As regards diplomatic preparation for war, Alexander put little effort into mending fences with Britain. This partly reflected his wish to postpone the outbreak of war for as long as possible and deny Napoleon any legitimate justification for invading Russia. He also knew that the moment war began Britain would automatically become his enthusiastic ally so preparation was not necessary. In any case there was not much direct help that Britain could offer for a war fought on Russian soil, though the 101,000 muskets it provided in the winter of 1812–13 were to be very useful. In terms of indirect help, however, the British in Spain were doing far more than they had ever managed before 1808. The performance of Wellington and his troops had not just transformed perceptions of the British army and its commanders. In 1810 it had also shown how strategic retreat, scorched earth and field fortifications could exhaust and ultimately destroy a numerically superior French army. In 1812 Wellington’s great victory at Salamanca not only boosted the morale of all Napoleon’s enemies but also ensured that scores of thousands of French troops would remain tied down in the Iberian peninsula.
The key issue before 1812, however, was which way Austria and Prussia would go, but here Russian diplomacy faced a very uphill struggle. It is true that Rumiantsev, and probably Alexander, did not help matters by their stubborn determination to hang on to Moldavia and Wallachia. There were influential figures in Vienna who saw Russia as a greater threat than France because Napoleon’s empire might well prove ephemeral whereas Russia was there to stay. Probably, however, Austria would have swung into Napoleon’s camp whatever Russia did.
Francis II was embarrassed to have to own up to the existence of the Franco-Austrian military convention aimed against Russia, and all the more so because the terms of this convention had been discovered by Russian espionage in Paris. But he told the Russian minister, Count Stackelberg, that he had been forced into this convention by the ‘strict necessity’ to preserve the Austrian Empire; the same necessity, added Francis, which had led him to sacrifice his daughter to Napoleon. The basic point was that Austria had made a similar decision in 1810 to the one that Russia had made at Tilsit. Confronting Napoleon was too dangerous. Another defeat would spell the end of the Habsburgs and their empire. By sidling up to Napoleon Austria preserved its existence for better times. If the French Empire survived, so would Austria as its leading satellite. If on the contrary Napoleon’s empire disintegrated then Austria, having regained its strength, would be well placed to pick up many of the pieces. The main difference between Russia in 1809 and Austria in 1812 was that the Habsburgs were in a much weaker and more vulnerable position. For that reason the Habsburg war effort in support of Napoleon in 1812 was far more serious than the Russian campaign against Austria had been in 1809. Nevertheless the two empires did quietly maintain diplomatic relations throughout 1812 and the Austrians stuck to their promise made on the eve of the war never to increase their auxiliary corps above 30,000 men and to move their troops into Russia through the Duchy of Warsaw, keeping the Russo-Austrian border in Galicia neutralized.42
The Prussian situation was even clearer. King Frederick William loathed and feared Napoleon. All other things being equal, he would have far preferred to ally himself with Russia. But things were not equal. Prussia was surrounded by French troops who could overrun the country long before Russian help could arrive from the other side of the river Neman. In the king’s view, the only way in which Prussia could ally itself with Russia was if the Russian army surprised and pre-empted Napoleon by invading the Duchy of Warsaw. To be effective this would require Austrian assistance and Polish consent. To that end Frederick William urged Alexander to support the re-establishment of an independent Polish kingdom under a Polish monarch.43
