Congress of Laibach

Emperors Alexander I of Russia and Francis I of Austria were present in person, and with them were Counts Nesselrode and Capodistria, Metternich and Baron Vincent; Prussia and France were represented by plenipotentiaries.

Britain, on the ground that she had no immediate interest in the Italian question, was represented only by the Lord Stewart, the ambassador at Vienna, who was not armed with full powers, his mission being to watch the proceedings and to see that nothing was done beyond or in violation of the treaties.

Metternich was anxious to secure an apparent unanimity of the powers to back the Austrian intervention in Naples, and every device was used to entrap the British representative into subscribing a formula which would have seemed to commit Britain to the principles of the other allies.

Finally, he was forced to an open protest, which he caused to be inscribed on the journals, but the action of Capodistria in reading to the assembled Italian ministers, who were by no means reconciled to the large claims implied in the Austrian intervention, a declaration in which as the result of the intimate union established by solemn acts between all the European powers the Russian emperor offered to the allies the aid of his arms, should new revolutions threaten new dangers, an attempt to revive that idea of a universal union based on the Holy Alliance against which Britain had consistently protested.

The issue of the declaration without the signatures of the representatives of Britain and France proclaimed the disunion of the alliance; within which, to use Lord Stewart's words, there existed a triple understanding which bound the parties to carry forward their own views in spite of any difference of opinion between them and the two great constitutional governments.