austrian troops for some years to come. The only difficulty remaining was to vest King Ferdinand's conduct in some respectable disguise. Capodistrias, when nothing else was to be gained, offered to invent an entire correspondence, in which Ferdinand should proudly uphold the Constitution to which he had sworn, and protest against the determination of the Powers to force the sceptre of absolutism back into his hand. [327] This device, however, was thought too transparent. A letter was sent in the King's name to his son, the Duke of Calabria, stating that he had found the three Powers determined not to tolerate an order of things sprung from revolution; that submission alone would avert war; but that even in case of submission certain securities for order, meaning the occupation of the country by an Austrian army, would be exacted. The letter concluded with the usual promises of reform and good government. It reached Naples on the 9th of February, 1821. No answer was either expected or desired. On the 6th the order had been given to the Austrian army to cross the Po.
[State of Naples and Sicily.]
[The Austrians enter Naples, March 24, 1821.]
[Third Neapolitan restoration.]
There was little reason to fear any serious resistance on the part of the Neapolitans. The administration of the State was thoroughly disorganised; the agitation of the secret societies had destroyed all spirit of obedience among the soldiers; a great part of the army was absent in Sicily, keeping guard over a people who, under wiser management, might have doubled the force which Naples now opposed to the invader. When the despotic government of Ferdinand was overthrown, the island of Sicily, or that part of it which was represented by Palermo, had claimed the separate political existence which it had possessed between 1806 and 1815, offering to remain united to Naples in the person of the sovereign, but demanding a National Parliament and a National Constitution of its own. The revolutionary Ministers of Naples had, however, no more sympathy with the wishes of the Sicilians than the Spanish Liberals of 1812 had with those of the American Colonists. They required the islanders to accept the same rights and duties as any other province of the Neapolitan kingdom, and, on their refusal, sent over a considerable force and laid siege to Palermo. [328] The contest soon ended in the submission of the Sicilians, but it was found necessary to keep twelve thousand troops on the island in order to prevent a new revolt. The whole regular army of Naples numbered little more than forty thousand; and although bodies of Carbonari and of the so-called Militia set out to join the colours of General Pepe and to fight for liberty, they remained for the most part a disorderly mob, without either arms or discipline. The invading army of Austria, fifty thousand strong, not only possessed an immense superiority in organisation and military spirit, but actually outnumbered the forces of the defence. At the first encounter, which took place at Rieti, in the Papal States, the Neapolitans were put to the rout. Their army melted away, as it had in Murat's campaign in 1815. Nothing was heard among officers and men but accusations of treachery; not a single strong point was defended; and on the 24th of March the Austrians made their entry into Naples. Ferdinand, halting at Florence, sent on before him the worst instruments of his former despotism. It was indeed impossible for these men to renew, under Austrian protection, the scenes of reckless bloodshed which had followed the restoration of 1799; and a great number of compromised persons had already been provided with the means of escape. But the hand of vengeance was not easily stayed. Courts-martial and commissions of judges began in all parts of the kingdom to sentence to imprisonment and death. An attempted insurrection in Sicily and some desperate acts of rebellion in Southern Italy cost the principal actors their lives; and when an amnesty was at length proclaimed, an exception was made against those who were now called the deserters, and who were lately called the Sacred Band, of Nola, that is to say, the soldiers who had first risen for the Constitution. Morelli, who had received the Viceroy's treacherous thanks for his conduct, was executed, along with one of his companions; the rest were sent in chains to labour among felons. Hundreds of persons were left lying, condemned or uncondemned, in prison; others, in spite of the amnesty, were driven from their native land; and that great, long-lasting stream of fugitives now began to pour into England, which, in the early memories of many who are not yet old, has associated the name of Italian with the image of an exile and a sufferer.
[Insurrection in Piedmont, March 10.]
There was a moment in the campaign of Austria against Naples when the invading army was threatened with the most serious danger. An insurrection broke out in Piedmont, and the troops of that country attempted to unite with the patriotic party of Lombardy in a movement which would have thrown all Northern Italy upon the rear of the Austrians. In the first excess of alarm, the Czar ordered a hundred thousand Russians to cross the Galician frontier, and to march in the direction of the Adriatic. It proved unnecessary, however, to continue this advance. The Piedmontese army was divided against itself; part proclaimed the Spanish Constitution, and, on the abdication of the King, called upon his cousin, the Regent, Charles Albert of Carignano, to march against the Austrians; part adhered to the rightful heir, the King's brother, Charles Felix, who was absent at Modena, and who, with an honesty in strong contrast to the frauds of the Neapolitan Court, refused to temporise with rebels, or to make any compromise with the Constitution. The scruples of the Prince of Carignano, after he had gone some way with the military party of action, paralysed the movement of Northern Italy. Unsupported by Piedmontese troops, the conspirators of Milan failed to raise any open insurrection. Austrian soldiers thronged westwards from the Venetian fortresses, and entered Piedmont itself; the collapse of the Neapolitan army destroyed the hopes of the bravest patriots; and the only result of the Piedmontese movement was that the grasp of Austria closed more tightly on its subject provinces, while the martyrs of Italian freedom passed out of the sight of the world, out of the range of all human communication, buried for years to come in the silent, unvisited prison of the North. [329]
[The French Ultra-Royalists urging attack on Spain.]
