Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

Nor is this all: the knowledge that M. de Talleyrand had recognised, and even been concerned in establishing, the new dynasty, had no slight influence on the opinion formed of it in other courts, and might be said more especially to have decided our own important and immediate recognition of it. He himself was then offered the post of minister of foreign affairs, but he saw it was more difficult and less important than that of ambassador to St. James’, and while he refused the first position he accepted the last.

VI.

The choice was a fortunate one. No one else could have supplied the place of M. de Talleyrand in England at that juncture; he knew well and personally both the Duke of Wellington and Lord Grey, the chiefs of the opposing parties, and it was perhaps his presence at the British court, more than any other circumstance of the time, which preserved, in a crisis when all the elements of war were struggling to get loose, that universal peace which for so many years remained unbroken.

With a firm conviction, indeed, of the necessity of this peace, he took the best and only course for maintaining it. An ordinary diplomatist is occupied with the thousand small affairs passing through his hands, and the thousand ideas of more or less importance connected with them. M. de Talleyrand’s great talent, as I have more than once said, was in selecting at once in every affair the most important question of the moment, and in sacrificing, without delay or scruple, whatever was necessary to attain his object with respect to that question.

He saw that the peaceful acceptance of the Orleans’ dynasty could be obtained, and could only be obtained, by being on good terms with England. A quarrel with us was an European war; a good understanding with us rendered such a war unlikely, almost impossible. Belgium was the especial question on which all earlier negotiations turned, and on which the amity of our government depended. That country, smarting under many real, and irritated by the thought of many fancied, grievances, had thrown off the Dutch yoke. The Dutch troops, who with a little more vigour might have been victorious, had retreated, beaten, from Brussels; the frontier fortresses were in the hands of the insurgents, and it is no use disguising the fact that there was, is, and ever will be, a considerable party in France in favour of extending the French frontier, and comprising Antwerp within the French dominions. England, however, was not then disposed, and probably will not at any time be disposed, with statesmen caring for the safety of their country, to submit to this. She had, in fact, as I have said at the peace of 1814, provided especially, as she thought, for the safety of the Netherlands, by the amalgamation of the Belgian and Dutch provinces into one kingdom, and by the fortresses which she had built or repaired for protecting that kingdom.

This policy was now overthrown, and could not be reconstructed without exciting the warlike and excited spirit of the French people. On the other hand, we could only make a limited sacrifice to French susceptibility and ambition. Much skill then was necessary on the part of all persons, but more especially on the part of the French negotiator, to avoid any serious wound to the interests of the one nation, or to the feelings of the other. There was a call, in short, for the steadiest discretion without any change of purpose; and all through the various phases of those long negotiations, by which jarring questions were finally composed, M. de Talleyrand warily persevered in his plan of planting the new government of France amongst the established governments of Europe through its alliance with Great Britain.

The establishment of conferences in London was one of the most artful of the measures adopted with this end. Here the ambassador of Louis Philippe was brought at once, and in union with the Cabinet of St. James’, into almost daily and intimate communication with the representatives of the other great powers. A variety of misrepresentations were removed, and a variety of statements made, not merely useful for the questions which were especially under discussion, but for the general position and policy of the State which the veteran diplomatist represented.

The quadruple alliance—an alliance of the western and constitutional governments of Europe—was, in fact, a mere extension of the alliance between France and England, and a great moral exhibition of the trust placed by the parties themselves in that alliance. With this remarkable and popular compact—a compact which embodied the best principles on which an Anglo-French alliance can be formed—the diplomatic career of M. de Talleyrand closed. He felt, as he himself said, that there “is a sort of space between death and life, which should be employed in dying decently.”

The retirement of Lord Grey removed from the scene of public affairs in England that generation which, long accustomed to the reputation of a man who had filled half a century with his name, treated both himself and his opinions with the flattering respect due to old remembrances. To the men of the new government he was, comparatively speaking, a stranger. The busy time of their career he had passed in seclusion from affairs. They considered him, in a certain degree, as antiquated and gone by: a sentiment which he was keen enough to detect, and sensitive enough to feel deeply.

His opinions, indeed, became somewhat embittered by certain affronts or negligences of which, during the latter part of his embassy, he thought he had to complain; and, after his retirement, it is said that he rather counselled his royal master to consider that the advantages sought for in an alliance with England were obtained, and that the future policy of France should be to conciliate other powers.