trusted and admired Alexander. The king was also grateful for the fact that the tsar had refused to abandon Prussia at Tilsit and had rescued his kingdom from Napoleon in 1813. Very soon the Russo-Prussian alliance was to be drawn even closer by the marriage of the king’s eldest daughter to Alexander’s younger brother and eventual heir, the Grand Duke Nicholas.6
Amidst the rivalries of the continental allies, Britain stood somewhat apart. Her role in the alliance which liberated Germany in 1813 was mostly limited to subsidizing her allies’ armies. By the winter of 1813–14, however, matters had changed. With Germany free and a final peace in the offing, Britain moved to the centre of the picture. The continental allies knew by bitter experience that if Britain and France remained at war they would end by being dragged in. Demobilizing their armies, restoring their finances and rebuilding international trade would be difficult. Britain therefore had to be brought into the peace settlement and her continental allies hoped that she would help to reconcile the French to peace by restoring many of the overseas colonies conquered between 1793 and 1814.
In 1813 Britain’s diplomatic representatives at the three allied courts had not been impressive. Lord Cathcart and Sir Charles Stewart were generals, more anxious to join in the campaign than to conduct negotiations. Meanwhile Lord Aberdeen, the 28-year-old envoy to Austria, could not even speak decent French and inevitably was eaten by Metternich. One Austrian source commented that ‘of the three only Aberdeen had any aptitude for diplomacy though he had no experience. The other two lacked either aptitude or experience.’ The allies appealed to London to send a political heavyweight who could conduct peace negotiations. In response there arrived at allied headquarters in January 1814 Viscount Castlereagh, one of the ablest foreign secretaries Britain has ever possessed.7
The basic point, however, was that Britain was by some margin the most powerful of the four allies. After its defeat in the American War of Independence, the United Kingdom had faced the combined challenge of the French, Spanish and Dutch fleets. Now in 1814 these fleets had largely been destroyed and the Royal Navy dominated the seas. Behind it stood by far the strongest merchant marine and shipbuilding industry in the world. Beyond those stood Britain’s immense financial and commercial resources. Scotland and Ireland, the historical back-doors into England, were now firmly under London’s control. To these fundamental elements in British power were added Wellington and his soldiers, the best army and the best general fielded by Britain in the last two centuries. In 1814 the allied monarchs knew that Wellington’s advance deep into southern France was keeping Marshal Soult and more than 40,000 troops tied down, far from the key theatre of operations in the north. Even more important, the logic of international relations in Europe worked in Britain’s favour. The continental allies might often resent Britain’s wealth and security, but their key interests were always more at risk from their land neighbours. They shared Britain’s commitment to a balance of power on the continent for reasons of their own security. But a continental balance of power meant that British maritime and colonial dominance could not be seriously challenged.8
This reality was reflected in the peace negotiations. Britain insisted that ‘maritime rights’ – in other words the international laws of the sea – should not be subject to negotiation. It got its way. The Russians were unhappy about this. The consul-general in London wrote that right up to the end of the war the Royal Navy was still seizing Russian ships and cargoes. Sometimes these ships did have false papers but it was in any case very difficult to prove the opposite to suspicious British officers. The Russian embassy was never informed that ships had been seized and all subsequent procedures were secret and slow. Even if the British ultimately accepted that the Russian ships were on legitimate business, the long delays caused ruinous losses. No apologies or compensation were ever offered, nor were British officers ever punished for mistaken or malicious seizure of ships. But in 1814 the Russian government had higher priorities than maritime law and could not afford to offend London.9
The most important territorial gains of the United Kingdom in 1793– 1814 – impossible without maritime supremacy – had been made from Indian princes and were therefore not part of the peace negotiations. Nor was the informal British commercial empire which was moving into the void left by the collapse of Spanish interests in South America. The colonies taken from France and her allies were subject to negotiation and London showed wisdom and moderation in returning, for example, the rich East Indies territories to the Dutch. But Britain retained Malta, the Cape and a number of islands in the Indian Ocean which strengthened her hold over the sea-lanes. Some of Britain’s war aims in Europe had already been achieved by December 1813. Spain, for example, had been liberated. The one big remaining priority was to get the French out of Belgium and to ensure that the Belgian coast was in friendly hands. Without this, wrote Castlereagh, the Royal Navy would need to remain on a permanent wartime footing. But no European power save France was opposed to this British interest, and at the very moment when Castlereagh was making his statement the Dutch revolt against Napoleon was promising to solve the Belgian problem in a manner acceptable to London. In these circumstances Britain was able to hold the balance among the allies, helping to moderate their quarrels and tilting against any of them whose power or pretensions seemed to threaten British interests.10
In 1814 most of this ‘tilting’ occurred against Russia, partly just because it was the most powerful of the continental allies and partly because Alexander’s aims and manner sometimes appeared unclear and even intimidating to British eyes. To an even greater extent than was true of Metternich, Alexander directed his country’s foreign policy. Whereas Metternich ran Austrian policy because his sovereign and indeed the Austrian elite as a whole shared his outlook and trusted him to defend their interests, Alexander controlled Russian policy because he was sovereign and autocrat. Far from expressing a consensus view of the Russian ruling elite, on some key issues the emperor was very much in a minority.