Thus the victory of absolutism was completed, and the law was laid down to Europe that a people seeking its liberties elsewhere than in the grace and spontaneous generosity of its legitimate sovereign became a fit object of attack for the armies of the three Great Powers. It will be seen in a later chapter how Metternich persuaded the Czar to include under the anathema issued by the Congress of Laibach (May, 1821) [330] the outbreak of the Greeks, which at this moment began, and how Lord Castlereagh supported the Austrian Minister in denying to these rebels against the Sultan all right or claim to the consideration of Europe. Spain was for the present left unmolested; but the military operations of 1821 prepared the way for a similar crusade against that country by occasioning the downfall of Richelieu's Ministry, and throwing the government of France entirely into the hands of the Ultra-Royalists. All parties in the French Chamber, whether they condemned or approved the suppression of Neapolitan liberty, censured a policy which had kept France in inaction, and made Austria supreme in Italy. The Ultra-Royalists profited by the general discontent to overthrow the Minister whom they had promised to support (Dec., 1821); and from this time a war with Spain, conducted either by France alone or in combination with the three Eastern Powers, became the dearest hope of the rank and file of the dominant faction. Villèle, their nominal chief, remained what he had been before, a statesman among fanatics, and desired to maintain the attitude of observation as long as this should be possible. A body of troops had been stationed on the southern frontier in 1820 to prevent all intercourse with the Spanish districts afflicted with the yellow fever. This epidemic had passed away, but the number of the troops was now raised to a hundred thousand. It was, however, the hope of Villèle that hostilities might be averted unless the Spaniards should themselves provoke a combat, or, by resorting to extreme measures against King Ferdinand, should compel Louis XVIII. to intervene on behalf of his kinsman. The more violent section of the French Cabinet, represented by Montmorency, the Foreign Minister, called for an immediate march on Madrid, or proposed to delay operations only until France should secure the support of the other Continental Powers.
[Spain from 1820 to 1822.]
[Ferdinand plots with the Serviles against the Constitution.]
The condition of Spain in the year 1822 gave ample encouragement to those who longed to employ the arms of France in the royalist cause. The hopes of peaceful reform, which for the first few months after the revolution had been shared even by foreign politicians at Madrid, had long vanished. In the moment of popular victory Ferdinand had brought the leaders of the Cortes from their prisons and placed them in office. These men showed a dignified forgetfulness of the injuries which they had suffered. Misfortune had calmed their impetuosity, and taught them more of the real condition of the Spanish people. They entered upon their task with seriousness and good faith, and would have proved the best friends of constitutional monarchy if Ferdinand had had the least intention of co-operating with them loyally. But they found themselves encountered from the first by a double enemy. The clergy, who had overthrown the Constitution six years before, intrigued or openly declared against it as soon as it was revived; the more violent of the Liberals, with Riego at their head, abandoned themselves to extravagances like those of the club-orators of Paris in 1791, and did their best to make any peaceable administration impossible. After combating these anarchists, or Exaltados, with some success, the Ministry was forced to call in their aid, when, at the instigation of the Papal Nuncio, the King placed his veto upon a law dissolving most of the monasteries [331] (Oct., 1820). Ferdinand now openly combined with the enemies of the Constitution, and attempted to transfer the command of the army to one of his own agents. The plot failed; the Ministry sent the alarm over the whole country, and Ferdinand stood convicted before his people as a conspirator against the Constitution which he had sworn to defend. The agitation of the clubs, which the Ministry had hitherto suppressed, broke out anew. A storm of accusations assailed Ferdinand himself. He was compelled at the end of the year 1820 to banish from Madrid most of the persons who had been his confidants; and although his dethronement was not yet proposed, he had already become, far more than Louis XVI. of France under similar conditions, the recognised enemy of the revolution, and the suspected patron of every treason against the nation.
[The Ministry between the Exaltados and Serviles, 1821.]
[Attempted coup d'état, July 6, 1822.]
[Royalists revolt in the north.]
