When M. de Montmorency, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, went to the Congress of Verona, he was the bearer of positive instructions containing these very words:
"France being the sole Power which is to act with her troops, she will be the sole judge of that necessity. The plenipotentiaries must not consent that the Congress should lay down the conduct of France with regard to Spain."
Led away by the generosity and elevation of his sentiments, which sometimes assumed a tinge of mysticism, to embrace a policy in which the private initiative of each nation should disappear before the decisions taken in common by a sort of directorate of the Great Powers charged to secure the universal prevalence of the interests of justice and humanity, the loyal and chivalrous Mathieu de Montmorency had been induced to demand that Russia, Austria, Prussia and France should address a final notice to Spain, after which the ambassadors were to be recalled. M. de Villèle declared himself against this collective action, in the council of ministers held at the Tuileries on the 25th of January 1822. He claimed the right of France to intervene alone. Louis XVIII. sided with his opinion, and declared that "France occupied a special position towards Spain; that for her to recall her ambassador was either too much or too little;" then he added:
"Louis XIV. destroyed the Pyrenees, I will not allow them to be set up again; he placed my House on the Throne of Spain, I shall not allow it to fall from it; my Ambassador must not leave Madrid before the day when a hundred thousand Frenchmen are pushing forward to take his place."
To speak in this way was to separate the action of France from that of the other Powers; M. Duvergier de Hauranne does not hesitate to admit this[495]. It was to disown M. de Montmorency; he forthwith resigned his office. He had wished to make the Spanish question an European question; with Chateaubriand, his successor, it became a French question. At this the head of the British Cabinet, Mr. Canning[496], displayed a profound irritation. The hostility of England did not stop the Government of Louis XVIII.:
"Keep up a high tone with the English ministers," wrote Chateaubriand, on the 16th of January 1823, to M. de Marcellus, France's representative in London.
"Say and repeat to Mr. Canning," he wrote again in a dispatch dated 28th January, "that we are as anxious for peace as he, and that England can obtain it before the opening of the campaign, if she will hold the same language as ourselves and demand the liberty of the King. But be sure to add that our decision is taken, and that nothing will make us go back."
And on the 13th of March 1823:
"Mr. Canning is angry with me for not yielding to his threats and casting France at the knees of England. He cannot go to war, he has not so much as one half a plausible reason for doing so, he feels this, and he is piqued at having gone so far. But war or no war, France will do what she must do, or I shall cease to be minister..."
And, in a postscript:
"Give parties, and answer Mr. Canning firmly."