Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/586

 578 WELLINGTON AT VERONA October it is difficult to see how even a Castlereagh could have prevented them doing so. What Wellington could do he did : as far as intervention in Spain was concerned, his function at the congress was to be ' an objection and an obstacle ^ and Mettemich's outburst to Neumann is a measure of how well he played the part. He was doomed to defeat from the beginning, but he could, and did, hamper the proceedings of his opponents at every stage. It has been suggested ^ that he made a bad mistake in taking Montmorency's ' simple dire ' of 20 October at more than its literal meaning and answering it as though it embodied an aggressive policy. Mettemich and the Prussian representative, it has been pointed out, who were as anxious as Wellington to avert war, were scrupulously careful to treat the paper as what it pretended to be, purely defensive. But it must be remembered that their ultimate aims were very different from those of Welling- ton, that he wanted to avert action of any kind, while they looked upon the ' simple dire ' as a good opportunity to put forward their views as to joint diplomatic intervention at Madrid. Further, the answers of Austria and Prussia rested entirely on the supposi- tion that France might be forced into hostilities against Spain by the action of the Spanish revolutionaries, while if Wellington admitted this supposition as being in the least likely, he largely weakened his own repeated assertions that the Spanish revolution was not dangerous.* In the extraordinarily complicated state of the Spanish question ^ it may well have been not the least advisable course to force the Austrian and French ministers into the open and make them deal with facts as they were instead of with a purely hypothetical position such as that presumed by Montmorency in his * simple dire '. It is true that Wellington failed in all his efforts to avert intervention in Spain ; his task was perhaps too big for him. But his resis- tance to the powers' proposals impressed most of his contem- poraries so strongly that it has been seriously suggested that his raising of the question of the Spanish colonies was a cunning piece of diplomacy meant as a counterblast to the unacceptable decision of the congress to withdraw the allied ambassadors from Madrid.^ This was not the case, but it adds another item to the mass of evidence which goes to prove that, though he made some mistakes,* » Netteraent, vi. 273. - Green in Tranmctiona of the Royal Hist. Soc., 1918, p. 69. ' Memoir on the Observations of the French Minister respecting Spain (Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches, sec. u, i. 501 ; also below, Mettemich to Neumann). « See Wellington's dispatch of 29 October 1822 (Wellington, Supplementary Di«' patches, sec. u, i. 460). Treitachke, Oeschichte Deutschlands, i. 491). Montmorency via Madrid and Paris {ante, p. 205 n.). This, however, was almost
 * Letter of Chateaubriand of 28 November 1822 (Villele, iiL 248 ; also vide
 * £. g. the information given to a Spanish agent at Verona, which leaked back to