It is necessary to take into consideration all these difficulties in order to appreciate the rare abilities, the adroit adaptation of means to ends, the clever profiting by times and occasions, the bold bearing-up against powerful antagonists, the conquest over personal antipathies, which in a few years placed England—humbled to the lowest degree when Lord Castlereagh expired—in the highest position she ever occupied since the days of Lord Chatham; and, at the same time, ended by making the most unpopular man with the nation, and the most distasteful minister to the Sovereign, the people’s idol and the monarch’s favourite.
I have asserted that England was never in a more humbled position than at the death of Lord Castlereagh. I had myself the opportunity of seeing this illustrated in a private and confidential correspondence between Prince Metternich and a distinguished person with whom he was on terms of great intimacy, and to whom he wrote without reserve;—a correspondence in which the Prince, when alluding to our great warrior, who represented England at the Congress of Verona, spoke of him as “the great Baby,” and alluded to the power and influence of England as things past and gone.
It was, in fact, too true that all memory of the long efforts of twenty years, eventually successful in liberating Europe, had wholly lapsed from the minds of those military potentates, who having during war experienced every variety of defeat, appeared at the conclusion of peace to have recovered unbounded confidence in their arms.
The institutions which had nourished the pride and valour to which we had owed our victories, were daily denounced by the sovereigns in whose cause we had fought; and every new expression of opinion that came to us from the Continent, manifested more and more that Waterloo was forgotten by every nation but the French. Nothing, in short, was wanting to complete our degradation after the false and impudent conduct of M. de Villèle, but its disrespectful avowal; and painful and humiliating must have been the sentiments of an English statesman, when he read the speech of the French minister in the Chamber of Deputies, and found him boast of having amused our Government by misrepresenting the force on the Spanish frontier as merely a cordon sanitaire, until it was made to act as army of invasion.
VI.
The ground, however, which the sovereigns forming the Holy Alliance had now chosen for fighting the battle of principles, was not well selected by them for the conflict.
During the despotism of Ferdinand, it was never forgotten in this country, that those with whom he filled his prisons, those whose blood he shed, those of whose hopeless exile he was the cause, had fought side by side with our own gallant soldiers; were the zealous and valiant patriots who had delivered the land from which they were driven, and re-established the dynasty which their tyrant disgraced. Many, then, who disapproved of the new Spanish constitution, were disposed to excuse the excesses of freedom as the almost natural reaction from the abuses of absolute power.
Nor was this all. There has always been a strong party in England justly in favour of a good understanding with the French nation. On such an understanding is based that policy of peace which Walpole and Fox judiciously advocated—the first more fortunately and more opportunely than the last. But as no policy should ever be carried to the extreme, we have on the other hand to consider that the only serious danger menacing to England is the undue aggrandisement of France. Her proximity, her warlike spirit, her constant thirst for glory and territory, the great military and naval armaments at her disposal, the supremacy amongst nations which she is in the habit of affecting, are all, at certain times, threatening to our interests and wounding to our pride; and when the French nation, with the tendency which she has always manifested to spread her opinions, professes exaggerated doctrines, whether in favour of democracy or despotism, the spirit of conquest and proselytism combined with power makes her equally menacing to our institutions and to our independence. Her predominance in Spain, moreover, which unites so many ports to those of France—ports in which, as we learnt from Napoleon I., armaments can be fitted out, and from which expeditions can be sent against our possessions in the Mediterranean, or our empire in the Channel, or against Egypt, on the high road to our Indian dominions, has always been regarded by English statesmen with a rational disquietude, and on various occasions resisted with boldness, perseverance, and success; nor did it matter to us whether it was the white flag or the tricolour which crossed the Bridassoa when either was to be considered the symbol of ambition and injustice.