People, ideas, machines IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

How the British deep state organised to defeat Napoleon. Intelligence. Procurement. Manufacturing capacity. Technology. Civil service reform. Balance of Power...

Dis te minorem quod geris, imperas

(Thou rulest because thou bearest thyself as lower than the Gods)

Horace (quoted by Burke 1795, noted by Metternich)

I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.

The last public words of William Pitt, in response to a toast in his honour as ‘the Saviour of Europe’, shortly after Trafalgar 1805

I want one great and essential quality for my station… I am not competent to the management of men. I never was so naturally and toil and anxiety more and more unfit me for it.

Prime Minister Grenville

I’ve tidied this up, shifted all Snippets to a new blog, this one is now just for Pitt & Metternich...

CRUCIAL LESSONS. Notes on both books finished, I’ll just reread this whole thing and tweak the Lessons at the bottom. [Blog on TSP project imminent]

Update 2/2: The Congress of Vienna

Update 20/1/2025: Metternich and the crises of 1813; defeat of Napoleon in 1814

Update 2/12: CH16: Final Victory — the end of the The Organization of Victory.

Update 29/11: CH14: Russia and the Peninsula, 1812-13

Update 13/11: CH13: Blockade, Taxes and the City of London, 1806-12

Update 10/11: CH12: The Defense Industries, 1800-14

Update 5/11: CH11: Government scandal and reform, 1803-12.

Update 2/11: CH9: Invasion Threat, 1803-12 & CH10: Intelligence 1803-11

Update 26/10: Metternich and world war 1806-12.

Update 6/10: a/ Metternich’s life as ambassador 1801-6, from the Peace of Amiens to Ulm, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, end of the Third Coalition and Pitt’s death. b/ CH8: Political Instability and the Conduct of the War, 1802-1812. c/ SNIPPETS.

Update 29/9: CH7: Transporting the Army by Sea, 1793-1811.

Update 20/9: CH6: Feeding the Armed Forces and the Nation, 1795-1812.

Update 18/9: a/ CH5: Intelligence and Communications, 1793-1801. b/ SNIPPETS.

Update 9/9: a/ Metternich returns to the Continent July 1794, b/ CH3 The First Crisis, 1795-98, c/ SNIPPETS.

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Introduction

I hope subscribers found the previous blog in this series on the CIA and Angleton interesting. It’s 99% finished, just a tweak of the conclusions to finish.

In this blog I’ll do notes on two books.

Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793-1815, by Roger Knight (TOOV).

It focuses not on the battles and political dramas but on the organisation:

• how the forces were built and supported

• intelligence

• communications

• procurement

• infrastructure and logistics planning such as ports, fortifications, canals

• tax and finance

• manufacturing capacity, R&D, new technology

• civil service reform

• how critical decisions were made.

One of many interesting things about TOOV is how it illustrates the way that operational excellence used to be high status. It has become the lowest status thing in Westminster. During the constitutional crisis of 2019 I told Tory special advisers to read Andy Grove’s classic High Output Management and ignore the noise of punditry. How the pundits howled at the idea of political people studying how to run meetings instead of jabbering to them. Daniel Finkelstein, as so often, spoke for Westminster when he said he found it ‘really boring’.

People who care about these things are seen sort of like sewage workers — somebody has to do it but it doesn’t occur to 99% of those aspiring to high status to lower themselves to such things as logistics and procurement. Management is an unmentionable word. Almost no MPs have any idea that they have no idea even how to run a meeting (MP ‘meetings’ tend to degrade towards each MP giving a speech while other MPs look at their phones). Those aspiring to high status in SW1 want ‘strategy’ in their job titles while they spend their time on the opposite of ‘strategy’ — SW1’s daily emotional rollercoaster of ephemeral news and punditry, a world of constant panic and little urgency, a world that can never focus on priorities long enough to get hard things done but couldn’t build hard things even if it could focus because it doesn’t value or know how to do operational excellence. We’ve fallen a long long way since Pitt.

If you’re a Labour spad pondering the next few years of managing one Whitehall debacle after another as Labour MPs gradually, and very patchily, become aware that switching ministers doesn’t solve the core problems because the pathological institutions fight intensely not for the public but to maintain themselves in a state of constant failure, I highly recommend you read this book and enjoy exploring a time when Whitehall actually was ‘world leading’. Beware though, its most important lessons will mostly be ‘unlawful’ and ‘contrary to HR’ today and if you pipe up ‘errr this is mad why don’t we do the obviously sensible thing instead’, you’ll be on Sue Gray’s chopping block sharpish. Remember the first rule of SW1: the Government does not control the Government, officials control most of government via ‘meritocratic open competition’ which, naturally, means their closed caste get all the jobs and power.

Metternich: Strategist and Visionary, by Siemann. This is a recent biography by someone who spent years in the original archives. It follows Metternich from his education pre-1789 through the Revolution and Napoleonic war to his death after the 1848 Revolutions. I put some post-1814 stuff from this book into my Bismarck Chronology.

I wrote a few months ago on how we are living through a cycle of regime change similar to that of the 1840s-60s. We look at a period like that and try to abstract some ‘lessons of history’. Historians argue. But we should recognise how much harder than the job of historians it was for even the most perceptive contemporaries to understand even a little of what was happening as they were living through it. It’s impossible for anyone ever to get more than a very hazy, fragmented sense of how a) powerful forces acting over decades (like automation) collide with b) individual decisions that are almost entirely irrelevant but occasionally profoundly nonlinear. And when you’re in the middle of it, surrounded by chaos and noise, even the wisest and most effective people in history are, as Bismarck said, ‘groping about like a child in the dark’. Today we are groping around ‘like a child in the dark’ as they were in the 1840s-60s, blown about by Tolstoy’s historic forces and most of our decisions amounting to nothing, but the odd one changing the branching histories of the future.

It will be valuable to explore 1) how the British state organised itself to deal with this earlier cycle of war, revolution and regime change before the pernicious virus of the Northcote-Trevelyan civil service and its fake meritocracy came in the 1850s (and compare it to lessons from Alanbrooke and RV Jones roughly half way between those changes and today) and 2) how Metternich navigated the same problems. We can compare the perspectives from a) Whitehall and b) one of the main figures on the Continent (and at some times the main figure) struggling with the same nightmares — a cosmopolitan aristocrat who believed in a European political community and a sort of ‘European common law’ protected by the balance of power.

In many ways the capabilities of the British state were far greater in the 1780s-1815 than they are now, in particular the talents of leading politicians and officials and the ability to organise hard things fast. In many ways, the Whitehall of the 1780s-1815 had more in common with the elite performance and culture of today’s Silicon Valley than it does 200 years later. And Pitt was recognisably much more similar to the likes of Elon or General Groves than any senior Minister of modern times, and his management style had far more in common with SpaceX than does today’s Cabinet Office, which would declare the Whitehall of Pitt almost all unconstitutional and ‘unlawful’. Ministers then were actually responsible rather than fake responsible as now.

Almost everybody in SW1 today would say ‘it’s impossible to run things like Pitt did, there’s no realistic alternative to how it’s done’. This is wrong. The error is a product of the fact that almost nobody in SW1 has ever worked in a high performance entity with an actual leader with a taste for talent. They have no intuitive feel for what it is like. All they know is pathological bureaucracies where the system is running the NPCs. The central irony of the Northcote-Trevelyan system is the way it morphed from supposedly meritocratic to actually a fake meritocracy with fake responsibility, an increasingly corrupt system that excludes and weeds out merit and suppresses individual responsibility while preserving the power and budgets of the largely useless caste that is the permanent government, neither meritocratic nor focused on ‘public service’ but on themselves. Their grip on power is slipping. But that’s for another day…

AI and European elites

These issues are also highly relevant to AI, power, and issues touched on in Leopold’s essay around how AI is forcing a rethink about how western states function. On one hand the old regimes are crumbling, on the other hand AI requires a transition to different core institutions for political power and a new international regime to accommodate the rise of China without a Great Power war — something that seems to me likely to be at least as world-shaking as the shift from medieval to ‘modern’ states, the creation of centralised taxation, standing armies etc. What replaces our crumbling regimes might easily be a dystopian horrorshow but it could also be a radical improvement on the state that evolved in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Having resolutely ignored AI, SW1 briefly perked up after Chat-GPT to write their usual ‘takes’ and has now herded to ‘oh it’s a fad/bubble’ and gone back to sleep on the subject. This is classic SW1, reliably wrong whenever it herds to a new conventional wisdom.

It’s natural for much of SW1 to align with EU elites who have introduced the strongest anti-AI regulations in the world and are kneecapping their own technology sector, as I said would happen 2015-16 in the referendum. UK/EU elites will develop a schizophrenic attitude: on one hand they will laugh at ‘tech bros’ and tweet ‘fad/bubble/scam’ (‘AI isn’t important’), on the other hand they will shriek with terror that ‘the fascist tech bros’ must be controlled by stringent regulations, ‘fascist Elon is allowing fascist deepfake disinformation’ (‘AI is important’).

They’re comfortable with such cognitive dissonance, do not assume it’s too stupid and self-defeating to persist, the whole trend is for these political-media-academia elites to radicalise in increasingly absurd and self-defeating ways and this is a natural area for the phenomenon to play out. You can already see these elites entirely comfortable with the cognitive dissonance of a) ‘the EU must have strategic autonomy’, which requires fundamentally different EU policies and execution on technology, while b) it kneecaps its own technology sector in so many ways, which is the opposite of what you do if you actually want ‘strategic autonomy’. They aren’t bothered by such absurdity. Just as they aren’t bothered by the absurdity of pushing through GDPR to ‘hit big tech’ even though they were told it would not have this effect and of course it has had the opposite effect. They just move on to the next thing.

This radicalisation process is so powerful that you will see much of SW1 try to push the government into aligning the UK with the EU’s tech/AI regulation. In a rare case of a clear Brexit win, Britain is outside this regulation simply because it happened after we left so SW1 did not have to execute anything hard to get a win, it happened by default and because in 2019 we insisted that the UK would not align with such future regulations when obviously the Treasury tried to sign us up to all future EU stupidity. There’s a powerful faction in SW1 who will argue ‘it’s in our interests to align’ then when they’ve destroyed a big advantage for Britain over the EU, and startups and talent leave for California, they’ll say ‘this is another area where there was no Brexit benefit’.

The absurdity will roll off their tongues without hesitation. The fact that it makes all our problems worse, from productivity to the MOD and NHS, won’t matter because they just construct an alternative mental universe where, miraculously, more government spending plus more EU regulation will magic-hand-wave-DEI-consensus-social-Europe-blahblahblah make up for Europe’s technology failures. Again it will mostly be a mistake to think of them as ‘lying’ and more accurate to think of them as radicalised online and delusional. Ironically, one of the few reasons to hope SW1 avoids its normal trajectory of dumb self-defeating failure is super-Remainer Blair, who is ahead of the SW1 pack, realises the importance of technology and how the EU is kneecapping itself, and is urging Labour NOT to align with the EU here…

Cf. the bottom of this blog for an idea on who should run the NSC AI Taskforce created by the next President.

(Ps. The Cabinet Office succeeded in removing the AI/data science capability we built for the PM’s office. HMT and Cabinet Office much preferred the PM’s office in the dark to having better information than them. Simon Case tried to use Truss to destroy it, half missed, but used the regime change to achieve the HMT/Cabinet Office goal. Another loss for the country, unnoticed in SW1 and uncovered by the old media. If you’re a Labour spad in No10, you’ve been screwed and you should go talk to the officials who built this and ask for a demonstration of the dashboards they built for the PM’s private office, which have vanished from the computers of spads and ministers. A test of your skills is if you can see this or if you let the Cabinet Office block the demo; a platinum medal if you manage to restore the system… When the next disaster hits and the old media jabber about how it’s being handled, remember that Whitehall sabotaged itself again rather than change its ways, it prefers to fail, it will fight to fail.)

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TSP

I’ll post in the week of 9 September on The Startup Party. A few words only on this for now. I’ve been quiet on this blog because I’ve been working on this.

I’m withdrawing from most other projects to focus on the new thing from September. I’m talking to potential cofounders, staff, donors, and supporters of all kinds about what to build. I’m circulating draft notes and plans etc. I’m thinking about the corporate and legal structures, how we raise money from around the world, how we prioritise and sequence efforts. (NB. we will be able to raise and spend money (for most of our goals) from around the world without disclosure of any kind.)

If you are rich and want to do something to fight against the vandalism of our useless political class, be very careful about giving money to the grifters and ‘think tank projects’ springing up in rancid SW1. Look at the baseline probability of success for such efforts. The chances they achieve anything meaningful are close to zero. The ‘think tanks’ and ‘campaigns’ of Tory world are almost all fake, they are ‘the Rwanda policy’ of political action, an alternative to useful action, something for SW1 to pretend is real rather than something that really does something, something aimed almost entirely at SW1 entertainment rather than real change. Tory world cannot build. Tory world sabotages people trying to build. Tory MPs were a bigger obstacle than my ostensible opponent on every major project I’ve done in SW1:

a/ The anti-euro campaign 1999-2001.

b/ The North East referendum 2004.

c/ School reform 2007-14.

d/ Building Vote Leave to win the referendum. Brexit was done TO, not BY, Tory MPs. We had to shuffle them onto Potemkin committees 2015-16 so we could build the startup without their sabotage (deliberate and accidental). This accounts for a lot of the problems since. They never understood why we won and never understood what to do with the victory.

e/ Changing how power works in Whitehall and how No10 works 2019-20.

A crucial thing to remember when thinking about Tory world is they don’t win because they are not actually trying to win, they are just trying to be players in the rancid SW1 game and don’t want that game disrupted by attempts to change its basic rules and agreed goals.

In the Michael Cimino movie Year of the Dragon, with Mickey Rourke, there’s a great scene where his senior management are trying to persuade Rourke to lay off the case — we’ve got an arrangement with the Chinese mafia, you’re screwing it up for everybody etc. It really reminded me of Tory World.

Management: The point here is you cease and desist.

Mickey Rourke: Yeah and what if I don’t, huh? What are you gonna do?… I been swallowing the bullshit around here for ten years and I’m chokin’ on it.

Management: You ever think about your pension?'

Mickey Rourke: Fuck the pension, that’s what's wrong with this whole goddamn police department. Everybody’s so worried about their pension.

Management: Never in the history of the department have I ever heard anything like this, this is a fucking disgrace.

Mickey Rourke: No, Lou, this is a fuckin’ war and I'm not gonna lose it. Not this one. Not over politics. It's always fuckin’ politics [smashes cup off table]… Nobody wants to win this thing, do you, just flat out win, do they?

Management: If you go the press again you know what you’re doing? You’re putting a gun to my head.

Mickey Rourke: That’s what we are — we’re four guys in a room with a gun to our heads.

Fuck the pension… Nobody wants to just flat out win…

My experience of SW1 for 25 years! MP after MP, loser after loser in 2020 kept saying ‘but it’s so NOISY, we can’t ANTAGONISE THE SYSTEM, think about your REPUTATION, your FUTURE EARNINGS, don’t make an enemy of THE MEDIA, of WHITEHALL’… These losers never even WANTED to win, never wanted to TRY to win, forget being ABLE to win.

Do you want to win? If you want to help something that changes the rancid SW1 game, save your time and money to build something valuable…

Please do not comment on TSP here but wait for the week of 9/9.

Thanks for subscribing. As subscribers can see, this blog is a very cheap way to be consistently ahead of the entire mainstream news-pundit-NPC complex on all important issues from the programmed failures of the Ukraine war to Biden’s senility.

If you want to be surprised by news, follow ‘the news’ — it guarantees you’ll be anti-informed because the biggest disinformation in the UK is not ‘social media’ or ‘Russia’ or ‘the far Right’ but the old political parties and Whitehall press offices — especially the Cabinet Office press office which lies more, and more brazenly and with least consequences, than any entity in Whitehall with the occasional exception of the MoD. Just watch what they say about the enormous classified black holes of the nuclear budgets that are cannibalising the conventional budgets. All lies, all fake budgets, all fake OBR numbers…

If you want to be unsurprised by news, subscribe!

Ps. Our new Foreign Secretary also has a lot to say about fascism and disinformation. He, like most NPCs, has been a sucker for disinformation himself. Here he is in 2019 swallowing far Left/Remainer conspiracy theories about me being ‘a Russian spy’. When he gives his inevitable speeches about ‘online radicalisation’, remember that he is a perfect example of it…

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Previous in this series:

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them. (This is 99% finished, a little tidying up to do.)

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). (Me, 3/2022)

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut, and one that ~100% of those in politics are too lazy or deluded to grasp! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

Organizing for Victory: Foreword and Chapter 1

At a dinner in Downing Street in September 1791, Burke warned Pitt of the dangers of the French Revolution spreading. Pitt replied:

Never fear, Mr Burke, depend on it, we shall go on as we are until the Day of Judgement.

His confidence was based on years of preparation.

Britain started organising for war long before it broke out in 1793. The struggle lasted a generation and involved enormous pressures.

• Over 20 years of war that spread across the world — a police action against the revolutionary regime became a world war of survival against Napoleon.

• Big reforms to the civil service.

• Enormous growth in the quality and quantity of output by industrialists and farmers.

• Acceptance of much higher taxes by the rich.

• Acceptance of extended military service by the less well off.

• Food shortages and social disruption.

• Sometimes intense domestic political conflict especially 1796-8 and 1807-12.

In the 1780s Pitt would often ride from Downing Street down the Strand to Somerset House. The Navy Office ran the building and was responsible for warships and spending. It was composed of 105 officials and clerks. In 1774 the old Somerset House was collapsing. It was demolished and rebuilt, originally intended to be quite functional but Parliament insisted it be ‘an object of national splendour’. All the main naval offices, then scattered, were brought together in the new building (we can’t be sure who decided to do this, some attribute it to Burke). .

His close ally, Henry Dundas, was treasurer of the Navy 1784-1800 and Home Secretary in 1791 and SoS for War in 1794. Dundas had an apartment in Somerset House as did many officials so they were there for fast meetings — a very far cry from today, a sign of how much more serious a country we were then, and it evokes examples such as Peter Thiel’s financial incentives for staff to live within a mile of the office. Sir Charles Middleton, the senior of 7 commissioners of the Navy Board which supervised the Navy Office, worked there and Pitt often visited him. The senior civilian on the Board was also responsible for design, construction, and repairing of warships. The Board managed government dockyards and financed and managed overseas bases such as Gibraltar, Halifax and Antigua.

Pitt was interested in the details of management. He often spoke to senior officials and didn’t mind about official reporting lines to other ministers (sometimes criticised as ‘government by enthusiasm’). The talented officials appreciated his intense efforts. Great leaders always disrupt normal organisation charts to delve into details and explore problems. This is always resented by a section of a large organisation.

Pitt and his team took a series of decisions in the 1780s that bore fruit in the next two decades:

• Tax and finance

• Investment in guns and munitions

• Fortifications

• Docks

• Shipbuilding

• Buildings and maintenance

Many of the team were educated at Christ Church where the influential dean, Cyril Jackson, kept his eyes open for talent and helped them network. E.g Lord Grenville, George Canning, Robert Jenkinson (future Lord Liverpool), and Robert Peel (younger, started his ministerial career in 1810). Two Christ Church men played crucial roles in intelligence, John King (undersecretary at the Home Office) and William Wickham (a spymaster then speaker of the House).

Many leading figures had some experience serving in the military including the future Lord Liverpool and Castlereagh. Now extremely rare.

Many were sent to France to learn the language fluently and understand the country, including Wellington (Eton then the French Royal Academy). Now extremely rare. David Dundas spent a lot of time in Prussia and helped reform the British Army that had been defeated in America. He’s forgotten today but Knight says no soldier other than Wellington was more important in beating Napoleon. (Nelson went to France to learn the language but was distracted by a girlfriend and came home without learning anything).

A lot of them had critical roles in their 30s. Now extremely rare and practically impossible in Whitehall (other than over the brief period March-July 2020 when we brought in people in the covid crisis). And many had roles because they were seen as very talented, they were introduced to powerful figures who then appointed them fast. Now extremely rare, generally ‘against the rules’.

Ch1: The Arms Race and Intelligence, 1783-93

In 1783 the last shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired at Cuddalore, in India, between Britain and France.

Most European powers started re-arming and peace was fragile.

Britain feared a French attack on India.

The French secretary of state, comte de Vergennes, thought another war inevitable as Britain would seek revenge, peace was ‘absolutely precarious’.

After the fall of Lord North’s government in 1782 there were four administrations within 21 months. William Pitt, second son of the earl of Chatham who had led Britain for much of the Seven Years War (1763-75), formed a government in December 1783. Pitt was 23. He won the 1784 election in a landslide and the elections of 1790 and 1796.

Lord North had been too passive on naval building at the start of the American Revolution and Britain was vulnerable to the Franco-Spanish alliance. Pitt refinanced debts for naval building and got Parliamentary approval for £2-3 million per year expenditure on new naval building.

Through the 1780s the combined battle-fleet tonnage of France and Spain exceeded Britain’s by about a third. And Britain needed to build other infrastructure to support the ships including provisions, gunpowder and shot. Under Pitt there was a plan for ~100 ships of the line with the supporting infrastructure and supplies and funding for maintenance — a peacetime operation never attempted by Britain before.

Three departments monitored war preparations of our enemies — Home Office, Foreign Office, and the Admiralty.* Each had its own intelligence network. Sharing of intel was patchy. Some HMT accounts relating to spies still exist. Annual spending by the FO on intelligence was ~£25k p/a up to 1786 then jumped with the crises to ~£100k in 1787 and ~£210k in 1788 so a nearly 10X growth over 2 years. The Admiralty had a network of sources watching the French and Spanish navies the most important of which was Captain D’Auvergne who commanded a squadron of small ships based in Jersey and reported to London on enemy movements. A European wide spy network had been built since the Seven Years War by a woman in Rotterdam, Margrete Wolters, who had agents from Paris to all enemy ports. She retired but the network continued.

Pitt took an interest in the strengthening of Gibraltar, crucial to Mediterranean access. It had been under siege by Spain for years. New defences were created and its defence was ‘never a problem in the coming wars’ (Knight).

At Cherbourg France tried to build breakwaters to establish safe anchorage for a Channel fleet. It would have been very dangerous. The geography of the south coast had given Britain an advantage: naval bases in Portsmouth and Plymouth were accessible in most winds but the French fleet could rendezvous only at Brest, facing west into the Atlantic, so could not leave in the prevailing westerly or south-westerly wind. The new Cherbourg harbour would have been north-facing so French ships could have left while British ships struggled. Louis XVI visited the engineering works. Britain watched carefully and worried. But in 1788 storms destroyed timber work and the engineers, operating without steam power, could not overcome the problems. It was abandoned in 1789.

Before 1787 Pitt focused on tax reform and domestic affairs. In 1787 a crisis broke out in the Netherlands when the Princess of Orange was imprisoned by the Patriot Party. Across Europe rumours of war spread. Prussia’s army marched. The French navy mobilised. In September Pitt ordered 27 ships into commission. Pitt knew the weak state of French finances and felt confident taking a tough line. Faced with the Prussian army already in Holland and the British navy mobilising, France backed down on 27/10 and said it would not interfere in internal Dutch politics. Pitt had a diplomatic success.

The Navy was demobilised but we kept more ships at sea than other Powers. Skills improved, intelligence flowed, trade was protected. Evan Nepean, promoted to undersecretary at the Home Office in 1782, had long experience in intelligence and stepped up work in 1788 in response to French and Russian activity in Britain. The government also used its intelligence network to spy on Opposition politicians at the time of the Regency crisis when the king’s illness appeared to be permanent and the prospect of the Prince of Wales becoming Regent seemed imminent and would have brought the Opposition to power. Nepean spied on the Duke of Portland and Mr Sheridan as well as French and Russian agents.

1790 diplomatic crisis with Spain. After 1786 the French navy was weakened by a lack of cash leading to strikes at docks. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly unwisely adopted a harsher penal code for the French navy which mutinied. In 1790 when the Spanish challenged British access to the Pacific, Pitt pushed back with Parliament’s support. The idea of fomenting rebellion in Spain’s American colonies had knocked around for decades and would knock around over the next 20 years. The British Navy mobilised. France tried to respond but was mired in internal chaos. After rising tension with Spain the Spanish backed down. By October Pitt had pressured Spain into conceding almost everything. Spain accepted rights of British to settle between Alaska and California. It was a ‘considerable diplomatic victory’ (Knight).

After 1783 Britain and France pursued new sources of crucial supplies. A diplomatic clash with Russia, spurred by the Ocharkov Crisis of 1791, didn’t turn out so well for Pitt. Britain was highly dependent on hardwoods, mast timber and hemp from Russia for ships. Some crucial officials had resigned, Hood was afloat and not available to Pitt. After threats and mobilisation, the government was shaken by Parliamentary and press criticism. Pitt retreated. The embarrassment was soon overtaken by events in France in 1792. The Channel fleet was almost constantly mobilised 1790-2 while the French navy was crippled by lack of money and political chaos. In 1792 Pitt felt he could cut the Naval budgets after a decade of growth.

Then in April 1792, France was invaded by Austria and Prussia. In January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined. Pitt was convinced war with France was very likely and, since the British navy was more advanced, the sooner the better. He manoeuvred France into declaring war in February 1793.

*(Before 1782 there were two secretaries of state who shared domestic business and foreign affairs was shared between them on a geographical basis, Northern and Southern. From 1782 the ‘foreign’ secretary took over all foreign affairs and the ‘home’ secretary took over domestic and colonial affairs.)

Ch 2: Pitt’s Investment, 1783-93

Some facts on the British economy.

• British population rose from 13m in 1781 to 14.5m in 1791 and ~16m 1801.

• 1783-1802 the economy grew at an annual rate of nearly 6% so roughly doubling and doubling again over 20 years.

• Much of government income derived from customs duties.

• We had the largest merchant fleet in the world with a quarter of global tonnage; France had a fifth.

• The level of imported raw cotton from West Indies grew ~8X 1780-1800.

• Annual exports of iron and steel doubled over 20 years.

• The most important area was northern Europe especially the Baltic.

• We exported textiles and manufactured goods to North America and the West Indies in return for cotton and sugar.

A crucial advantage for Britain was the ability of Whitehall to do high quality procurement and contracting with the private sector for critical supplies, logistics etc. France was much more reliant on state control.

