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By Root 2740 0

army, a rising among the Croats of the old ‘military frontier’, and a small British naval squadron that took the ports of Trieste and Fiume. And in the Kingdom of Italy, the staunchly loyal Eugène de Beauharnais had rejected an attempt on the part of his father-in-law, King Maximilian of Bavaria, to get him to change sides, but had none the less been forced to retreat to the Piave river, thereby abandoning large expanses of territory and with them much manpower and revenue. And finally in Naples Murat was supposedly mobilizing his army to assist Eugène, but he was known to be extremely pessimistic and stories were circulating that he was trying to negotiate a deal with the Allies.

The situation, then, was very bleak, but as evidence of Metternich’s desire to keep Napoleon on the throne of France, in the wake of the battle of Leipzig there arrived one more peace offer. We come here to the so-called Frankfurt memorandum. Not surprisingly, the triumph of the Allies was viewed with little enthusiasm by the Austrian chancellor. Those in the allied camp who wished to see the overthrow of Napoleon had naturally been encouraged by the results of Leipzig, while Metternich feared that it would whip up support for German nationalism, and all the more so as Stein had come west from Königsberg in the hope of promoting revolution. To deal with this situation, Metternich negotiated a series of bilateral agreements with states such as Baden and Württemberg that safeguarded their independence in exchange for their accession to the allied cause, and at the same time pressurized Alexander into demoting Stein’s putative German government to a mere control commission whose authority was restricted to those areas like Saxony (whose monarch paid the price of not going over to the Allies in April) that had no legitimate government. But the crucial issue was to put an end to the war, and this was also the only means of saving Napoleon. What was needed was a new peace offer - and one that was very generous. France, Metternich now suggested, should be offered the frontiers of 1797 complete with Belgium and the Rhineland. In this he was supported by a Nesselrode as alarmed by Stein’s ‘Jacobinism’ as he was, and this in turn produced the agreement of Alexander I. There was a degree of calculation here - the tsar seems to have believed that Napoleon would again reject a deal and thereby legitimize the continuation of the war. Much more surprising was the behaviour of the British ambassador to Austria, Lord Aberdeen. Young and inexperienced, he had been severely shaken by what he had seen at Leipzig and, without consulting any of his fellow envoys, therefore gave his assent to the new terms as well, even though they left several important British goals completely unredeemed.

Whether the proposed settlement would ever actually have been ratified is impossible to say. But in the circumstances it was the best that Napoleon could hope for. Instead of the prompt agreement that was the most realistic response, however, there came mere temporizing. According to the envoy who brought him the terms, the emperor wanted peace and was prepared to abandon Spain and recognize the collapse of the Confederation of the Rhine on condition of a guarantee of Dutch neutrality and the preservation of the Kingdom of Italy in its present form. However, his written response was much less forthcoming. Napoleon refused to comment on the terms at all, and merely proposed fresh peace talks. This was not enough. The Frankfurt memorandum had caused fury in the British camp - ‘Metternich . . . I consider one of our greatest enemies,’ wrote Sir George Jackson82 - and Cathcart and Stewart therefore pressed hard for the terms to be withdrawn or at least for their discussion to be postponed until a special plenipotentiary of real stature could be sent out from London. In practice, then, the proposals lapsed. Such a plenipotentiary was duly sent out in the person of no less a figure than Lord Castlereagh, but by then the allied armies had pushed on to the Rhine, and with every step they