to the Principal Private Secretaries are Plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Undersecretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.’ ‘Can they all type?’ asks his mystified minister. ‘None of us can type, Minister,’ replies Sir Humphrey, ‘Mrs McKay types – she is your secretary.’
The demands of nineteenth-century diplomacy also meant that protocol was further codified, and treaties became longer. Rules were even needed to keep the diplomats apart. Foreign Secretary George Canning duelled with his Cabinet rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, making today’s National Security Council debates seem somewhat tame. A gifted poet, songwriter and speechwriter, Canning had also shown himself an accomplished warmaker, whose belief that ‘we are hated throughout Europe, and that hate must be cured by fear’ would gladden the hearts of many modern Eurosceptics.3 Napoleon had also been happy to ignore the gentlemanly codes of diplomatic immunity and throw British envoys in jail for espionage. But after his fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established a more robust system, for the first time regulating a profession of diplomacy that was distinct from politics and statecraft.
The congress took place against an inauspicious backdrop. Russian Cossacks were on the Champs-Élysées, trying to prevent Napoleon from making another comeback. His reckless ambitions had shattered borders and destroyed institutions. Europe was threatened by decades of conflict and uncertainty, so the powers that had defeated him – Russia, Great Britain, Austria and Prussia – invited the other states of Europe to send their representatives to Vienna. All despatched heavyweight statesmen, the titan diplomats of their age who had spent, or were to spend, decades at the top of the international system.
Austria fielded Prince Klemens von Metternich, a former ambassador to Prussia and France. By this stage diplomacy was firmly established as a sound profession for the upwardly mobile nobility – Metternich’s father and son were also in the family business. Metternich’s relationship with Napoleon must have been complex – he had arranged Napoleon’s marriage to an Austrian princess, but also made the career-threatening mistake of publicly arguing with him at Napoleon’s thirty-ninth birthday party. He also numbered Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat among his numerous lovers, their trysts taking place in what is now the British ambassador’s Residence in Paris, then home of her more scandalous sister Pauline.† Metternich had previously entered a bizarre agreement barring him from diplomacy while his father-in-law was alive. I suspect this is unique among pre-nuptial deals. Like many diplomats of the age, he spoke better French than his native language, and left illegitimate offspring in most of the capitals in which he served.
Britain sent Lord Castlereagh (who had wounded Canning in the thigh in their duel, but escaped unscathed himself). His destructive tendencies were not limited to Cabinet colleagues – he would slice his own throat several years later, after suffering from a mental breakdown and gout. Castlereagh was a principal architect of the system of rolling congresses agreed at Vienna. He divided people in death as in life, prompting Lord Byron to pen the poisonous epitaph ‘Posterity will ne’er survey, A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh, Stop, traveller, and piss.’
Prussia sent Karl August von Hardenberg, a former chancellor, more austere perhaps than some of the other rogues around the table, and seen by his contemporaries as too regularly outfoxed by Metternich. Tsar Alexander I, a manipulative autocrat who had succeeded his assassinated father at the age of twenty-three, represented Russia himself, not trusting anyone else to defend his corner. Like George W. Bush almost 200 years later, he would hold prayer meetings with his foreign policy advisers before taking key decisions.
France, the defeated power, sent Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was to be the star of the show. A former bishop with a justified reputation as a womaniser, he had been prevented from taking his family birthright because of the social embarrassment of a deformed leg. Instead he turned his restless talents to statecraft, with zeal. He had managed by hook or by crook to serve Napoleon and the regime he had deposed, making him ideally suited to the intrigue and drama of the congress. At Vienna, through diplomatic cunning, he prevented the partition of France and repositioned himself in French politics as the saviour of his country.
Talleyrand also saw commercial and personal opportunity – he demanded payment from other states for his services, employed the celebrity chefs of his day, and ate and drank prodigiously. He used to hold meetings in his bedroom so that he could press the advantage of his warm bed over his cold, standing interlocutors. Through guile and skill he turned a weak hand into an advantage. When the king of Saxony challenged France as ‘one of those who have betrayed the cause of Europe’, Talleyrand countered with panache, ‘That, sire, is a question of dates.’
This eclectic array of characters gathered at the end of summer 1814 to reorganise the internal boundaries of Europe, and establish a common position on the abolition of the slave trade, the role of royal families across the continent, navigation of rivers and a new German confederation. A massive agenda, by any standards. There cannot ever have been such a colourful and scandalous cast list at any international conference in history, until perhaps the Big Three summits that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt bestrode at the end of the Second World War. Few could have survived the media spotlight of the twenty-first century. They make modern diplomatic events seem particularly lame, austere and genteel.
There is no collective noun for diplomats, though people might think up a few when cities are clogged by motorcades, or in Vienna’s case cavalcades. Inevitably, matters of diplomatic precedence and protocol featured heavily in their deliberations. Seating plans alone were feverishly contested, as the leaders competed for influence and power. Hundreds of representatives, and a supporting cast of mistresses and flunkies, were lavishly entertained for months in the capital. To complicate their task, Napoleon escaped from his exile in spring 1815 to retake the French throne, and the powers had to break off their deliberations in order to defeat him again and despatch the vanquished autocrat to distant St Helena.
The negotiations were tortuous. The British wanted to retain the ‘balance of power’ of the preceding century, to ensure future Napoleons could not disturb the equilibrium, and to protect their domination of the seas. Prussia wanted more territory. Austria needed to play off the allies against each other, in order to contain the Russian threat. Russia wanted to use religion to bolster the positions of the continent’s monarchs and to keep the Turkish sultan in check.
Coming to decisions in this context was hard work. Voting was out of the question, given the belief of most royal participants that they had a divine right to be there, and that there could be no question of sharing sovereignty. In reality, as with so many conferences, the key players had stitched up the process in advance. Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to form an inner circle of negotiations, with other players consulted when necessary, and ideally not at all. Talleyrand saw the danger, and put himself vociferously at the head of those excluded, managing to delay the start of the conference with his histrionic protests of injustice. All four of the big players calculated that they could use France as a counterbalance to their opponents within the inner circle, and so expanded their core group to include the wily Frenchman. Once in the gang, Talleyrand dropped all his demands for issues to be tackled in a larger group, and converted elegantly to the concept of a great-powers deal. This was realpolitik at its most brazen and effective.
Recognising the advantage of being pen-holder, much treasured to this day in the British and French missions to the United Nations and European Union, Castlereagh drafted the most important clause, a mutual-support pact in the face of revolution. Through a conference that lasted months, a new European order was born, with key business now to be managed by the five great powers – Great Britain, Russia, France, Prussia and Austria. This big-power stitch-up was the forefather of the modern United Nations Security Council, where China and the United States have replaced Prussia and Austria.
Unlike previous peace conferences, the architects of the 1815 congress were less concerned with punishing the transgressor – in this case France – than