The government obtained advantages from its dealings with contractors: it needed the market expertise and flexibility provided by merchants and agents, and it profited from the innovations of private manufacturers, who were, in general, more creative than their counterparts in the state establishments. (Knight, p23)

Advanced procurement contributed to:

• shipbuilding

• armaments

• munitions

• civil engineering

• fortifications

• supplies and foodstuffs including uniforms, horses, forage, cattle, flour.

Naval capital spending was ~£65 million 1784-92. Dockyard workers were retained at wartime levels. Private shipbuilders added capacity while royal dockyards focused on the 90- and 100-gun ships. Companies provided almost all small arms and cannon. The Victualling Board signed ~10k contracts with >~1k contractors 1793-1815, many of them small and medium sized companies. One of them, John Trotter, was a creative entrepreneur who in 1808 was brought into government as storekeeper general.

Pitt improved economic policy in ways Hayek would have approved:

• increased taxes on luxuries but cut tax on tea so much smuggling became unprofitable;

• brought in a ‘sinking fund’ of surplus revenue (run by independent commissioners and protected from HMT raids by legislation) to redeem the national debt, with £1m p/a from 1792;

• simplified taxes including complex customs duties;

• grew revenue by 50% 1782-96 while costs of collection fell.

Pitt reformed the machinery of government:

• He continued the changes made since the disaster under Lord North to stop officials enriching themselves in their position. He was seen as honest himself which helped him make changes.

• He reformed salaries.

• He abolished unnecessary sinecure posts as they became vacant through death of the incumbent.

Knight says he didn’t move as fast on corruption as he might have but his legacy as honest helped ensure reforms continued after his death.

There was tension between the Admiralty (Howe) and the Navy Board (Middleton). A board of 7 commissioners oversaw the Admiralty, headed by the first lord (Howe), and it was senior to the Navy Board (established 200 years before the Admiralty) that built and maintained ships. From 1778 until his resignation in 1790 Middleton dominated the Navy Board as comptroller of the navy. And Pitt supported Middleton in reforming many aspects of naval procurement which inevitably caused resentment and opposition. E.g he reformed pay from per day to for-the-job (reminiscent of FedEx changing pay to per-shift rather than per hour which I read about in a Munger interview). And he changed the way goods were stored so ships could be equipped and get to sea much faster. He strictly enforced officers sticking to set budgets. He improved the supply chain for wood. Middleton was a mix of ‘self-belief, ruthless ambition and evangelical righteousness, and he trusted no one to do a job as well as he could himself’. (He was also a strong opponent of slavery and encouraged Wilberforce’s campaign.) Howe, first lord of the Admiralty, was locked in a bitter struggle with Middleton — undermined by Howe’s inability to speak (Nelson said of one letter to him that it was a jumble of nonsense’).

Templar and Parlby were the most important contractors for building new docks. These greatly enhanced and speeded the maintenance of the fleet. A metallurgist and contractor, Williams, came up with a solution for the use of copper in boats (an ingenious practical solution given there was then no theory for electrolysis). Such formidable R&D was obviously a target of French espionage.

During mobilisation in the Dutch Crisis of 1787 (above) the improved navy performed well.

At the head of the Ordinance Board was the master-general, a Cabinet post until 1798 and always held by a senior serving officer. The Board was mostly MPs. It ran armaments for army and navy and oversaw building of barracks and fortifications. It also invested in R&D for gunpowder production and this paid off in the war when we had better powder. And it improved the production of cannon partly by improving the ‘proofing’ process, i.e firing a number of rounds before the government bought the cannon. They improved maps, refined survey instruments. (The Duke of Richmond served as master-general for a decade — he was unpopular but in many ways effective.)

There was neither a Secretary of State for War nor a commander-in-chief in peacetime, partly because of memories of the power of military force during the Commonwealth. The army was in a poor state in 1783. It was deployed to fight smuggling and also, given no police, for domestic order including occasional industrial disturbances. From 1790 recruitment increased with a decentralised system Knight says was ‘very successful’. Purpose built accommodation for troops hardly existed and was built.

Pitt also improved the efficiency of the Post Office and transport of post abroad. By 1800 delivery speeds were up. All traffic had to give way to new coaches. (A troublesome official was pensioned off.)

This combination of improvements, and the improvement in Whitehall’s expertise in letting and management of contracts, were critical to war preparation. And France had not used the decade before war to improve capabilities in the same ways. Britain lost the American War but ‘won the peace that followed’ (Knight).

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Metternich: early years and the outbreak of Revolution

Politics is the science of the vital interests of states at the highest level.

Metternich

Siemann identifies three phases of Metternich’s life pre-1815:

• 1773-88. Early childhood and formative years of youth. This generation of elites grew up in the old cosmopolitan Enlightenment Europe, a generation that saw itself as part of a European community and which subscribed to the idea of a European legal order in which the less powerful also had rights.

• 1789-92. French Revolution.

• 1792-1815. An almost uninterrupted World War. Metternich was an envoy then Foreign Minister of the Austrian monarchy dealing with ‘the world soul on horseback’, as Hegel described Napoleon.

Metternich was born into one of the leading aristocratic families in the Empire. His father had many important roles.

He had an unusually close relationship with his parents and a much closer relationship than one often reads about in equivalent aristocratic British families of the time. He was taken to Strasbourg aged 6 to be vaccinated against smallpox. He wrote to his father in German and his mother in French. His father often took him on diplomatic trips as a child. He had tutors. One of them, Johan Simon, got embroiled in the Revolution after 1789 and we can trace how Metternich followed his writings and career. Simon believed in the principle docendo discitur, learn by teaching.

His father was sympathetic to the Enlightenment and three principles:

• religion is predominantly moral, not a dogmatic institution;

• barriers between estates could be overcome via secret societies;

• he held cosmopolitan ideals.

In 1788, aged 15, he departed with two tutors for Strasbourg, then a leading university in France and Germany. He studied English and experimental physics among many other things. Like Goethe, he studied law and history under Christoph Koch, who sought to infer and collect from history ‘certain principles and rules of behaviour that are eternally true’, and form ‘a system of morality and politics for ourselves’ — to discover the motives of governments, ‘their mistakes and qualities, their strengths and weaknesses’, the origins of empires and the causes of their downfall. Metternich studied European wars, the Peace of Westphalia 1648, the art of diplomacy, and the balance of power.

On 14 July 1789 the Bastille was stormed. A week later the Strasbourg City Hall was stormed. Metternich was in Strasbourg and saw the mob. His own tutor, Simon, was one of the leaders and in 1793 would be on a military tribunal that passed death sentences during the Terror (Metternich seems to have kept this secret from his parents and hid some of the details from posterity). The military command was unsure and stopped little. Shocked, the middle classes started arming themselves.

In October 1790 he moved to study in Mainz, a Catholic university. He listened to professor Hofmann make derogatory remarks about prayers and attack the nobility for living off the sweat of others. Metternich also became friends with Niklas Vogt, a Kantian professor of history who preached that enlightenment spreads through publicity, at odds with the freemasons and illuminati. Vogt taught that the mixed federal constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, sitting at the centre of Europe, protected European peace and civilisation. The balance of power was a way to balance selfishness in people and countries, patriotism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Metternich also studied Montesquieu’s ideas of a mixed constitution and ‘the power to halt power’. When considering how to revive Europe in 1814-15, Metternich would talk of ‘reconstruction’, not restoration, and he had in mind the idea of a ‘composite state’ and the subtle nature of the Holy Roman Empire, by then gone.

His education gave him a perspective on the cycles of history that would have made sense to the ancients — an aristocracy attacked the power of the monarchy, the democracy brought in a republic, the republic collapsed in Terror, and the chaos generated a new tyrant. Now Europe needed ‘reconstruction’, a new mixed constitutional order in Europe, Germany and the Habsburg Empire. He wanted a form of international ‘common law’ that established a system of balance and ‘reciprocity’ transcending the interests of individual states and Europe as a whole. He thought that the ancient world was dominated by unremitting hostility between states. The modern world sees states enter ‘a social league’ with a principle of balance of power and solidarity of nations. The purpose of diplomacy was to seek this system day by day.

He studied the French Constitution when it was published in September 1791. He studied many revolutionary pamphlets which survive in his library.

Emperor Joseph II died in February 1790 and there was an imperial coronation. Then in March 1792 Emperor Leopold II died unexpectedly and the entire vast complex process had to be repeated. The young Metternich’s father was important enough that the family participated in both ceremonies. Metternich watched carefully the elaborate rituals and legalities of the Holy Roman Empire which emphasised the decentralised, composite state system.

In October 1789 opposition forces had proclaimed the Revolution in Brussels. In January 1790 the Estates General declared the ‘United Belgian States’ and for the first time those living in the Habsburg Netherlands called themselves ‘Belgians’. Austrian troops retook Brussels in December 1790. Leopold II appointed Metternich’s father as minister plenipotentiary in summer 1791. Metternich visited his father in Brussels for the first time during the Mainz university holiday Sep-Oct 1791. He watched domestic and international affairs collide with revolution and war. He wrote how in Brussels he learned the ‘tower perspective’. When visiting a new city he would find the tallest tower in the centre, climb it, and thoroughly orient himself — a method he said he applied to politics for the rest of his life.

My first glances at great affairs were from the point where they met. Of this perspective I have never since lost sight.

In April 1792 the French National Assembly forced Louis XVI into declaring war and invaded the Austrian Netherlands, the start of the French Revolutionary Wars. (This declaration fell in the interregnum after Leopold II suddenly died.)

In July 1792 after the new Austrian emperor was crowned there was a gathering of monarchs in Mainz for a Congress of Princes. Metternich and his father were there. Metternich saw how the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick was drafted. And he talked to French emigrants agitating around the royal families. Metternich thought that the French monarchy had handled the outbreak revolution so badly that ‘things had to turn out the way they did’ and that many aristocratic French emigrants ‘did not at all comprehend the Revolution’ and remained victims of ‘lofty delusions’. The manifesto threatened France with the destruction of Paris if violence was threatened to the French king. It backfired. The National Assembly issued a passionate call to the peoples of Europe and offered French help if they wanted to rebel against their own governments. (The future king Louis Philippe said that the manifesto did more to rally the French to fight than all the propaganda of the revolutionaries.) On 10 August revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries and Louis XVI fled. The next day Austrian and Prussian troops entered France from Luxembourg.

In this wartime crisis, Metternich visited Brussels again in September 1792. Metternich did not return to his studies in Mainz in 1792 but stayed based in Brussels until he went to England in 1794. He worked with his father on the chaotic war and diplomacy including shuttling back and forth between the army and Brussels — a dramatic, fast, intense apprenticeship. On 20 September the Prussian army suffered a dramatic defeat at Valmy where their advance on Paris was halted by the French, a French victory that Goethe famously said:

From this place [Valmy] and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history.

Within days the King was replaced by the (First) Republic and a new calendar was introduced.

In October 1792 the French general, Custine, conquered Mainz leading to the founding of the Republic of Mainz by the German Jacobins. Metternich’s teacher, professor Hoffmann, helped found a Jacobin club, which began as a reading circle, and its functioning stayed with Metternich for decades — it was a blueprint for the later societies he worked to suppress after 1815, such as the Carbonaria and Young Europe in Italy and socialist clubs in Germany. Metternich learned to look for material interests behind high sounding phrases about the public interest spoken by the ‘proletarians of intellectual labour’ (Riehl). In July 1793 Mainz was recaptured.

In November 1792 the French occupied Brussels. Metternich observed for the first time a government packing up archives, the treasury etc for evacuation. (In 1809 he would participate in something similar when Vienna was evacuated as Napoleon approached.) His family left Brussels over the night of 8-9 November. It was his first experience of exile and would be repeated in 1794 then again in 1848 when the revolution erupted and forced him to flee Vienna. Watching carefully, Metternich believed that military measures alone could not solve the problem — ‘moral remedies’ were necessary and he watched his father try to do this.

In January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined. On 31 January 1793 the French National Convention demanded Belgium be integrated in the French state. Protests engulfed Belgium. In March 1793 the Austrians returned to Brussels after victory at Neerwinden. Metternich’s father pursued the restoration of the estates’ historical rights, the prohibition of secret societies, compensation for those who had suffered losses, and a general amnesty.

Metternich watched French chaos as earlier victories evaporated. Some French generals were executed. Others defected and tried to cut deals with Austria. Metternich spent hours talking to French revolutionaries. Watching Dumouriez’s defection in April to escape the guillotine, Metternich said:

The French Reign of Terror destroyed its own commanders just as cartridges destroyed the soldiers.

In October, the Girondist Vergniaud was believed to say:

The Revolution is Saturn, it devours its own children. [A google suggests confusion over the actual origin of this quote, a link to the definitive story would be appreciated.]

Metternich accompanied his father to an international conference at Antwerp in April 1793.

Britain and Austria had initially thought the Revolution was somewhat helpful in weakening a powerful France. This changed after a series of events:

• In November 1792 the National Convention extended their ‘support and brotherhood to all peoples who wanted to regain their freedom’.

• The invasion of Belgium. Britain had consistently opposed French occupation of Belgium.

• In January 1793 Louis XVI was executed.

• 1 February France declared war.

The Powers gathered in Antwerp and formed the coalition that would become known as the First Coalition: Britain, Austria, Prussia, Netherlands, Spain, Sardinia. It agreed a plan against France but the military side was conventional and slow. In October, Metternich like many was deeply shocked by the execution of Marie Antoinette.

On 5 February, Robespierre gave a speech, Virtue and Terror:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie [homeland, fatherland].

Visit to England 1794

Metternich went to England in March 1794. His father wanted to negotiate loans for Austria. Arriving in London he met the King, Pitt, Fox and others. One of them was Burke who had published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Burke argued that commercial interests and intellectuals had combined to destructive effect to exploit resentment, overthrow order and seize wealth and property. Burke also referred to the ‘mixed system’ of European government that obliged sovereigns to ‘submit to the soft collar of social esteem’, softened authority, and encouraged liberty. But liberty has to combine with public order, morality and religion, ‘the solidity of property’, with peace and order. In a 1795 letter, Burke wrote how:

A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the two last centuries either did not exist at all, or existed solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted. General wealth loosened morals, relaxed vigilance, and increased presumption. Men of talent began to compare, in the partition of the common stock of public prosperity, the proportions of the dividends with the merits of the claimants. As usual, they found their portion not equal to their estimate (or perhaps to the public estimate) of their own worth. When it was once discovered by the Revolution in France that a struggle between establishment and rapacity could be maintained, though but for one year and in one place, I was sure that a practicable breach was made in the whole order of things, and in every country. Religion, that held the materials of the fabric together, was first systematically loosened. All other opinions, under the name of prejudices, must fall along with it; and property, left undefended by principles, became a repository of spoils to tempt cupidity, and not a magazine to furnish arms for defence.

I knew, that, attacked on all sides by the infernal energies of talents set in action by vice and disorder, authority could not stand upon authority alone. It wanted some other support than the poise of its own gravity. Situations formerly supported persons. It now became necessary that personal qualities should support situations. Formerly, where authority was found, wisdom and virtue were presumed. But now the veil was torn, and, to keep off sacrilegious intrusion, it was necessary that in the sanctuary of government something should be disclosed not only venerable, but dreadful. Government was at once to show itself full of virtue and full of force. It was to invite partisans, by making it appear to the world that a generous cause was to be asserted, one fit for a generous people to engage in. From passive submission was it to expect resolute defence? No! It must have warm advocates and passionate defenders, which an heavy, discontented acquiescence never could produce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated body of authority to say, or to act as if it said, “I will put my trust, not in my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, in indolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicious humors, because you cannot punish me without the hazard of ruining yourselves

A copy of this letter has been found in Metternich’s papers. Burke quotes Horace — dis te minorem quod geris, imperas — and concluded that the heart of the ‘feudal tenure’ could not be changed. Metternich thought that the only group who could fulfil the role of an elite between the upper level and lower is a nobility defined by achievement which one could join, like the British gentry.

He visited the royal family in St James’s Palace and was amazed at the relative lack of pomp and pretentiousness relative to the Holy Roman Empire. He experienced British understatement. As he had in Brussels, he climbed the Monument on Fish Street to survey the city. He visited the stock market and saw traders of all nations arrange their places. He was ‘astounded’ by the ‘activity and order’ in the Bank of England. He saw the coal smoke ‘like an impenetrable cloud above it all’. He toured the shops and was amazed by the products and the integrity of shopkeepers. He visited the workshop of Jesse Ramsden, a mathematician, astronomer, maker of scientific instruments.

Between meetings with the British elite, Metternich listened to many debates in Parliament and jotted sketches of it as he watched. He wrote of the monument to Lord Chatham, father of the Prime Minister. He walked around Westminster Abbey in amazement. He visited the theatre and caught sight of an old teacher, Hofmann, in the audience (Hofmann was there under an alias as a French spy). He visited Oxford and saw the combination of ancient buildings and modern studies. He watched different social orders mingle on Sundays in Hyde Park without tension at a time these orders were fighting each other to the death: ‘In Hyde Park, freedom and equality existed on the old soil, and, contrary to the situation at home, there was no need for a revolution in order to bring them about’.

He was given permission to watch a fleet depart. He saw up close the power of the British Empire. He saw over 400 warships and merchant ships organise themselves and set sail with amazing choreography. As an old man he described it as maybe ‘the most beautiful sight I have ever seen’. And he saw the celebrations in London when this fleet smashed a French convoy carrying supplied from America in the battle at Ouessant in June 1894: a) a victory for Britain, b) but the French grain ships got through, c) the French navy had to withdraw to port, d) both sides claimed victory.

Siemann concludes that the standard accounts of Metternich are wrong and are not based on the archive information about this trip. Metternich was far more pro-British than historians have realised and this trip made a lifelong impression on him. He could feel the combination of reverence for history and the most modern, creative country in the world. And he could feel the relative stability. Siemann writes (p130) that Metternich developed the outlook of a conservative British Whig which had no real counterpart in the Austrian Empire. In 1819 he would write that ‘If I were not what I am, I would like to be an Englishman.’

He would make two further visits, one in 1814 then in 1848 after he fled Vienna. When he arrived in 1848 he wrote that Britain is what it is ‘because of its unshakeable belief in the value of the law, of order, and the kind of freedom which, if it truly, wants to exist, must be based on these foundations.’ Eight months before he died he wrote of:

The great maritime empire, which is not a continental European empire, and the continental and central power which is not a maritime power, finally always meet each other where either truly general questions or questions pertaining to their direct interests are concerned.

Metternich’s return to the Continent 1794 and marriage 1795

He returned to the Continent probably in July 1794, sailing from Harwich to near Rotterdam (Oostend in Belgium had been captured by France). His ship was blown into trouble between English and French fleets and newspapers reported he’d been captured but he arrived in Holland safely.

Over coming months:

• His family were expelled from their home in the Rhineland to exile in Austria.

• His family suffered a serious financial crisis.

• The Austrian empire retreated from the Belgian Netherlands and the left bank of the Rhine.

• His future career became highly uncertain.

The crisis was such that he considered emigrating to America.

His return brought him into contact with the battles of the First Coalition. Austrian and Prussian troops were trying to organise resistance to the new French revolutionary armies of the levée en masse which began in late 1793.

Until June 1794 Emperor Franz II was in Brussels determined to defend Habsburg rule. Over June to August, towns, cities and fortresses toppled. Brussels fell on 9 July. Metternich’s father had to flee again (4th). He had implored the provinces to contribute to the costs of the war but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears. In late 1793 he’d suggested arming the peasants to combat the French conscription but it was a step too far for the Emperor. Franz Georg was also undermined by von Trauttmansdorff with Franz, including accusations he was trying to line his pockets. Franz Georg fled from Brussels via numerous stops to Benrath (near Dusseldorf). Franz then dissolved his government of the Austrian Netherlands and Belgium (23/7) and ended salaries for the likes of Franz Georg who, at the end of August, continued on his way to Vienna.

Robespierre went to the guillotine in July and the reign of terror in Paris collapsed without diminishing the intensity of French attacks. By September French troops had moved into the States General.

Metternich reached Benrath by August where he experienced Franz’s dissolution of the Austrian Netherlands. The he was moving around amid the chaos. He published his second pamphlet (anonymously) which argued for arming the people. Prince Coburg had urged the same on 30/7 in a remarkably nationalist-sounding appeal for ‘the German spirit and German blood’ to resist France.

Metternich reflected on the extreme violence unleashed by the Vendée counter-revolution and the Terror to repress it, a violence that ‘respected no age, or sex or rank’ that had blown up Jan-May 1794. For Metternich, the revolutionary French were similar to the German vandals who had destroyed the Roman civilisation. After the first surge, he thought that the French had been largely beaten back until the introduction of levée en masse from late 1793 and accompanying Terror. The conventional armed forces of Europe could not cope and now there was no alternative to ‘arming masses against masses’. He blamed resistance to this idea on ‘narrow minds’, perhaps a reference to von Trauttmansdorff who had opposed his father’s suggestion. He also discussed the social revolution, the way in which a mob of those with nothing to lose had mobilised against all those with property, not just the aristocracy, and he claimed the mob was an entirely urban phenomenon.

Overall his arguments were:

• The French revolution was a social revolution, not just political, and a pan-European issue.

• The old diplomacy and politics has failed.

• War has been transformed and we’ll need to copy the French conscription.

• The ultimate purpose of politics is peace and order, upheld by the consensus omnium bonorem as Cicero put it.

Over summer to autumn 1794 the French occupied place after place: Cologne (6/10), Bonn (10/10), Koblenz (23/10), Metternich’s birthplace. His family and their staff fled again. Metternich’s mother was caught up in the chaos of evacuation as the Prussians retreated and French advanced. She had to sell her coach for ready cash. She headed for Vienna to reunite with her husband and others of the family fleeing the advancing chaos…

In autumn 1794 Metternich was sent by his father to review the family’s estate at Königswart (confiscated from the Metternich family by the Czech government in 1945).

An Apple map of the journey today from Koblenz, his birthplace (occupied in October), to the family estate in Königswart (today Kynžvart Castle in the Czech Republic)

The French took the Koblenz estate. The library was plundered by the French. The family archive had been removed and survived. Metternich undertook thorough surveys of the Königswart estate.

In December 1794 the family was reunited in Vienna. His parents wanted him married and, though not keen, he went along with their wishes. In September 1795 he married the 22 year old Eleonore von Kaunitz, a granddaughter of the former Austrian chancellor. Metternich had to keep his romance and the negotiations with Eleonore’s family as separate as possible, as the latter sought (as was normal then) reassurances about the Metternich family’s newly precarious finances. Eleonore was charming, intelligent and rich from a great family. She could expect to inherit an annual income of ~50k guilders, about five times the annual salary of the best paid civil servant in Vienna in 1816. Although Metternich would have a few long-term affairs, Siemann says he did love her. To one of his later lovers, he said that his wife was ‘never pretty’ but had ‘all those properties on which domestic happiness is based’ and there was ‘nothing in the world I would not do for her’. The marriage could only go ahead, given the precarious finances, because of the direct help of Emperor Franz II. He was married in Austerlitz on 27/9/95. Metternich thereafter lived in a Viennese villa in Rennweg, now the Italian Embassy, when his family were not staying at the Palais Kaunitz at Heldenplatz. (Details of the financial negotiations p148ff.)

After marriage in Vienna he spent his time on science and medicine. Thugut took over as the Emperor’s chief minister in July 1794. Metternich did not agree with his approach.

After his successful Italian campaign, Napoleon conquered Mantua and threatened Vienna. Austria sued for peace.

In October 1797 Austria agreed the Peace of Campo Formio, which set the stage for a Congress opening at Rastatt in January 1798. It marked the end of the First Coalition and left Britain fighting alone against France.

The leader of the Austrian delegation was Coblenz. When it came to signing the deal Coblenz sought some final concessions from Napoleon. Napoleon threatened him that France ‘may conquer all Europe’ and when Coblenz still hesitated to sign, Napoleon smashed to the ground a porcelain figure from the table — a present from Empress Catherine II to Coblenz. Coblenz signed. Austria diplomats were ‘speechless’ (Siemann).

Austria renounced Belgium and northern Italy to the river Etsch and Lombardy. In return Austria received regions belonging to the Republic of Venetia. The peace involved:

• Austria accepting a new state on what had been its territory;

• in a secret article Austria recognised the surrender of the left bank of the Rhine and Mainz, opening a path to the violation of imperial law;

• Austria agreed to pay compensation for those dispossessed on the Rhine from secularised estates belonging to the Austrian empire.

Franz appointed Metternich’s father as imperial plenipotentiary to the congress. Metternich accompanied him, helped him, and had access to the diplomatic documents. As the Congress progressed, imperial delegates started to realise the Emperor had agreed to the surrender of territories and other things contrary to Imperial law. Siemann writes (p162) that trust in the Emperor was shaken, there was talk of treason and violation of the law. Thugut got a lot of blame.

Metternich’s view of the State Chancellery was that it was ‘of such complete ignorance and apathy that nothing similar has ever existed before’. He thought in December 1797 that ‘the Empire has gone to hell’. He feared Vienna itself being taken and he feared those ruling in Vienna did not understand the dynamics of the French revolution. The rest of Europe may be ‘shaken to its foundations’ by France. He probably knew in January 1798 that the peace of Campo Formio had secretly done the deal that the Congress would end with.

While discussions were still happening at Rastatt, Austria declared war on France again in March 1799. Franz Georg’s role ended shortly after. But Metternich had proved himself able to the Emperor and he was seen as suitable for a new diplomatic post.

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CH3: The First Crisis, 1795-98

Pitt said of the French in Jan 1793 that ‘their ambition was unbounded, so the anarchy, which they hoped to establish, was universal’. By June he made clear he wanted a change of government: ‘the best security we could obtain would be in the end of that wild ungoverned system’. Pitt rejected negotiations with France.

There was great consternation about French infiltration and subversion. 2,000 loyalist associations were founded 1792-3. Burke warned of the threat to ‘our property, our wives, everything which was dear and sacred’. News came of French armies slaughtering prisoners and threatening to slaughter all English prisoners. The Duke of York replied that ‘mercy to the vanquished is the brightest gem in the soldier’s character’. French orders were reversed and instead soldiers were threatened with execution for killing prisoners. On 1 June 1794 after a battle in the Atlantic, British sailors rescued hundreds of French crew.

Britain underestimated French military strength and overrated the bad effects of domestic chaos on it.

