Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/208

 200 April Wellington and the Congress of Verona^ 1822 IN 1917 I delivered a paper before the Royal Historical Society* on the position taken up by Wellington at the Congress of Verona. In that paper I put forward a theory which I thought likely to be true, because it was coherent and because it was the only way which I could discover of reconciling apparently hope- less contradictions. Very briefly that theory came to this, that Wellington fell so much under the influence of Mettemich as practically to substitute an Austrian policy for a British policy at the congress, and that this assumption carries with it the inevitable corollary that the Congress of Verona cannot there- fore be said to have opened up a new era in British foreign policy. Now there are undeniably certain facts with which this theory does not seem at first sight compatible ; and within the narrow limits of that paper, I could not be expected to answer those obvious and formidable objections. What I shaU attempt to do here is to show that these objections are not really inconsistent with the theory I have adopted, and that properly understood they may even support it. Now the real difficulty of accepting that theory lies in this, that at first sight it seems impossible to reconcile it both with Wellington's three protests of 30 October, 19 November, and 20 November, and in a lesser degree perhaps with the repeated exhortations which he addressed to the French ministers as to the dangers to which France was exposed on the side of Spain from a military invasion of that country. These are the main objections, and no one who has studied the history of these times will be inclined to belittle them. I shall attempt to reconcile our theory with these discrepancies by showing first that the famous protest of 30 October was for all practical purposes withdrawn ; secondly, that the protests of 19 and 20 November appear to have been written partly with the object of providing a substitute for the paper of 30 October, and partly with the intention of throwing dust in the eyes of parliament ; and thirdly, that so far from doing all that in him lay to thwart the French in their
 * Transactions of the Boyal Historical Society, 4th ser., L 69-76, 1918.