The attack of the despotic Courts on Naples in the spring of 1821 heightened the fury of parties in Spain, encouraging the Serviles, or Absolutists, in their plots, and forcing the Ministry to yield to the cry for more violent measures against the enemies of the Constitution. In the south of Spain the Exaltados gained possession of the principal military and civil commands, and openly refused obedience to the central administration when it attempted to interfere with their action Seville, Carthagena, and Cadiz acted as if they were independent Republics and even spoke of separation from Spain. Defied by its own subordinates in the provinces, and unable to look to the King for any sincere support, the moderate governing party lost all hold upon the nation. In the Cortes elected in 1822 the Exaltados formed the majority, and Riego was appointed President. Ferdinand now began to concert measures of action with the French Ultra-Royalists. The Serviles, led by priests, and supported by French money, broke into open rebellion in the north. When the session of the Cortes ended, the King attempted to overthrow his enemies by military force. Three battalions of the Royal Guard, which had been withdrawn from Madrid, received secret orders to march upon the capital (July 6, 1822), where Ferdinand was expected to place himself at their head. They were, however, met and defeated in the streets by other regiments, and Ferdinand, vainly attempting to dissociate himself from the action of his partisans, found his crown, if not his life, in peril. He wrote to Louis XVIII. that he was a prisoner. Though the French King gave nothing more than good counsel, the Ultra-Royalists in the French Cabinet and in the army now strained every nerve to accelerate a war between the two countries. The Spanish Absolutists seized the town of Seo d'Urgel, and there set up a provisional government. Civil war spread over the northern provinces. The Ministry, which was now formed of Riego's friends, demanded and obtained from the Cortes dictatorial powers like those which the French Committee of Public Safety had wielded in 1793, but with far other result. Spain found no Danton, no Carnot, at this crisis, when the very highest powers of intellect and will would have been necessary to arouse and to arm a people far less disposed to fight for liberty than the French were in 1793. One man alone, General Mina, checked and overthrew the rebel leaders of the north with an activity superior to their own. The Government, boastful and violent in its measures, effected scarcely anything in the organisation of a national force, or in preparing the means of resistance against those foreign armies with whose attack the country was now plainly threatened.
[England and the Congress of 1822.]
When the Congress of Laibach broke up in the spring of 1821. its members determined to renew their meeting in the following year, in order to decide whether the Austrian army might then be withdrawn from Naples, and to discuss other questions affecting their common interests. The progress of the Greek insurrection and a growing strife between Russia and Turkey had since then thrown all Italian difficulties into the shade. The Eastern question stood in the front rank of European politics; next in importance came the affairs of Spain. It was certain that these, far more than the occupation of Naples, would supply the real business of the Congress of 1822. England had a far greater interest in both questions than in the Italian negotiations of the two previous years. It was felt that the system of abstention which England had then followed could be pursued no longer, and that the country must be represented not by some casual and wandering diplomatist, but by its leading Minister, Lord Castlereagh. The intentions of the other Powers in regard to Spain were matter of doubt; it was the fixed policy of Great Britain to leave the Spanish revolution in Europe to run its own course, and to persuade the other Powers to do the same. But the difficulties connected with Spain did not stop at the Spanish frontier. The South American colonies had now in great part secured their independence. They had developed a trade with Great Britain which made it impossible for this country to ignore their flag and the decisions of their law courts. The British navigation-laws had already been modified by Parliament in favour of their shipping; and although it was no business of the English Government to grant a formal title to communities which had made themselves free, the practical recognition of the American States by the appointment of diplomatic agents could in several cases not be justly delayed. Therefore, without interfering with any colonies which were still fighting or still negotiating with Spain, the British Minister proposed to inform the Allied cabinets of the intention of this country to accredit agents to some of the South American Republics, and to recommend to them the adoption of a similar policy.
[Death of Castlereagh, Aug. 12, 1822.]
Such was the tenour of the instructions which, a few weeks before his expected departure for the Continent, Castlereagh drew up for his own guidance, and submitted to the Cabinet and the King. [332] Had he lived to fulfil the mission with which he was charged, the recognition of the South American Republics, which adds so bright a ray to the fame of Canning, would probably have been the work of the man who, more than any other, is associated in popular belief with the traditions of a hated and outworn system of oppression. Two more years of life, two more years of change in the relations of England to the Continent, would have given Castlereagh a different figure in the history both of Greece and of America. No English statesman in modern times has been so severely judged. Circumstances, down to the close of his career, withheld from Castlereagh the opportunities which fell to his successor; ties from which others were free made it hard for him to accelerate the breach with the Allies of 1814. Antagonists showed Castlereagh no mercy, no justice. The man whom Byron disgraced himself by ridiculing after his death possessed in a rich measure the qualities which, in private life, attract esteem and love. His public life, if tainted in earlier days by the low political morality of the time, rose high above that of every Continental statesman of similar rank, with the single exception of Stein. The best testimony to his integrity is the irritation which it caused to Talleyrand. [333] If the consciousness of labour unflaggingly pursued in the public cause, and animated on the whole by a pure and earnest purpose, could have calmed the distress of a breaking mind, the decline of Castlereagh's days might have been one of peace. His countrymen would have recognised that, if blind to the rights of nations, Castlereagh had set to foreign rulers the example of truth and good faith. But the burden of his life was too heavy to bear. Mists of despondency obscured the outlines of the real world, and struck chill into his heart. Death, self-invoked, brought relief to the over-wrought brain, and laid Castlereagh, with all his cares, in everlasting sleep.
[Canning Foreign Secretary. Wellington deputed to the Congress, Sept., 1822.]
[Congress of Verona, Oct., 1822.]