From 1791-1801 the triumvirate of Pitt, Dundas and Grenville mainly directed policy and strategy. Knight writes that the Cabinet ‘supported decisions that effectively they had already taken’ (p64). Dundas was more focused on securing the colonies and sea power, Grenville more focused on the Continent, but overall mutual respect kept them together for the first phase of the war.

Henry Dundas had built a political base in Scotland. He was friendly and loved by many but his plain speaking and power ‘made him enemies’ (Knight). He was influential with the East India Company. From 1787 he was a commissioner of the India Board of Control through which the government liaised with the Company. From 1793-1801 he was its president. As Secretary of State for War 1794-1801 he built up defences and made us ‘safer from invasion than ever before’ (Knight). Pitt was closer to Dundas than to Grenville and wrote in 1794 that ‘every act of Dundas’s is as much mine as his’.

Grenville was cold, withdrawn and unpopular. Lord Liverpool said of him that ‘he has no feelings for anyone’ but Canning said after meeting him that he was less reserved than his reputation, perhaps more ‘from shyness than haughtiness’. In May 1787 he had been present when Pitt encouraged Wilberforce to champion the abolitionist cause. He was Home Secretary in 1789 then Foreign Secretary in 1791. He was a careful minister with serious linguistic skills, formidable grip of his brief, always well prepared (one can still inspect his large and meticulous map collection).

Knight says that there ‘much wrong’ with the command structure at the top of the army, including a tradition of ordering the army from St James’s, and the triumvirate took time to grasp the complex of problems. The Whig Opposition attacked the government’s performance but was divided. Moderates split from Charles Fox. Of the more radical group, Sheridan and Charles Grey (later the PM who introduced the Reform Act in 1832) were effective orators and bitter rivals.

Grey was ambitious, passionate, ‘at times depressive and introspective, with a powerful need to be in charge that did not make him popular’ (Knight, p66). Lady Holland, a Whig grandee, described him as ‘a man of violent temper and unbounded ambition’. He had 11 sons, 4 daughters, and kept a string of mistresses including Sheridan’s second wife and Georgina, duchess of Devonshire, who bore him a daughter. Both parties wanted his support. His father was General Sir Charles Grey and family connections were with Pitt’s administration but there was distance between father and son and his Whig career was ‘shaped by personal, rather than political, considerations’ (Knight). As Lady Holland said, ‘all the beauty and wit of London were on that side, and the seduction of Devonshire House prevailed’. Grey, Sheridan and other younger Whigs set up the Association of Friends of the People which argued for annual elections and more democracy. He later regretted this impetuous decision.

The First Coalition was formed Feb-March 1793. Britain paid over 100 subsidies to support coalitions over the next 20 years. In April 1793 British troops commanded by the Duke of York went to the Netherlands. The British Army was being reorganised and the rapid growth of untrained men caused problems. Dundas ordered an expedition to besiege Dunkirk. The Duke of Richmond warned against it and advised focus on training. Knight says that Richmond was right, the poor performance of the British Army in this war was due to lack of training and the loss of experienced troops in the West Indies, and the Army did better in the Napoleonic War because of focus on training.

The Dunkirk expedition was a disaster. The Duke of York sat outside Dunkirk for two weeks without artillery then his army was defeated and much of the artillery that arrived was captured.

Knight says that Austria decided to abandon their position in the Netherlands in May 1794 but Siemann recounts a different chronology (above) with this decision taken in July. On 1 June Britain had the naval victory of Ouessant, leading to celebrations witnessed by Metternich (above) but anti-war feeling continued to grow. By July 1794 British forces were evacuated from the Low Countries. The scene was so dismal that the future Duke of Wellington tried and failed to leave the army for a civilian job.

Dundas focused on weakening France by taking her West Indies colonies and their sugar plantations. Forces were sent to the West Indies over winter 1793 with a plan to return them to relieve Toulon in 1794. Meanwhile Toulon was lost in December. Overconfidence from Admiral Hood was partly to blame as was the lack of a planning staff in Whitehall.

The West Indies campaign continued and casualties were a huge drain on resources. A large force for the West Indies campaign was assembled in summer 1795 but it set out late then was smashed by a storm in November. Eventually over coming years Britain pushed France out but it came at huge cost. Disease was a huge factor. 1793-1801, half the 90k force died of disease, another 20k deserted or were discharged, so the losses were ~70%, a rate never seen again in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. These losses deepened the manpower shortages.

The main problem was competition for skilled seamen. Trade had been growing fast. Merchant seamen were fully employed with good wages. The merchant marine was expanding and paid better. In 1794 the merchant marine and navy each employed ~80k seamen. Pitt brought forward bills to force shipowners to supply men to the navy but there was an immediate and strong political pushback and the shipowners said that the measure would undermine trade including coal trade. The March 1795 Quota Acts required each county to raise men for the navy. This also met opposition from the county members and the measures were complex and ineffective, which meant that there was no alternative to impressment in an emergency, though it only contributed a small amount and at times of emergency. The King’s Bounty was more effective than impressment (an able seaman fot a £5 bounty plus 2 months wages on volunteering).

There were also shortages for land forces. In 1793 the army was 18k though it expanded fast to 42k in 1794. In 1795 it was reckoned that 128k troops were needed for the defence of Britain. In 1796 there was 15k cavalry and 53k infantry. The total of regular, militia and volunteer troops reached 100k by 1799 and the theoretical strength of the home garrison varied between 65k and 100k for most of the Revolutionary War.

An effect of the shortages was supplements from foreign troops. The quality was low. Local volunteers were paid by the government.

Backing up the regular army were the militia regiments used for invasion defence and to control domestic unrest. They were established by annual Militia Acts passed by Parliament and raised by ballots held in local towns and parishes. An individual could avoid service by paying for a substitute. Those dealing with domestic unrest were kept on the move so fraternisation with locals was a minimum. Sometimes the militia itself joined in disturbances and riots. Their performance and quality of officers improved as the war went on. (Until the war Ireland had been more peaceful than England but the implementation of the Militia Acts caused repeated violence.)

By the end of 1794 the government had serious unrest: crowds raged about high prices and impressment, against recruiting offices and crimping houses. To ‘crimp’ was to entrap into the army, navy or East India Company, sometimes via drink and prostitutes; sometimes via loans at exorbitant rates that the seamen had to ‘volunteer’ to obtain the bounty to repay the debt. There was violent resistance to impressment in ports across Britain, particularly the north east; in North Shields the press gang was run out of town. The 1787 and 1791 mobilisations had been fiercely resisted and deadly violence was common.

On 13 July 1795 rioters marched down Whitehall and threw stones through the windows of No10 as Pitt hosted dinner. The army drove the crowd off as they chanted ‘Pitt’s head and a Quartern Loaf for Sixpence’. Knight says that by the end of October 1795, ‘matters seemed to be out of control, and revolution spreading across the Channel’ with the King’s coach jeered, shouts of ‘Bread and Peace’ as he went to the opening of Parliament. As he returned to the Palace he had to be rescued by the Life Guards and the empty coach was smashed up.

Within weeks Pitt pushed through the ‘Two Acts’ — the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act. Treason was expanded to include attempts to coerce Parliament, attacks on the constitution. Seditious meetings included meetings of more than 50, universities excepted, unless permitted by local magistrates.

In 1794 the Duke of Portland (William Cavendish-Bentinck), courted by Pitt, had broken with the Whigs and come over to support the government with 60 supporters. This realignment kept the Whigs out of power for a long time. It also required a reshuffle. Dundas gave up the Home Office to Portland who took a hard line on domestic unrest and, as a supporter of Adam Smith, opposed Government purchases of food in 1795/6. Pitt wanted him to take on a new department as Secretary of State for War. Dundas threatened to resign. He wrote to Pitt that modern wars are ‘a Contention of Purse’ so ‘the Minister for Finance must be Minister for War’. Pitt pleaded and the King persuaded Dundas to take the offer. Dundas’s relationship with Pitt allowed him to make the new job work. Colonies were added to the department’s responsibilities in 1801 and this lasted until the Crimean War.

The other Portland Whigs got five Cabinet places. Lord Spencer became First Lord of the Admiralty. There was constant tension over appointments. The tradition of promotion by seniority ‘was a significant weakness’ (Knight) and it took time to ease out older officers and promote younger and more vigorous. (This is a near-universal problem with peacetime armies, is a huge problem in the UK now.)

There was some distant success. Britain captured the Cape from the Dutch and the wonderful harbour of Trincomalee in Ceylon both of which were important for the empire’s security far into the future.

But overall by 1795-6 the situation was grim.

• Manpower shortages.

• A nightmare of disease in the West Indies.

• Recurrent riots and resistance to military service.

• French successes and Austrian retreats.

• The failure of the first British armies on the Continent, including the Dunkirk fiasco.

• Finances were strained. By the fourth year of the war expenditure had grown to over £42 million of which £28M had been spent on the armed forces and Ordnance. Income had hardly increased and in 1796 was only £19M. Government credit was weakening, seen in the value of the 3% ‘Consols’.

Pitt had thought that the financial and inflation situation in France would force them to negotiate peace. This proved wrong.

In 1796 Britain explored peace options with France. Talks continued until France ended them in September 1797. France had crushed the Vendée counter-revolution and was planning invasion of Ireland.

In 1796 Britain also decided to abandon the Mediterranean. Napoleon was overrunning Italy. Spain switched sides and declared war on Britain in October. In August the British Mediterranean fleet was withdrawn to Lisbon and Gibraltar.

In December 1797 Pitt introduced the Loyalty Loan, money raised from the public for bonds. It raised £18M but was not enough so in Jan 1798 he introduced the Triple Assessment, a form of graduated income tax based on the assessed taxes of the previous year. In 1799 this was extended to an income tax of two shillings in the pound on income over £200.

Britain suffered some setbacks at sea. The Channel fleet was led poorly by the unwell Alexander Hood. In December 1796 a mistake, through faulty intelligence, led to ‘the most dangerous single moment of the French Revolutionary War’ (Knight). A French expedition slipped through the blockade and headed to Ireland while the British fleet went to Portsmouth for resupply. Storms forced the French to return without landing. It had been a close shave. And it also became clear in London that the security of Ireland was much shakier than they’d realised, and troops there were hampered by the enmity of much of the local population. All Irish generals were replaced.

In 1797 a rabble French force landed in Wales but although easily dealt with it caused a bank run and the 1797 Bank Restriction Act prohibited the Bank of England from issuing anything other than paper notes and the export of gold was illegal. Britain was off the gold standard but it did not lead to a change of strategy. By the end of the Revolutionary War the national debt was close to £700M, more than doubled since Pitt came to power.

The Home Office Office, army and the Ordnance reviewed risks of invasion and prepared plans for defences. Colonel George Hanger had argued in March 1795 that the British Fleet was no guarantee against French invasion and cited the 1779 fiasco when the French and Spanish fleets had combined to threaten Plymouth. Hr urged defensive works around London to protect against a French invasion up the Thames in the east. Others wrote similarly. Dundas argued (1798) for pre-emptive strikes on French ports where preparations seemed underway. Such strikes continued until 1815.

In Feb 1797, Admiral Jervis won a victory at Cape St Vincent. Nelson also won fame for his exploits and Jervis would promote Nelson’s career. Jervis was a strict disciplinarian and brilliant with logistics and administration. He considered it a core part of his duty as commander to care for the health of his forces and maintain hospital ships. [When Jervis ordered two mutineers to be executed the next day and an Admiral objected to executions on the sabbath, Jervis insisted that either the Admiral was replaced immediately or he would immediately resign. They were executed. But he forgave Nelson for disobeying orders. When a hero lost years of savings and wept on the boat, Jervis gave him the £70 from his own pocket but added, ‘but no more tears mind, no more tears Sir’.]

3 months later there was a mutiny in the fleet at Spithead over money and discipline. Parliament acted to improve pay. There were other outbreaks. Rebellion spread and there were threats to sail to London and hold the city hostage. Admiral Duncan played a big part in ending the mutinies and getting a grip on the fleet then defeating the Dutch ships, ending fears of another invasion of Ireland.

In May 1798 there was a serious rebellion in Ireland. The French could not reinforce them with serious numbers.

The Government was slow to realise that the big French move in 1798 was to conquer Egypt. But in April they reinforced Jervis’s fleet and Jervis reinforced Nelson. Nelson then pulled off an amazing victory over the French fleet at the Battle of Aboukir Bay (aka Battle of the Nile), 1 August 1798, which changed the strategic picture: the Mediterranean was back under British control, the best of the French navy was destroyed, trade was revived and Russia and Turkey were encouraged to join the war against France.

But on the Continent, the French situation was still powerful. Spain had joined her. Prussia, Sardinia and the Two Sicilies had retired. She’d strengthened her position in Switzerland and Italy.

In March 1799 war returned between France and Austria and was followed by the Second Coalition which Britain signed up to on 1 June. Pitt also passed the Combination Acts in 1799 to ‘prevent the unlawful Combination of Workers’, partly out of fear of invasion of southern England.

In 1795 the Duke of York, ‘a tireless and able administrator’ (Knight), became commander-in-chief of the Army . Talents such as Wellesley were on the up.

In 1800 Hood (Lord Bridport) was replaced as commander of the Channel fleet by Jervis (Lord St Vincent) who was a great improvement. [Knight later dates this as 1801.] Talents such as Nelson were on the up.

Large sums were being spent on fortifications such as Dover Castle.

The pattern of action against France was the same:

• fleet actions in European waters

• amphibious expeditions

• colonial warfare

• defence against invasion

• diplomatic coalitions

But now Britain’s financial strength was much greater. Income tax reforms were generating ~50% increase in revenue 1796-9. The economy was growing and generated wealth for the war.

And the intensity and scale of the war was increasing…

CH4: Whitehall at War

The term ‘civil service’ first appears in a HMT document of 1816. Before then officials were commonly called ‘officeholders’ and those who were awarded or inherited sinecures were ‘placemen’.

The Treasury was controlled by a Board of 7 commissioners. The first lord commissioner was the PM. HMT was the primary policy department and supervised the Commissariat which was responsible for supplying and provisioning the army, leaving control of the army in the hands of the PM. In 1797 the Treasury contained 142 clerks of whom 85 served in the Commissariat. It doubled in the next 7 years.

Departments with substantial spending such as the Admiralty, or tax raising powers, such as Customs or Excise, were managed by boards of commissioners usually 6 or 7 strong appointed by the king.

The Secretary of War had 35 clerks in 1796 and this increased fourfold by 1806. In 1797 the naval departments together employed ~400 commissioners, senior officials and clerks; by 1815 this rose ~50%. In the Home Office there were 34 permanent clerks in post 1782-1801 who joined from the age of 16-19 (much younger than now). Most departments grew by 2-3 times over 20 years to 1815.

The PM could not order a minister to carry out a policy, only the Cabinet could collectively do this.

Pitt spent a lot of time on finding and promoting young talent. He nurtured talent stretching as far into the future as the Earl of Aberdeen who resigned as PM in 1855. And Pitt was happy to place young talent such as Canning in the office of the Foreign Secretary Grenville and use him to, essentially, spy on his boss.

There was little system for the Cabinet then. Pitt did not discuss appointments with most ministers who first heard about Cabinet changes when they were announced. From the start of the war to 1797 the conclusions of only 12 minuted Cabinet meetings were formally communicated to the king. There was a system for despatches to be available in a Cabinet room for ministers to read. Memos in the Grenville papers can be seen to be initialled by ministers with recommendations scribbled. Pitt ran the Cabinet ‘very loosely’ (Knight) and did not stick to formal reporting chains. In the 1790s, an inner circle of Pitt, Dundaas and Grenville ‘made the decisions’ (Knight) and much was done with Dundas alone at his home. Dundas recalled:

In transacting the business of the State, in forming our plans etc, we never retired to Office for that purpose. All these matters we discussed and settled either in our morning rides at Wimbledon, or in our even’g walks at that place. We were accustomed to walk in the evening from 8 o'clock to sometimes 10 or Eleven in the Summer Season.

Pitt preferred to talk to people than to write letters — like General Groves!

His private secretary, Henry Legge, organised his daily schedule. Legge said that his job required ‘Secrecy, attention to writing Letters civilly to those who desire to wait upon him, to be exact in recollecting the Hours and Days that different people are appointed to come’. Pitt was ‘the best temper’d Man in the World, and the most pleasant to work with, for he is clear and patient, and likes to make those happy with whom he has to transact Business.’

Pitt drank too much but Knight says it affected his performance ‘marginally’. His nerves were good. He would take a mutton chop and a glass of wine and water at 3pm. (Wilberforce apparently took opium before speaking.)

The arrival of Jervis (Lord St Vincent) at the Admiralty in 1801 was ‘a rude shock’ (Knight). He brought to Whitehall his style of command at sea, a style that would cause floods of tears, ‘a mental health crisis’, and legal action in Whitehall today. He operated with ‘a brusqueness more fitting to the quarterdeck than to Whitehall’ (Knight). He only received visitors from 5-7am!!!

The Duke of York was a ‘natural bureaucrat’ (Knight) and as a member of the royal family he was beyond normal party politics. He was active in preparing against invasion. He sought to shift the army away from promoting men without merit on the basis of numbers of troops raised via crimps.

There was a ‘a systemic failure’ in Dundas’s department (Knight): instructions flowed from the SoS office ‘in such detail that the commander in the field was deprived of initiative’ (Knight, p104). Dundas took little advice from the army and navy commands and there was ‘no general staff organisation to bring information together’. When the Duke of York commanded armies in the 1790s he had little say in the planning operations in London beforehand.

As the war and the money involved grew, the old systems of ‘presents’ and other corruption in procurement became a bigger problem. Charles Abbot was appointed to investigate as chairman of the Select Committee on Finance and did a great job producing numerous reports to Parliament. The transparency forced change and department by department the ‘presents’ and ‘fees’ paid to officials were eliminated. Although clerks tenure was permanent, duffers were weeded out. When Dundas arrived at the Home Office he retired four clerks (12%!). (In 1800 the secretary at war complained to Pitt of HMT investigating his department without his permission, a pattern of ‘irregular and very unceremonious’ interference without notice to those at the head of the organisation.)

Whitehall had to manage the dockyards, labour relations, and repeated strikes (worse when food prices spiked).

There was a big expansion of overseas bases and the logistics to support them.

A big debate in the 1790s was ‘the political arithmetic’ of the nation. How many people are there? What sort of taxes can they support? Abbot helped with his Population Bill of 1800 which led to the 1801 census and the first accurate numbers. The population was bigger than the pessimists had thought. Thomas Irving, the inspector general of imports and exports in the Customs department, produced much more accurate accounts by using returns collected under the Convoy Act under which merchants had to declare the value of their cargo. Calculations of national income were revised up to £200M p/a. From 1785-94 British annual imports averaged £20M and exports £14M. From 1795-1804 the figures rose to £24M and £22M.

The Board of Agriculture and internal Improvement from 1793 under Sinclair then Young improved farming, food supply and statistics.

When the Peace of Amiens came, William Marsden watched bitterly from the Admiralty Office ‘the disgraceful scene’ of an English rabble welcoming the French envoy with news of the Peace.

12 years more war lay ahead of much greater intensity and scale.

CH5: Intelligence and Communications, 1793-1801

Many parts of Whitehall engaged in intelligence collection and analysis:

• The FO

• The HO

• The individual services

• Admiralty

• SoS for War

There were networks of informers and agents. Warships blockading ports passed information back. Fishing boats and agents reporting to Captain Philippe D’Auvergne at his base in Jersey were an important resource. He reported to the Admiralty and War Office. At the Admiralty clerks compiled a classified index by geographical area into which information was inserted. All sorts of commercial information was used such as Lloyds Coffee House.

Lord Spencer summarised the system in a confidential memo to the Cabinet in April 1798. Intelligence was collated and circulated to Cabinet. A précis of the latest intel can be circulated but customers should be cautious because one needs to make judgements ‘from a general view and comparison of the whole’.

The Secret Office in the Post Office intercepted other governments’ despatches. It was established in the 17th century, never officially acknowledged, and funded by secret service money from HMT. It had agents in foreign post offices. Security in departments was a problem. There was nothing like the modern system of security clearances. Sometimes Grenville had despatches delivered to his home.

At the outbreak of war the secret service was a small internal surveillance organisation headed by Evan Nepean, undersecretary in the Home Office. It grew into the Alien Office which monitored people after the passing of the Alien Act 1793. It handled home security and offensive spying in Europe. It was led and dominated by William Wickham, an expert linguist and member of the elite Christ Church group. He spied on radicals and in 1794 warned Pitt some were planning revolution. Pitt and Dundas acted fast. Habeas Corpus was suspended, the revolutionary circle was broken. This got him appointed superintendent of the Alien Office working to the Home Secretary. He reported to the Foreign Secretary on intercepting foreign correspondence so was, for a brief period, in charge of both foreign and domestic. But he was sent to Geneva on a secret mission connected to possible peace deals and under his replacement separate ministries re-established their own networks. Secret service money was issued to different departments. Money was distributed across Europe via a network of private bankers. Ministers had to swear an affidavit that they were distributing the cash for the purposes given. Pulling together intelligence for assessment therefore came to depend on cooperation at the undersecretary and Cabinet levels.

There are some amusing letters from the acerbic Jervis about the uselessness or worse of some agents when he saw the cash they were paid. There are also interesting letters between Lord Spencer, first lord of the admiralty, and Henry Swinburne, a British representative in Paris with diplomatic immunity who also bought books for Spencer in Paris bookshops.

From Geneva, Wickham ran operations but he was greatly hampered by the disintegrating Coalition and the divisions between opponents of the French revolutionaries, the royalists and constitutional monarchists at each other’s throats etc.

Diplomatic despatches were sent in cipher by post from across Europe (often weekly or fortnightly) and the security of this was critical. Wright: it’s ‘likely’ most of these ciphers were not secure. Most ciphering was done in the Deciphering Department of the FO, a process dominated by the Willes family for over 120 years! Wright says that the family were ‘apparently blessed with mathematical genes’. [Any further information on this extraordinary fact, please post in comments!] King’s Messengers carried the most secret documents, including code books, and had a shuttle from the Continental courts to English packet boats in North Sea ports. But there were only 40 such messengers and they were expensive and controlled by the lord chamberlain. It was a dangerous job with lives lost to shipwreck, murder, being thrown from their horse.

The undersecretary at the FO was responsible for receiving messages, deciphering and delivering to the SoS. The weather played havoc with transport. Average running time from Spithead to Barbados was ~40 days; a large warship could make Gibraltar from Spithead in 30 days but the average for frigates was ~18 days. Sometimes they could move very fast with lucky winds. In 1800 a message from Minorca got to Sicily (~500 miles) in 2 days. In 1799 a ship got from Nova Scotia to Britain in 16 days, a record. The main post route ran from Harwich to the Dutch ports then Great Yarmouth to Cuxhaven, then, in the Napoleonic War, even further north as far as Sweden. It was a dangerous business made worse by the threat of French privateers. And when they got to the Continent, the roads were often awful. (In Britain roads had improved because of the turnpike trusts in the later 18th century. This was valuable for the domestic economy and the military.)

There was also a system of shutter/optical telegraphs, designed and built in the mid-1790s, which connected the top of the Admiralty building with commanders-in-chief at the Downs, Portsmouth or Plymouth in minutes. Fast construction was helped by the accurate information from the Ordnance Survey. The French had invented optical telegraphs and by 1794 there was a line from Paris to Lille. Britain got going in 1796. Portsmouth-London took ~15 minutes. By 1800 warships off France could signal to the Admiralty via anchored signal ships.

These telegraphs were complemented by another Admiralty system started in 1794: signalling stations around the coasts, 5-7 miles apart. They were simpler than the optical telegraphs but they could signal possible surprise attacks and developed a friend-or-foe system.

Speed was particularly important at the outbreak of war then in 1803 when it renewed because those who got the news first in far flung spots could take the initiative with surprise on their side.

1798 saw the biggest intelligence failure of the Revolutionary War (p144ff).

• Napoleon was spotted in Feb in Channel ports.

• In March it was decided to send him to Egypt.

• Reports reached London of large forces at Toulon but no information. the destination.

• The withdrawal of the fleet from the Mediterranean (above) hit intel gathering.

• Nelson was sent in May to try to find out what France was up to.

• Each department had its own theory but did not share information. E.g a long letter from our consul in Tuscany suggested Egypt but it was not passed on from the FO. The East India Company’s intelligence network suggested Egypt but it was not passed on.

• The system was partly swamped by the growth in volume: FO files doubled 1783-92 then again in the next decade. (In 1793 Grenville hired a friend from Christ Church to be a FO précis writer.)

• A smart transport agent spotted that French ships were not prepared to leave the Straits of Gibraltar and reported back. Although this information was transferred to Nelson, the crucial word ‘Egypt’ was missing and the suggested target was Spain or Naples.

• On 19 May Napoleon’s fleet left Toulon. Luckily Nelson got intel from someone else who suggested Egypt. But by the time he caught up with the fleet it had dropped off the army. Wright: if he’d known about Egypt earlier, Nelson would probably have smashed the fleet at sea and ‘history would have taken a different course’.

• Neither Jervis nor Nelson had crucial information available in London. Jervis complained afterwards, rightly, that a crucial message had been put on a ship charged with convoy duty so delayed. Dundas did a swift lessons learned inquiry and reported to Grenville that although he hated to ‘indulge in retrospective melancholy’, he concluded that they should have got intelligence to Nelson earlier and scuppered the expedition.

There were disinformation operations from both sides, e.g false orders put on ships meant to be captured.

Wright: the verdict on the ‘overall defence intelligence performance must be one of continualBritish failure’.

3 main problems:

1. We faced an unstable regime in the Directory. Intentions were hard to read and French counterintelligence made it harder.

2. Judgements of ministers were repeatedly skewed by fear of a French invasion of Ireland creating rebellion. Weakness of defence there plus hostility of population was a big problem. But it also meant London assumed the French were thinking about it more than they were.

3. Potential allies among anti-revolutionary elements were bitterly divided. Much information from exiles was deluded or fraudulent (cf, Iraq 200 years later). As Talleyrand said, they ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’.

Whitehall improved through the 1790s and Dundas’s post-mortem caused improvements.

Wright says Nepean had too much power and was insufficiently checked. Things improved when ministers stopped interpreting intelligence and focused on policy. (He doesn’t explain this, presumably he does in a later chapter — clearly a critical question. In WW2 Churchill insisted on seeing a lot of raw intelligence particularly after some cockups.)

