Leipzig 1813

Merveldt And His Mission— He Gets The Last Laugh

Those accounts do not look too kindly on the wily Westphalian, who had been a professional soldier for nearly 30 years---fighting from the Balkans to Italy to Germany to Poland and back to Saxony in 1813. His military career had even been interrupted for about a year in the early

1790’s when he served as a novice in a Teutonic Knights monastery. But those accounts neglect his extensive and successful history as a diplomat during the Napoleonic Wars. He had served the Hapsburgs at the Court of St. Germany and the rest of Europe. More important, those accounts barely recall his final assignment as Francis' special envoy to the Court of St. James after his release from French custody and Petersburg and in other assignments throughout

parole in 1814. Though he died just a few weeks after the tragic French calamity at Waterloo, his last duties brought great honors from the Hanoverian regime before his death--a strange enough occurrence for someone who just 18 months previously had been the subject of great mirth and ridicule After all, his capture by Poles on the first day of Leipzig was the source of snickering and derision. And the terms of his subsequent parole made it impossible for him to take arms up against the French for the remainder of the current conflict as the Napoleonic wars ended. But what really happened on October 16 to Merveldt, and what happened at Merveldt's meeting with Napoleon.  Francis I, Emperor of Austria and father-in-law to the Emperor of the French, Napoleon I, was terrified that he would again lose a war to the French. This would have been the fifth war lost in 16 years to Napoleon. This frightening fear was only amplified by the dreadful defeat at Dresden for the mainly Austrian Army of Bohemia just two months earlier. In addition, the Austrian treasury and demography were exhausted by not only the previous defeats, but the expensive experience of Schwartzenberg and his Austrian auxiliary corps with Napoleon in Russia just a year previously.  The English themselves, always interested in the long-term, were tired by the more than 20 years of almost continuous warfare—mainly subsidized by British pound sterling—on the continent. They were not pleased that Russia seemed invigorated and emboldened by every skirmish in Germany which brought them closer to the France and the English Channel. Perhaps, despite the bad taste left by the presence of General Bonaparte, the French needed to maintain a somewhat strong presence in Europe. France, after all, was a civilized nation, while Russia was clearly not and had the additional ignominy of being ruled by a power-hungry Czar who practiced both patricide and regicide. Recent ruminations by Marshal Enterprises have established the following hypothesis:

Marshal Enterprises

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