Metternich- The First European Read online

  'I frequented the sittings of Parliament as much as possible, and followed with particular attention the famous trial of Mr Hastings,' Metternich tells us in his memoir. On 10 April he went to Westminster to watch the marathon prosecution of the former Governor-General of Bengal for corruption. According to Liedekerke Beaufort, Lord Cornwallis was being cross-examined. 'Lord Cornwallis did not accuse Mr Hastings but he didn't excuse him either.' He adds that Fox, Grey and Stanhope spoke, and how Warren Hastings was hard put to keep his composure 'during a terrible diatribe which Burke threw at him, with unbelievable heat, lasting more than half an hour'. Burke ended by denouncing the administration in India as 'drinkers of blood and butchers of the people'.

  On 20 April they drove down to Portsmouth, to see the East India merchantmen set sail. A fleet of men-of-war was there to guard against a French attack. Admiral Sir Hyde Parker sent two officers to show them the arsenal, the shipyards and the fleet. They went on board the Caesar of a hundred guns, the captain entertaining them in his cabin, where they drank a great deal of wine, toasting the King and the fleet. Next day a skiff manned by a single sailor took them through the fleet, 'passing beneath vessels which seemed like mountains', to a signal station on the Isle of Wight from where they watched the merchantmen weigh anchor. Metternich thought it 'the most beautiful sight I ever beheld'. They were rowed out to the flagship, the Queen Charlotte, where they were Lord Howe's guests till evening. A cutter brought news that the French had put to sea, and Metternich asked the Admiral if he could sail with him and see the battle, but 'Black Dick' replied, 'I have to send you back alive and can't let you face the dangers of an engagement.'

  The party returned to London, to a further round of balls and plays. One evening 'Messieurs de Metternich dined early at the hotel in order to go to Drury Lane to see the tragedy of Henry VIII, in which Mrs Siddons acted to perfection.' They also saw Macbeth at Drury Lane and Hamlet at Covent Garden. On 1 May they went to their friend Haydn's benefit concert, at which he conducted two new symphonies. 'Viotti [a famous violinist] played marvellously a concerto specially composed for the occasion. Dussek performed at the piano as perfectly as ever, while a Miss Park sang very well.'

  As soon as the news of Lord Howe's great naval victory over the French off Ushant—the 'Glorious 1st of June'—reached London at night, the city was illuminated with bonfires and torches in celebration. 'Black Dick' had dismasted ten enemy vessels and captured seven others. Metternich rushed down to Portsmouth to see the fleet return with its prizes. 'The admiral's ship, which I had left a few days before in the most perfect condition was one of those which had suffered most damage,' he recalls. 'She had engaged the French admiral's flagship and looked like a ruin, most of her crew having been killed or disabled.'

  Desandrouin and the Metternichs stayed at London for several months more, although Liedekerke Beaufort went home at the end of May. Further doors opened when Metternich was appointed Ambassador to the Hague, Kaunitz having recommended him to the Emperor. He was presented to the Prince of Wales and became sufficiently intimate to warn him against his Whig friends. (Thirty years later the Prince Regent reminded him, 'You were very right then!')

  'I got to know William Pitt, Charles Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Charles Grey and many others who, both at the time and later, played an important part in public life,' he writes. However, it seems unlikely that he knew them very well, even if he may have been introduced. It is more probable that he heard them speak a good deal, since he tells us he frequented the sittings of Parliament as much as possible.

  Burke had criticised Leopold II's policy in Belgium. 'Their great object being now, as in his brother's time, at any rate to destroy the higher orders,' he had written of the Emperor's advisers. 'They would make him desirous of doing, in his own dominions, by a royal despotism, what had been done in France by a democratic.' Metternich cannot have enjoyed such comments. It is probable that he had already read Burke's Thoughts on French Affairs, since it was published in 1791 and appeared almost immediately in a French translation, though less likely that he had had discussions with the author.

