When the armies of Revolutionary France had occupied the Dutch Republic in 1795, the head of state, the Stadholder William V, fled across the Channel, to spend the last ten years of his life as an exile at Kew. Shortly after his death, his son William, who had taken service in Prussia, was taken prisoner by the French at Auerstadt in 1806. Napoleon recognised his title of Prince of Orange and granted him a pension in order to neutralise him and undermine his standing in England. The French-dominated Dutch Republic, renamed the Batavian Republic in 1795, was turned into the kingdom of Holland in 1806, with Napoleon’s brother Louis as King. When Louis proved to be too good a Dutchman, Napoleon deposed him and in 1810 incorporated the kingdom into France.
While the Prince of Orange lived on a French pension, his son, also named William, studied at Oxford and then went on to serve against the French in the Peninsular War under Wellington. This suited Liverpool and Castlereagh, who envisaged restoring the house of Orange to a strengthened Holland after the defeat of Napoleon. In the spring of 1813 the Prince of Orange, referred to by the British as the Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands, was back in London. That summer Castlereagh began planning a rising in the Netherlands to coincide with the advance of the allied armies, and formed up an Orange Legion, mainly from French prisoners of Dutch nationality. At the same time plans were made for the marriage of the Sovereign Prince’s son, known as the Hereditary Prince, to the British Prince Regent’s daughter Princess Charlotte, who was just under eighteen years old.
The Netherlands
She was a tall, fresh-looking girl, a little on the massive side. She was intelligent but poorly educated. Her upbringing had been bedevilled by the atrocious morals of her father and the vagaries of her mother, compounded by their quarrels and the break-up of their marriage. She could be unruly and stubborn, and her behaviour often shocked by its lack of decorum and restraint.
When the match was first suggested to her, she was not overjoyed. She had known ‘Silly Billy’, as she called him, since childhood, and felt little in the way of love for the short, skinny young man he had grown into. But her father managed to convince her of the advantages of the match, and on 12 December 1813 she had given her consent.
By then the Hereditary Prince was in the Netherlands, commanding the British and Dutch forces operating against the French. His father was also in the country. In his desire to strengthen the future Dutch state, Castlereagh envisaged turning it into a monarchy. This went against Dutch political tradition, as the Netherlands had been a republic before the French invasion. But circumstances appeared to favour Castlereagh’s plans. ‘The Prince is a Sovereign, nobody knows how, but everyone considers him as such,’ William’s First Minister Gijsbert van Hogendorp wrote to Castlereagh in November 1813, at the same time asking him to resolve the question of his future status. ‘It is of course solely up to the Nation to make him a Sovereign, but his title is subject to agreement between the Powers.’2
Castlereagh encouraged the Prince to occupy Belgium (formerly the Austrian Netherlands) as the French were forced to abandon it, and discreetly extend his rule over it. Having been assured by the Prince that the Belgians would welcome Dutch rule, Castlereagh, whose knowledge of the area was limited to the study of maps, foresaw no problems. He was however realistic enough to dismiss as outdated the proposal put forward by Hogendorp that Britain take Dunkirk for herself in order to possess a military base on the Continent, as she had before the fall of Calais in 1558.3
Castlereagh did not linger in The Hague. He had already wasted enough time on the Channel crossing and he was eager to get on. So, after discharging his business with the Sovereign Prince, he set off again on 9 January 1814. He left most of his party behind in The Hague, despite angry protests from his wife, whose mind was set on accompanying him. His mission would take him through dangerous territory, lately the theatre of war, infested with deserters who had turned bandits and regular troops who were often little better, and roamed by Russian irregular cossacks eager for loot. There could be no question of exposing Lady Castlereagh and her young charges to such dangers.4
Castlereagh, Planta, Robinson, Montagu and their various servants clambered into four travelling coaches and set off. Desperate to make up for lost time, they covered the distance of nearly 1,000 kilometres between The Hague and Bâle at breakneck speed, only stopping for the night once. It was a gruelling experience. ‘My dearest Em,’ Castlereagh wrote from Münster on 13 January, ‘We arrived here this morning at 8 o’clock, having travelled without a halt since we parted. The roads for the last forty miles have been dreadfully bad – worse than a ploughed field frozen. The servants’ coach broke down, which has given us some hours in bed whilst they were coming up in a country wagon. The last twenty English miles took us 101/2; hours and I only marvel at how our English carriages could bear it.’
They made for Paderborn, Cassel and then Frankfurt, where they arrived two days later, and from where Castlereagh complained to his wife that ‘our bones are a little sore’ and that ‘German dirt is beyond the worst parts of Scotland’. He may have been exaggerating the discomfort in order to demonstrate his wisdom at dissuading her from making the trip with him. ‘Robinson and I have hardly ever seen any other object than the four glasses of the carriage covered with frost which no sun could dissolve, so that we were in fact imprisoned in an icehouse for days and nights, from which we were occasionally removed into a dirty room with a black stove smelling of tobacco smoke or something worse,’ he continued.5
Two days later, from Durlach, he was able to report that there had been a thaw, and indeed that he had found time when they passed through Frankfurt to go out and buy her some ‘finery’. That night, at a post-house, he met Gentz, who had just come away from headquarters and was on his way back to Vienna. The next day, 18 January, he reached Bâle, having taken fifty hours to cover the last 350 kilometres from Frankfurt in freezing conditions.
His appearance at Bâle caused something of a sensation. He was kitted out in a curious blue tailcoat covered in braid of a kind not seen on the Continent since the 1780s, a pair of bright scarlet breeches and ‘jockey boots’. One of his attendants was decked out in what looked like a hussar uniform, and ‘appeared to have put his shirt on over his coat’, while Planta ‘does nothing but flourish about with a long sword and a military cloak’, according to one witness. ‘Castlereagh is a pretty man, with a calm, thoughtful and earnest manner,’ Humboldt wrote to his wife the following day, greatly amused by the contrast between the Austrian, Prussian and Russian diplomats, all uniformed, booted and dripping with decorations, and Castlereagh, who in his gold-braided blue coat, red waistcoat and breeches, and white silk stockings, ‘resembled nothing so much as a footman’.6
Alexander had left for headquarters. Before going he had told Cathcart that he wanted to be the first to talk to Castlereagh, and requested that he refrain from holding any discussions with others. Castlereagh had no intention of complying. The next morning at 10 o’clock he called on Metternich, with whom he spent two hours. At midday Metternich had to attend a conference, but the two met again at 4 o’clock over dinner, hosted by Aberdeen and