CH6: Feeding the Armed Forces and the Nation, 1795-1812

At the highest British armed forces were three times larger than in the American War, roughly 10-15% of the adult male population. In 1801 Britain was feeding 400k in uniform,

They needed feeding with a complex logistical operation, lemons to limit scurvy etc.

Usually after the Cabinet made decisions about the next year’s campaigns in late autumn the Victualling Board would be informed of the numbers of men, location etc and had to make plans, liaise with the Navy Board, Transport Board etc. It negotiated contracts, organised logistics etc.

There were three periods of civilian shortages and price rises: 1795-6, 1800-1, 1809-10. We could not grow enough wheat to feed ourselves and we imported grain mainly from northern Europe. In 1795 a law was passed outlawing obstruction of grain transport in Britain because of local disturbances during shortages. Sometimes Pitt secretly organised an agent to buy wheat from America and secretly got the East India company to deliver supplies in order to alleviate shortages.

There were often fears about parts of the Army refusing orders or fighting with each other.

There were three main types of contractor.

A/ A few well-capitalised commission agents who bought large amounts taking profits on a percentage basis. There was always a danger of monopolies.

B/ Most supplied particular commodities for a specified period, often with 6 month termination agreement. There was competitive tendering but the lowest tender wasn’t always met because of credit and probity checks.

C/ Merchants who undertook to supply a ship or garrison with every type of provision at a particular port. They had to be well-capitalised and well organised. The government successfully managed to transfer a lot of risk to the private sector. The biggest merchant was Pinkerton but he went bankrupt.

The system relied on the London Corn Market in Mark Lane, the meat market at Smithfield, and some other specialists. The expanding agriculture industry with rising productivity helped. The City’s financial infrastructure was critical. And open, fair contract tendering and no favouring of monopolies gave Britain big supply chain advantages over France and Spain.

The Victualling Board was a critical institution organising very complex logistics and weather. Knight says that George Phillips Towry was ‘perhaps the most remarkable of all the lesser administrators in Whitehall during the wars against Napoleon’. The Transport Board . Before railways, the easiest and cheapest way to move things big distances was via rivers, canals and the sea. In the later 18th Century there was huge improvement in the canal system which speeded things up and lowered prices. Drovers shifted hundreds of cattle (shod like horses!) from farmers to graziers (for fattening) near markets along drovers’ roads. There was a vast network of credit and transport infrastructure evolved over centuries. The system was so efficient that you could send a dog home to Wales from London on its own with a note attached to it addressed to each inn on its way with a promise to pay for the dog’s food on a subsequent journey (p166)!! Ships had to be supplied with live beasts, beer, coal and fresh water.

Pioneering engineering improved water supply. Samuel Bentham (brother of Jeremy), inspector general of naval works responsible to the Admiralty Board, made many contributions. His job was created by Middleton. In Plymouth the Plymouth Dock Water Company piped water from Dartmoor. There was a network of ships just to supply water to other ships.

This supply and logistics network underpinned the strategy of blockading French naval bases and it enabled the projection of British power across the world. It also helped the defence against invasion at the height of the danger in 1805.

And before the Battle of Trafalgar, the French navy had suffered from years of blockade and poor supplies while Nelson’s crews were well supplied. British seamen were better fed and morale was higher…

CH7: Transporting the Army by Sea, 1793-1811

The Transport Board chartered privately owned ships to move infantry, cavalry, ordnance, food etc to supply other ships on blockade duty and garrisons abroad.

They also supported amphibious operations, ‘the most complex and costly operations attempted by the British state’. The PM had the authority for such operations because a) they were such a big deal the resources used affected other important decisions and b) he was First Lord of the Treasury.

From 1794 Pitt reconstituted the Board and the Navy Board gave up the job of hiring transports. It worked for the navy, army, Ordnance so negotiation with and procurement from shipowners were handled by a single central entity. Middleton at the Admiralty wanted to remove the inspection and surveying of ships from the dockyard officers.

Most of its orders came from the Secretary of State for War. The Navy kept trying to regain control but failed until 1817.

The Board replaced a more complex and lengthy process with using the registered tonnage required by the Customs Act of 1786 to calculate the chartering rate.

In 1799 France had almost no merchant marine. Britain had 14,500 registered ships measuring 1.4M tons; by 1815, 22,000 at 2.5M tons. The Board relied on the market and had to pay market prices. Ships could be retained by the Board or its agents and were not discharged until they returned to Deptford or Portsmouth. Merchant ships (with few exceptions) were compelled to sail in convoy by the Compulsory Convoy Act of 1798. The government provided indemnification for loss against capture but only if the ship stayed with the convoy. (Lord St Vincent was hostile to the Board when at sea but when in the Admiralty he changed his mind and wrote in 1797 that it was ‘very efficient’. He despised all contractors (!) and attacked the profits but the system was efficient.)

There were disputes between Army and Navy. In 1795 the Duke of York issues new regulations for troops at sea that appeared to remove them from naval discipline. All 8 admirals in Portsmouth wrote in protest to Lord Spencer who persuaded the Duke to withdraw his regulations.

Enemy territory was taken under British control in Newfoundland, West Indies, Malta, the Cape, India, Mauritius and Indonesia. Much was given back under the Peace of Amiens but then taken again when the war resumed. There were over 50 amphibious operations 1793-1815.

The worldwide transport of British troops was so effective that by 1811 France and her allies did not possess a single overseas territory. The annual cost was usually 7-8% of the total naval budget.

But large expeditions in home waters were hard from start to finish of the wars. After the nightmare West Indies operation (above) there was a shortage of ships and no large amphibious operations 1796-8.

According to Wright, Pitt and other ministers kept considering amphibious plans that were impractical given the logistical demands and tonnage of transport needed. Had the Board been represented in Cabinet by a single senior minister the limitations would have become clearer. Dundas’ failure on the West Indies operation also made him rightly more cautious.

The operations we could manage were relatively small. We could not do big combined amphibious operations. ‘The expedition to Walcheren in 1809 was the largest to leave British shores in the French wars’. It was a disaster. Poor relations between army and navy were part of the reason. It was only about 1810 when we had a foothold for troops in Portugal which solved the problem of creating a bridgehead on the Continent.

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Siemann: Life as an Ambassador, 1801-06

Napoleon had himself elected First Consul in 1799.

The Peace of Lunéville, 9/2 1801, ended the war of the Second Coalition. In 1802 France and Britain signed the Peace of Amiens.

• Poland was not restored as an independent monarchy.

• Venice went to the Habsburgs.

• Piedmont went to France.

• German ecclesiastical princes and smaller dominions within the empire became pawns to be moved around the chessborad.

• The old Empire was still alive and passed another fundamental law, the Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation of 1803, stipulating how the secular property owners of the left bank of the Rhine would be compensated. It was the last law passed in the Holy Roman Empire.

The basic problem was Napoleon’s ambitions. As Metternich told him in 1813, ‘Your peace is never more than a truce.’

For Metternich, Lunéville was a rupture for the Empire and his career. It was a failure for Thugut who resigned from all offices in 1801. Count von Cobenzl dominated Austrian politics as the state and conference minister and as court and state chancellor until 1805. Metternich was now prepared to become a diplomat and the new peace created options. He was now 27. Cobenzl got him appointed in January 1801 as minister to Dresden which was an attractive post. Saxony was ‘the venerable electorate in which the Reformation had begun’ and represented the leading voice of Protestantism in the Empire (though its leaders had converted to Catholicism). It was considered a neutral central power and was carefully observed by Austria, Prussia and France.

In November 1801, when he took up his Dresden post, Metternich wrote some ‘self-instructions’, a 105 page document in the form of a Vortrag (presentation) for the Emperor. From January to November he buried himself in state archives studying recent European politics and diplomatic communications. His approach in this document he followed in notes to the Emperor: the historical context, present options, consider their pros and cons, what’s the best path. He would repeat this formula on future big occasions.

• Although he later said that by now he assumed the Holy Roman Empire was ‘tending inevitably to its end’, he did not write that in his booklet. He was still concerned with trying to preserve and strengthen it.

• He did not expect peace but a continuing struggle ‘of political principles’ in a ‘chaos of elements’.

• England was a maritime and global power that’s dropped its usual neutrality so the European conflict now has a global context. There was no need for rivalry between England and the ‘exclusively continental’ Austrian Empire.

• Alexander I was a ‘fickle character’ and the traditional friendship with Russia was lost.

• Prussia had a ‘congenital hatred’ for the Habsburgs and would side with Revolution to undermine the Empire to expand its own territory and power. It violated ‘all acknowledged international and moral principles’.

• The Habsburg rule in Italy would dissolve as Napoleon reshaped it.

• Poland was useful sitting between three Powers and therefore diminishing ‘the frequent collisions which always occur if there is immediate contact’. The partition of Poland, driven by the ‘blind desire for aggrandisement’ of the Prussian and Russian cabinets, was ‘contrary to all sound principles’, a violation of international law and morality.

• France would surround itself with medium rank powers.

• Austria had to try to restore a balance of power but it would take time.

In Dresden, he met the Russian general Prince Bagration and his 19-year old wife with whom he would have an illegitimate child (see later). He met other women with whom he would have affairs. He also had a son with his wife (two earlier sons had died in 1799). He became particular friends with the English Ambassador, Hugh Elliot. (Elliot said to him that if he did not have interesting news to report ‘I invent my news and contradict it by the next courier’.)

From Dresden he watched the passage of the Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation of 1803 stipulating how the secular property owners of the left bank of the Rhine would be compensated. He concluded that the law ‘destroyed the last foundations of the old German Empire and thus greatly accelerated the moment of its utter dissolution.’ His father lobbied for the compensation and the family benefitted financially from a new property near Ulm.

In 1803 he was appointed to the embassy in Berlin and the war revived in the War of the Third Coalition (1803-5) which became global: Napoleon challenged Britain’s maritime superiority in the Mediterranean, the Ionian islands and the Bosphorus, in Alexandria, and the Americas. He grew the French fleet and strove to dominate the Continent.

In Berlin there was a split between those wanting peace and war and King Friedrich Wilhelm III had ‘even less of a plan than Thugut’ (Siemann). He got to know Alexander I and gained his trust. And he could study how the Third Coalition failed.

In Berlin from December 1803, Metternich thought that Austria had to convince Napoleon of Austria’s peaceful intentions and restore the alliance with Russia. Austria had guaranteed neutrality in the event of a resumption of war between France and Britain. His position in Berlin called for great diplomatic caution, trickiness and discretion. He had to advance somewhat contradictory goals. He had to improve relations with Russia and Prussia without giving France the impression she was building a possible counterweight. Although he remained suspicious of Prussia he also had to try to improve relations as division was undermining Austrian interests in Germany and Europe. Without cooperation Austria and Prussia, stuck between France and Russia, would be coerced.

Siemann writes (p187) that observers of Napoleon 1801-5 were unsure of the extent of Napoleon’s ambitions. Metternich was also unsure whether he had the ‘insatiable imperiousness’ of which Britain accused him or whether, being ‘so savvy in matters pertaining to the state’, he might be persuaded ‘to welcome a moderate system of states’.

Many around the Prussian King did not fear Austria but did fear Napoleon and thought Prussia could continue to expand if she kept friendly to Napoleon. (And the Prussian court was chaotic with formal ministers surrounded by advisers to the king.)

In 1799 Napoleon had said of General Mack:

Mack is one of the most mediocre individuals I have met in my life. Full of a sense of superiority and full of vanity, he believes himself to be capable of everything. It would be desirable to see him put on a mission against one of our good generals one day, he would get to see nice things.

Cf. my Tolstoy blog. Bilibin tells Andrei the tragicomic story of how the French tricked their way across the Tabor bridge which was supposed to be destroyed to stop the French advance. He tells the story very amusingly and gets to the punchline.

‘It’s not treason, or dastardliness, or stupidity: it’s the same as at Ulm… it is…’ — he seemed to be trying to find a suitable expression. ‘It’s … c’est du Mack. We’ve been Macked,’ he concluded, feeling that he had coined a word, a new word that would be repeated.’

In October 1805, Napoleon faced Mack in the battle of Ulm: the Austrians suffered a disaster. Russian troops marched to the eastern border of Prussia and threatened to invade unless Prussia joined the alliance. In Berlin, Metternich told the Tsar that a common declaration was needed, Napoleon would drive to Vienna, they needed Prussian help.

Over 1-3 November, there were intense discussions in Berlin between the Tsar, the Prussian king, ministers, and Metternich. Metternich managed to pull Prussia towards a deal on mutual assistance, the Treaty of Potsdam (3/11/1805). The negotiations were tortuous with Prussian ministers and courtiers obstructing drafting of a deal. Finally Metternich made a threatening declaration as Prussia would not agree a commitment to help if Napoleon attacked Vienna. With pressure from Metternich and the Tsar, Prussia signed.

Metternich wrote that watching the Prussian king and ministers he concluded that ‘Prussia is only accustomed to work when it is clearly for her own benefit; that is all she looks to and Europe would disappear before her eyes if it depended on her efforts to save it.’ Prussia did not keep its promises made in Berlin, November 1805.

There was a military conference with the Russians, Austrians, Prussians, and an envoy from Pitt. But Prussia undermined the Third Coalition. The Foreign Minister Haugwitz obstructed cooperation. And the Tsar blundered in interfering in military matters.

On 13 November, Napoleon entered Vienna. The allies were smashed at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805.

Metternich said in his Memoirs that the allies should not have fought at Austerlitz but should have halted ‘at a suitable distance’ and the French would have been forced to fall back on Vienna and Napoleon would have been in a terrible position. Napoleon’s formula was to compensate for numerical inferiority by dividing the enemy’s armies and fighting them one after the other. Paul Schroeder argues that Napoleon was overstretched with winter coming, logistics and communication under pressure etc.

After Austerlitz, Metternich urged Hardenberg to unite Prussian forces with Russia and Austria and stick to the deal.

The Peace of Pressburg was signed on 26 December 1805.

• Austria lost power in South Germany, Tyrol, and Italy.

• She was forced to recognise the prince electors of Bavaria and Württemberg as kings and the new kingdom of Italy.

• She had to pay reparations.

• The path to the end of the Holy Roman Empire was prepared. In the French text, the Habsburg ruler was ‘the Emperor of Germany and Austria’ but the term Holy Roman Empire was not used.

After this it was clear that there was no prospect of removing Napoleon any time soon. Metternich wanted the three eastern Powers to remain in defensive alliance but at peace with France. But the idea of Napoleon being contained in a general European system of peace was doomed.

Prussia occupied Hanover which necessarily led to a military and trade war with Britain. And Prussia awarded Talleyrand the star of the Order of the Black Eagle, made with diamonds. And Prussia secretly negotiated a deal with Napoleon though it was complex — Haugwitz negotiated it with Napoleon but the King didn’t sign it. Metternich got wind of it. Before he left for his new post in St Petersburg, he confronted Hardenberg. It was clear Prussia was no longer part of a balancing coalition against France and the future of the Holy Roman Empire seemed in doubt.

In Berlin he’d shown the Emperor’s circle that he was a skilled diplomat with a European perspective. He’d developed relations with the Tsar and other crucial figures. But instead of going to St Petersburg, Napoleon’s actions meant he was instead sent to Paris.

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PART 3: Defending the Realm

CH8: Political Instability and the Conduct of the War, 1802-1812

Before 1801 British politics was stable and Pitt the undisputed leader. After 1801 it was much more chaotic through the Napoleonic War to 1812. Scandals climaxed in 1805-9. In these five years — during which Napoleon reached the height of his power after smashing Prussia at Jena in 1806 and Russia in 1807 then bringing Russia into alliance — there were three changes of PM, four SoS for War, and five First lords of the Admiralty. Each government got weaker and the unity of the Opposition declined.

Pitt resigned in February 1801 because he wanted to give Catholics greater freedom but the King would not agree. Addington became PM but he was clearly not a figure on the scale of Pitt. As Canning jibed:

Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington.

Dundas and Lord Spencer among others would not serve. Addington appointed Lord St Vincent as First Lord of the Admiralty who immediately demanded an enquiry into the running of the Navy which became the Commission of Naval Enquiry and the start of a process that drove a wedge between Addington and Pitt. St. Vincent was a brilliant admiral but became a ‘political liability’ (Wright). His style alienated Westminster. He did not have the personality to smooth ruffled feathers. The result was a loss of morale and problems in the dockyards and victual yards.

Addington sued for peace which was very popular. Wheat prices fell. Pitt said to Dundas that almost everybody was ‘very much delighted with the peace’. The Peace of Amiens was concluded on 25 of March 1802.

• France’s domination of Europe and Britain’s domination of the sea were confirmed.

• France’s overseas territories were restored and the Cape was returned to the Dutch. The Cape would be retaken in 1806.

• France retained most of what she’d grabbed including Venice and the Rhineland.

• Britain held onto Trinidad and Ceylon.

• Malta was supposed to return to the Knights but Britain didn’t leave.

The aristocracy, deprived of the Grand Tour, took advantage of the peace and went on holiday to their old haunts.

The regular army was set at 132k, over double the previous peacetime size. 80k were in Britain with a 50k militia to guard against invasion.

In spring 1803 Addington thought that if war was inevitable, the sooner the better. The war resumed with a British declaration on 18 May 1803. Just before, Napoleon had sold Louisiana to America for much needed cash. Addington made a fool of himself by making the announcement in Parliament wearing a colourful uniform of the Volunteer Cavalry.

Napoleon massed troops in the Channel ports for invasion and was building launches. In June France occupied Hanover. In Sunderland a press gang was thrown out of town by seamen and the coal trade was brought to a halt. There was trouble in Ireland. Wickham’s intelligence office had been ‘dismantled’ (Wright) during the peace! The dockyards were in disarray.

Napoleon decreed in May 1803 that all Englishmen in France were to be arrested. Many stayed in jail until 1814. Britain expelled Frenchmen but as war progressed changed tack and started internment and traditional exchanges of prisoners died out as each side tried to wear down the other.

It’s interesting to read how pro-Napoleon some prominent British politicians were. In May 1803 Fox called Napoleon ‘the most stupendous monument of human wisdom’ and defended the execution of a British subject as ‘state Necessity, the law of the Wise & the Good in Every Age’!

Pitt went on the offensive in spring 1804 attacking Addington over the Navy and the government soon fell over the Army Estimates. Pitt returned to No10 in May 1804 but his political authority was ‘a shadow of what it had once been’ (Wright). Grey and Sheridan were always on the attack.

Dundas, ennobled as Lord Melville in 1802, took over as First Sea Lord and started reversing St Vincent’s changes. Melville (Dundas) employed more contractors to get more ships to sea. He kept most of the 70 ships of the line blockading French ports to guard against invasion. He persuaded the Cabinet to agree the seizure of Spanish ships carrying silver to Cadiz from Mexico even though we were not at war and the seizure was illegal under international law. (Unfortunately the Spanish fought and a ship containing families blew up and sank.) The seizure was ‘widely unpopular’ (Wright) and Melville was ‘extremely distressed’ (Wright) by the episode.

Melville was soon forced to resign after discussion in Parliament (April 1805) of a report, sparked by St Vincent’s inquiry, on the finances of the Navy in the 1780s. Money that should have been kept at the Bank of England was kept at Coutts. This had been prohibited in 1782. Did Melville know the paymaster of the Navy had done this and had he even profited personally? There was intense Parliamentary debate. Melville’s enemies attacked. After a tied vote the Speaker broke the tie voting against Melville who resigned, his reputation ruined. But he avoided a guilty verdict when impeached by the Lords in April 1806, a theatrical social event that banished thoughts of the war for a fortnight.

Pitt tried to replace his old friend with the Home Secretary, Robert Banks Jenkinson, later to be PM as Lord Liverpool, but he turned it down. So Pitt appointed the veteran Admiral Sir Charles Middleton who agreed provided he was given a peerage (Lord Barham). He did not change much and delegated a lot of decisions to people he trusted.

In July 1805 Britain and Russia agreed an alliance and in August Austria joined what became the Third Coalition.

Napoleon had been crowned Emperor on 2/12/1804 though Britain didn’t recognise the change and continued to refer to him as Bonaparte. After his admiral fled from Nelson in August, an enraged Napoleon dropped his invasion plan and the army headed for Ulm where around 16-20 October Napoleon surrounded Austria’s army under Mack and forced his surrender. On 21 October Nelson conquered at Trafalgar and lifted the threat of invasion with the news arriving in London in the early hours of 6 November. But then Napoleon smashed everyone at Austerlitz (December). The Third Coalition was in ruins. Pitt died on 6 January 1806. His funeral at St Paul’s on 22 February was just six weeks after Nelson’s.

Grenville formed a new government in alliance with the leading Whig, Charles Fox, who became Foreign Secretary. It became known as ‘the Ministry of all the Talents’. (An odd aspect to modern eyes, and even to contemporaries, was the Lord Chief Justice joining the government!) Charles Grey was First Lord of the Admiralty. Windham was made Secretary of State for War [remarkable to me given he had in his bitterness at Pitt described Trafalgar as a defeat!] and botched one thing after another including army and militia reforms. Wilberforce wrote that Windham was ‘a most wretched man of business, no precision or knowledge of details, even in his own measures’. Everything he touched was a disaster. He was moved.

Fox and Windham abandoned coalitions but they couldn’t make a satisfactory peace with Napoleon either.

In January 1806 Britain retook the Cape from the Dutch. In May 1806, frustrated by their inability to make a deal with Napoleon, Britain imposed ‘the Fox Blockade’ — an order-in-council declaring that all Continental ports between the Elbe and Brest to be under a blockade and ships could trade with ports beyond this area only if they had loaded cargoes in ports friendly to Britain. It was contrary to international agreements and allowed Britain to inspect neutral ships in a wide area.

Over the next two years Napoleon consolidated his power. On 14 October 1806 Napoleon smashed Prussia at Jena. He retaliated against the Fox Blockade with the Berlin decrees in November: all trade by European countries, even neutral ones, with Britain was forbidden and any British goods trade on the Continent were to be seized. The Continental blockade was begun and economic warfare continued until Napoleon’s downfall.

In September 1806 Fox died and Grey, now Lord Howick, became Foreign Secretary. Tom Grenville took over as First Lord but did not have the manner needed for success in the Commons. He was shrewd in various ways but was replaced after 21 weeks. The Navy had a hard problem: there were far more applications for promotions and postings than there were places. In 116 working days he made 889 appointments: NB. appointments are now (21st Century) almost entirely out of ministerial hands. On his last day he shifted ships to form the core of the fleet used for the attack on Copenhagen, though he didn’t get credit for it.

Interestingly Grenville admitted late in his term that ‘I want one great and essential quality for my station… I am not competent to the management of men. I never was so naturally and toil and anxiety more and more unfit me for it.’ (Italics added) I am not aware of any other PM making such an admission on the subject of management, usually ignored.

Grenville revived Pitt’s argument with the King over Catholics and like Pitt resigned over it. His government fell in March 1807 and he was replaced by William Cavendish-Bentinck, the Duke of Portland. Portland was nearly 70 and suffered from gout and a kidney stone. He didn’t control his Cabinet. Canning was Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh was SoS for War. The Prince of Wales threw his weight around as his father’s mental state declined, causing more trouble.

A new army was trained from 1803 while on invasion duty. Castlereagh did a great job. He strengthened the volunteers. He granted a bounty to militiamen if they would join the regular army. Nearly 28,000 who were coming to the end of their five years’ militia service were rapidly enlisted. He restored the militia ballot and brought it up to strength and created the local militia which took over from the volunteers which were slowly run down.

In June 1807 Napoleon defeated Russia at Friedland and signed the Peace of Tilsit with the Tsar: the Fourth Coalition was beaten. [This is the scene in War and Peace where Boris witnesses the meeting of Napoleon and the Tsar on a raft in the middle of the river.] After this Napoleon wrote to his minister of marine in July that:

The Continental war is over. Energies must be turned towards the navy.

He tried to secure the Danish and Portuguese fleets.

But on 14 July Lord Mulgrave proposed to Cabinet that a force be sent to Copenhagen to prevent the seizure of Danish ships. In September the Copenhagen pre-emptive operation was launched. An attack on a neutral country was debated in Parliament. Wilberforce supported the government.

In November France invaded Portugal. The Portuguese prince regent fled to Brazil with his treasure on a British ship with much of his fleet.

Napoleon was building a new fleet at Antwerp.

For more than a century Britain had focused on Plymouth and Portsmouth and had no deep water port on the east coast.

In the Mediterranean Cuthbert Collingwood was commander-in-chief of the MED fleet and ‘played a masterful defensive game’ (Wright). He had 74 warships and over 25k seamen with a 30k army. Toulon was blockaded. Sicily, which resupplied Malta, was a problem but in 1810 Napoleon failed to take it and gave up. For a decade it was critical that Britain could move ships, men and goods faster by ship around the Mediterranean than Napoleon could by land.

In 1808 there was a Spanish uprising against French rule. The brutal French response spread the contagion. In June Arthur Wellesley was given the command in Spain. The first phase was a disaster. Despite military success forcing 18k French to surrender, the senior generals signed an armistice allowing the French army to be repatriated with arms and plunder. There was shock in Britain, an enquiry. Wellesley was ‘implicated and lucky to get away relatively unscathed’ (Wright).

Overall though it had been a bad year for Napoleon who had hoped in 1807 to grab the ships of Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Spain and Russia but all operations went wrong thanks to snappy British action.

At the end of 1808 Napoleon marched an army to Spain carrying all before him. Then there was a domestic scandal: the Duke of York was accused in the Commons by a radical MP, Colonel Wardle, of making appointments corruptly influenced by his former mistress. The Duke was forced to resign, it harmed the Army. (Wardle had made friends with the mistress, got into her confidences, his reputation was destroyed when this emerged. She was given money in return for documents but Wright doesn’t explain the details.) For two years the Duke was replaced by General Sir David Dundas then the Duke was reinstated 1811. There was tension between Dundas and the new, young secretary at war, Palmerston, over finances. The government did not fall because the Opposition was divided.

In 1809 there was serious trouble over the failure of the Walcheren expedition (above) and the enquiry. And tensions became so extreme that the Secretary of State for War, Castlereagh, and the Foreign Secretary, Canning, fought a duel on 21/9/1809. Canning was an outsider, not an aristocratic insider. His sharp brain and sharp tongue made him enemies in Cabinet and around the King. He knew Portland, ill, had tried to resign on 10 May but the King had refused. Canning wanted the job. He plotted to move Castlereagh. In the duel, Castlereagh aimed to kill. Both shots missed. Canning was hit in the thigh by the second shot. Canning was lucky to survive, Castlereagh lucky to avoid the dock for wilful murder.

