Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/219

 1920 CONGRESS OF VERONA, 1822 211 troupes fran5aises commandees par le due d'Angouleme. Le due de Wellington communiqua en outre au comte Lieven, en lui demandant le secret le plus absolu, les lettres du ministre d'Angleterre a Madrid, Lord FitzRoy Sommerset, qui faisaient la description de la situation interieure de I'Espagne. (Rapports du corate Lieven du 13 (25) fevrier et du 4 (16) mars 1823.) ^ On the prospects of a French invasion of Spain, Wellington wrote, ' The Spanish bubble will burst and there will be no mili- tary resistance at all '. ' The French will be successful in their military operations as far as they can carry them.' ^ Two things at any rate seem clear. Conversations were held at Verona relating to French military operations in Spain, and Wellington joined in these conversations. It was natural for him to have done so. All of us delight in our profession and love to discuss our art. The blame does not lie with Wellington in yielding to an infirmity common to man, but with those who selected him for the work of the congress. In anticipating and, as I hope, in helping to remove these objections, we have incidentally disclosed some of the grounds we have for supposing that Metternich's policy prevailed over Canning's at Verona. How indeed can we deny the collapse of British diplomacy and the accompanying French intervention in Spain in the spring of 1823 ? How get away from the knowledge that 'our protests were treated as waste paper' and 'our remon- strances mingled with the air ' ? And how can we explain these things in any other way ? For there were only two obstacles in the way of a French invasion of Spain. The one obstacle was the uncertainty of military operations ; the other obstacle was the fear of Great Britain. On both, Wellington seems to have leassured the allies. From the mouth of the greatest soldier in Europe, whose every syllable on military matters was worth its weight in gold, they seem to have been told of the easy campaign which lay before them ; nor were they disposed to deny to Wellington in the inner circles at home the exercise of that imposing influence which he wielded abroad. J. E. S. Green. » Wellington, Suppl. Desp. ii. 64, 1867. Also Suppl. i. 521, 557, 563. See also certain passages in Politique de la Restauralion, Brussels, 1853, containing the corre- spondence between Chateaubriand and Marcellus, the young French charge d'affaires in London, e.g. letters of 3 May, 3 and 6 June 1823, pp. 129, 166, 169. Les Tablettes Universelles, no. 40, of 27 August 1823, rather supports Marcellus. The author, Guizot, asks if Canning was deceived at Vienna, Verona, and Paris. P2
 * Martens, TraiUs conclus par la Russie, xi. 395-6, 1895.