Alexander, however, did not share these reservations. Back in August 1812, when he had met Bernadotte at Åbo to negotiate their alliance, he had dangled before him the idea that if Napoleon were to be defeated, he, Bernadotte, might replace him as ruler of France. He had brought the matter up more than once since then, and encouraged Bernadotte to prepare the ground.
While Bernadotte adopted the role of king-in-waiting, he did not wish to spoil his chances in the event of a restoration of the exiled Bourbons, so he made contact with them, representing himself as a potential strong arm, a kind of French General Monck. Nor did he neglect to court French revolutionaries who loathed the Emperor in Napoleon and longed for a return to the republic. For their sake he posed as a latter-day Cromwell, and kept up secret contacts with various of the marshals across the battle lines. He released captured French officers on parole, hoping they would provide him with a sympathetic following in France. A natural braggart, he attempted to enhance his appeal by aping Murat in fanciful dressing up, particularly on the battlefield.
Bernadotte’s attempts to gain popularity were not crowned with much success. When his forces besieged Stettin, he had tried to win over the commander of the French garrison, but his efforts were met with insults. He was nearly hit by a specifically aimed shell as he inspected his outposts, and sent an angry protest (it was not done to try to kill enemy commanders in such inglorious ways), to which he received the reply that the gunner had spotted a French deserter riding along and had acted in accordance with regulations.
But he was encouraged by the support of Alexander’s former tutor, the Swiss philosopher Frédéric César de La Harpe, and by people such as the writer Madame de Staël, who had decided that he would make the ideal ruler for France, a new William of Orange who would introduce constitutional monarchy with a strong hand, and, at her prompting, by Benjamin Constant. ‘Remember,’ Madame de Staël wrote to Bernadotte from London on 11 October 1813, ‘that Europe depends upon you for its deliverance.’ His head swelled to such a degree that at one stage he actually suggested that he might take the title of Duke of Pomerania, which he had occupied, and as such assume the imperial crown of Germany if for one reason or another it did not go to either Austria or Prussia.12
Castlereagh was so alarmed by reports of Bernadotte’s waywardness that he instructed Stewart to go to his headquarters to keep an eye on him. Stewart’s reports only served to deepen that anxiety. General Pozzo di Borgo, whom Alexander had sent to Bernadotte’s headquarters, was shocked by the manner in which he was hedging his bets. When Pozzo had taxed him with this, ‘The scene that followed would have warranted calling a doctor,’ he reported to Alexander. ‘I do not believe that I have ever in my whole life had to make such an effort to remain silent as I listened to so much vulgarity, brutishness and nonsense.’13
The reports Castlereagh was receiving from his three envoys at allied headquarters confirmed his worst fears as to the fragile state of the coalition, which raised the possibility that some or all of the allies might make peace with Napoleon without Britain if it suited them. All his efforts had gone into binding them together with obligations not to do so. On 3 October Aberdeen had signed a treaty with Austria whose only specific clause excluded either party entering into any negotiations, talks, armistices, ceasefires or other suspensions of hostilities without mutual agreement. But that was not good enough for Castlereagh, who feared Metternich’s propensity for negotiating.14
In August Castlereagh had begun work on a project for a comprehensive treaty that would solve the problem once and for all. In a letter to Cathcart on 18 September he wondered whether ‘a greater degree of union and consistency may not be given to the Confederacy against France than results from the several Treaties which have been successively signed between the respective Powers’. He attached his ‘Project for a Treaty of Alliance Offensive and Defensive against France’, which he thenceforth referred to as his ‘grand design’.
This set out the principal allied war aims, and suggested inviting powers such as Spain and Portugal into the coalition. It not only proposed to make it illegal for any one of the contracting parties to withdraw from the alliance or enter into any communication with the enemy, but repeated the old recommendation of Czartoryski and Pitt that after the conclusion of peace a perpetual defensive alliance would be maintained for the preservation of that peace.15
In a second letter to Cathcart written on the same day, Castlereagh instructed him to show the project to Alexander first, stressing that Russia was Britain’s natural partner in such matters. He reminded Cathcart that Britain’s maritime rights must be kept out of the discussion, as, were they to become part of the general negotiation, the French would sooner or later seize on them with a view to splitting the coalition.16
Conditions were hardly favourable for any kind of diplomatic transactions, and the chances of pinning the allies down to anything as definite as Castlereagh’s ‘grand design’ were slight as the allied armies took the field and the three sovereigns and their ministers set off in their wake.
Metternich had improvised a mobile chancellery, the Reiseabteilung, with a number of assistants and secretaries in carriages followed by wagons with desks and chairs, papers, books, maps and even a printing press. The Russians had a similar outfit, but it had come under strain by this stage.
Alexander’s First Minister Admiral Shishkov was being bundled around in a carriage with two secretaries and no escort. ‘You cannot imagine how sad I am,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I am sick, I am terrified, and to cap it all, there is the weather! It is grey, misty and rainy, and the sky is covered from morning till evening with black and purple clouds, as though it were representing the horrors of war.’ One moment he would find himself alone on deserted roads fearing capture by the French, then he would run into a jam as he encountered the Tsar’s kitchen wagons or a concentration of troops. He often had to beg for a corner of some hut to sleep in. Count Ioannis Capodistrias, a Russian diplomat attached to the general staff and ordered to deal with all diplomatic problems raised by the campaign, found himself sharing roadside hovels with the Russian commander Barclay de Tolly. While the General worked on operational plans, the diplomat wrote out manifestos and memoranda on the same table.17
Aberdeen, who had succumbed to ‘a severe attack of Cholera morbus’, was appalled at the conditions and complained that even in the comparative safety of Toeplitz, which he described as a ‘vile hole’, they had to pack up everything each morning so as to be ready for a quick getaway in the event of a French attack. He was deeply distressed by the sufferings of the soldiers he saw all around him, but lifted his spirits by admiring the landscape and regaling his correspondents with plentiful dendrological observations.18
‘We cannot help laughing as we go about from the early morning in full dress, with swords, decorations and all our finery,’ noted Humboldt in a letter to his wife after a meeting with Metternich, explaining that if they did not wear full uniform at all times they would be pushed into the ditch by marching columns or trampled by the horses of cavalry. Humboldt was remarkably impervious to the carnage, and enjoyed the opportunity this haphazard existence gave him of indulging his taste for raddled whores and fat lower-class women. Metternich was also surprisingly