  Metternich developed a sincere if qualified admiration for England, even praising the Revolution of 1688. 'Not a single law was broken, not a constitutional form violated, not one individual right destroyed,' he would write in 1821. 'It was not one of those upheavals brought about by violence and revolt.' In his view (as Bertier de Sauvigny puts it), England had been 'vaccinated' against revolutions, while her institutions were a basis of strength for each government, as was the separation of political parties. He preferred the Tories as more practical, considering the Whigs to be 'tainted by ideology'. But the system was only suited to England—it could not be exported.

  News came that the French had invaded the Netherlands. Metternich sailed for Holland from Harwich in September 1794. His ship was caught by a gale which almost ran her aground off Dunkirk when the port was being shelled by the English; for over two hours the vessel was caught in the crossfire and was only saved by the wind changing. Eventually he landed in Holland and presented his credentials, though not at The Hague, since the Dutch government had fled across the Rhine. He rejoined Count Franz-Georg, who had also taken refuge in the Rhineland. The invaders were not going to be evicted for another twenty years, and neither father nor son could return to their posts. He recalls accepting the situation with resignation 'but with a feeling of bitterness towards the Revolution . . .'

  3

  A Back Seat

  I had withdrawn entirely from public affairs and observed them purely as a spectator.

  METTERNICH, Memoirs

  When I was five-and-twenty years old, I foresaw nothing but change and trouble in my time; and I sometimes thought then that I would leave Europe and go to America, or somewhere else, out of the reach of it.

  METTERNICH to George Ticknor in 1836

  The new Imperial foreign minister Baron Thugut blamed Count Franz-Georg for the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, accusing him of excessive leniency, of paving the way for the French by arming the peasants. In his memoir Metternich, while conceding that Thu-gut was not untalented, calls his ministry 'an unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations'. He claims that Thugut owed his prominence to subtlety and dexterity, 'qualities which, if accompanied by deep dissimulation and a love of intrigue, can only too easily be mistaken for talent'.

  Meanwhile the Rhineland fell to the armies of the Revolution. The Metternich estates were confiscated, and though the Emperor gave Franz-Georg a pension, the family was ruined—becoming what in the twentieth century would be known as 'displaced persons'. Only the Bohemian estate was left. Till now it had brought in little income, so the young Metternich was sent to make it more profitable. He spent the last two months of 1794 at Königswart, managing the property. He had a facility for languages and it was probably then that he first acquired his knowledge of what he called 'Slavonic', picking up some Czech from the servants.

  He had visited Vienna for the first time in October 1794, with his father. Although its population was over 200,000, behind its medieval walls (the site of today's Ringstrasse) it was curiously small and compact. There were a few suburbs, yet the setting was still essentially rural. It contained many palaces, not just the Hofburg but those of great magnates from all over Central Europe, each with its own art gallery and even opera house, not to mention ballrooms or riding schools. According to Josef Pezzl, writing in 1789 in Skizze von Wien, a well-to-do count numbered among his servants a secretary, two valets, a lackey, a huntsman, messengers and footmen. (This was only for personal needs; his household required a majordomo, a chef and a master of the horse, each with his own staff.) The middle class was comparatively small. Yet in some ways Vienna was also a very modern city, such vast new buildings as the General Hospital and the Academy of Military Surgery being scarcely a decade old. Moreover, lavish expenditure by the privileged classes put enormous sums of money into circulation besides providing employment.

 
When Metternich rejoined his parents here early in 1795 they solved the family's financial problems by finding him a rich bride. Eleanor von Kaunitz, granddaughter and heiress of the great foreign minister, was nineteen and a famous catch on account of her enormous dowry; she had had many other suitors. Small and plain, save for curly dark hair and large brown eyes, she was scarcely pretty. But she was levelheaded and very affectionate, while Metternich recognised her intelligence.

  On meeting the handsome young Count in the summer of 1795, 'Laure' fell in love at once. He did not. 'I was only twenty-one and the thought of marrying so early simply hadn't occurred to me.' The wedding took place on 27 September 1795 in the church next to the Kaunitz Schloss at Austerlitz (now Slavkov near Brno) in Moravia—in Metternich's words, 'a place which became wretchedly famous ten years later'. The occasion was something of a fête champêtre, six peasant couples being married at the same time. Weeks of hunting parties and banquets followed at the Kaunitz house, which was built like a French château with two wings on each side of the courtyard. Eleanor's father, a widower who had no other children, insisted that she must go on living with him. He obligingly died two years after the wedding.