Both resigned. Castlereagh was soon rehabilitated and became Foreign Secretary in 1812. Canning withdrew to Lisbon as Ambassador and refused the offer of a job from Lord Liverpool in 1812. He later reflected that he had ‘thrown away’ the chance of involvement in ‘the mightiest scheme of politics which this country ever engaged in’ over ‘a miserable point of etiquette, one absolutely unintelligible (so I have almost uniformly found it)  at a distance of more than six miles from Palace Yard.’

In the chaos (not well explained by Wright) the Portland government fell and Spencer Perceval became PM but his government was weak from the start.

On top of this chaos was the King’s deteriorating condition. The Prince regent’s position was confirmed by Parliament in February 1811 with the proviso he should do nothing irreversible for a year. The transition of the Prince regent’s loyalties from Whig to Tory was ‘helped by the installation of a new and Tory mistress, Lady Hertford’ (Wright!).

The year from spring 1811 was ‘the nadir of British fortunes’ (Wright). During 1811 Napoleon gathered his forces for the invasion of Russia. The French economy strengthened as Europe grew under France’s control and the land war was largely over.

In spring 1812 the Prince Regent abandoned the Whigs. Wright says it was fateful for if Grenville had become PM he might, terrified of the financial position and convinced Britain could not afford to keep the war going, have sought peace with Napoleon. Grey though wanted to support the Peninsula army more. So the Whigs were again deeply divided. The Tories realised Napoleon’s overtures were delaying tactics to buy time.

On 11 May 1812 Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the Commons by a deranged merchant bankrupted by trade blockades. Liverpool became PM. He was ‘persistent, prudent, discreet and trusted’ (Wright). Castlereagh continued as Foreign Secretary. In November they won twice as many seats as the Opposition.

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Metternich & World War 1806-12

After the American and French Revolutions, war and regime change spread across Europe then from 1806-12 the European system fractured and the conflict went global:

• Napoleon smashed Austria (1805) and Prussia (1806), created his Continental System, and imposed his own counter-blockade on Britain and British trade.

• The Holy Roman Empire ended, the Rhenish Confederation replaced it, Prussian and Austrian power was degraded in the wars of the Fourth and Fifth Coalitions.

• The invasion of Britain was prepared.

• In 1812 Russia was invaded, Moscow occupied.

• Finally the Sixth Coalition brought Napoleon and his system down.

• And the Peace of Vienna rebuilt the international system and an approach to the balance of power and international law.

The struggle for power was global. From 1780 to 1815, cities across the world fell to conquering armies:

• Vienna

• Berlin

• Madrid

• Lisbon

• Rome

• Paris

• Moscow

• Delhi

• Cairo

• Jogjakarta

During 1806-15 Metternich felt himself in a duel with Napoleon for the fate of the world, a duel that had its most dramatic moment in an over eight hour discussion at the Palais Marcolini in Dresden on 26 June 1813. In his Memoirs from birth to 1853, two-thirds of the text covers 1806-15. The period 1815-1853 takes a tenth of the text. He always considered the period 1806-15 the most critical of his life and he thought that while archives would tell the story post-1815, his insider account of 1806-15 was critical for history.

In January 1806 he considered Austerlitz a critical turning point, like 14 July 1789:

The world is lost: Europe will now burn down and a new order will emerge only out of its ashes, or rather, old order will make new empires happy. We shall not experience it any longer, the epoch in which laws assert their eternal rights against blind imperiousness; a change in the form of all European states is unavoidable; it will, it must come about; and we shall witness this complete overthrow.

Metternich wrote that the only way out was a firm coalition aimed at toppling the Napoleonic regime. Europe had made a terrible mistake in trying to ‘set limits to the man, to build a fence around him’ but ‘resistance’ was no good, toppling him must be the goal.

Who does not want to conquer, he will be conquered. The only man in Europe who wills actively has provided us with terrible proof of this eternal truth. [Bold added, italics in original.]

But he kept this view quiet!

His appointment came in May 1806 after Napoleon had made clear that people associated with certain views were not acceptable to him.

He had to resolve issues left over from Pressburg, the German Constitution, and the future of Austria’s position in the international system given a treaty between France, Russia, and Austria was to be agreed in Paris. There were still enemy troops on Austrian territory. Austria somehow had to try to calm Napoleon’s energy and hostility without over-committing.

Between Metternich leaving Austria on 11 July and arriving in Paris on 2 August (after being delayed at the border), Europe saw many changes. There was a new federal constitution for Germany and 16 states declared they were leaving the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon then threatened Emperor Franz with war if he did not abdicate as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. On 6/8, Franz accepted the demand. He abdicated and released the imperial estates from all obligations.

Metternich met Napoleon for the first time on 8 August in the audience chamber of the Palace Saint Cloud — the palace Louis XVI had acquired for Marie Antoinette and where the first consul had been declared French Emperor in 1804 — after learning of the extraordinary coup in European and Austrian affairs, which also had profound implications for his own family.

At his first audience he found Napoleon to be a parvenu aping aristocratic manners. He later said he never forgot his first impression.

Metternich wrote that Napoleon often ‘privately regarded the Parisians as children and often compared Paris to the opera’. Metternich saw him as a master of ‘roles and masks’ who saw propaganda as part of a work of art. (He had a famous actor teach him how to gesture.) When Metternich pointed out falsehoods in his bulletins on battles, Napoleon said, ‘They’re not written for you, the Parisians believe everything.’ Conversations with Napoleon had a ‘charm’, said Metternich later, that he found ‘hard to define’. He would strip discussion about complex issues of ‘useless accessories’ to get to the essential points. He would often say ‘I see what you want, you wish to come to such and such a point, well let’s go straight to it’. He listened to objections and Metternich said he never felt ‘the least difficulty in saying to him what [he] believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him’. He described Napoleon as a divided personality. In his private life he was good-natured and indulgent of family. As a statesman he ‘admitted no sentiment’.

He crushed or removed his enemies without thinking of anything but the necessity or advisability of getting rid of them.

And afterwards he forgot about them. Metternich described how after watching his wife give birth he turned pale and said ‘If that is the cost I do not demand any more children’. But in the face of pain and suffering brought about by politics he showed indifference. He later said to a minister (1813):

Yet don’t think that my heart is less sensitive than those of other men. I’m a very kind man [un assez bon homme]. But since my earliest youth I have devoted myself to silencing that chord within me which never yields a sound now.

One of Napoleon’s core policies was a shift in resources from much of the old aristocracy, like Metternich, to a new elite. In 1808 Metternich wrote:

Europe has been hunted, raped, and it is still being hunted down …; ambition, vanity, cupidity, all the passions are put in movement in the accomplices of the great work of destruction.

Napoleon’s marshals were given vast estates and new hereditary titles. Officers got pensions.

Metternich saw how his heroes were Alexander, Caesar and Charlemagne but the last was the most politically relevant for he styled himself as the successor to Charlemagne. He created a sense of continuity by appointing Dalberg — the last archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire — the prince primate of the Rhenish Confederation. He also had a sense of how fragile his new creation was:

Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may be beaten twenty times and still go back to their palaces; that I cannot do — the child of fortune; my reign will not outlast the day when I have ceased to be strong, and therefore to be feared.

Napoleon told Metternich that he had followed the revolution when young ‘from ignorance and ambition’ but had since followed ‘my own instinct and I crushed the Revolution’. He said of the title of the Habsburg emperor — ‘by the grace of God elected Holy Roman Emperor’ — that ‘Power comes from God and it is that place alone where it is outside the reach of men. From there I shall adopt the title in due course.’ And he did it in 1807 when a new constitution of Westphalia was created with the formula ‘Napoleon, by the Grace of God’. But Metternich thought that Napoleon saw religion, like everything, in instrumental terms and he looked for orientation not to the Enlightenment but to Machiavelli.

Metternich considered it impossible that after this break the old Empire could be restored. He claimed after 1815 that his vantage point at Paris from 1806 gave him the insights into Napoleon that enabled him to bring him down.

In September 1806 he predicted war between France and Prussia but Prussia would not be ready. On 14 October 1806 Napoleon smashed Prussia at Jena. In June 1807 Napoleon defeated Russia at Friedland and signed the Peace of Tilsit with the Tsar in July. The Fourth Coalition was beaten.

Tilsit suspended the entire idea of the balance of power between five Powers for France and Russia divided Europe into two spheres of influence and Russia joined the Continental System. Prussia was reduced in size and forced to pay an enormous tribute, effectively ending her role as an independent Great Power. Metternich and Talleyrand thought Napoleon made a mistake being so harsh with Prussia. Talleyrand later said that he had ‘triumphed and was therefore inflexible’, he had become ‘intoxicated’.

From now on, Metternich thought that a bilateral war against France was impossible for Austria — only a firm coalition, learning lessons from past failures, could succeed. But he did not give up. He thought that the entire system depended on Napoleon who [like everyone!] had no good solution to the succession problem so the system was very fragile.

Napoleon’s system relied on a) his vast army of French, foreign troops and mercenaries, and b) financing for the war machine. And the finance means extorting all sorts of payments from people across Europe. It was connected to Napoleon’s Continental System and the prohibition on British imports. Napoleon hopes that economic war would force Britain to capitulate. Short-term it boosted France’s economy, and made many money, and caused trouble in Britain (see above).

In August 1807 Napoleon demanded that Portugal join the Continental System, close its harbours to British trade, confiscate British property, arrest British nationals etc. Portugal would concede on the harbours but refused to arrest innocent people. Napoleon threatened in October that if Portugal did not do exactly what he demanded, ‘the House of Braganza will not be reigning in Europe in two months’ — a direct threat to remove a European ruling house. He then said that British ambassadors were forbidden in Europe and he would declare war on anybody who received a British ambassador. This strengthened Metternich’s view that Napoleon’s thirst for power had no limits.

Napoleon declared war, marched to Lisbon and declared the House of Braganza dismissed. The Prince Regent fled to Brazil (see above). In summer 1808 Napoleon forced the crown of Spain into his brother’s hands with a coup. But his dealings with Spain also led to massacres and resistance that tied up a lot of his forces for years.

Napoleon was placing his family on foreign thrones: Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Westphalia. Even Talleyrand warned him it would backfire and he was increasingly at odds with Napoleon. By 1808 Metternich assumed that Napoleon would see Austria as another kingdom to hand to a relative or political ally.

From Sep-Oct 1808, Napoleon held another meeting with the Tsar at Erfurt. Neither Metternich nor Franz were invited. Napoleon combined diplomacy with theatrical banquets, music and arts all breathlessly reported by the media. Napoleon wanted to keep Russia onside and Austria isolated while he was engaged in Spain, discuss the division of the Ottoman Empire, and how to force Britain to make peace. It was only a partial success with Russia cautious about over-committing to Napoleon, though the Tsar did commit to no separate peace deal with Britain. A theme of all discussions was: how far will Napoleon go, how much more chaos would there be, who else was for the chop? Talleyrand told Napoleon at Erfurt that Austria was conservative, not aggressive. Napoleon didn’t agree.

Metternich saw in France two rival networks. There was a network of military people and others promoted and enriched by war. And there was the mass of the bourgeois and some of the old regime who were more inclined to peace and more resistant to the costs of continued war. He thought Tallyrand in the second group and wanted to work with him, despite his personal venality and dangerousness:

Men like M. de Talleyrand are like sharp-edged instruments with which it is dangerous to play; but for great wounds great remedies are necessary, and he who has to treat them ought not to be afraid to use the instrument that cuts the best.

In January 1809 after learning that Talleyrand and others were discussing possible successors if he were killed, Napoleon came by forced march in 6 days from Spain to Paris. There he humiliated Talleyrand in a famous scene (and may have called him ‘nothing but shit in silk stockings’).

The Metternich-Talleyrand relationship deepened after this until Talleyrand even passed on secret information about troop movements. In March 1809 Metternich sent to Vienna a coded survey of the exact distribution of French regiments, provided by Talleyrand. Napoleon never discovered until after 1815. Metternich often encoded information about him and referred to him only as Monsieur X. He asked for considerable cash and Metternich secured it, thinking it was well worth it.

Napoleon interpreted many Austrian actions, such as army reorganisation, as preparing to renew war. Metternich had to try to persuade him this was not so while trying to figure out if Napoleon was preparing a new blow. The guerrilla war in Spain was expensive and weakening. He tried to persuade the Russian Ambassador in Paris, Count Tolstoy, that Austria and Russia must unite to defeat Napoleon but he failed. The Tsar still thought he could share the Continent with Napoleon. Metternich repeatedly reported to Vienna that provoking a war alone against France would be ‘madness’. In November 1808 he arrived in Vienna where he discovered immediately that the Empire was about to launch another war. In discussions with the Emperor he discovered that the Emperor himself was unaware how far preparations had gone. He wrote memos and had meetings. His overall view remained that another war without a big coalition was a mistake.

But the decision was taken on 23/12/1808 to start the war in March. In Vienna they hoped that Napoleon was sufficiently weakened by the Spanish war to give them a chance and that growing German patriotism would give them a strong ally. Both proved false hopes.

He returned to Paris with instructions to act as before — to reassure Napoleon there would be no war. Rumours spread. He stuck to the line.

The new war broke out in April, the war of the Fifth Coalition. Metternich foresaw Austria ended as a Great Power, her estates handed out to Napoleon’s allies, Napoleon as King of Europe, Europe divided into 20-30 small states dominated by France and Napoleon, finally he would use old Europe’s powers to smash Russia ‘back into the steppes of Tartary and behind the Volga’, a showdown with Britain over global power, and Europe would be doomed to ‘a new and frightful revolution’ and civil war after his death.

In 1809 Metternich was, in order:

• ambassador in Paris

• a political prisoner of Napoleon under house arrest

• peace negotiator

• interim minister

• and finally accountable minister of the imperial household and of foreign affairs.

After the first clash won by Napoleon, the Austrians appealed to German nationalism. The Bavarians and Swabians did not lift a hand. Napoleon entered Vienna on 13 May. Franz fled to a fortress in Hungary. Napoleon brought Metternich to Vienna as a potential bargaining chip and put him under house arrest (Metternich had worried about possibly being shot but Napoleon offered Metternich and his family personal guarantees of security). In July Napoleon exchanged him in a prisoner swap after failing to get much advantage — a swap that occurred during a battle and involved Metternich’s carriage nearly blasted by cannon. Shortly after, Metternich was with the Emperor at the defeat at the battle of Wagram where he saw for himself the lack of coordination and chaos in the Austrian high command. Prussia did not help. Stadion’s policy was in military and diplomatic ruins and he resigned on 8 July 1809. On 31/7 Metternich was appointed as an interim to replace him (a messy setup for a while).

He soon had a long ride in a carriage with the Emperor after which he hoped and believed the Emperor would stick with him through thick and thin. Their cooperation lasted until the Emperor died.

Metternich believed Austria’s position was even worse than after Austerlitz because she was devoid of all allies.

• The war had been misconceived. Hopes in German nationalism were misplaced (cf. Napoleon, 7/1813). The military strategy and coordination were bad. E.g Austria could not match Napoleon’s coordination of large units at scale and speed and was still moving armies around as in 19th century wars.

• They were one more failed military campaign from a possible crackup of the empire.

• They could not give up the Dalmatian coast without potential disaster — it was the most important territory financially and without it they’d lose access to the Adriatic.

• They could accept a reduction in the army as they had to save cash anyway.

• He insisted they retain the title ‘Emperor’ — by losing it ‘Austria would lower itself … to the class of tributary powers’.

• Domestic administration must be centralised to ‘remove the unhappy influences of divided powers’, the effect of competition from court offices.

• The army command must be kept out of the negotiations.

• ‘To necessity we must yield’. We must tack, turn and flatter to ‘preserve our existence till the day of general deliverance’, we must ‘preserve our strength for better days’. We have no choice but to join the Continental System and to recognise the ‘usurpation of Spain’.

• We must drive division between France and Russia, partly by making Russia think Austria was competing for Napoleon’s friendship.

His first experience as a Minister negotiating with France at Altenburg was bad. The Emperor botched the whole thing by empowering the head of the armed forces, Prince Lichtenstein, to negotiate with Napoleon without Metternich’s knowledge. This led to chaos and failure. Metternich told Lichtenstein that if the talks wobbled Napoleon would declare him a prisoner and this happened. This was, writes Siemann, a precursor to a structural problem that lasted until the Emperor died in 1835 — ‘the antagonism between him and the other officials the monarch consulted’.

Napoleon swindled the Austrian military, held Lichtenstein effectively hostage (as Metternich had predicted), forced him to agree everything, then the next day (14/10/09) simply announced there was a deal before the Austrian Emperor had even been shown the terms. The Austrians were appalled by his behaviour but they swallowed it (the Treaty of Schönbrunn) because they felt they had no choice as they were on the brink of destruction. [Should Napoleon instead have either a) been more generous and tried to make them a real ally or b) actually overturned the Empire and regime?]

Siemann writes that Metternich did not think that German nationalism could rescue them. His view was reinforced by Napoleon himself who said to Metternich in July 1813:

Do you count on Germany? See what it did in the year 1809! To hold the people there in check, my soldiers are sufficient, and for the faith of the princes, my security is the fear they have of you.

Siemann writes that the Treaty of Schönbrunn was also the definitive end of any realistic hopes to restore the Holy Roman Empire and henceforth Metternich focused on the Empire of the Habsburgs. Austria was weakened by loss of territory and a 85M franc contribution to pay. The Continental System hit her trade. The Army was cut. Austria was under a sword of Damocles, just one error from destruction.

On 27 November 1809 Metternich and Franz returned to Vienna and were greeted by crowds happy at the end of French occupation. Metternich now occupied the Palais Kaunitz as permanent Foreign Secretary. He reorganised the Chancellery. And he introduced domestic measures, some learned from Napoleon, to try to strengthen the Emperor’s control, including control of the media.

Joseph II and Leopold II had experimented with press liberalisation and dropped it. Franz reinstated a full traditional censorship. Metternich wanted a full strategy:

Public opinion is the most powerful of all means; like religion, it penetrates the most hidden recesses, where administrative measures have no influence. To despise public opinion is as dangerous as to despise moral principles… Posterity will hardly believe that we have regarded silence as an efficacious weapon to oppose the clamours of our opponents, and that in a century of words!

Metternich built a literary bureau to manipulate the media and tried to organise famous intellectuals. He encouraged new publications that would seem independent but take the government line. He wanted to control the foreign press too as harmful ideas infiltrated from French, Italian and other publications. While he was in Paris for months negotiating the Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, his father developed the censorship system. They set up an imperial gazette to report government news; a government publication for public announcements to be sent to reginal authorities; and a journal covering social and economic topics and arts. The bureau began work in April 1810 with a library, subscriptions, and relations to the police. It provided domestic and international press summaries and warnings. From now international politics and domestic politics were seen as intertwined via the press and public opinion.

He also organised a secret counter-intelligence system to identify and neutralise Napoleon’s spies in Austrian cities. The Emperor gave him authority to give orders to the police minister. Prussia organised similarly a new secret counterintelligence service in 1809. Metternich wrote of the new service that ‘I would almost like to call [it] the political police’. His organisation was based on what Napoleon had built.

By December 1809 Napoleon decided to take another wife from one of the grandest European families. Metternich thought any new anti-Napoleon combination was far in the future. He therefore encouraged the Habsburgs to engage in the European chess match and marry the Archduchess Marie Louise to Napoleon. Napoleon quickly decided on the Austrian option. He insisted to the Austrian Ambassador that the deal must be done. The news arrive in Vienna as a humiliating shock — Napoleon had neither proposed nor negotiated a marriage contract as was normal for aristocratic houses. But the political situation meant they had to hold their tongues and make the best of it. Metternich’s wife reported to Metternich from Paris that she had been warned that if Franz did not consent it would lead to his and Austria’s ‘ruin’.

Metternich played a central role in the negotiations between Napoleon and Franz then the elaborate plans for the wedding. There were two ceremonies — one in Austria in March 1810 (without Napoleon), one in Paris in April. The day before the first, Metternich was awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece, an ancient honour.

Metternich then went with the Archduchess to Paris, arriving on 28 March. He ended up staying until late September. While he was away his father deputised for him. He had many discussions with Napoleon. Metternich hoped to reduce the financial penalty (the 85M francs), get wider scope for the Austrian army to rebuild, and win access to the Adriatic. He also, secretly, hoped to negotiate the return of his own estates seized by the King of Württemberg in 1809 — and succeeded. He reported back that the celebrations in Paris were of such an extraordinary scale and ‘almost unparalleled splendour that it is difficult to give an impression of them to someone who has not seen them’. Napoleon chose the Diana Gallery in the Louvre for the religious ceremony then the Tuileries, the palace of the French kings, for the banquet.

Talleyrand later wrote that the spectacle had a level of luxury that set off an ‘absolute lack of propriety, and in France, when propriety is too much lacking, mockery is at hand’.

Three years later in Dresden Napoleon said to Metternich that:

When I married an Archduchess, I tried to weld the new with the old, Gothic prejudices with the institutions of my country.

Metternich hoped that the success of the marriage would enable him to make diplomatic gains but Napoleon was harder to manipulate via his wife than he’d hoped. Over months he saw Napoleon regularly and spoke at length many times. He wrote that ‘a veil was spread over the future of Europe which I longed to raise’. the critical moment came on 20 September 1810 when they spoke at length privately and Napoleon revealed that he thought war with Russia was inevitable, he was planning for it, and wanted to know how Austria would behave. Metternich unusually recorded the exact wording of their talk immediately after and kept the note which survives. Napoleon even told him not to talk to his own foreign minister about it.

Napoleon’s marshal, Bernadotte, sat on the Swedish throne and he favoured a strong Poland — both interfered with Russia’s zone of influence. The Continental System was harming Russian trade. A strengthening Poland also meant potentially taking some of Galicia from Austria. Napoleon asked him bluntly about the prospect of war, ‘What part will you play then?’ Metternich wriggled out of a straight answer. Napoleon said that he did not want Austria’s ‘active cooperation’ as he did not want a military coalition as he’d built in 1809 — it was more trouble than it was worth, he wanted the fighting troops to be entirely under him with allies providing troops to keep other areas, and each other, quiet. As the discussion progressed, Napoleon said, according to Metternich:

I shall have war with Russia on grounds which lie beyond possible human influence, because they are rooted in the peculiarities of the matter itself. The time will soon approach … when hostilities will be inevitable.

Metternich raised the possibility of an invasion of Russia sparking national rebellions. Napoleon replied: only 80-100k of the troops invading would be French; the rest would come from the Rhenish Confederation and Poland; but French troops would occupy Germany and Italy and would ‘more than suffice to hold Germany and Italy in check and stifle every popular movement in its birth’.

Four days later he had his last audience with Napoleon. He was back in Vienna by 10 October.

In a report to the Emperor of January 1811, Metternich summarised his thinking:

• Napoleon’s aim was ‘the monstrous idea of ruling alone over the whole Continent’, an aim he pursued with ‘admirable coolness in the conception of expedients’.

• Napoleon had amassed vast wealth to himself.

• The German rulers had gained so much they would not fight him and it would be foolish to rely on ‘the voice of the German peoples’ after recent experiences.

• Russia is incoherent and in financial trouble. Prussia is ‘no longer to be reckoned among the powers’.

• A crucial issue is the extent of Napoleon’s problem in Spain with resistance and the British operation.

• Coalitions have failed. Tilsit was the ‘highest triumph’ of French policy because Russia and Austria were isolated from each other.

• The royal marriage had saved the Habsburgs and ended the Empire’s isolation.

• Austria could not now ally with Russia or Napoleon would crush them before fighting Russia.

• Austria should not ape the Rhenish Confederation (the ‘confederate mob’) and ally with France and integrate forces. Partly this was because Austria was the last representative ‘of an old order of things founded on eternal unchangeable law’.

• Austria should seek neutrality. Napoleon didn’t want a big Austrian army. And French troops would, as Napoleon had told him on 20/9 (above), strangle any popular uprisings.

• And Russia remained expansionist — since Peter the Great the empire had expanded at the expense of Austria and allies, had enabled the rise of Prussia, had undermined Poland, abandoned a ‘true European policy’, and aimed to destroy the Ottoman Empire too.

While he’d been in Paris, Metternich was constantly under attack from parts of the court including the Emperor’s wife who was very anti-France. A lot of this was connected to the tensions of domestic policy. The most sensitive issue was inflation and restoring a stable currency. This was so sensitive that the Emperor warned Metternich in writing that if a report on the currency situation leaked via him, he would be instantly dismissed. The president of the court chamber, von Wallis, relentlessly insisted on parsimony with state finances. Metternich advocated spending on the army and extending conscription. He had summarised the issue in 10/1810:

Every state rests on two bases: a) on industrial power of wealth and goods from national capital; b) on the independent preservation and safeguarding of these goods, on the power to wage war. Both condition each other, both are one. No wealth is grounded that cannot preserve and, it follows, defend itself; and no power to wage war is lasting that undermines the wealth. Finding the right proportion between the two, balancing them out so that they naturally strengthen each other, that is the genuine economics of the state.

From early 1812 Metternich had to drop his hopes for strict neutrality because of Napoleon’s accelerating plans for invading Russia. On 28/11/1811, he wrote to Francis that the time had come when Napoleon would soon gamble again and ‘the final struggle of the old order of things against his revolutionary plans is unavoidable’ with Napoleon aiming for the ‘ultimate destruction of the old order’ through continental war. In February 1812 Prussia committed itself, like the Rhenish Confederation, to full and unconditional support for France in case of war and was promised compensation which would come partly at Austria’s expense.

Metternich was particularly worried about Galicia destabilised by Poland or Prussia and Napoleon being hostile to Austria. He therefore explored the idea of a limited Franco-Austria alliance with as little commitment as possible but therefore freedom to stop Poland being revolutionised and therefore protect Galicia. But he didn’t know how Napoleon would act. After negotiations, France and Austria agreed a limited alliance on 14 March 1812.

• Austrian territory was guaranteed.

• The Ottoman Empire was respected.

• A small Austrian contingent of 30k was agreed but under Austrian command.

• Austria was obliged to enter the war against Russia but not Britain.

• Galicia was protected.

