¹ Further letters by Frederick Lamb to Viscount Gastlereagh are published in: Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, second Marquess of Londonderry, edited by Vane, Charles William, Marquess of Londonderry, 12 vols, London 1848–1853Google Scholar; cf. volume 12: 29 May 1820, p. 268; 26 June 1820, pp. 272–278; 21 September 1820, pp. 320–322; 24 March 1821, pp. 374–379.

² Wilhelm I.

³ Johann Rudolf Graf von Buol-Schauenstein.

⁴ The Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach had submitted the constitution of 5 May 1816 to the Bundestag to be guaranteed. Although the constitution of the Bund at that time made no provision for such a thing, and Metternich had initially rejected the notion of expanding the Bund's powers in this way, the Bundestag eventually approved Weimar's application in a decision of 13 March 1817, in view of its elevated position within the system of European states.

⁵ Graf von Eyben.

⁶ Leopold Engelke Hartwig von Plessen.

⁷ Günther Heinrich von Berg.

⁸ On the right to declare war and conclude peace cf. art. 35 of the Vienna Final Act (as a composite power the Bund has the right to declare war, and to conclude peace, alliances including treaties etc. but, according to art. Q DBA [Deutsche Bundesakte], only for self-defence and to maintain the independence and external security of Germany); also, esp. arts. 39–42 of the Vienna Final Act (concerning the action to be taken by the Bund in case of attack by a foreign power), art. 43 (concerning the protection of individual states of the Bund), arts. 48 and 49 (concerning cease-fires and the conclusion of peace).

⁹ August Friedrich Graf von der Goltz.

¹⁰ This was the Inner Council, which consisted of seventeen members and was responsible for matters concerning the Bund. Eleven states (Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg, Baden, the Electorate of Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt, Holstein, and Luxemburg) had individual votes; the remaining six votes were shared as group votes between a number of states: the Saxon grand duchies and duchies (12th vote), Brunswick and Nassau (13th vote), the two Mecklenburgs (14th vote), Oldenbourg, the three Anhalts, and both Schwarzburgs (15th vote), the two Hohenzollern, Liechtenstein, all the Reuß, Schaumburg-Lippe, Lippe and Waldeck (16th vote), and Lübeck, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Hamburg (17th vote). The Inner Council decided issues by simple majority voting. In the event of a tie, the chairman (the Austrian presidential envoy) had the casting vote. In addition to the Inner Council, there was the General Assembly of the Bundestag, which was responsible for certain matters affecting the Bund. It differed from the Inner Council only in the distribution of votes. An important feature of the distribution of votes in the Bundestag was that Austria and Prussia could not outvote the middling and smaller states, either in the Inner Council, or in the General Assembly.

¹¹ Hans Christoph Ernst Freiherr von Gagern.

¹⁸ On 13 March 1815 the King of Württemberg announced a constitution on the basis of his princely power of decision. Thereafter he submitted it for approval to a gathering of the Estates specially convened for the purpose. A majority of this gathering rejected the constitution, regarding it as a new-fangled imposition, and insisted on the ‘good, old law’ of the traditional Württemberg Estates. This unleashed a four-year struggle in which reactionary positions were defended against a modern constitutional state.

¹³ Johann Adam Freiherr von Aretin.

¹⁴ This refers to the secular imperial princes who lost their unmediatized status when the Reich came to an end. Thereafter they were in a mediatized legal relationship with the Reich. The aristocracy who were mediatized in 1806 and later were guaranteed certain privileges in the Act of the German Confederation of 1815 (art. 14).

¹⁵ Under the terms of the Peace of Lunéville (1801) Bavaria, which had been occupied by French troops since 1800, had to cede the Rhine Palatinate and Jülich to France. Under Napoleon, however, Bavaria grew to become the largest of the middling German states: in the period 1803–10 it gained the ecclesiastical principalities of Augsburg, Eichstätt, Freising, Regensburg, Passau, and Bamberg, the imperial towns of Lindau, Kempten, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Nördlingen, Rothenburg, Schweinfurt and others, numerous Abbeys, the Prussian margravates of Ansbach-Bayreuth, Vorarlberg, Tyrol, and Salzburg, and the Inn and Hausruck quarters. The last five were given back to Austria, for which Bavaria received the following as compensation at the Congress of Vienna: Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, and the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine.

¹⁶ Art. 13 of the Act of the German Confederation reads: ‘All states of the Confederation will have a constitution based on the provincial Estates.’ This imposed the duty to introduce constitutions in the individual states. The public understood this to mean that the states were to create a representative system, if possible with two chambers, consisting of a parliament with legislative and tax-raising powers. However, art. 13 neither named a date by which these constitutions were to be in place, nor defined what the term actually meant. Nor was the composition of the provincial Estates explained, nor how they were to be chosen, what powers they were to have, or whether they were to be representative bodies based on the traditional Estates, or modern parliaments. In this way the Act of the German Confederation refrained from interfering in the constitutional autonomy of its member states. The Vienna Final Act (art. 54) again made it clear that individual states had a duty to issue a constitution. Between 1820 and 1829, however, the Diet of the German Confederation did nothing to remind negligent governments of their legal obligations, especially as the list of those who had not fulfilled their constitutional duties was headed by Austria and Prussia.

¹⁷ Between 1794 and 1814 all the former imperial territories that lay west of the Rhine from Cleve in the north to the Swiss border in the south were under French rule. They included the archdioceses of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, the dioceses of Worms and Speyer, the Electorate of the Palatine, the duchies of Cleve, Geldern, Jülich, Simmern, and Zweibrücken, and the imperial towns of Aachen, Cologne, Worms, and Speyer, as well as various other small territories.

