Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [116]
The Vice-Chancellor contended that any such concert would be a direct violation of their system of neutrality from which the emperor would not easily be brought; that it was a wise system not to talk before the means of supporting your language were proved to exist; that this country was not in a situation to go to war; that, although their present situation was unquestionably a bad one . . . it was not desperate, and that, by endeavouring to improve it a worse might, and probably would, succeed; that the French had 100,000 men in Italy; that their whole force now upon the coast might at a moment be equally turned on this country; that the Austrian army was at this moment upon the peace establishment, etc., etc. . . . These and similar arguments was I doomed to the pain of listening to . . . I never witnessed the display of so much ignorance, weakness and pusillanimity on the part of any individual calling himself a statesman.35
This was, needless to say, grossly unkind to Cobenzl. But in 1803 the fact remains that all the British could hope for from Vienna was that Austria might be prepared to enter another coalition with them when the circumstances were right - but this did not seem likely for a very long time. Francis II, the Archduke Charles, Cobenzl and Colloredo all agreed that war could only be considered after a long process of internal reform. The most obvious policy was simply to revive the bureaucratic absolutism of Joseph II to eradicate provincial and noble privilege, and mobilize the resources of all Francis’s dominions. But this was something that the emperor simply would not do. Temperamentally averse to interfering with the rights of his subjects, he also dared not risk a repeat of the turmoil of 1789-90. Reform, then, was inclined to be both gradualist and piecemeal. Denied the empire-wide system of conscription he wanted, for example, Charles had to content himself with reducing the length of service owed by men who volunteered for the army in the hope that this would produce more recruits. In the same way, a variety of fiscal reforms were introduced - there was, for example, a considerable rise in import duties - but the perquisites of the nobility were left untouched. Far from provinces such as Hungary being stripped of their privileges, Francis was forced to turn to them cap in hand. By means of its largely noble triennial Diet, Hungary had the right to set its own levels of taxation and conscription. In 1796 (the last occasion on which it had met) the Diet had rallied to the Habsburg cause and voted a subsidy of 4.4 million gulden, the dispatch of large quantities of supplies and an increase of 5,000 in the number of soldiers sent by Hungary to the regular army. This last move brought her quota up to 52,000 men, but as all the recruits concerned were volunteers, in practice this total was never met. In 1802, the Diet was summoned again after a break in 1799. Asked for 2 million gulden, the deputies agreed to grant Vienna less than half this figure, and would only make limited concessions on the issue of recruits for the army. To say that no progress was made in these years towards a revived Austria was unfair - the Archduke Charles did achieve a significant degree of reform in the field of the empire’s administration - but so slow was the rate of change that Britain was clearly going to have a long time to wait. Even as late as 6 August 1805, Minto was writing in his diary, ‘I hear that Austria has declared positively she will take no part in any confederacy against France, and assigns her total want of means as the motive of this conduct. I am sorry for it, thinking a continental war the only chance of terminating our difficulties, though even that chance may not be good. But the longer it is delayed, the worse prospect of success there will be as Bonaparte will increase his strength every year, and resistance may come at last