Napoleon gathered European leaders, without Russia, in Dresden in May 1812. It was sort of a reverse Tilsit. Now Russia was absent and isolated. Napoleon and Francis met for the first time. Francis was impressed. Metternich confirmed his view from discussions with Napoleon that he was aiming for a ‘Carolingian Empire under a Bonapartist dynasty’, that this was ‘the va banque of a gambler who had become foolhardy because of former gains’. Metternich wrote that Napoleon assumed that the Tsar would have to commit his army to protect Moscow and he was prepared for a split campaign continuing in 1813. [Do other sources suggest Napoleon considered carefully what actually happened — a Russian withdrawal and guerrilla war?]

Metternich got news in Prague on 28 June of Napoleon’s proclamation to his army at Dresden on 22 June that marked the invasion’s start. He quickly had to battle for money. His anger towards the president of the court chamber burst out during a presentation to the Emperor:

The court chamber always assumes that Austria no longer needs an army. An attempt at refuting this proposition would be like tussling with a chimera. It seems undeniable to me that our military constitution at present is the worst possible because the state pays many individuals and in the hour of danger no one is available.

He followed French and Russian military bulletins supplied to him from various sources. He intercepted mail. He got reports from the official Austrian contact at Napoleon’s HQ. Napoleon entered Moscow in September then it burned. On 4/10 he got a bulletin from 17/9. He realised the Russians had withdrawn, Moscow was burning, and there was now ‘a war between the Siberian empire and Europe’ and that ‘Russia has been beaten back for the next hundred years’. Napoleon left Moscow on 19/10. Rumours reached Vienna that Napoleon was dead. Wild stories spread everywhere in the chaos. On 15/12 he discovered that Napoleon had arrived in Vilnius on 5/12. By 17/12 he realised Napoleon was back in Paris. And he started making plans for increasing the Austrian army.

In 1813 the entire picture would be transformed by Napoleon’s disaster.

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CH9: The Invasion Threat, 1803-12

The government wrote in 2/1801 the Memorandum of Circumstances to be Determined and Acted upon Previous to & at the Moment of Invasion. It set out explicitly plans for summary justice in the event of interference with crucial operations during an invasion.

There was serious tension between plans for evacuation and ‘scorched earth’ tactics to slow an invasion and local resistance to such plans.

No10 assumed Napoleon would try to seize London fast. There were plans to deal with refugees from the coasts and to stockpile food.

All landing sites for boats were surveyed — more serious than in the 2020s!

Plans were made for a rapid response force to try to crush any landing as they came ashore.

Fortifications were built to slow any advance on London from the beaches.

By 1804 the two combined services totally ~600k, impressed, recruited, or volunteered. The mobilisation was to enlist 11-14% of adult male population, about three times the participation ratio of France. [How does this compare with WW1 and WW2?]

It worked because it had the support of local elites. Aristocracy and gentry organised volunteer or yeomanry cavalry. The 1801 census helped organise recruitment.

The militia did routine internal security chores like guarding installations. They were kept on the move so they didn’t get too close to locals.

Press gang violence was frequent. Many joined the Sea Fencibles to escape the press gang.

Leading politicians including Pitt served as colonels of Volunteer regiments. Volunteers were central to the Duke of York’s plans — sabotage and harassment without hazarding themselves in serious action.

Training improved 1803-5.

From mid-1805 to July 1807 there was relief as Napoleon focused elsewhere, strengthened by Nelson’s victory. After Tilsit, Napoleons focus returned to the invasion.

Coastal artillery and fortifications were built including 168 Martello Towers, round towers with thick walls to fire on the beaches.

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CH10: Intelligence, security and communications, 1803-11

The Alien Office pre-1803 was successful in countering French moves though its efforts to stir trouble in France were ‘an expensive failure’ (Knight).

An assassination plot against Napoleon by French royalists was led and financed by Britain. It was uncovered in 1804 and caused embarrassment. (Alien Office records were destroyed from 1834.)

Collection and distribution of intelligence improved from 1803.

Wickham had briefly achieved a centralised system coordinated across departments, known as the ‘Inner Office’, but it had been broken up by Addington (above). Information circulated better than in the 1790s but had flaws. The Hydrographic Office shared navigational data such as charts on the Baltic.

There was an attempt in 1803 to bring about the comprehensive integration of military intelligence — a Depot for Military Knowledge. Like the French system it was designed to integrate secret and open source intelligence with four departments:

• Plans.

• Movements.

• Library

• Topographical

The plan was to bring the Secret Office in the Post Office and the Alien Office together with foreign intelligence.

It failed though the reasons are murky. Knight suggests (p287) a lack of ‘office space’, which sounds like the sort of nonsense I was given in 2020 but seems much less likely in 1803!?

Knight writes that Wellington did integrate military intelligence in the Peninsula with diplomats, navy, army, civilians working together. (Cf. Wellington’s Headquarters, Ward, p29-30.)

Documents circulated signed and annotated by each undersecretary through FO, HO, Admiralty, SoS for War, Post Office (its packets picked up important information), and Alien Office (interviewing passengers at ports). There was an indexing and summarising process with great volumes known as Digests. Colonel Henry Banbury was appointed military undersecretary to the SoS for War in 1809. He took a big role in this process.

The Alien Act of 1796 limited entry to certain ports and required persons seeking entry to Britain to obtain permission from the SoS. Boats would push off and search boats seeking to land. Passengers would be screened, questioned, searched.

The navy, especially D’Auvergne, kept close watch on French ships and had a network of agents in ports. We also used smuggler networks. Information travelled in ships under 10 tons, cheap and fast. Smuggled goods and intelligence went on the same ships. Neither government could stop regular contact between smugglers and fishermen. Family links across the Channel were strong. In 1811 the Post Office wrote to John Barrow asking for the release of smugglers detained on a warship as they were bringing French newspapers for the PO. [Did anything like this continue in WW1 and WW2 or could we actually stop this almost 100%?]

When Collingwood took over as commander-in-chief 1805-10 he built his own Mediterranean-wide intelligence network that reported to himself. He ran disinformation campaigns, such as having his ships appear to be undergoing repairs when French spies were about so they would report false information.

The packet service was a crucial capability that worked very well though it was a constant struggle to fend off privateers from grabbing Post Office boats which had to refine carefully guns versus weight/speed.

There was a friend-foe signal system at sea. Ships were assigned numbers. Records were updated and distributed. The signals were linked to the coastal signal stations. If a ship did not identify herself satisfactorily the station would signal the navy. (Both sides sought the codes for their enemy’s system.) The shutter-telegraph system (above) was designed for command and control, not defensive security. France also built a Europe-wide semaphore system. At the height of his power in 1807, Paris was in contact with Brussels, Amsterdam, Mainz, Turin, and Venice. A London -Plymouth line was ordered in 1805. Other lines were built.

In 1807 Canning misinterpreted intelligence about Danish naval mobilisation and even moved a British plenipotentiary in Copenhagen who failed to confirm the duff intelligence. Napoleon had also fed disinformation via different routes to confuse London. In June Napoleon beat Russia at Friedland and enforced Tilsit (above). In London fear grew that Napoleon would seize Denmark’s navy and exclude Britain from the Baltic, which would have been disastrous. The Copenhagen operation was launched. It became controversial because of international opprobrium. Canning and other ministers defended it on grounds of intelligence but, obviously, wouldn’t reveal sources. (A rumour was spread that a British officer perched hidden under the famous raft at Tilsit.) Opinion largely favoured the government, not least because Russia had subsequently declared war. [My sense from Knight without further reading: a) the intelligence basis for Copenhagen was iffy and Canning was wrong on some details, but b) better safe than sorry, the loss of the fleet would have been a disaster and the pros outweighed the cons.]

Even after this there were worries about invasion though the focus shifted from the south coast to the north and Ireland. This was partly because of the new naval construction in Antwerp etc. These fears, supported by a flow of intelligence on French naval building, led to the disastrous decision to attack Antwerp which was agreed by a Cabinet lacking an effective PM as the Duke of Portland was seriously ill. Senior army officers were ‘virtually unanimously pessimistic’ (Knight) but Castlereagh ignored them. Knight writes that the records show politicians ‘shouldered aside’ intelligence that weighed against the action they wanted to take.

By 1811 British intelligence rightly identified falling morale in the French navy. From 1812 Napoleon stripped dockyards of men for his armies and was increasingly deluded by reports seeking to tell him what he wanted to hear on naval matters while the true state of his navy declined fast. His naval orders became increasingly fantastical.

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CH11: Government scandal and reform, 1803-11

There were repeated parliamentary inquiries and scandals and pressure to reform.

The abolition of personal fees paid to officials and clerks had only been partly done and there was no compensating payment of salary.

There were problems with officials and officers holding public money in private hands.

There were problems with sinecures.

Obscurities and complications in Army and Navy budgets undermined Parliamentary scrutiny.

The Tories after 1807 used two big parliamentary commissions to change the army and navy budgets.

After the end of the Peace of Amiens the number of state employees doubled over the next decade. The volume of paperwork rose. The number of clerks doubled.

Large state industrial establishments grew, such as dockyards and arsenals.

There was a big shortage of office space.

Competition for salaries tempted officials to move to the private sector. [As today.]

St Vincent pursued corruption in the Navy (see above). The reports of the Commission of Naval Inquiry in 1803 focused on issues like corruption in dockyards, badly administered contracts. They didn’t get to the bottom of things (Knight) but they did force scrutiny and two Acts. Resistance to change continued.

After Addington was forced out Lord Melville (Dundas) became First Lord. He began his own Inquiry in 1805 led by Sir Charles Middleton. This blew up into allegations that Melville had been involved in illegal practices and he was forced to resign (cf. CH8). Inquiries followed into Army and Navy estimates. Pitt also reformed HMT. At that time HMT was only 36 clerks. Pitt created a new non-political expert post (forbidden to enter parliament) and appointed to it a very able man, George Harrison.

The Commission of Naval Revision and Commission of Military Enquiry developed further reforms to the armed forces. They ran for 7 years, 19 reports, and took evidence under oath. The Victualing Board and Office were reorganised. There were radical clerical staff cuts. Duties were defined, Templates for new forms were published. Auditing and accounts improved. Better systems enabled the Board to plan longer term, convoys etc.

Naval accounts also improved. In 1810 for the first time a detailed printed Naval Estimate was presented to Parliament. Management accounts were created in departments. (NB. Budget numbers circulated in budgets and spending reviews are fake and known to be fake to the tune of hundreds of millions, sometimes billions. This practice has become so routine Insiders don’t even think of it as weird, and so few MPs now have ever been part of a serious organisation they are not shocked.]

Indictments were recommended for corruption where found. Even close friends of the King were exposed and their attempts at coverups stymied (e.g George Villiers).

Palmerston was appointed secretary at war in 1809, aged 25, and embarked on an intense effort to improve military accounts and save money. He stayed in the post for 19 years!

Interestingly there was a shift to official hostility towards officials accepting gifts from contractors — which made me remember reading Walmart banned their staff accepting any gifts. Now it is widespread in Whitehall, particularly the MoD, for officials to accept such gifts. There is essentially no proper scrutiny of the corrupt ties between the MoD and BAE in particular, both parties and Whitehall are keen to keep this corruption quiet.

Sinecures were gradually abolished. There was a big changeover in personnel in key offices. In 1809 Perceval passed the Sale of Offices Prevention Act which forbad soliciting money for procuring offices.

Another sign of success was the lack of strikes which had plagued 18th Century wars.

Knight writes that 1803-15 there was a ‘silent revolution’ — the ‘quiet triumph of the men of business’. Tensions over appointments dissipated as it became more normal to appoint talented, assiduous young men to key roles.

A theme of this chapter is the identification and promotion of able young men into positions of responsibility — the opposite of what happens now.

All in all, what a stark contrast with the situation now — a disastrous MoD, Parliament silent and complicit, fake accounts hiding vast waste and corruption, fake meritocracy, the opposite of ‘quiet triumph of the men of business’, instead a triumph of mediocrity in key jobs.

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CH12: The Defense Industries, 1800-14

Foreigners who came to Britain after the war were amazed at our prosperity and technology.

Most of government spending from taxes and loans was spent in Britain and foreign trade continued protected by the navy.

Steam power was already in use by 1805 for things like pumping out docks and dredging but also was starting to be used in manufacturing.

Iron and steel production grew 4X 1790-1815.

Crucially the Pitt government supported major infrastructure building and simply bought off opposition — the Crown bought things and the Consolidated Fund compensated losers. THIS IS REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT AND AN ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL LESSON FOR TODAY WHEN WHITEHALL MAKES IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO BUILD ANYTHING!!

We had laboratories for R&D. We improved the quality of everything — guns, shells, rockets, artillery, mines. We even experimented with submarines and chemical weapons.

The relationship between government buying and companies was critical. Dockyards, foundries, factories were in private hands. Government tried hard to encourage competition and cut costs. Roughly 85% of warships built 1803-15 were built by private shipyards.

Lord Melville was crucial when he came to Admiralty in 1804 and forced a change of practices including enforcing lessons from the East India company — which had figured out how to repair ships much faster. It was unpopular in the Admiralty but Melville insisted (p359 for details).

The Navy Board disliked the shift to private dockyards but the politicians insisted. This led to deteriorating relations between the Navy and a few big incumbents as more players competed and intense competition drove down costs. There were penalties for lateness — unlike now when the taxpayers get fleeced and companies are rewarded for lateness! Whitehall was relaxed about companies going bust (unlike now).

There were always suspicions about cost cutting leading to lower quality, including from Nelson, but overall the private system plus serious inspections and penalties worked very well.

The royal yards continued to build the biggest ships.

State yards acted as reception, storage and distribution depots for the equipment and raw materials.

Workers in ammo factories were paid by the day, rather than by piecework — again careful thought about incentives and goals!

St Vincent pushed a huge engineering project to build a breakwater in Plymouth harbour. It made a huge difference to naval capabilities. Post-1815 French visitors who’d worked on similar failed projects during the war were stunned to see it.

Britain had combined financial and contract management with the new steam technology to great effect. (Knight)

The breakwater still holds back the swell today.

Foreigner accounts are similar to those you can today from visitors to SpaceX — full of wonder and admiration for those who built it.

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CH13: Blockade, Taxes and the City of London, 1806-12

When Lord Grenville left office in 1807, he was sure that the country could not raise sufficient cash to finance a significant army.

He was wrong.

The government had to do four things.

1/ Raise vast sums of money by taxes and loans. 

2/ Ensure trade flourished. 

3/ Pay the interest on an escalating national debt.

4/ Provide large amounts of money to meet the expenses of Wellington’s army in the Peninsula and subsidise European allies through cash, credit and war materials.

In the 18th century taxation in Britain had accounted for roughly 20% of national income. Much went on the capital intensive navy. In France it was 10 to 13%. 

Before the Peace of Amiens, loans accounted for 70% of military costs but after this fell to 30%.

This was largely because after 1797 Pitt persuaded Parliament to impose an income tax for the first time in the countries history. From 1799 two shillings in the pound (imperial) were to be paid on all incomes over £200. Those on incomes between £60-£200 paid less than two shillings. The income tax raised £155 million before 1815.

There were many indirect taxes including on drink. 

There were also luxury taxes on things like carriages, silk.

Knight is ambiguous implying £345 million was paid by the rich on luxury taxes from Amiens to 1815 but possibly he means all indirect taxes.

1793-1815 £540M was paid in direct and indirect taxes compared to a cost of £830 million for the army, navy and ordinance. £600 million of new debt was created. 

Over all wars £66 million was paid to a dozen countries in subsidies, over half in the last 5 years. 

In 1811 half government expenditure was on the combined cost of army, navy and Ordnance. Interest on the national debt was almost as large.

The government relied on the Bank of England selling debt to the City.

Many international merchants and bankers moved to London to escape Napoleon’s blockade including Nathan Rothschild.

In 1797 legislation suspended the convertibility of the currency to gold and export of gold became illegal.

Value of cotton textile exports 6X 1792-1815.

The East India Company exported vast amounts from UK around the world. It acted as a procurement agency. It paid duties on Asian imports and shipped vast amounts from Asia to Britain.

Preserving trade and shipping convoys necessitated close relations between businessmen and officials. Admiral Collingwood ran convoys out of the MED for supplies such as fresh fruit. The low level of merchant shipping losses was an important success.

Napoleon hoped with the Continental System not to starve Britain but to destroy her economy. But French trade declined and didn’t recover to its 1788 level until 1825.

The combined policies of UK, US and France effectively defined ALL trade as smuggling and neutral merchants could only operate with subterfuge and false documents. The City continued links with European banks and informal networks continued flows of money and smuggling.

Britain occupied Malta in 1800 and Heligoland in 1807 and used both for smuggling to Europe.

Smuggling networks proliferated in Europe as French soldiers and inspectors were a burden on locals. Asymmetrical incentives worked to spread smuggling. Both sides gained and lost from it. Banks like Rothschilds played both sides.

French customs revenue fell by four-fifths.

The French blockade weakened. Amazingly three-quarters of wheat exported to Britain came from France!

Under pressure from the aristocracy and merchants, the Tsar re-opened Russian ports to neutral ships 31/12/1810.

Cf. p406 for a detailed case study of complex transatlantic financial dealings over gold.

Britain’s worst economic crisis was 1810-12.

• Trade declined.

• Merchant houses were broken by speculation.

• Government stocks went down. The value of 3 per cent Consols fell from 70 in 1810 to 56 in 1812.

• Bankruptcies rose.

• Food shortages and poor harvests.

• Unemployment and violence.

• Luddite protests.

18 June 1812 America declared war.

Decimation of Napoleon’s army at the end of 1812 turned the tables and relieved the pressure.

• Revolt against his rule spread.

• The Continental System unravelled. In Feb 1813 Hamburg, tax collectors and customs officials were attacked. Pressure spread across Europe.

• Nat Rothschild got money to Wellington for his advance into France. He was paid commission and undertook it at his own risk.

CH14: Russia and the Peninsula, 1812-13

Wellington’s army was entrenched. He sought to preserve it while Massena’s wasted away with hunger, disease, desertion, poor logistics etc. French troops were withdrawn for Russia. Through 1812 he made progress. Crucial was logistics: the French could not concentrate forces in Spain because they couldn’t conquer logistical problems while Wellington could. He kept the sea ‘always on my flank’ and built a brilliant communication system so the army could always if necessary embark on the coast. He had plentiful merchant shipping. Wellington also built an intelligence system and Major George Scovell broke Napoleon’s codes.

Fewer than 20k of the Grand Army escaped Russia and fought again in a Napoleonic army.

In Russia and Spain, Napoleon was defeated by weather and logistics and time.

In Russia too they improved procurement and logistics planning after 1805. They needed 850 carts to carry a day’s food and forage for 120k men and 40k horses.

1809-12 the Whigs pushed to abandon the Peninsula. Wellington was attacked for going too slowly and NOT fighting a great battle. The strategic argument about slowly destroying the French army and sucking in resources from across Europe did not land. But Lord Liverpool bravely and wisely defended him through thick and thin. By late 1811 Wellington wrote to Liverpool of the French problems and predicted:

It is impossible that this fraudulent tyranny can last. If Great Britain continues stout we must see the destruction of it.

Privately Wellington was brutal describing his army as ‘the worst British Army ever sent from England’ with very bad general officers. He complained constantly about media reports.

Unlike the French who requisitioned without payment, Wellington mainly paid locals for food and supplies.

Napoleon rebuilt an army. But 1812-14 Russia conscripted 650k plus a reserve army.

In October 1813 Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, the ‘Battle of The Nations’ with half a million engaged. Casualties were huge, it took years for the area to recover. On 2/11 he retreated across the Rhine into France. By the end of January 1814 the Allies occupied much of northern France. On 13/3 the Allies entered Paris and Napoleon abdicated.

1808-14 in the Peninsula, 8k British soldiers were killed, 38k wounded, 6k missing. The chance of an officer dying was 7% and of being wounded 30%.

In 1808 Wellington was under forty and his staff were in their thirties. He took no leave in 5 years.

CH15: The Manpower Emergency, 1812-14

Pressures over UK and French trade wars spilled into relations with America.

There was tension between UK/US over naval deserters and over UK forbidding (1807) neutral ships trading with France — America had the biggest neutral fleet so suffered.

UK naval actions caused outrage. Jefferson talked of war in 1807. America imposed their own embargo on Americans trading with Britain but it harmed America more than Britain. France also seized American ships. 

In 1812 Maddison declared war on Britain 6 days before Napoleon invaded Russia. Their invasion of Canada was a disaster.

Britain imposed a blockade on America’s east coast. Tonnage collapsed, down by six-sevenths. US government depended on taxes on imports and exports so was effectively bankrupt. 

UK was limited by demands for manpower in US, Mediterranean, the Atlantic, North Sea and around the world. Unlike the rest of the world UK had a strongly growing business and industrial sector that generated competition for wages which the armed forces had to adapt to. The army had to cope with strong demand for naval labour.

In the 12 years of the Napoleonic War, with the exception of the quiet year 1807, the regular army never recruited as many as it lost through death, discharge, desertion and relied on transfers from the militia.  110k militiamen transferred to the regular army in the Napoleonic War compared to 36k in the Revolutionary War — a clear indicator of the different scale (Knight).

Army medicine improved a lot. 

France imposed conscription on all 20-25 men. Peasant society resisted it and provided refuge for those on the run. Every year 1808-12 they had available ~200k new conscripts. But the officer training school trained 4k officers per year — not nearly enough especially after the Russian disaster. 

By 1813 Britain was operating ‘near its limits’ (Knight) with a volunteer army. 

In November 1813 the government introduced a ‘New Military System’ — to transfer men to the regular army.  

In 1814 the army reached its peak of 230k and the militia was down to 70k.

The militia also had to deal with things like Luddite protests. They guarded POWs — 50k by 1812 and perhaps 100k plus in 1813, which also contributed to tensions over food prices.

CH16: Final Victory

The Allies entered Paris in March 1814. Napoleon was exiled to Elba. Castlereagh, Metternich et al arrived in Paris and spent two months negotiating.

• Britain got Antwerp and Scheldt switched from France to Holland, to secure against future invasion.

• France gave up claims on other countries.

• Louis XVIII was put on the throne.

• France’s frontiers were close to those of 1792, most colonies were returned.

• Austria would remain dominant in north Italy.

• The Cape of Good Hope went to Britain.

• Other problems were punted to the Congress of Vienna.

In June the Tsar and Prussian King visited England with Metternich. The Tsar was popular but then got obnoxious and lost goodwill.

Ministers agreed to keep 75k each under arms for the duration of the Vienna Congress to be used by joint decision.

But Parliament was already keen to reduce expenditure and demobilised 50k by the end of 1814 — we paid Prussia to provide troops on our behalf.

In November everyone gathered in Vienna.

Poland and Saxony were big problems. Russia had 200k in Poland and the Tsar wanted a Polish kingdom under Russian control. Prussia wanted Saxony.

Castlereagh gambled. He confronted Hardenberg with a secret signed alliance between Britain, Austria and France to fight Prussia in the event of attack. A shocked Hardenberg backed down and accepted just a third of Saxony. Liverpool swapped Castlereagh for Wellington in February. On 7/3 the news hit Vienna that Napoleon had left Elba.

By chance Wellington was in Vienna and he was highly respected by the leaders there so was appointed to lead the joint army. Napoleon gathered an army and marched on Paris. Troops defected to him. At Waterloo Knight says Napoleon’s attack nearly worked and was stopped by point-blank volleys of British troops. Almost all of Wellington’s staff were killed or wounded.

Napoleon was exiled to St Helena.

Very interestingly Knight writes that British ministers were not in the habit of writing ‘ideas on long-term policy or strategy’. Now, we write endless ‘strategy’ documents that are not strategy.

Dominance of the sea gave Britain protection against invasion. But the vagaries of wind and weather made it hard to transport an army for surprise attacks. Very large amphibious operations were beyond ‘the administrative capacity of the country’ (Knight).

Napoleon flinched from gambling on an invasion. Do we know exactly why?

Only when the harbour at Lisbon, made safe by the Torres Vedra Lines, could receive supplies reliably did Britain have a bridgehead on the Continent for Wellington to challenge Napoleon. Sending this army was unpopular and challenged in Parliament but Wellington’s successes gradually won support. The government deserves much credit for sticking with it.

Knight argues that Napoleon’s disasters occurred when he was operating beyond the reach of his telegraph system: Copenhagen, evacuation from Lisbon, Portugal, Russia.

Britain was the only country that fought France for 22 years pausing only with Amiens.

We now think mainly of Waterloo and Vienna but the foundations of victory were:

• industrial capacity

• procurement

• great companies

• shipbuilders

• farmers

• seamen

• City bankers and merchants

• great officials and junior ministers in Whitehall etc.

Aftermath

After Waterloo France was taken back to her 1790 borders. Savoy and other fortresses were lost. An indemnity of 700M francs was imposed. Vast amounts of paintings and other art were taken.

Parliament abolished the property tax in 1816, reducing revenues. The army and navy were cut.

London offices of army and navy lost 20-30% of staff. The Transport Office was abolished.

Most of the habits of sound administration endured.

Government demand shrank, contracts disappeared, demobilised sailors and soldiers competed for jobs in an economy with suddenly less government spending.

12/1816 riot at Spa Fields. Peterloo 1819. Riots and tension.

Pressure for parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and Corn Law reform.

We ended the war with roughly the warship tonnage of France, Russia. Netherlands, USA, Spain and Portugal combined. The potential to bring this back into government service gave Britain a crucial asset for decades. In December 1812, Kutuzov had written that the destruction of Napoleon would leave the world open to British naval dominance which ‘would then be intolerable’.

We now had bases in:

• Gibraltar

• Halifax

• Antigua

• Sydney

• Malta

• Corfu

• Ceylon

• Cape of Good Hope

British naval dominance won by Nelson at Trafalgar was vastly extended and was one of the central geopolitical facts of the world until the challenge from America and Germany at the end of the century.

This the end of the Knight book which is excellent. I’ll next complete the Metternich tale until 1815. The post-1815 story of Metternich is partially in my Bismarck chronology.

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Metternich, 1813 (Siemann CH 6)

Siemann argues Metternich’s role in the tumultuous year of 1813 has been underrated by historians. In particular, Siemann argues that he was preparing to switch Austria into a new coalition from the start of 1813 after the news of Napoleon’s disasters arrived and played a crucial role in steering not just the Sixth Coalition but the conduct of crucial military operations. In January he organised a temporary truce with Russia even though it was against the terms of his deal with Napoleon.

