Gentz, D.I., ii. 70. "M. le Prince Metternich s'est rendu chez l'Empereur pour le mettre au fait de ces tristes circonstances. Depuis que je le connais, je ne l'ai jamais vu aussi frappé d'aucun événement qu'il l'était hier avant son départ."
Castlereagh, xii. 311.
Gentz, D.I., ii. 76. Metternich, iii. 395. "Our fire-engines were not full in July, otherwise we should have set to work immediately."
Gentz, ii. 85. Gentz was secretary at the Congress of Troppau, as he had been at Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. His letters exhibit the Austrian and absolutist view of all European politics with striking clearness. He speaks of the change in Richelieu's action as disagreeable but not fatal. "Ces pruderies politiques sont sans doute lâcheuses.... La Russie, l'Autriche, et la Prusse, heureusement libres encore dans leurs mouvements, et assez puissantes pour soutenir ce qu'elles arrêtent, pourraient adopter sans le concours de l'Angleterre et de la France un système tel que les besoins du moment le demandent." The description of the three despotisms as "happily free in their movements" is very characteristic of the time.
This is the system conveniently but incorrectly named Holy Alliance, from its supposed origination in he unmeaning Treaty of Holy Alliance in 1815. The reader will have seen that it took five years of reaction to create a definitive agreement among the monarchs to intervene against popular changes in other States, and that the principles of any operative league planned by Alexander in 1815 would have been largely different from those which he actually accepted in 1820. The Alexander who designed the Holy Alliance was the Alexander who had forced Louis XVIII. to grant the Charta.
Castlereagh, xii. 330.
Metternich, iii. 394. B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1160. Gentz, D.I., ii. 112. The best narrative of the Congress of Troppau is in Duvergier de Hauranne, vi. 93. The Life of Canning by his secretary, Stapleton, though it is a work of some authority on this period, is full of misstatements about Castlereagh. Stapleton says that Castlereagh took no notice of the Troppau circular of December 8 until it had been for more than a month in his possession, and suggests that he would never have protested at all but for the unexpected disclosure of the circular in a German newspaper. As a matter of fact, the first English protest against the Troppau doctrine, expressed in a memorandum, "très long, très positif, assez dur même, et assez tranchant dans son langage," was handed in to the Congress on December 16 or 19, along with a very unwelcome note to Metternich. There is some gossip of another of Canning's secretaries in Greville's Memoirs, i. 105, to the effect that Castlereagh's private despatches to Troppau differed in tone from his official ones, which were only written "to throw dust in the eyes of Parliament." It is sufficient to read the Austrian documents of the time, teeming as they do with vexation and disappointment at England's action, to see that this is a fiction.
Had Ferdinand's first proposals been accepted by the Neapolitan Parliament, France and England, it was thought, might have insisted on a compromise at Laibach. "Les Gouvernements de France et d'Angleterre auraient fortement insisté sur l'introduction d'un régime constitutionnel et représentatif, régime que la Cour de Vienne croit absolument incompatible avec la position des États de l'Italie, et avec la sûreté de ses propres États." Gentz, D.I., ii. 110.
Gentz, Nachlasse (P. Osten), i. 67. Lest the reader should take a prejudice against Capodistrias for his cunning, I ought to mention here that he was a man of austere disinterestedness in private life, and one of the few statesmen of the time who did not try to make money by politics. His ambition, which was very great, rose above all the meaner objects which tempt most men. The contrast between his personal goodness and his unscrupulousness in diplomacy will become more clear later on.
Colletta, ii. 230. Bianchi, Diplomazia, ii. 47.