The vacant post was filled by Canning, by far the most gifted of the band of statesmen who had begun their public life in the school of Pitt. Wellington undertook to represent England at the Congress of 1822, which was now about to open at Vienna. His departure was, however, delayed for several weeks, and the preliminary meeting, at which it had been intended to transact all business not relating to Italy, was almost over before his arrival. Wellington accordingly travelled on to Verona, where Italian affairs were to be dealt with; and the Italian Conference, which the British Government had not intended to recognise, thus became the real Congress of 1822. Anxious as Lord Castlereagh had been on the question of foreign interference with Spain, he hardly understood the imminence of the danger. In passing through Paris, Wellington learnt for the first time that a French or European invasion of Spain would be the foremost object of discussion among the Powers; and on reaching Verona he made the unwelcome discovery that the Czar was bent upon sending a Russian army to take part, as the mandatary of Europe, in overthrowing the Spanish Constitution. Alexander's desire was to obtain a joint declaration from the Congress like that which had been issued against Naples by the three Courts at Troppau, but one even more formidable, since France might be expected in the present case to give its concurrence, which had been withheld before. France indeed occupied, according to the absolutist theory of the day, the same position in regard to a Jacobin Spain as Austria in regard to a Jacobin Naples, and might perhaps claim to play the leading military part in the crusade of repression. But the work was likely to be a much more difficult one than that of 1821. The French troops, said the Czar, were not trustworthy; and there was a party in France which might take advantage of the war to proclaim the second Napoleon or the Republic. King Louis XVIII. could not therefore be allowed to grapple with Spain alone. It was necessary that the principal force employed by the alliance should be one whose loyalty and military qualities were above suspicion: the generals who had marched from Moscow to Paris were not likely to fail beyond the Pyrenees: and a campaign of the Russian army in Western Europe promised to relieve the Czar of some of the discontent of his soldiers, who had been turned back after entering Galicia in the previous year, and who had not been allowed to assist their fellow-believers in Greece in their struggle against the Sultan. [334]
[No joint declaration by made by the Congress against Spain.]
Wellington had ascertained, while in Paris, that King Louis XVIII. and Villèle were determined under no circumstances to give Russian troops a passage through France. His knowledge of this fact enabled him to speak with some confidence to Alexander. It was the earnest desire of the English Government to avert war, and its first object was therefore to prevent the Congress, as a body, from sending an ultimatum to Spain. If all the Powers united in a declaration like that of Troppau, war was inevitable; if France were left to settle its own disputes with its neighbour, English mediation might possibly preserve peace. The statement of Wellington, that England would rather sever itself from the great alliance than consent to a joint declaration against Spain, had no doubt its effect in preventing such a declaration being proposed; but a still weightier reason against it was the direct contradiction between the intentions of the French Government and those of the Czar. If the Czar was determined to be the soldier of Europe, while on the other hand King Louis absolutely denied him a passage through France, it was impossible that the Congress should threaten Spain with a collective attack. No great expenditure of diplomacy was therefore necessary to prevent the summary framing of a decree against Spain like that which had been framed against Naples two years before. In the first despatches which he sent back to England Wellington expressed his belief that the deliberations of the Powers would end in a decision to leave the Spaniards to themselves.
[Course of the negotiation against Spain.]
But the danger was only averted in appearance. The impulse to war was too strong among the French Ultra-Royalists for the Congress to keep silence on Spanish affairs. Villèle indeed still hoped for peace, and, unlike other members of his Cabinet, he desired that, if war should arise, France should maintain entire freedom of action, and enter upon the struggle as an independent Power, not as the instrument of the European concert. This did not prevent him, however, from desiring to ascertain what assistance would be forthcoming, if France should be hard pressed by its enemy. Instructions were given to the French envoys at Verona to sound the Allies on this question. [335] It was out of the inquiry so suggested that a negotiation sprang which virtually combined all Europe against Spain. The envoy Montmorency, acting in the spirit of the war party, demanded of all the Powers whether, in the event of France withdrawing its ambassador from Madrid, they would do the same, and whether, in case of war, France would receive their moral and material support. Wellington in his reply protested against the framing of hypothetical cases; the other envoys answered Montmorency's questions in the affirmative. The next step was taken by Metternich, who urged that certain definite acts of the Spanish people or Government ought to be specified as rendering war obligatory on France and its allies, and also that, with a view of strengthening the Royalist party in Spain, notes ought to be presented by all the ambassadors at Madrid, demanding a change in the Constitution. This proposal was in its turn submitted to Wellington and rejected by him. It was accepted by the other plenipotentiaries, and the acts of the Spanish people were specified on which war should necessarily follow. These were, the commission of any act of violence against a member of the royal family, the deposition of the King, or an attempt to change the dynasty. A secret clause was added to the second part of the agreement, to the effect that if the Spanish Government made no satisfactory answer to the notes requiring a change in the Constitution, all the ambassadors should be immediately withdrawn. A draft of the notes to be presented was sketched; and Montmorency, who thought that he had probably gone too far in his stipulations, returned to Paris to submit the drafts to the King before handing them over to the ambassadors at Paris for transmission to Madrid.
[Villèle and Montmorency.]
[Speech of Louis XVIII., Jan. 27, 1823.]