He had to help create a new coalition, shape agreed war aims, and avoid provoking an attack by Napoleon before the coalition and Austrian forces were ready.

Metternich proposed he act as a mediator for a general peace. But Siemann writes that Metternich thought Napoleon would never allow anything like a return to 1792 borders, even if forced to retreat or concede, he would always look for a chance to turn the tables and restore his grand ambitions. He proposed negotiations with Napoleon but assumed they would fail and a new war would come.

His Emperor’s brother got embroiled in an international conspiracy for a revolution against Napoleon in central Tyrol. This was a nightmare as it could have led to Napoleon attacking before Austria was ready. Metternich got the Emperor to force his brother to renounce the operation.

Russia and Prussia agreed a peace treaty in February. Russia entered Berlin as liberators on 4/3 and the Prussian king declared war on Napoleon on 17/3. Kutuzov proclaimed ‘a return to freedom and independence’ for the princes and peoples of Germany.

The die was cast, says Siemann, on 3 March. The Emperor made him Grand-Chancellor of the Order of Maria Theresia, the most important Austrian military order — the second most important role after the Emperor. From this day, he was consistently looking for a new alliance against Napoleon and would not be tempted again by offers of alliance from Napoleon.

Over coming weeks:

• He strengthened regime control, and his own, of police and intelligence.

• He proposed (14/3) to Franz that Austria offered to all belligerents an ‘armed mediation’ by Austria and make intense military preparations.

• He took urgent steps to raise vast money for the anticipated conflict, ‘the most extraordinary of all times and all situations’ justifying ‘extraordinary measures’ (an advance on the property tax, the most dependable element of the state’s income).

• He developed a design for a new European political order after peace was restored based on a ‘just balance between the major powers and on the independence and well-being of second- and third-rate powers’. It must include Britain and Russia and extend to the sea as well as land. And it implied the preservation of the Ottoman Empire.

• He established contact with the other Powers.

In April Metternich hoped Napoleon would respond favourably to the idea of Austria’s armed intervention but this changed with the new Russia-Prussia campaign.

In April the king of Saxony left the Rhenish Confederation to join Metternich’s armed mediation, a first sign of Metternich’s new strategy. On 16 May Napoleon told Count Bubna (with ‘a blistering intensity’) to convey in Vienna that Austria’s position made it unsuitable to be a mediator: ‘I do not want your armed mediation’. But next day he relented and signalled he might, subject to details.

In May Metternich wrote instructions for Stadion for a discussion with the Tsar. These instructions ‘anticipated the fundamental principles and architecture of the order later agreed to at the Congress of Vienna’. They included France giving up territories on the left bank of the Rhine, Holland independence, reconstitution of the former territories in Italy and the papacy, restoration of much of Austria’s position in Italy, a re-jigging of Poland, the Rhenish Confederation ended and a new German system. It was based on the idea of a balance of power and respect for smaller states.

Metternich still refused to join with Russia and Prussia. Then in May, Napoleon had successes against the allies and pushed back into Germany. The Allies cracked. There were huge rows about the command of the forces. The Tsar insisted on command but was such a disaster, as at Austerlitz, that he contributed to the disaster at Bautzen 20-21 May. Prussian generals threatened to do their own thing. The alliance wobbled and ‘was at the point of complete disintegration’ (Siemann).

On 27/5 a report arrived from Stadion that Russian was asking for a truce. Metternich advised Franz that they should get nearer the action in case of negotiations. He was worried about the crackup of the Russia-Prussia alliance and the possibility of another deal between Napoleon and a panicky Tsar.

On 1/6, they left Vienna. World history was now made, says Siemann, via ‘uniquely intense communication’ between the Palais Marcolini in Dresden (Napoleon’s HQ), Reichenbach in the Silesian mountains (the Russia-Prussia HQ), Gitschin Castle 85km NE of Prague (Austrian HQ), Opotschno Castle (temporarily used by the Tsar). Metternich and France arrived at Gitschin on 3/6.

Metternich took with him a mobile Chancellery consisting of 10 carriages, 42 horses, a cook, servants, and officials. It was without precedent for the kings of Russia, Prussia, and Austria to meet in person with the British foreign secretary. Metternich embarked on intense negotiations between the kings and ministers, with officials moving from royal room to royal room ironing out the deals. Siemann argues that the deals agreed at the famous Congress of Vienna in 1815 were determined more than generally realised in these intense discussions. Castlereagh was deeply complementary to Metternich about his role in these discussions. (Many credit Castlereagh with the Sixth Coalition but he only entered the picture in 1/14, it was Metternich who got it going from summer 1813, p339.)

Then Napoleon offered a truce which was agreed on 4/6 — the Truce or Armistice of Pläswitz — then extended into August. (Napoleon later wrote on St Helena that this was his biggest error.)

Siemann: from 3/6, Metternich practised his ‘unique peripatetic conference diplomacy’ for a year until the Treaty of Paris on 30/5/1814.

The Tsar and the Prussians wanted to resume the battle ASAP. Metternich wanted to delay in order to build the strength of the Austrian army. He had to negotiate with Napoleon and the Tsar and other forces. 17-20 June, the Tsar and Franz/Metternich talked at Opotschno Castle. The way Metternich had negotiated Napoleon’s wedding and his continual desire to keep negotiating with Napoleon meant the Tsar and Prussian king were surrounded by people whispering about Metternich’s true inclinations. Metternich told the Tsar that Franz wanted to trust Napoleon but he did not trust him, and thought that Napoleon did not want peace. He was not still trying to do a deal with Napoleon, he was set on a coalition to end the war. If Napoleon accepts negotiations, he told the Tsar, these will show Napoleon is not being honest and ‘the result will be the same’. And negotiations buy us time for our army and also split Napoleon from the French public and elites who want peace.

When Napoleon learned of the meeting between the Tsar and Metternich, he invited him to Dresden. Before he left for Dresden on 25/6, he approved agreements that became the (secret) Reichenbach Convention of 27/6, which continued the territorial adjustment that would come after victory (including in Germany and Italy and the distribution of the Duchy of Warsaw among Russia, Austria and Prussia). Austria agreed to declare war on Napoleon if he did not accept Allies conditions by 20/7. (Cf. McGuigan for a day-by-day description of Metternich’s diplomacy in June 1813. Metternich also started a new affair in Gitschin with the Duchess of Sagan.)

Metternich arrived at the Palais Marcolini in Dresden on 26/6 and met Napoleon 26-30 June. According to Siemann, the sources show a surprisingly high degree of commonality despite many accusations Metternich embellished his stories. The Chinese room in which the meeting occurred can still be seen.

The two big questions were: what is Napoleon’s military capacity and how keen is he on negotiations?

They discussed the balance of military forces and after Metternich said that the most important thing he learned was the importance of further weeks delay to improve Austrian preparations.

Napoleon and Metternich in Dresden

That night he sent a courier to Schwarzenberg to ask about timing of reinforcements and he had a reply on 28th. Metternich therefore wanted more time by extending the truce.

Metternich made four demands:

1. recognition of Austria’s armed mediation

2. a meeting of the belligerents and Austria as mediator at a peace conference in Prague on 10 July

3. a deadline for talks of 10 August

4. a stop to all acts of war until then.

Napoleon agreed. Metternich also got an agreement that Austria could supply Russia and Prussia in Silesia without it being interpreted as a breach of Austrian neutrality. Given this Metternich therefore considered himself authorised to guarantee the prolongation of the truce on behalf of the three Powers. But Metternich steered clear of territorial questions and knew that Napoleon, cheered by recent successes, would not accept losing any territory unless forced after battle. Metternich told Napoleon that for peace to come he would have ‘reduce your power within bounds compatible with the general tranquility’ but did not get into specifics.

Napoleon commented that the French could not complain about the Russian expedition as he’d sacrificed Germans and Poles, and les than 30k French. ‘You forget, sire, that you are speaking to a German’ replied Metternich.

At one point Metternich referred to the French people’s desire for peace, the tragedy of a future generation being slaughtered in further battles. Napoleon answered:

You are no soldier and you do not know what goes on in the soul of a soldier. I was brought up in military camps and know nothing but military camps and a man such as I am does not give a fuck about the lives of a million of men [un homme comme moi se f[out] de la vie d’un million d’hommes].

This is often translated with euphemisms such as ‘I do not concern myself about the lives…’. But Metternich recorded the original in French and referred to it in a letter at the time as ‘the much worse expression used by Napoleon’.

Napoleon also stressed that he did not fear threats or death — he would fight to maintain his conquests.

From Dresden Metternich went to meet Hardenberg, Humboldt, Nesselrode and Stadion on 4 July. They were enraged when Metternich told them he’d agreed to extend the truce. He had to threaten that Austria would not join them if they started fighting prematurely. And he had to get a hesitant Emperor Franz to agree to join the fight. He also had to try to convey to Franz that once they took the plunge they had to stick with it — he pleaded that the course ‘once chosen will be followed with the greatest steadfastness and tenacity’.

Franz was still thinking a permanent peace with Napoleon was possible and he wanted Metternich to attempt it. They agreed that if peace could not be found, then it was vital for Napoleon to get the blame across Europe, so they agreed on the importance of the negotiations.

People started arriving in Prague mid-July for what turned out to be a ‘farcical’ (Siemann) peace conference. Russia and Prussia did not send Hardenberg and Nesselrode. Napoleon delayed sending representatives. Then he offered Austria territory in return for preserving neutrality or joining him. Metternich informed Russia and Prussia to show loyalty to them.

Also important was that Napoleon thought his marriage, and child, would inhibit Franz from joining a war against him. So confident was he on this, writes Siemann, that even on 9 August, the day before the truce ended, he still warned that he should not be pressured. He was shocked when he heard that war had been declared as the truce ran out on 10/8. 150k Austrians joined Russia and Prussia for a force of ~350k amassed in Bohemia under Schwarzenberg. Austria published a manifesto explaining their actions and blaming Napoleon for the breakdown of negotiations.

The core principle of Allied strategy was 1) to avoid fighting Napoleon himself and instead to focus on his generals and 2) abandon ideas of fixed defences and instead give each other’s army mutual support if Napoleon attacked them. An army attacked by him should withdraw while the others supported it. Metternich described it as ‘avoid all major battles and wear down Napoleon who is sitting in a tight spot’. Siemann says that from now until the end of thew war, one can see that when they followed this approach it worked and when they didn’t Napoleon got the upper hand.

After war resumed, the Tsar demanded to lead the troops as supreme commander. Metternich strongly opposed this. He made clear that Austria would not participate and insisted on Schwarzenberg, who was cautious and determined to avoid the traps Napoleon had repeatedly and successfully set for his opponents. The two worked closely together which was crucial for keeping military operations in line with the political ends and keeping the Tsar’s interference under control.

Initially the general approach worked and there were victories over Napoleon’s generals while they avoided him. Then on 26-27 August the Allies were defeated at Dresden. The Tsar had insisted on attacks against the orders of Schwarzenberg. Schwarzenberg was furious and complained to Franz and Metternich: the Tsar caused chaos and did not control his own generals, and he demanded the Tsar leave the army and other Russian generals be removed or put clearly under his command or else he would resign. At roughly the same time (3 days after Dresden) the Tsar told Metternich that he would appoint himself supreme commander. Metternich threatened that Austria would leave the coalition. The Tsar backed down but told Franz to fire Metternich. By the end of September Metternich felt confident he’d overcome this crisis and looked forward to battle only after Napoleon had lost ‘half his army without any danger to us’.

On 9 September Russia, Prussia and Austria signed an alliance, the protocols of Teplitz, and Britain joined on 3/10. The Powers pledged to stick together to bring peace and no side deals with Napoleon. It consisted of bilateral contracts, not a general contract. There were secret articles which also pointed the way toward the territorial settlement of Vienna including the dissolution of the Rhenish Confederacy. German states were offered ‘entire and absolute independence’. Metternich was already considering the form of Confederation that the German states could form and which was created in 1815 (and which Bismarck ended in a hotel room half a century later). For Siemann, Teplitz is further evidence of Metternich’s influence on Vienna and evidence against Paul Schroeder’s thesis that it was Castlereagh who made the crucial breakthroughs. Really, Metternich and Castelreagh already agreed on a large number of the key territorial issues.

On 18/10 the Allies fought Napoleon at Leipzig. It was another bloodbath. But finally (1) the allies managed to coordinate and avoid being beaten separately by Napoleon’s tactical and operational skills and speed. And (2) diplomacy had weakened Napoleon’s army. On 8/10, just before the Battle of Leipzig, he got Bavaria, the most important member, to defect from the Rhenish Confederation. On 5/11, Metternich entered Frankfurt. On 6/11, he watched Franz enter Frankfurt in a procession with the look of the old Holy Roman Empire. On 7/11, two days after Metternich arrived in Frankfurt, the Rhenish Confederation collapsed entirely. He wrote:

How I enjoyed letting it die its orderly death — this monstrous association.

The German states were promised independence but they had to pledge troops and money to finish the job against Napoleon.

Napoleon tried to arrange a quick peace. Metternich said No. He wanted the armies to pursue and finish the job.

Central to Metternich’s picture of a revived balance of power was the idea of ‘respected equality of rank’ — that is, Powers were respected as independent entities that other Powers would pledge not t conquer. He sought a less anarchic balance of power than the world after 1648. So Austria accepted Bavaria’s independence in the Treaty of Ried and the long-term game of trying to conquer it or swap it for something else came to an end. This was a preface to a more general shift in how Metternich saw fundamental priorities.

Metternich also opposed Prussian plans for a new German structure put forward by Stein and supported by the Tsar. Stein was promoting an ethnically based German nationalism that saw Prussia as the more German state. This was a fundamental threat to Austria. According to Siemann, Metternich was already formulating the federal solution for Germany that would be agreed in 1815 and which Bismarck ended in 1866.

Catastrophe and Resolution, 1814 (Siemann CH7)

There were three phases of the Sixth Coalition:

• Austria entering war on 10/8 to the Allies arriving in Frankfurt.

• Allies’ decision 11/13 to continue the war to January 1814 when they occupied heights in the French Langres region.

• Battles on French soil before Allies entered Paris 4/14.

Siemann says this period was ‘probably unique’ in that the military engagements were accompanied by uninterrupted diplomacy between the belligerents.

After they entered Frankfurt the Prussian King was against crossing the Rhine. The Russian generals mostly agreed. Metternich pushed to continue. On 9/11 it was agreed to continue. The plan was to approach France from multiple directions.

Metternich wanted the constant diplomacy in order to buy time and stop Napoleon pulling apart the Allies as he’d done before. He worked with Allies to present options for peace conferences to Napoleon. Castlereagh and others objected at points but Siemann says the moves were tactical — not evidence of mendacity. He was convinced that Napoleon would not really make a peace deal.

On 1/12 a Manifesto to the French people was published drafted mostly by Metternich. He was obsessed with the disaster of 1792 when the Duke of Brunswick had threatened Paris with destruction thus provoking an enraged reaction from the French people which was used by the National Assembly as justification and energy for war. He said later that the Manifesto was the most difficult bit of work he’d done and came ‘from the bottom of my heart’. His core goal was to ‘separate Napoleon still more from the nation and act on the mind of the army’ to undermine Napoleon’s attempts to rally new forces by stating that the war was against Napoleon not the people. [Note the difference with Ukraine where NATO unleashed a wave of anti-Russian media extending even to the likes of liberal historian T Garton Ash celebrating Ukrainians burning Russian books.]

The Manifesto said France should return to her natural borders — the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees but with some gains since 1789. All Europe wanted ‘freedom, happiness and peace’, ‘a condition of peace which will use a wise distribution of power and a just balance to protect the peoples against the endless suffering that has burdened Europe’. 20,000 copies were distributed in France. His police minister brought an early copy to Napoleon who remarked on the ‘thorough piece of cunning’ that must have been written by Metternich.

Metternich had to keep on top of the constantly changing military situation, the issue of what to do about Napoleon, the different interests of the Allies, constant intrigues and so on — all while moving every few days to a new camp. After constant travel he arrived in Paris on 10 April, went to London on 5 June, was back in Paris on 2 July then in Vienna on 18 July.

At Langres 25/1-2/2, crucial decisions had to be made. The Tsar wanted to pause, Schwarzenberg and Metternich to push on. The Tsar had ideas about letting a parliament in Paris draw up a new constitution, which horrified Metternich who feared simply a renewal of the Revolution. Castlereagh agreed. The Tsar also wanted to stop negotiations with Napoleon.

Castlereagh agreed with Metternich on the overall vision of a peace based on balance. And on reinstating the Bourbons. Castlereagh and Metternich worked together very closely after Castlereagh had arrived in Basel on 19/1 then travelled to Langres, and this was crucial. Castlereagh had not trusted Metternich before they met and worked together. Now they worked harmoniously. And it was helped, says Siemann, by Metternich’s trip to London and love for the English. They were both pragmatic and cool members of the cosmopolitan generation of the 1770s. Their friendship lasted until Castlereagh’s terrible death.

Metternich stressed to Franz that the crucial weapon of the Coalition had been to ‘rip from his face the mask of peace’. He wanted to present a case for peace from the representatives of Europe to the French people, not Napoleon. Siemann says that historians now believe Metternich still wanted a deal with Napoleon leaving him on the throne — and only shifted after the victory of 21/3 — but he did not. He was working out terms for the dismantling of the Napoleonic Empire and a new federal system for Germany — a system of sovereign princes ‘connected by a federal tie which assures and guarantees the independence of Germany’. For Siemann, the demands drawn up now could only be understood as an order to Napoleon to abdicate dressed in unfulfillable demands. When Napoleon read the terms he was enraged and rejected them.

On 3/2 delegates to the Congress of Chatillon had arrived including Castlereagh. The Tsar again threw a spanner in the works declaring he wanted to march on Paris, crush Napoleon and arrange an election for a new government. There was hastily arranged meetings 10-15/2 in Troyes. Blucher had suffered defeat by Napoleon. Castlereagh tried and failed to change his mind.

After months of following armies and seeing constant horror, exhausted by travel and lack of sleep, Metternich was deeply depressed.

My thinking is concentrated on one point. I let the moments that are no longer pass by and drift into the future. My friend, in the end tears come to my eyes.

Metternich gambled — he threatened to withdraw Austrian troops and agree a separate peace with Napoleon. The Tsar relented under the pressure.

Despite being outnumbered, Napoleon could still win battles against the allies. Schwarzenberg lamented:

If I divide up my army I may be beaten en detail. If I collect in one spot I starve.

He despaired over ‘proud, vain ignorant sovereigns who play soldier’.

There was a major Council on 25/2. The three kings and the chief generals and diplomats were all there. They eventually agreed to return to the old strategy: avoid gambling on one big battle with Napoleon, try to wear him down. And it was agreed to march on Paris.

The Allies then discussed a new alliance for what might be a longer war given Napoleon’s resilience. Metternich and Castlereagh pushed the same core ideas. The Allies agreed on no separate deals with Napoleon. They agreed troops and cash. They agreed the independence of states after peace. They agreed to keep cooperating and meeting to maintain the peace. A secret article dealt with territorial issues. It was a natural development of other documents written in 1813 including Teplitz. And it was a medium for propaganda to shape opinion. The Treaty of Chaumont was agreed early March.

Now the final battles loomed. Allies broke off negotiations. Metternich’s mobile HQ had to be more distant from Schwarzenberg to avoid falling into enemy hands. Events moved fast. On the evening of 24/3, Napoleon spent the night in a house that Franz had left that morning.

On 20-21 March Schwarzenberg achieved a decisive victory at Arcis-sur-Aube. From 25/3, Metternich, Franz, Castlereagh, Hardenberg, Humboldt and others went to Dijon, out of the way of Napoleon, while the armies pressed on to Paris. The bigshots had a fortnight of isolation, discussion and romance with local women. They discussed the issues that would dominate Vienna. And the immediate issues of France. How would Parisians respond to occupation? Would they accept Louis XVIII? Would it be civil war or were they exhausted?

Talleyrand now helped the Allies solve the problems. He had connections with everybody. And he understood how to manage the transition peacefully. He manipulated Paris into and through a process formally ending the Napoleonic regime and a Senate agreeing to the restoration. Talleyrand wanted the Bourbons because he knew they would carry the most weight with the rest of Europe’s leaders. Metternich and Hardenberg arrived in Paris from Dijon on 10/4. On 11/4 Napoleon formally resigned. Metternich was too late to stop the deal on Napoleon going to Elba and claimed later that if he’d arrived 3 days earlier he could have stopped it. The Tsar had ‘done many silly things and behaved like a pupil who has escaped his teacher. The teacher is back and now it will get better again.’ In another letter he described the Tsar as ‘the biggest child on earth’.

Metternich now worked day after day for weeks on all the details of the peace treaty. He wanted not vengeance but ‘the greatest possible political balance among the powers’. The work culminated in the Treaty of Paris, 30 May 1814.

• It cancelled the legal basis of Napoleon’s conquests.

• It set up the process for the Congress of Vienna.

• The Bourbons had to restore documents stolen by Napoleon from archives around Europe. But the art stayed in the Louvre!

• There were no reparations.

• The borders were those of 1/1/1792.

• German states were to be independent united by federal ties.

• Holland and Switzerland were independent.

• Malta went to Britain.

• France retained colonies according to the distribution in 1792.

Foreign troops had withdrawn from French soil six weeks after the Bourbons were restored.

On 5 June Metternich returned to England for the first time in 20 years with the Tsar and Friedrich Wilhelm III. Metternich represented Franz. He received an honorary degree in Oxford witnessed by the Tsar, king of Prussia, Wellington and Blucher. He was again astonished at the relative wealth.

He talked in London to Hardenberg, Castlereagh, and Nesselrode. They discussed the tricky questions such as the Duchy of Warsaw and Germany. There were worries about the stability of the French regime and they agreed to remain on a war footing with each holding 75k in reserve. They agreed a timetable for the Congress kicking off and the agenda. He also arranged that only Franz was in Vienna for the preliminary discussions in September. He tried to fix it with a committee of 7 including the 4 plus Spain, Portugal and Sweden to fix the plan for the Congress. His main worry was the Tsar causing chaos and a breakdown.

The Tsar made many errors in London, provoked public dislike which also improved the standing of Austria, criticised the government and fell out with the Prince Regent. Meanwhile Metternich strengthened the relationship he’d built with the future George IV since his first visit.

On 30 June Metternich went to Paris with Hardenberg where he talked with Talleyrand and Louis XVIII. He was reassured that Russia was now isolated. He then went via Stuttgart and Munich to discuss the German situation particularly Austria’s relationship with Bavaria. He got to Vienna on 18 July.

Back in Vienna he organised a civil medal for soldiers to commemorate Austria’s victory. He organised for Franz to give a speech to the delegates of provincial assemblies thanking them for their loyalty and service and reminding them that the monarchy existed for ‘the common welfare’. It was though a risky business for an Austrian Emperor in these times to address ‘the people’ — Metternich kept the speech short as ‘it is always risky to go too deeply into questions when faced with delegates of the people, … in particular in our times’. [This sums up so much about modernity. The rulers felt obliged to address ‘the people’ but it was inherently risky, what if they booed, what if they demanded more, what if they asked for greater representation?]

And he prepared the choreography for the Congress which he hoped would ‘cast a light ahead on twenty years of peace.’

Metternich, war, violence

He referred to war largely privately, not in diplomatic texts.

A letter to his wife written in Dresden on 28/6/1813, still reeling from his encounter with Napoleon who was ‘swearing like a devil’, referred to the nightmare scenes after recent battles with hundreds of thousands dead and wounded. The horror was contrasted with the beauty of the Japanese garden and orangery of the Palais Marcolini where Napoleon put on theatrical productions, with costumes of antique empires, not far from the slaughter. Walking in the garden, he ‘could easily have wept over these continual upheavals that are called the histories of empires’.

During the last weeks of August 1813, he was often on the battlefield. He wrote how the sights ‘produces an abysmal hatred in me against the being who, in the service of a delusion and out of the most undignified feelings, has the throat of hundreds of thousands of people cut.’

I believe, my friend, that my deep feeling that I am called upon to end this great tragedy will be fulfilled. For years now, this idea has not left me. It has been the driving force in all of my political actions. I have sacrificed everything for it.

Similarly he wrote on 20/10/13 about the appalling scenes after the Battle of Leipzig. At the end of October he was following Schwarzenberg’s army along the path of Napoleon’s retreat — a path full of dead and dying men and horses, mixed with survivors dropping to their knees as they passed by. Napoleon had covered the road from Moscow to Frankfurt with horror and ‘sacrificed the blood of so many millions out of a vain feeling of misguided fame’. The horrors continued month after month — violence, agony, rape.

By spring 1814, he reported on some places he rode through that had been thoroughly destroyed — no house intact, no upright tree, no horse, almost nobody alive, the dead unburied.

This is why I work for peace, ignoring all the yelling of the stupid and the fools — I want peace fast and a good one.

Siemann says that Metternich did sometimes refer to himself as ‘saviour of the world’ in secret correspondence with female confidantes including mistresses. But many who met him referred to his lack of vanity and this should be weighed against the attacks on him. He thought of himself as called upon to replace Napoleon’s wars with a new peace.

In my Bismarck chronology, I refer to comments by Metternich after 1815. He hated the new terrorists who he saw as destructive madmen who could provoke a return to chaos. He warned of how Powers could slide into war like ‘a great natural catastrophe’ with a foolish diplomat (Canning) playing the role of deus ex machina who sets in motion the destruction and death. He explained how he saw diplomatic offensives and military preparations as executing the principle of —

Si vis pacem para bellum [if you want peace, prepare for war] everyone understands… This saying, and nothing else, have I applied throughout the whole history of the Greek affair, but only in the way of negotiation. This men do not understand. I have filled my diplomatic arsenal, completed and trained my troops, not in order to come to war, but to prevent it. (1824)

On 6 February 1848, Metternich wrote to Apponyi:

Revolutions march fast! This saying invariably reminds me of that young, very popular poet Bürger in Germany: The dead ride fast [Die Toten reiten schnell].’

As I have said many times since January 2022, it has been a tragedy that our pygmy political class forgot the most important political lesson of the past centuries — it takes constant efforts to maintain peace and the small human progress each year that compounds over decades to generate remarkable advances, because order and civilisation are very fragile and it can all collapse very fast with the work of decades destroyed in months.

