The highwater-mark of the activity of the Allies as a central government
for Europe was reached at the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (q.v.) in
1818. France was now admitted to the Alliance, the objects of which were
reaffirmed by a public declaration to which she adhered; but at the same
time a secret treaty renewed the compact of Chaumont between the four
other powers. Certain questions outstanding from the congress of Vienna
were referred for settlement to a ministerial conference to meet at
Frankfort in the following year. The treaty which was the result of this
conference was signed on the 20th of July 1819. The bulk of it was
concerned with territorial settlements in Germany: between Austria and
Bavaria, and Bavaria and Baden; but some of the articles arranged for
the cession of the border fortresses Philippeville and Mariembourg to
the Netherlands, defined the frontiers of Savoy, and settled the
reversion of the Italian duchies held by the empress Marie Louise.
Alexander I. of Russia and Metternich.
Congress and protocol of Troppau, 1820.
Meanwhile the balance of forces within the European concert had shown a
tendency to shift. At the outset the restless activity of the emperor
Alexander, his incalculable idealism, and his hardly veiled ambitions
had drawn Austria and Great Britain together in common suspicion of an
influence that threatened to be little less disturbing to the world's
peace than that of Napoleon. But at Aix Metternich had begun to realize
that, in the long-run, the system of repression which he held to be
essential to the stability of the European, and above all of the
Austrian, polity would receive little effective aid from Great Britain,
fettered as she was by constitutional forms; while Alexander, alarmed at
the discovery of revolutionary plots against his person, had already
shown gratifying signs of repentance. The "Jacobin" propaganda of the
tsar's agents continued, it is true, especially in Italy; and, in spite
of the murder of the dramatist Kotzebue, as a Russian emissary, by the
fanatical "Bursche" Karl Sand, Alexander joined with Castlereagh in
protesting against the reactionary policy embodied in the Carlsbad
Decrees of October 1819. But the murder of the duke of Berri on the 13th
of February 1820 completed the Russian autocrat's "conversion." At the
congress of Troppau, which met in the autumn of the same year, he was a
"changed man," committed henceforth heart and soul to Metternich and his
policy. The outcome of this new understanding was the famous Troppau
Protocol, published to the world on the 19th of November 1820, and
signed by Austria, Prussia and Russia. The immediate occasion of this
manifesto was the military insurrection, under General Pepe, at Naples,
by which the Spanish constitution of 1812 had been forced on the king
(see NAPLES: _History_). But the protocol embodied a general principle
involving issues infinitely more important than any arising out of this
particular question. "States which have undergone a change of government
due to revolution," it declared, "the results of which threaten other
states, _ipso facto_ cease to be members of the European alliance, and
remain excluded from it till their situation gives guarantees for legal
order and stability. If, owing to such alterations, immediate danger
threatens other states, the powers bind themselves, by peaceful means,
or if need be by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of
the Great Alliance."
This was, in effect, an attempt to apply the principle of the Carlsbad
Decrees to all the world; and, had the attempt succeeded, all Europe
would have been turned into a confederation on the model of that of
Germany; for a political alliance, charged with the safeguarding of the
territorial settlement defined by treaty, would have been substituted a
central diet of the great powers, armed with undefined authority; and
the sovereign independence of the nations would have been at an end. To
any such principle, and therefore to the protocol in which it was
embodied, Great Britain offered an uncompromising opposition. In vain
Metternich urged upon Castlereagh that the protocol was but the logical
conclusion drawn from premises to which he was already committed; for,
if the alliance was to be effective in maintaining peace, it must
interfere wherever and whenever peace should be threatened, and
therefore to crush internal revolutions which could not but have an
external result. The logic was perfect; the proposition that on which
every "project of peace" must eventually break. Castlereagh's reply was,
in brief, that Great Britain could never admit a principle which she
would not in any circumstances allow to be applied in her own case.
First rift in the alliance.
Congress of Laibach, 1821.
The absence of the signatures of Great Britain and France from the
Troppau protocol marked the first rift in the alliance, a rift that was
soon to develop into a breach. For the time, indeed, the crack was
"papered over." Castlereagh was prepared to leave Austria a free hand to
deal with the risings in Naples and Piedmont, since she had treaty
rights in the former case and her interests, as an Italian power, were
threatened in both. Great Britain was even represented at the congress
which reassembled at Laibach in January 1821, though Lord Stewart, the
ambassador at Vienna, was not armed with full powers. Castlereagh had
approved of the invitation sent to the king of Naples to attend the
congress, as implying "negotiation," an improvement on the dictatorial
attitude of the protocol. But everything in the conferences tended still
further to shatter the unstable foundations of the alliance. Capo
d'Istria, as though the debates of Aix-la-Chapelle had never been,
raised once more the spectre of the "Universal Union" which Castlereagh
believed he had laid for ever. Metternich, anxious to prove to the
Italian Liberals that the tsar was no longer their friend, welcomed the
demonstration, and Prussia followed obediently in Austria's wake. "It is
clear," wrote Lord Stewart, "that a Triple Understanding has been
created which binds the parties to carry forward their own views in
spite of any difference of opinion which may exist between them and the
two great constitutional governments." (See TROPPAU and LAIBACH.)
Effect of revolution in Spain.
Congress of Verona, 1822.
But the narrower "Holy Alliance" of the three autocratic monarchies, as
opposed to the two western constitutional monarchies, was not in fact
destined to take shape till after the Paris revolution of 1830. Several
factors delayed the process, notably the revolt of the Greeks against
the Ottoman rule, and the Spanish question, which latter formed the main
subject of discussion at the congress of Verona in 1822. In the Eastern
Question the interests of Austria and Great Britain were identical; both
desired to maintain the integrity of Turkey; both saw that this
integrity was in the greatest peril owing to the possible intervention
of the Orthodox tsar in favour of his co-religionists in revolt; and
both agreed that the best means of preventing such intervention was to
bind the Russian emperor to the European concert by using his devotion
to the principles of the Holy Alliance. At Verona, however, the Eastern
question was entirely overshadowed by that of Spain, and in this matter
the views of Great Britain were diametrically opposed to those of the
other powers of the alliance. She shared indeed with France and Austria
the strenuous objection to the emperor Alexander's proposal to march
150,000 Russians into Piedmont in order to deal with Jacobinism whether
in France or Spain; but she protested equally strenuously against the
counter-proposal of France, which was ultimately adopted, that a French
army should march into Spain to liberate the king from his
constitutional fetters in the name of Europe. George Canning, carrying
on the tradition of Castlereagh, once more protested, through
Wellington, as British plenipotentiary at the congress, against the
whole principle of intervention; and when, in spite of the British
protest, the other powers persisted, the breach of Great Britain with
the continental alliance was proclaimed to all the world. When, on the
7th of April 1823, the French army under the duke of Angouleme crossed
the Bidassoa, the great experiment of governing Europe through a central
committee of the great powers was at an end. (See VERONA, CONGRESS OF;
ALEXANDER I.; LONDONDERRY, ROBERT STEWART, 2ND MARQUESS OF; CANNING,
GEORGE.)