It was with great dissatisfaction that Villèle saw how his colleague had committed France to the direction of the three Eastern Powers. There was no likelihood that the Spanish Government would make the least concession of the kind required, and in that case France stood pledged, if the action of Montmorency was ratified, to withdraw its ambassador from Madrid at once. Villèle accordingly addressed himself to the ambassadors at Paris, asking that the despatch of the notes might be postponed. No notice was taken of his request: the notes were despatched forthwith. Roused by this slight, Villèle appealed to the King not to submit to the dictation of foreign Courts. Louis XVIII. declared in his favour against all the rest of the Cabinet, and Montmorency had to retire from office. But the decision of the King meant that he disapproved of the negotiations of Verona as shackling the movements of France, not that he had freed himself from the influence of the war-party. Chateaubriand, the most reckless agitator for hostilities, was appointed Foreign Minister. The mediation of Great Britain was rejected; [336] and in his speech at the opening of the Chambers of 1823, King Louis himself virtually published the declaration of war.
[England in 1823.]
[French invasion of Spain, April, 1823.]
The ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts had already presented their notes at Madrid demanding a change in the Constitution; and, after receiving a high-spirited answer from the Ministers, they had quitted the country. Canning, while using every diplomatic effort to prevent an unjust war, had made it clear to the Spaniards that England could not render them armed assistance. The reasons against such an intervention were indeed overwhelming. Russia, Austria, and Prussia would have taken the field rather than have permitted the Spanish Constitution to triumph; and although, if leagued with Spain in a really national defence like that of 1808, Great Britain might perhaps have protected the Peninsula against all the Powers of Europe combined, it was far otherwise when the cause at stake was one to which a majority of the Spanish nation had shown itself to be indifferent, and against which the northern provinces had actually taken up arms. The Government and the Cortes were therefore left to defend themselves as best they could against their enemies. They displayed their weakness by enacting laws of extreme severity against deserters, and by retiring, along with the recalcitrant King, from Madrid to Seville. On the 7th of April the French troops, led by the Duke of Angoulême, crossed the frontier. The priests and a great part of the peasantry welcomed them as deliverers: the forces opposed to them fell back without striking a blow. As the invader advanced towards the capital, gangs of royalists, often led by monks, spread such terror and devastation over the northern provinces that the presence of foreign troops became the only safeguard for the peaceable inhabitants. [337] Madrid itself was threatened by the corps of a freebooter named Bessières. The commandant sent his surrender to the French while they were still at some distance, begging them to advance as quickly as possible in order to save the city from pillage. The message had scarcely been sent when Bessières and his bandits appeared in the suburbs. The governor drove them back, and kept the royalist mob within the city at bay for four days more. On the 23rd of May the advance-guard of the French army entered the capital.
[Angoulême and the Regency, and the ambassadors.]
It had been the desire of King Louis XVIII. and Angoulême to save Spain from the violence of royalist and priestly fanaticism. On reaching Madrid, Angoulême intended to appoint a provisional, government himself; he was, however, compelled by orders from Paris to leave the election in the hands of the Council of Castille, and a Regency came into power whose first acts showed in what spirit the victory of the French was to be used. Edicts were issued declaring all the acts of the Cortes affecting the monastic orders to be null and void, dismissing all officials appointed since March 7, 1820, and subjecting to examination those who, then being in office, had not resigned their posts. [338] The arrival of the ambassadors of the three Eastern Powers encouraged the Regency in their antagonism to the French commander. It was believed that the Cabinet of Paris was unwilling to restore King Ferdinand as an absolute monarch, and intended to obtain from him the grant of institutions resembling those of the French Charta. Any such limitation of absolute power was, however, an object of horror to the three despotic Courts. Their ambassadors formed themselves into a council with the express object of resisting the supposed policy of Angoulême. The Regency grew bolder, and gave the signal for general retribution upon the Liberals by publishing an order depriving all persons who had served in the voluntary militia since March, 1820, of their offices, pensions, and titles. The work inaugurated in the capital was carried much further in the provinces. The friends of the Constitution, and even soldiers who were protected by their capitulation with the French, were thrown into prison by the new local authorities. The violence of the reaction reached such a height that Angoulême, now on the march to Cadiz, was compelled to publish an ordinance forbidding arrests to be made without the consent of a French commanding officer, and ordering his generals to release the persons who had been arbitrarily imprisoned. The council of ambassadors, blind in their jealousy of France to the danger of an uncontrolled restoration, drew up a protest against his ordinance, and desired that the officers of the Regency should be left to work their will.
[The Cortes at Cadiz.]
[Ferdinand liberated, Oct. 1.]
After spending some weeks in idle debates at Seville, the Cortes had been compelled by the appearance of the French on the Sierra Morena to retire to Cadiz. As King Ferdinand refused to accompany them, he was declared temporarily insane, and forced to make the journey (June 12). Angoulême, following the French vanguard after a considerable interval, appeared before Cadiz in August, and sent a note to King Ferdinand, recommending him to publish an amnesty, and to promise the restoration of the mediæval Cortes. It was hoped that the terms suggested in this note might be accepted by the Government in Cadiz as a basis of peace, and so render an attack upon the city unnecessary. The Ministry, however, returned a defiant answer in the King's name. The siege of Cadiz accordingly began in earnest. On the 30th of August the fort of the Trocadero was stormed; three weeks later the city was bombarded. In reply to all proposals for negotiation Angoulême stated that he could only treat when King Ferdinand was within his own lines. There was not the least hope of prolonging the defence of Cadiz with success, for the combat was dying out even in those few districts of Spain where the constitutional troops had fought with energy. Ferdinand himself pretended that he bore no grudge against his Ministers, and that the Liberals had nothing to fear from his release. On the 30th of September he signed, as if with great satisfaction, an absolute and universal amnesty. [339] On the following day he was conveyed with his family across the bay to Angoulême's head-quarters.