In Metternich’s letters and comments, we can see someone facing the collapse of fragile civilisation and working to try to repair it and bring a new system of peace.

We need people thinking like this now.

The end of an era and a new beginning for Europe, the Congress of Vienna 1814-15 (CH8)

Europe was devastated. Britain lost more men and treasure proportionately than in World War I. The entire Napoleonic system of conquests and law had collapsed in half a year.

The participants started arriving in Vienna in September. The diplomats had mostly been born around 1770. They were cosmopolitans with shared European experiences of Enlightenment, the ancien regime, the Revolution, and Napoleon’s wars.

They sought ‘reconstruction’ of the imperial system — a system of empires, not nation states — as the only conceivable basis for international order and a new peace. It is ahistorical to blame them for not solving the national issues that erupted decades later in Italy, Germany, the Balkans and Poland. When these nations emerged there was inevitable violence. In 1815 they were looking to calm violence, not provoke new battles and hatreds.

Five ways empires and states differed:

1. Empires had blurred boundaries. Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Britain extended into the vast spaces of Siberia, the Sahara and the oceans.

2. From centre to periphery there was diminishing integration, less legal grip of the centre, less say at the edge about what the centre did etc.

3. Empires were multi-national/multi-ethnic and granted different rights and duties to different groups.

4. Empires were composite states with gradations of power and influence and imperial structures sometimes superimposed on several states.

5. They evolved accidentally, they were not planned, they did not spring from single founders.

The first meeting of the big Four was on 16/9. Talleyrand arrived on 23/9 and immediately sought to put himself at the head of the other Powers outside the four. Metternich rejected the idea of the Four being subject to any kind of majority vote and told Talleyrand he’d cancel the whole thing rather than accept such ideas.

Four levels of interaction emerged:

1. Conferences of Five — the Four plus France. This was the heart of the process.

2. Conferences of Eight — the Five plus Sweden, Spain, Portugal. These 8 signed the Final Act of the Congress.

3. The German committee chaired by Metternich.

4. 12 special committees.

Everything came together at the end in one document, a Treaty on General Peace, signed on 9 June 1815 as some of the participants headed for the final act at Waterloo. It remained in force until Bismarck ripped up the German provisions in 1866.

The Treaty of Paris had been provisional and looked forward to a more general solution. It had to settle everything globally.

Metternich’s approach

He had to figure out the different interests and how they could be reconciled.

[P]olitics is the science of the vital interests of states. Since, however, an isolated state no longer exists … we must always view the society of nations as the essential condition of the present world.

He wanted law and order as the precondition for freedom and wealth. This could only come with a balance of power on a shared legal basis.

Poland. The Tsar changed his mind and started insisting on grabbing all Poland. The others thought this a disaster that would break the balance. Metternich wanted an independent buffer state between the Powers. Discussions became so heated the Tsar threatened to challenge Metternich with a duel. Rumours of war spread. Then Prussia made clear it wanted to grab all Saxony. Secretly Austria, Britain and France agreed to fight the other two. The Tsar eventually backed down. A compromise was reached over Poland. Prussia had to accept half of Saxony.

Italy. Lombardy and Venetia had been recaptured in 1814. Metternich’s approach was to treat Italy as an object for Franz’s decision and the Congress to ratify, not discuss like Germany. Franz saw Italy as a patrimony of his family for his family.

Germany. Metternich doubted the existence of a genuine German sentiment that included Austria and was suspicious of Prussia’s German patriotism. Apart from Napoleon’s attacks, the old Holy Roman Empire (HRE) suffered a ‘want of inward vitality’. Trying to put it back together given the problems that had evolved would have dissipated effort that could be better spent. He was not inclined to begin a new round of territorial confiscations in Germany.

In London exile in 1849, he wrote about 1813-15 that there had been four options.

1. Total independence for German states after the end of the Rhenish Confederation.

2. A new German empire under a common leader.

3. Unification of the members of the former empire in a federation.

4. A ‘hostile assimilation of princely territories’ into Austria and Prussia directed against the former states of the Rhenish Confederation, i.e annexation.

Regarding (2), restoration of the HRE in a new empire, he wrote that ‘too many pieces of the collapsed edifice had been lost’. It would also have led to huge conflicts with the other big Three Powers.

But the Empire of Austria, declared on 11 August 1804, existed. He described it in 1849:

The Empire, without being a federal state, had yet the advantages and the disadvantages of a federal shape. If the head of the house of Austria was in the modern sense of the word absolute, this notion was restricted in its sovereign power, according to the different Constitutions of the several countries whose crowns he united on his own head. The greatest limitations applied to the large regions which belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary and its other parts… That this situation was a most peculiar one cannot be doubted; and it is no less certain that it would have been untenable, if it had not been founded on the most important of powers – namely, the interest of the different parts of the Empire in being united. These facts, which were clearly seen by the Emperor and myself, exercised a pervasive influence on the reconstruction of the Empire in the years 1813 to 1815.

So the Emperor’s power was distinctly ‘peculiar’ even to that time, never mind ours. It was ‘absolute’ yet constrained by different constitutions of which he was the head, particularly vis Hungary. The complexity of the Empire is visible in the title of the Emperor which stretches to 10 lines and ~100 words in Siemann!

In 1813 Goethe had compared the HRE with the old Greek order. All the constituent states had to defend itself against neighbours and its youth therefore were engaged in politics from early on. Goethe embodied a German patriotism stretching back to pre-1789. It was NOT the case that people thought of themselves as German only after the wars of liberation under Napoleon.

While working on the Constitution and Federalist Papers, Maddison, sent books on the HRE by Jefferson in Paris, had borrowed features of the checks and balances of the HRE’s federal structure. And Montesquieu had the HRE in mind when he wrote:

Every man invested with power is apt to abuse it and to carry his authority as far as it will go... To prevent this abuse it is necessary, from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.

In 1814 von Humboldt put a lot of effort into plans for a German constitution. This was influential with Hardenberg.

Metternich wanted a Confederation. In 1813 he had made Austria’s entry to the Sixth Coalition conditional on the states of the Rhenish Confederation becoming independent and on Germany becoming a federation of states (above). In January 1814 at Langres he got Hardenberg and the Prussian King to agree on a Confederation and it made its way into the Treaty of Paris.

Originally Metternich supported a more powerful and centralising Confederation but after the Polish-Saxon crisis, and the evidence of Prussia’s desire for expansion, he changed his mind. The middle and smaller states were scared of Prussia. And Metternich used this fear to create a ‘third Germany’ as a counterweight to Prussia.

• The Federal Act of 8 June 1815 declared the territory it covered ‘Germany’.

• It referred back to the HRE by defining the parts of Austria and Prussia that belonged to the Confederation as ‘their possessions formerly belonging to the German empire’.

• Three foreign heads of state were members with full rights: the king of England (via Hanover), the king of Denmark (via Holstein and Lauenburg), and the king of the Netherlands (via Luxembourg).

• The Bund was a legal subject in international law.

• It had no head of state.

• It was multi-ethnic — it had Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovenians, Italians etc.

• The new Confederation embodied the ‘checks and balances’ of the HRE.

Everyone in Vienna wanted Austria included in Germany. And after the HRE, the Bund made it possible for Austria to stay in ‘Germany’.

Metternich, Castlereagh et al insisted on rejecting the unity of nation, language and territory.

The Vienna system guaranteed national identities within a state. E.g the Poles were promised ‘national institutions’ but they were spread across Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Swiss Confederation was similar. The EU is similar.

After the collapse of 1848 and his exile Metternich continued to reflect on the issues up to and at Vienna. He continued to believe that if Austria were to continue as a) an empire and b) part of Germany’s body politic, then the Bund was, roughly, the only solution: you could tweak it but not do something entirely different. In 1849 he wrote an ironic aphorism capturing his dilemma regarding the national question:

As a monarchy, Austria is a giant whose forces cannot be sucked up by democratic children and revolutionary dreamers; it even overcomes the administration introduced by fossils like Metternich, weaklings like Pillersdorf, and stubborn Schwarzenbergs [his successors] — but the Achilles heel of this giant is Germany!

In December 1848, Schwarzenberg insisted that he remained a German, a Habsburg, and an Austrian and said:

Austria is a German federal power still today. This position, which has emerged from natural developments over a thousand years, it does not consider giving up.

The ‘Holy Alliance’: a ‘loud-sounding nothing’

This was signed between the three kings on 26/9/1815. It was supposed to be a pact based on Christian values.

Franz and Metternich didn’t want to sign it but couldn’t kill it. Metternich was repeatedly derogatory and called it ‘a ‘loud-sounding nothing’, a ‘moral demonstration’, the ‘overflow of the pietistic feeling of Emperor Alexander’. (Alexander had been persuaded by the prophetess Juliane von Krüdener that he was the instrument of the downfall of the Anticchrist, Napoleon. He once had dinner with Metternich with an extra place laid for Christ. She influenced the idea of the Holy Alliance.) He also realised it would be very unpopular and be seen as a dynastic conspiracy to create ‘an institution to keep down the rights of the people, to promote absolutism’.

Waterloo and the end of the Congress

There was a famous aphorism: The Congress does not work, it dances (Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse). This affected views for ever after. But Siemann thinks it was unfair.

But there certainly were extraordinary social events. The most extravagant was the party at Rennweg on 18 October 1814 which Metternich organised. He hired Despreaux, a famous stage artist who had worked in the ancien regime and for Napoleon, and Charles de Moreau, the architect and painter. The total cost came to 318,000 guilders. Part of the construction was a two-story ballroom with cafe and orchestra. As Siemann says, there’s an interesting irony that the crowned heads of Europe gathered at the festival to celebrate victory over the French — with the language and visual style of France. There was a military commemoration of victory over France, which Talleyrand did not attend, and a festival in honour of peace, which he did.

In the middle of the night of 7 March 1815, Metternich was awoken by an urgent message: Napoleon had disappeared from Elba. Very fast that morning the key people spoke and agreed to stop demobilisation and prepare for the final act. There was no discussion of negotiations with Napoleon. Armies were mobilised. On 15 June 1815, Wellington triumphed at Waterloo. The final Act of Vienna meanwhile was signed on 9 June 1815.

After the victory, France now was forced to pay an indemnity and have an army of occupation for 5 years. In November there was a second Treaty of Paris and a renewal of the Quadruple Alliance.

At the end of the Congress, Metternich was given Schloss Johannisberg on the Rhine by Franz as a gift for all his labours in war and peace (watercolour, 1841after classical restoration). Nearby would be the assembly of the German Bund and the Central Commission on Revolutionary Activity, set up by Metternich in 1833, would have its offices.

FINISHED!

I will read through the whole thing once more and tweak the section below…

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Thoughts…

1/ Like everything, the importance of elite talent was fundamental. People like Pitt, Nelson and Wellington along with hundreds of brilliant managers and officials were the most important source of strength.

In the armed forces, there was a big problem: the tradition in the armed forces of promotion by seniority meant that when war came there were duffers in senior posts and there was a difficult process of adjustment as political leaders forced retirements and promotions of younger people with new ideas. From reading a lot of history, some of which is in previous blogs in this series, this problem seems near universal: it’s practically impossible in peacetime to have the sort of intensity necessary to ditch this universal law of large bureaucracies.

NB. In the wars of 1793-1815 ministers made vast numbers of appointments but appointments are now almost entirely out of ministerial hands, in the hands of the permanent official casts, and the Whitehall of today is 10X or 100X less effective than under Pitt.

Cf. CH9 for a number of very able young men identified and promoted to key roles leading to big improvements in efficiency. In 1808 Wellington was under forty and his staff were in their thirties. Knight lists some of these young men whose names I will repeat to honour their efforts! — Huskisson, Herries, Harrison, Calvert, Palmerston, Bunbury, Croker, Barrow.

2/ The economy and British trade were growing fast. Wealth is the sinews of war. This caused problems for relative wages and recruitment to the navy, because sailors could make good money in the merchant navy.

3/ Unlike today, in critical areas for war preparations Whitehall was relatively fast, flexible, and encouraged real expertise. It didn’t systematically do the equivalent of moving the official in charge of funding intelligence services’ capabilities to a non-job in DEFRA, as Whitehall tried to do in 2020.

4/ Whitehall had close relations with private companies and the feedback loop for procurement was fast therefore drove learning and improvement. Pitt personally supported key officials in improving procurement and contracts. Open, fair contract tendering and no favouring of monopolies gave Britain big supply chain advantages over France and Spain. Contrast this with today’s Whitehall absurdly reliant on BAE and paying for it in blood. In Wright, one keeps seeing evidence of how attentive our ancestors were to incentives and how to engineer them for desired ends (e.g Middleton moving ship procurement from dockyard officers to the Transport Board).

Government tried hard to encourage competition and cut costs. Private companies supplied ships, weapons, ammunition, supplies of all kinds. Roughly 85% of warships built 1803-15 were built by private shipyards. NB. The Navy Board disliked the shift to private dockyards but the politicians insisted.

There were penalties for lateness — unlike now when the taxpayers get fleeced and companies are rewarded for lateness!

The relationships between Whitehall and private companies meant that buying commodities on a grand scale could be conducted discretely to avoid price rises and imported commodities could be transported in neutral ships.

Markets for iron, steel, coal, copper etc were stimulated.

5/ No10 actually ran critical aspects of economic policy, Pitt did not let HMT officials run things. Pitt used legislation to stop HMT vandalism on the sinking fund.

6/ R&D for military technology was taken seriously and there was close working relations between Whitehall and critical companies with R&D facilities (e.g the improvement in copper bolts for ships).

7/ Relative political stability. Pitt’s long rule was a huge advantage. 1799-1812 there were 6 PMs, 10 foreign Secretaries, 7 Secretaries of State for war, 9 first Lords of the Admiralty. But this chaotic system ended up out-performing Napoleon’s extraordinary talents. As Parliament faced extremely hard realities, Napoleon became more delusional, surrounded by yes men, ordering ships to be built by people he’d already sent to Russia.

8/ The 1790s war began with an Army that suffered from lack of training. Training much improved for the Napoleonic War. This problem seems to be a permanent feature. Wars start with untrained army and it takes time for training to improve.

9/ The sort of planning staff that Alanbrooke assembled with the Chiefs of Staff Committee in WW2, expert in logistics and planning all the complexities of campaigns, was absent at the start of the French wars.

10/ Political assessments about goals and motives are repeatedly wrong. E.g Pitt thought French leaders would be forced by the economic situation to make peace in the 1790s. It’s easy to think ‘X is rational, more efficient, therefore my opponent will do it’ and underrate the extent to which the opponent will suffer to achieve their political goal. (We’ve seen this error across the West vis Putin and Ukraine: it’s so costly he will change course’.)

11/ Even in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, Jervis hit huge problems trying to root out corruption in Whitehall and the Navy. Perhaps I am over-interpreting but this seems a striking parallel to the situation now with covid and Ukraine: despite these disasters, Whitehall adamantly fights getting to the truth on procurement especially military procurement where there is much more secrecy therefore much more corruption.

12/ Figuring out motivations and intentions of foreign live players is incredibly hard and the best people are bound to make mistakes but if you have developed capabilities wisely you have a margin of safety to deal with your inevitable errors.

13/ Cabinet was managed very loosely. Pitt preferred to talk to people than write letters, like General Groves. Our leaders would profit from doing the same but this is greatly discouraged now and the civil service try very hard to manage the PM’s time so they only hear from senior people often far from the action and true expertise.

14/ There was innovation with statistics and accounts that helped Whitehall plan. (The moves by the Cabinet Office to undermine and disperse the No10 data science and AI team are, obviously, an example of Whitehall today is going in the opposite direction.)

15/ Britain made intense efforts to be at the frontier of communication technology (e.g optical telegraphs) and this was crucial for defence, intelligence etc. We built canals that improved speed and cut costs. In contrast, we are now resigned to lag behind the frontier in many aspects. Hedge funds get bigger GPU clusters than GCHQ.)

16/ One is constantly struck by the dizzying cast of adventurous enterprising characters our country produced! And because of the political culture — a class of leaders who were enterprising and determined to see Britain prosper — Whitehall could benefit from the talents of these characters applied in endlessly diverse ways, such as the adventures by Adam Smith’s 60 year old cousin to Ceylon (p142) or Captain D’Auvergne running intelligence operations on sea and land.

17/ As well as communication infrastructure, we profited enormously from the City and financial/payments infrastructure. It was critical for raising money for the war but also for the practical operations of intelligence, transport etc.

18/ A constant tension with intelligence… On one hand, centralising intelligence has costs: initiative gets crushed, a new empire not close to the action sets bad priorities etc. On the other hand, distributed intelligence without good sharing has costs: e.g in 1798 departments not sharing intel meant nobody could piece together the story about Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition and Nelson wasn’t given the best information he could have been given so missed the chance to catch Napoleon at sea before he landed in Egypt.

19/ Cabinet responsibility. I’m not sure so far how much insight we have (from Wright and other books) on the coordination among ministers, a perennial problem in Whitehall. In my time, my assumption was ‘if it’s substantially cross-departmental it will probably be chaos unless I or someone I trust exerts a lot of relentless effort to make it a priority’. Left to itself Whitehall treats cross-departmental issues as battlegrounds for power and budgets — not to solve the ostensible thing — and really struggles to coordinate as if aimed at the same goal because they are not incentivised to. You can argue (as Wright does re the Transport Board) that a Cabinet minister in charge would have made coordination easier. Perhaps. And no doubt in that time this may well be true. But now the Cabient is already bloated and dysfunctional. Giving a minister responsibility rarely works on anything. This is why lots of jobs were given to Heywood — the Cabinet Secretary, having more actual power than a minister — can solve problems others cannot. But this is also not a solution, it’s a workaround for a broken system.

20/ It’s hard for Whitehall not to self-sabotage. After the Peace of Amiens Wickham’s intelligence office was dismantled and had to be rebuilt.

21/ While aspects of international law were respected, state necessity sometimes meant it was ignored. E.g 1/ Dundas persuaded the Cabinet in 1804 to agree the seizure of Spanish ships carrying silver to Cadiz from Mexico even though we were not at war and the seizure was illegal under international law. 2/ The Copenhagen operation. c/ No10 backed assassination plots against Napoleon.

22/ 1805 crisis. The inability of the Tsar, Austrian Emperor and Prussian King to coordinate politically and militarily in 1805 combined with Napoleon’s rapid manoeuvres to cause a series of disasters with Ulm (October) and Austerlitz (December), thus breaking the Third Coalition and leaving Britain again isolated and in deep trouble. And although Nelson saved us from invasion at Trafalgar, he died then Pitt died shortly after — our best statesman and our best admiral both gone.

23/ Power generates counter-coalitions. Napoleon had tremendous successes but these gradually created more and more people who were prepared to take risks to stop his growth. And whoever you are you never know when someone smart and determined secretly decides to start taking action to undermine you. Often after a great success, individual X is widely seen as incredibly powerful and at exactly this moment unseen people decide to try to bring them down. As Bismarck said, as you go through a political career you tend to create far more enemies than friends. (NB. I think this lesson is underrated by technical people working on AI. As individuals/companies like Sam Altman/OpenAI become more powerful, they are generating counter-coalitions. And so will AI agents they create.)

24/ Metternich had the same problem everyone has around power — power attracts people who want to influence power and this leads to intrigues, lies, lack of trust and cohesion, and chaos, unless the person with ultimate power enforces a different culture (formally and informally). Monarchies almost inevitably have the problem that they embody multiple power centres by design — such as religious, dynastic, state power — so a lack of clear structure is a feature. This problem can never be solved, it can only be more or less out of control.

• Sometimes the staff and the leader don’t know what they’re doing and generate intrigue and chaos.

• Sometimes the staff do know what they’re doing but the leader is too weak and/or useless to create a good team so together they still generate intrigue and chaos.

• Sometimes the staff know what they’re doing but the leader wants chaos among staff in the belief this strengthens their power (e.g Hitler, FDR, the Trolley).

• (The combination of a leader who knows what they’re doing and a staff that doesn’t is much rarer as by definition a leader with authority will upgrade staff. But sometimes the leader can be somewhat trapped by circumstances.)

25/ The biggest calculations of war are political, not military. E.g Napoleon’s decision to gamble va banque on the Russian invasion was, like Hitler’s decision to invade Russia and declare war on America, so immense in its consequences it swamped questions of relative military leadership and army quality. This is very much one of the big lessons of Alanbrooke.

26/ Serious problems persisted with press gangs and naval recruitment. It’s hard to see from Knight to what extent this was because a lack of innovative policy and how much was just inherent in the situation — i.e intense competition for skilled naval employment and competitive labour markets. It would be interesting to see a short summary comparing WW1 and WW2 on some of these issues to see whether the vastly bigger bureaucracies handled them better or worse.

27/ We should look carefully at the Alien Office and the inspection of boats in this war, WW1 and WW2 for tips on how to end the small boats farce.

28/ Parliament was a noisy battleground BUT it also ran many serious inquiries that exposed problems and forced change. It took evidence under oath. If you watch Parliament now, a) it ignores many crucial disasters (e.g procurement in covid and UKR, the dramatic failure of early warning in HMT autumn 2022), b) when it does investigate it does an abysmal job — MPs grandstand for cameras and almost never dig into the details effectively, c) they almost never take evidence under oath. The transition in quality of people in Parliament and the seriousness with which they devoted themselves to serious business is extraordinary.

29/ Elite talent is not uniform, some people are brilliant for some roles but not others. E.g Admiral Jervis (Lord St Vincent) was a brilliant admiral and naval strategist and leader. But people like this who are extremely tough and unforgiving are exactly what’s needed in a battle but can find it hard to work in the different atmosphere of Whitehall!

30/ Crucially the Pitt government supported major infrastructure building and simply bought off opposition — the Crown bought things and the Consolidated Fund compensated losers. THIS IS REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT AND AN ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL LESSON FOR TODAY WHEN WHITEHALL MAKES IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO BUILD ANYTHING!!

31/ Pitt gets most of history’s glory but we were also lucky to have Lord Liverpool and Perceval as PM. Mostly forgotten today but Wellington’s Peninsula campaign was strongly attacked. Liverpool stood firmly with Wellington for years despite a press campaign. Perceval was described by Canning as ‘The Pilot Who Weathered The Storm’.

32/ The aristocracy of the time had great privileges but paid with the blood of their children in these wars. The professional managerial class now takes a lot of privileges but is much less committed to sending their kids to the wars they start.

33/ British ministers did not write much about ‘strategy’. Now, we write endless ‘strategy’ documents that are not strategy — and almost nobody reads — but we do not do strategy. Presumably then, speeches to Parliament and Hansard are our best record of such thinking, given Cabinet was not minuted then?! Pitt, like General Groves, preferred to talk to people who understood details than to write long things about ‘strategy’.

34/ Napoleon’s vast losses in Russia 1812 then the Battle of Leipzig 1813 were critical. Only after this did a coalition stick together. Knight says that by 1815 he had lost the support of the French public (but does not provide evidence for this).

35/ Only when the harbour at Lisbon, made safe by the Torres Vedra Lines, could receive supplies reliably did Britain have a bridgehead on the Continent for Wellington to challenge Napoleon. Sending this army was unpopular and challenged in Parliament but Wellington’s successes gradually won support. The government deserves much credit for sticking with it.

36/ Knight argues that Napoleon’s disasters occurred when he was operating beyond the reach of his telegraph system: Copenhagen, evacuation from Lisbon, Portugal, Russia.

37/ The pressure of invasion, blockade, manpower shortages, finances etc pushed major changes to administration, transparency on accounts, removal of sinecures, patronage etc. Cf. the two lengthy parliamentary commissions of Naval Revision and Military Inquiry reporting 1806-12. Britain was astonishingly meritocratic and gave what now seems astonishing powers and freedom to young talented men. Our system now is moving in the opposite direction: fake meritocracy, fake responsibility.

38/ The uprising of the people of Madrid against the French rule in 1808 was crucial and its timing lucky. If it had happened a few weeks later, our army would have been in South America and we might never have heard of Arthur Wellesley!!

39/ This period saw the start of new attempts by regimes everywhere to control ‘public opinion’. Metternich, 1809: ‘Public opinion is the most powerful of all means; like religion, it penetrates the most hidden recesses, where administrative measures have no influence. To despise public opinion is as dangerous as to despise moral principles… Posterity will hardly believe that we have regarded silence as an efficacious weapon to oppose the clamours of our opponents, and that in a century of words!’

40/ The Tsar’s incompetent interference in the army was a recurrent problem and very hard to solve. Only once Napoleon had suffered the Russian disaster and Europe united in 1813 was this problem also solved and the Allies could cooperate much better militarily without the Tsar creating Austerlitz-like disasters.

41/ In the background of dealing with many problems Metternich had to deal in parallel with a wide cast of characters, including the Tsar, trying to get him fired. This problem is universal in politics and greatly underrated by hacks and politicians. It operates as a constant source of friction/entropy then often surges at the worst moments. The easiest way to minimise it is to be a certain sort of character who avoids putting their head above the parapet on difficult things — think Boris in War and Peace who brilliantly learns the ways of court politics. But if you train yourself to be like this you’re also training yourself to be the opposite of the sort of character who can do the decisive thing at the decisive moment. And whether you develop into one sort of character or another is, I think, little reflected on by certain types of character. They’re closer to programmed machines, and their last moments of ‘choice’ — before the internal heuristics were made permanent — might have been when they were ~17-25?

42/ From 1813 Metternich, learning from the disaster of 1792, went to great lengths to publicise that the war was against Napoleon not the people in order to ‘separate Napoleon still more from the nation and act on the mind of the army’. Note the difference with Ukraine where NATO unleashed a wave of anti-Russian media extending even to the likes of liberal historians like T Garton Ash celebrating Ukrainians burning Russian books and widespread calls to ban Russian from everything from music to chess events. This anti-Russian campaign has been replayed by Putin to Russians to strengthen his regime. This is the sort of big picture decision that is constantly taken by default without serious thought — thousands of officials many of which have read books about the French Revolution nevertheless default into an approach that is stupid and contrary to ‘lessons of history’ that could be learned if the institutions were structured to learn.

43/ The personal touch in diplomacy is often crucial. E.g Castlereagh did not trust Metternich, for good reasons, until they started working together from January 1814. But it was spending hours together and sharing confidences that quickly changed the relationship. This is partly about manners and temperament.

If readers are aware of definitive accounts of exactly why Napoleon decided a) not to invade Britain and b) to invade Russia, please leave links in comments.

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[To be hacked around as I go along…]

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