  Eleanor presented Metternich with a daughter, Marie, in 1797, the first of seven children. Judging from Metternich's later taste in wives—and mistresses—sometimes Laure must have bored him profoundly, but he became a kind and considerate husband, writing almost every day when he was away from her during the early years of their marriage and afterwards seldom less than once a week.

  This was the quietest period of Metternich's life. He attended lectures on geology, chemistry and physics, above all on medical science. He records that there had been numerous distinguished physicians at Vienna for many years, commenting, 'Man and his life seemed worth studying.' He overcame any squeamishness, spending long hours in hospitals and anatomy theatres—which meant witnessing operations without anaesthetics. He even claims that he thought of becoming a doctor. This is usually dismissed as affectation, yet noblemen who practised medicine for the benefit of their tenants were not unknown in the eighteenth century.

  He always insisted that 'public service' had never attracted him as a young man. He tells us, unconvincingly, 'A diplomatic career appeals to ambition but I have never been moved by such a feeling.' However, the real reason why he spent so much time in his library or in the hospitals was that Thugut would not employ his father, who in consequence could not make the younger Metternich an Attaché.

  During 1796 General Bonaparte's army swept like a whirlwind through northern Italy. By 7 April 1797 his cavalry were within seventy miles of Vienna. The Emperor's ministers hastily negotiated an armistice. A formal peace was signed at Campo Formio in October by which France gained among other territories the left bank of the Rhine. The treaty (perhaps the most profitable ever secured by the French) meant the end of ancien régime Westphalia and the Rhineland. A congress was summoned to Rastatt in Baden to discuss compensation for all those counts and princes who, like the Metternichs, had been dispossessed. Even Thugut accepted that Franz-Georg was the best man to be the Imperial plenipotentiary, while his son represented the Westphalian College of Counts. They arrived in December 1797 and stayed until March 1799.

  The realities of the situation were recalled by Napoleon on St Helena. 'Old Count Metternich represented the Emperor at the Congress as head of the German confederation, while Count Cobenzl represented him as head of the House of Austria, forming two legations with opposite aims and instructions.' He adds that Count Metternich's party was 'merely one of parade', which explains Franz-Georg's behaviour.

  The elder Metternich's pomposity at Rastatt has been derided by Metternich's biographers. As representative of the Holy Roman Emperor, Franz-Georg insisted on a canopied chair of state in the conference hall, adopting the stiffest of manners. But he had precious little else to bargain with. Outwardly the representatives of the new France laughed; inwardly they felt a certain inferiority. Metternich copied his father, assuming a frozen hauteur which aroused painful resentment—his mocking wit must have made it peculiarly effective. Privately he was in despair. 'I can't bear the thought of leaving my home in the hands of these criminals,' he lamented. 'I don't want to be quoted, but in my opinion everything is going to the Devil, and it's high time for everyone to save what he can from the general shipwreck.'

  All hoped that Bonaparte would return to settle matters. He had left Rastatt a few hours before the Metternichs' arrival but never came back, going to Egypt instead. The congress dragged on. Thugut took little interest in it, save as a means of buying time while he built up a new coalition against a France weakened by Bonaparte's absence. The French envoys were even less interested. The younger Metternich called it 'a congress which from beginning to end was never more than a phantom'.

  He was horrified by the French, 'ill-conditioned animals' who made a sad contrast with the émigrés he had known at Mainz and Brussels. 'The highest polish and an elegance one could scarcely hope to emulate have been replaced by the utmost slovenliness, extreme amiabiality by a dull, sinister air,' he comments. Some were sullen and tongue-tied, others had uncouth accents—'one speaks the most beautiful Gascon', and all wore dirty boots, workmen's neck cloths and long greasy hair. 'You would die of fright if you met the best dressed of them in a wood.' They looked thoroughly disgruntled 'as much with themselves as with anybody else'. One should remember that most Europeans regarded such people much as they do the Khmer Rouge in our own day. 'I think I see traces of the men of September in them, men of the guillotine,' he wrote to his wife.