For many of Alexander’s advisers the key point was that an exhausted Russia was pouring out its wealth and soldiers on issues which appeared far removed from the empire’s own core interests. Aleksandr Chernyshev was not just very loyal but also a consummate courtier. Even he wrote to the emperor in November 1813 that ‘of all the coalition powers, Russia is the one which most needs a speedy peace. Deprived of trade for many years, it needs to restore order to its finances;…the richest Russian provinces have been devastated and require help urgently. Only the end of the war will heal these wounds.’11
Very few of Alexander’s advisers would have disagreed. Admiral Shishkov had opposed crossing the Neman into Germany. The idea of crossing the Rhine into France reduced him to near hysteria. The minister of finance, Dmitrii Gurev, issued warnings that a further year of war threatened the state with bankruptcy. Kutuzov was dead and Rumiantsev marginalized, but Jomini took up their old call, reminding the emperor that a powerful France holding the Rhine frontier and the Belgian coast was essential to Russian interests since only this could check ‘formidable British power’. Of Alexander’s senior generals, the Russian commanders in the Army of Silesia took the same line as Blucher. As a royalist emigre, Alexandre de Langeron had personal reasons for wanting to drive Napoleon off his throne but Fabian von der Osten-Sacken horrified the assembled dignitaries of Nancy, all desperate to sit on the fence, by calling on them to join him in a toast of ‘death and destruction to the tyrant who has so long been the scourge of the French nation and the plague of Europe’. On the other hand, in Alexander’s own headquarters many of his closest advisers were much more cautious and inclined towards a compromise peace.12
Karl Nesselrode dismissed the worries of his father-in-law, the minister of finance, in terms of which the emperor would certainly have approved: ‘The troops are fed and more or less clothed at the expense of the countries in which they are waging war. The conventions with Prussia and Austria are wholly to our advantage, the revenues of the Duchy of Warsaw accrue to us alone. So I don’t understand why the war should be so terribly expensive.’ On the other hand, Alexander’s chief assistant for diplomatic affairs disagreed with the emperor on the two key issues which were of overriding importance not just for the monarch but also for Russia’s relations with its allies. These were the fate of Poland and the question of whether to march on Paris and seek to overthrow Napoleon. Though he knew that his advice would be unwelcome, Nesselrode showed moral courage by continuing to defend what he considered to be the state’s true interests.13
Nesselrode had submitted his key memorandum on Polish affairs to Alexander back in January 1813. In it he argued that appeasing the Poles by establishing an autonomous Polish kingdom would not add substantially to Russia’s strength and would have fatal political consequences. It would both alienate Vienna and infuriate patriotic Russians, who believed that recent Polish behaviour towards Russia made them unworthy of any concessions. In the longer term, it would be immensely difficult for the autocratic tsar to function simultaneously as constitutional king of Poland. Since nothing would ever wean Polish elites from hopes of independence, the final result of incorporating the Duchy of Warsaw into the empire might be the loss of the Polish-dominated provinces which currently were part of the empire’s western borderlands.14
Nesselrode’s views had not changed by the winter of 1813. Meanwhile he was also submitting to Alexander