[Violence of the Restoration.]
The war was over: the real results of the French invasion now came into sight. Ferdinand had not been twelve hours in the French camp when, surrounded by monks and royalist desperadoes, he published a proclamation invalidating every act of the constitutional Government of the last three years, on the ground that his sanction had been given under constraint. The same proclamation ratified the acts of the Regency of Madrid. As the Regency of Madrid had declared all persons concerned in the removal of the King to Cadiz to be liable to the penalties of high treason, Ferdinand had in fact ratified a sentence of death against several of the men from whom he had just parted in friendship. [340] Many of these victims of the King's perfidy were sent into safety by the French. But Angoulême was powerless to influence Ferdinand's policy and conduct. Don Saez, the King's confessor, was made First Secretary of State. On the 4th of October an edict was issued banishing for ever from Madrid, and from the country fifty miles round it, every person who during the last three years had sat in the Cortes, or who had been a Minister, counsellor of State, judge, commander, official in any public office, magistrate, or officer in the so-called voluntary militia. It was ordered that throughout Spain a solemn service should be celebrated in expiation of the insults offered to the Holy Sacrament; that missions should be sent over the land to combat the pernicious and heretical doctrines associated with the late outbreak, and that the bishops should relegate to monasteries of the strictest observance the priests who had acted as the agents of an impious faction. [341] Thus the war of revenge was openly declared against the defeated party. It was in vain that Angoulême indignantly reproached the King, and that the ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts pressed him to draw up at least some kind of amnesty. Ferdinand travelled slowly towards Madrid, saying that he could take no such step until he reached the capital. On the 7th of November, Riego was hanged. Thousands of persons were thrown into prison, or compelled to fly from the country. Except where order was preserved by the French, life and property were at the mercy of royalist mobs and the priests who led them; and although the influence of the Russian statesman Pozzo di Borgo at length brought a respectable Ministry into office, this only roused the fury of the clerical party, and led to a cry for the deposition of the King, and for the elevation of his more fanatical brother, Don Carlos, to the throne. Military commissions were instituted at the beginning of 1824 for the trial of accused persons, and a pretended amnesty, published six months later, included in its fifteen classes of exception the participators in almost every act of the revolution. Ordinance followed upon ordinance, multiplying the acts punishable with death, and exterminating the literature which was believed to be the source of all religious and social heterodoxy. Every movement of life was watched by the police; every expression of political opinion was made high treason. Young men were shot for being freemasons; women were sent to prison for ten years for possessing a portrait of Riego. The relation of the restored Government to its subjects was in fact that which belonged to a state of civil war. Insurrections arose among the fanatics who were now taking the name of the Carlist or Apostolic party, as well as among a despairing remnant of the Constitutionalists. After a feeble outbreak of the latter at Tarifa, a hundred and twelve persons were put to death by the military commissions within eighteen days. [342] It was not until the summer of 1825 that the jurisdiction of these tribunals and the Reign of Terror ended.
[England prohibits the conquest of Spanish colonies by France or its allies.]
[England recognises the independence of the colonies. 1824-5.]
France had won a cheap and inglorious victory. The three Eastern Courts had seen their principle of absolutism triumph at the cost of everything that makes government morally better than anarchy. One consolation remained for those who felt that there was little hope for freedom on the Continent of Europe. The crusade against Spanish liberty had put an end for ever to the possibility of a joint conquest of Spanish America in the interest of despotism. The attitude of England was no longer what it had been in 1818. When the Czar had proposed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle that the allied monarchs should suppress the republican principle beyond the seas, Castlereagh had only stated that England could bear no part in such an enterprise; he had not said that England would effectually prevent others from attempting it. This was the resolution by which Canning, isolated and baffled by the conspiracy of Verona, proved that England could still do something to protect its own interest and the interests of mankind against a league of autocrats. There is indeed little doubt that the independence of the Spanish colonies would have been recognised by Great Britain soon after the war of 1823, whoever might have been our Minister for Foreign Affairs, but this recognition was a different matter in the hands of Canning from what it would have been in the hands of his predecessor. The contrast between the two men was one of spirit rather than of avowed rules of action. Where Castlereagh offered apologies to the Continental sovereigns, Canning uttered defiance [343] The treaties of 1815, which connected England so closely with the foreign courts, were no work of his; though he sought not to repudiate them, he delighted to show that in spite of them England has still its own policy, its own sympathies, its own traditions. In face of the council of kings and its assumption of universal jurisdiction, he publicly described himself as an enthusiast for the independence of nations. If others saw little evidence that France intended to recompense itself for its services to Ferdinand by appropriating some of his rebellious colonies, Canning was quick to lay hold of every suspicious circumstance. At the beginning of the war of 1823 he gave a formal warning to the ambassador of Louis XVIII. that France would not be permitted to bring any of these provinces under its dominion, whether by conquest or cession. [344] When the war was over, he rejected the invitation of Ferdinand's Government to take part in a conference at Paris, where the affairs of South America were to be laid before the Allied Powers. [345] What these Powers might or might not think on the subject of America was now a matter of indifference, for the policy of England was fixed, and it was useless to debate upon a conclusion that could not be altered. British consular agents were appointed in most of the colonies before the close of the year 1823; and after some interval the independence of Buenos Ayres, Colombia, and Mexico were formally recognised by the conclusion of commercial treaties. "I called the New World into existence," cried Canning, when reproached with permitting the French occupation of Spain, "in order to redress the balance of the Old." The boast, famous in our Parliamentary history, has left an erroneous impression of the part really played by Canning at this crisis. He did not call the New World into existence; he did not even assist it in winning independence, as France had assisted the United States fifty years before; but when this independence had been won, he threw over it the aegis of Great Britain, declaring that no other European Power should reimpose the yoke which Spain had not been able to maintain.
