Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment, and pride were tolerated in the earlier part of his life with amusement on account of the affection he could inspire; later they were regarded with ill ease, and at last with a sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence could entrap no matter what combination of antagonists. This intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures are invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria Theresa.
He was older than his Empress by some seven years; there lay between them just that space which makes for equality and comprehension between a man and a woman. The year of her marriage had coincided with that of his own; he had come at twenty-five to the court of this young sovereign of eighteen. She had recognised—with a wisdom that never failed her long and active life—how just and general was his view of Europe, and it was from this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted to his genius. He had already studied in three universities, had refused the clerical profession to which his Canonry of Munster introduced him, and had travelled in the Netherlands, in France, in England, and in Italy, where he was made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the palace.
His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. It was but four years after Maria Theresa’s marriage and his own that she succeeded to the throne and possessions of the Hapsburgs: then it was the sudden advent of Prussia, to which I have alluded, began the great change.
Maria Theresa’s succession was in doubt, not in point of right, but because her sex and the condition in which her father had left his army and his treasury gave an opportunity to the rivals of Austria, and notably to France.
Europe was thus passing through one of those crises of instability during which every chancery discounts and yet dreads a universal war, when the magazine was fired by one who had nothing to lose but honour. Frederick of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of Maria Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the integrity of her possessions, and suddenly invaded them.
From the ordering of that march of Frederick’s into Silesia—from the close, that is, of the year 1740—Kaunitz, a man not yet in his thirtieth year, was at work to repair the Empire and to restore the equilibrium of Europe. Upon the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the complete modern transformation of society has made such causes seem remote, yet (as it is the thesis of these pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously preserved the unity of Europe.
In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved the interests of Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. At Florence, at Rome, at Turin, at Brussels, his mastery continued to increase. In his thirty-sixth year he was ambassador to London—he concluded, as we have seen, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; by his fortieth he had been appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly be remembered had begun. He had seen, as I have said, the necessity for an alliance between the two great Catholic Powers. Within the two years of his residence in Paris he had successfully raised the principle of such a revolution in policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A task which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated it to others, one which would have seemed impossible even to those whom he might have convinced, was achieved. To his lucid and tenacious intellect the matter in hand was but the bringing forth of a tendency already in existence; he saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the circumstances of his time; his business was but to define and realise it.
In such a mood did he take up the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was well fitted for the work he had conceived. The magnificence which he displayed in his palace in the French capital was calculated indeed to impress rather than to attract the formal court of Versailles; that magnificence was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious household were well suited to those whom he had designed to capture. The French language was his own; Italian, though he spoke it well, was foreign to him; the German dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His habits were French, to the end of his long life French literature was his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, must come from the hands of the French.
MARIA THERESA
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE AND RECENTLY RESTORED
TO VERSAILLES