  He grew bored. 'I have absolutely nothing new to tell you,' he complained to Eleanor at the end of the first month. 'Our business here goes very slowly—I wish it had no further to go,' he grumbled at the close of April the following year. In those days he seems to have been genuinely in love with her. 'I can't tell you how much I'm going to enjoy coming back to Vienna at the most beautiful time of the year, to our little garden of which I'm so fond, and to you and my loved ones. You will be so happy and we shan't be separated again, ever. We will give the sort of parties you like and spend months in the country.' He wrote once a week, sometimes daily, until she joined him at Rastatt in the summer of 1798.

  During her absence he explored the Baden countryside. With his father he visited the Margrave Charles Frederick's court at Karlsruhe, where he was so well received that he fancied the heir's consort had fallen in love with him. He enjoyed the Comédie Française when it came to Rastatt, admiring the actresses' dresses, and went to balls. 'There is not under the roof of heaven anything more dreary than a ball at Rastatt; there are almost a hundred men, nearly all envoys or their deputies, and eight or ten women, half of them over fifty.' He conducted a symphony concert and played the violin in a quartet—'the most pleasant evening I've spent in Rastatt, since I like playing very much.' But usually he refers to 'this miserable Rastatt'. In April he wrote to Eleanor that as it was Holy Week he was staying away from the theatre and would take Communion. (His atheism seems to have been short-lived.) He was moved by the number of peasants who crossed the Rhine to attend the Holy Week services; they told him that their churches were closed and that they dared not ring the bells. They also told him they were paying twice as much tax as they had under the ancien regime. 'Fine regeneration, fine liberty!' he observed. 'Everyone jeers or weeps when the word "liberty" is mentioned or "equality", at which they mock even more.'

  He complained of his work load. 'I work all day,' he told Eleanor in May 1798. To make matters worse, 'I have had to let my secretary go away on leave. His wife is so ill that it would have been cruel to stop him, but I'm left alone with a mass of papers.' He suspected, correctly, that Bonaparte had no intention of returning to bring the congress to a successful conclusion—'It all looks like a trick'—and was far from surprised on being definitely informed that Bonaparte would not come.

  French resentment of his aristocratic airs and graces burst out in slanders that he p
atronised brothels. He was even said to have met his father in one (a not entirely inconceivable meeting). One Paris newspaper accused him of mistaking haughtiness for dignity and demanded that he stop treating better men than himself with such offensive disdain.

  The congress came to an end when another war broke out between Austria and France in the spring of 1799. As soon as the French plenipotentiaries left Rastatt they were ambushed and murdered by a troop of Hungarian hussars. Their papers were stolen; although proof was never found, it was rumoured that these contained information about Austrian plans to annex part of Bavaria. However, there was no suggestion that the Metternichs were implicated, unpopular as they were with the French.

  The younger Metternich was only too pleased to go back to Vienna. He claims that Rastatt made him dislike still more the very idea of a diplomatic career. 'The French Revolution had reached and passed the culmination of its barbarous follies; the Directory was only the miserable dregs of it; and a disunited Germany was paralysed by the peace which the Prussians had signed separately with France at Basel and by the North German princes' policy of neutrality whatever the price. Only Austria went on fighting and the war was badly managed.'

  He went back to his books, but did not shut himself off from the world. 'I led the life of a man who enjoys the best society,' he says, adding that he went only to drawing rooms where there was good conversation; they were also those where he was sure of meeting people with influence. The house he visited most was that of his wife's aunt, Princess Carl Liechtenstein, who had been a close friend of Joseph II and was one of the great Viennese hostesses. He could be seen too in the salon of Countess Rombec, sister of Count Ludwig Cobenzl, the Imperial ambassador at St Petersburg; it was always full of French émigrés, very different from the new men with whom he had been dealing at Rastatt. He made the acquaintance of a Corsican, Carlo Pozzo di Borgo, at that time an English agent, who would later enter the Russian service.