[Affairs in Portugal.]
[Constitution granted by Pedro, May, 1826.]
The overthrow of the Spanish Constitution by foreign arms led to a series of events in Portugal which forced England to a more direct intervention in the Peninsula than had yet been necessary, and heightened the conflict that had sprung up between its policy and that of Continental absolutism. The same parties and the same passions, political and religious, existed in Portugal as in Spain, and the enemies of the Constitution found the same support at foreign Courts. The King of Portugal, John VI., was a weak but not ill-meaning man; his wife, who was a sister of Ferdinand of Spain, and his son Don Miguel were the chiefs of the conspiracy against the Cortes. In June, 1823, a military revolt, arranged by Miguel, brought the existing form of government to an end: the King promised, however, when dissolving the Cortes, that a Constitution should be bestowed by himself upon Portugal; and he seems to have intended to keep his word. The ambassadors of France and Austria were, however, busy in throwing hindrances in the way, and Don Miguel prepared to use violence to prevent his father from making any concession to the Liberals. King John, in fear for his life, applied to England for troops; Canning declined to land soldiers at Lisbon, but sent a squadron, with orders to give the King protection. The winter of 1823 was passed in intrigues; in May, 1824, Miguel arrested the Ministers and surrounded the King's palace with troops. After several days of confusion King John made his escape to the British ships, and Miguel, who was alternately cowardly and audacious, then made his submission, and was ordered to leave the country. King John died in the spring of 1826 without having granted a Constitution. Pedro, his eldest son, had already been made Emperor of Brazil; and, as it was impossible that Portugal and Brazil could again be united, it was arranged that Pedro's daughter, when of sufficient age, should marry her uncle Miguel, and so save Portugal from the danger of a contested succession. Before renouncing the crown of Portugal, Pedro granted a Constitution to that country. A Regency had already been appointed by King John, in which neither the Queen-dowager nor Miguel was included.
[Desertion of Portuguese soldiery, 1826.]
[Spain permits the deserters to attack Portugal.]
[Canning sends troops to Lisbon, Dec., 1826.]
Miguel had gone to Vienna. Although a sort of Caliban in character and understanding, this Prince met with the welcome due to a kinsman of the Imperial house, and to a representative of the good cause of absolutism. He was received by Metternich with great interest, and his fortunes were taken under the protection of the Austrian Court. In due time, it was hoped this savage and ignorant churl would do yeoman's service to Austrian principles in the Peninsula. But the Regency and the new Constitution of Portugal had not to wait for the tardy operation of Metternich's covert hostility. The soldiery who had risen at Miguel's bidding in 1823 now proclaimed him King, and deserted to Spanish soil. Within the Spanish frontier they were received by Ferdinand's representatives with open arms. The demands made by the Portuguese ambassador at Madrid for their dispersion and for the surrender of their weapons were evaded. The cause of these armed bands on the frontier became the cause of the Clerical and Ultra-Royalist party over all Europe. Money was sent to them from France and Austria. They were joined by troops of Spanish Carlists or Apostolicals; they were fed, clothed, and organised, if not by the Spanish Government itself, at least by those over whose action the Spanish Government exercised control. [346] Thus raised to considerable military strength, they made incursions into Portugal, and at last attempted a regular invasion. The Regency of Lisbon, justly treating these outrages as the act of the Spanish Government, and appealing to the treaties which bound Great Britain to defend Portugal against foreign attack, demanded the assistance of this country. More was involved in the action taken by Canning than a possible contest with Spain; the seriousness of the danger lay in the fact that Spain was still occupied by French armies, and that a war with Spain might, and probably would, involve a war with France, if not with other Continental Powers. But the English Ministry waited only for the confirmation of the alleged facts by their own ambassador. The treaty-rights of Portugal were undoubted; the temper of the English Parliament and nation, strained to the utmost by the events of the last three years, was such that a war against Ferdinand and against the destroyers of Spanish liberty would have caused more rejoicing than alarm. Nine days after the formal demand of the Portuguese arrived, four days after their complaint was substantiated by the report of our ambassador, Canning announced to the House of Commons that British troops were actually on the way to Lisbon. In words that alarmed many of his own party, and roused the bitter indignation of every Continental Court, Canning warned those whose acts threatened to force England into war, that the war, if war arose, would be a war of opinion, and that England, however earnestly she might endeavour to avoid it, could not avoid seeing ranked under her banner all the restless and discontented of any nation with which she might come into conflict. As for the Portuguese Constitution which formed the real object of the Spanish attack, it had not, Canning said, been given at the instance of Great Britain, but he prayed that Heaven might prosper it. It was impossible to doubt that a Minister who spoke thus, and who, even under expressions of regret, hinted at any alliance with the revolutionary elements in France and Spain, was formidably in earnest. The words and the action of Canning produced the effect which he desired. The Government of Ferdinand discovered the means of checking the activity of the Apostolicals: the presence of the British troops at Lisbon enabled the Portuguese Regency to throw all its forces upon the invaders and to drive them from the country. They were disbanded when they re-crossed the Spanish frontier; the French Court loudly condemned their immoral enterprise; and the Constitution of Portugal seemed, at least for the moment, to have triumphed over its open and its secret enemies.
[The policy of Canning.]
The tone of the English Government had indeed changed since the time when Metternich could express a public hope that the three Eastern Powers would have the approval of this country in their attack upon the Constitution of Naples. In 1820 such a profession might perhaps have passed for a mistake; in 1826 it would have been a palpable absurdity. Both in England and on the Continent it was felt that the difference between the earlier and the later spirit of our policy was summed up in the contrast between Canning and Castlereagh. It has become an article of historical faith that Castlereagh's melancholy death brought one period of our foreign policy to a close and inaugurated another: it has been said that Canning liberated England from its Continental connexions; it has even been claimed for him that he performed for Europe no less a task than the dissolution of the Holy Alliance. [347] The figure of Canning is indeed one that will for ever fill a great space in European history; and the more that is known of the opposition which he encountered both from his sovereign and from his great rival Wellington, the greater must be our admiration for his clear, strong mind, and for the conquering force of his character. But the legend which represents English policy as taking an absolutely new departure in 1822 does not correspond to the truth of history. Canning was a member of the Cabinet from 1816 to 1820; it is a poor compliment to him to suppose that he either exercised no influence upon his colleagues or acquiesced in a policy of which he disapproved; and the history of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle proves that his counsels had even at that time gained the ascendant. The admission made by Castlereagh in 1820, after Canning had left the Cabinet, that Austria, as a neighbouring and endangered State, had a right to suppress the revolutionary constitution of Naples, would probably not have gained Canning's assent; in all other points, the action of our Government at Troppau and Laibach might have been his own. Canning loved to speak of his system as one of neutrality, and of non-interference in that struggle between the principles of despotism and of democracy which seemed to be spreading over Europe. He avowed his sympathy for Spain as the object of an unjust and unprovoked war, but he most solemnly warned the Spaniards not to expect English assistance. He prayed that the Constitution of Portugal might prosper, but he expressly disclaimed all connection with its origin, and defended Portugal not because it was a Constitutional State, but because England was bound by treaties to defend it against foreign invasion. The arguments against intervention on behalf of Spain which Canning addressed to the English sympathisers with that country might have been uttered by Castlereagh; the denial of the right of foreign Powers to attack the Spanish Constitution, with which Castlereagh headed his own instructions for Verona, might have been written by Canning.
[Canning and the European concert.]
The statements that Canning withdrew England from the Continental system, and that he dissolved the Holy Alliance, cannot be accepted without large correction. The general relations existing between the Great Powers were based, not on the ridiculous and obsolete treaty of Holy Alliance, but on the Acts which were signed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The first of these was the secret Quadruple Treaty which bound England and the three Eastern Powers to attack France in case a revolution in that country should endanger the peace of Europe; the second was the general declaration of all the five Powers that they would act in amity and take counsel with one another. From the first of these alliances Canning certainly did not withdraw England. He would perhaps have done so in 1823 if the Quadruple Treaty had bound England to maintain the House of Bourbon on the French throne; but it had been expressly stated that the deposition of the Bourbons would not necessarily and in itself be considered by England as endangering the peace of Europe. This treaty remained in full force up to Canning's death; and if a revolutionary army had marched from Paris upon Antwerp, he would certainly have claimed the assistance of the three Eastern Powers. With respect to the general concert of Europe, established or confirmed by the declaration of Aix-la-Chapelle, this had always been one of varying extent and solidity. Both France and England had held themselves aloof at Troppau. The federative action was strongest and most mischievous not before but after the death of Castlereagh, and in the period that followed the Congress of Verona; for though the war against Spain was conducted by France alone, the three Eastern Powers had virtually made themselves responsible for the success of the enterprise, and it was the influence of their ambassadors at Paris and Madrid which prevented any restrictions from being imposed upon Ferdinand's restored sovereignty.
Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts. Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte. [348] It was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar's thoughts during the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias, sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of 1815. It is not necessary to the title of a great statesman that he should have called into being the elements which make a new political order possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn them to account.