¹⁸ Enclosure: Extract from a Hanau Paper (29 November 1817).

¹⁹ Johann Rudolf Graf von Buol-Schauenstein.

²⁰ The Confederation of the Rhine was founded in 1806 on the instigation of Napoleon and under his protection. Initially encompassing sixteen princes from southern and western Germany, including Bavaria, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Baden, it was intended to consolidate the French rule of western Germany. By 1808 Würzburg, Saxony, and other small states in central and northern Germany had joined, and the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia was declared a member state in 1807. The members of the Confederation of the Rhine declared themselves sovereign states and formally severed their ties with the Holy Roman Empire. As allies of France, they had to supply contingents of troops for Napoleon's campaigns. In return, they were elevated to a higher rank, and in some cases their states were enlarged at the expense of the smaller imperial states. Most of the members of the Confederation of the Rhine adopted the French Civil Code, and introduced reforms on the French model. The Confederation of the Rhine fell apart when most of its member states joined the Prussian-Russian-Austrian alliance during the wars of liberation.

²¹ The Landwehr was a general, armed militia of able-bodied men whose task was to protect the country.

²² Enclosures: Tableau de la Population et de l'armée de ligne de la Confederation Germanique, avec la division en corps d'armée / Proposition de l'Autriche sur les fondamentaux de l'organisation de la force armée et de la défensive de la Confederation Germanique.

²³ During the period of French rule, the Jews of Frankfurt had been granted civil rights, but after the collapse of the Napoleonic hegemony, these had been withdrawn immediately. Thereupon a struggle broke out about the legal status of the Jews. Lasting almost a decade, it was not settled until 1824, and the Bundestag played an important mediating function.

²⁴ Article 16 DBA [Deutsche Bundesakte] promised negotiations on improving the legal position of the Jews in Germany, and guaranteed the rights granted to them by individual states (that is, not by the French rulers).

²⁵ Each individual state of the German Confederation had its own regulations governing the production and distribution of goods, raised its own customs barriers, and even levied transit duties on goods which were not being imported into, but merely transported through its territory.

²⁶ Not traceable.

²⁷ Article 19 DBA [Deutsche Bundesakte] promised that the General Assembly would negotiate on trade and transport, including shipping, between the various states of the confederation.

²⁸ Ludwig I.

²⁹ Cf. note 14 of this section.

³⁰ As the Act of the German Confederation provided only a brief outline of the conditions under which the German states had come together in a confederation, the various German governments attended ministerial conferences in Vienna from 25 November 1819 to 24 May 1820 in order to flesh out the confederal constitution. The result of these negotiations was the Vienna Final Act of 15 May 1820, which was adopted unanimously by the General Assembly of the Frankfurt Diet as federal law on 8 June 1820.

³¹ Town in northern Moravia. Setting of a large European congress, held from 20 October to 20 December 1820, at which the Great Powers discussed revolutionary movements, especially in Spain, Portugal, and Naples-Sicily.

³² Friedrich Landolin Karl Freiherr von Blittersdorf.

³³ The Five Power Alliance between Austria, Prussia, Russia, England, and France, which had come into being in 1818, was closely entwined with the Holy Alliance in organizational terms. By contrast to the Holy Alliance, however, of which it was not a member, England had a predominant position within the Five Power Alliance. The Five Power Alliance, for example, convened the congresses of Troppau, Laibach, and Verona, conducted their proceedings, and determined their outcomes. The Five Power Alliance subscribed to the aims of the Holy Alliance, that is, to preserve the legal status quo within and between the European powers.

³⁴ Prussia's adoption of free trade in its Customs Law of 26 May 1818 was bitterly opposed by Duke Ferdinand of Anhalt-Köthen, and led to a customs conflict between Prussia and Anhalt. This was exacerbated in June 1820 by the Friedheim incident, which gave Anhalt-Köthen cause to appeal to the Bundestag. On the instructions of the authorities in Anhalt, Friedheim, a merchant, refused to pay the excise tax demanded by the Prussian customs office at the Saxon border on the cargo of a ship going to Anhalt. When the customs authority impounded his ship, Anhalt-Köthen complained to the Bundestag and demanded that the Bund instruct Prussia to return the ship, arguing that the Prussian customs system by which imports passing through Prussia attracted not transit duty but a higher import duty was illegal. Anhalt's aim was to bring down the whole of Prussian customs policy by demonstrating that it was in contravention of the Bund. The Bundestag's attempts to mediate failed. Finally, Prussia freed the ship on 1 January 1822, when the dukes of Anhalt signalled their willingness to compromise at the end of the conference concerning navigation on the Elbe. Nevertheless, Anhalt tried to continue the conflict as a matter of legal principle. The Bundestag, however, rejected this, and on 7 May Anhalt-Köthen formally withdrew its claim. Both parties attempted to put an end to the customs conflict by negotiating a compromise.

³⁵ The law concerning the investigation of subversive activities passed as part of the Carlsbad decrees provided for a central political commission of investigation to be set up. Known as the Mainz (Mayence) Central Investigation Commission, it was intended to uncover the conspiracy that was assumed to be behind Sand's assassination of Kotzcbue.

³⁶ The newspapers in the individual German states enthusiastically commented on the revolutionary movements and constitutional struggles which took place between 1820 and 1822 in Spain and Italy. The General Assembly of the Bund, therefore, attempted to gain an overview of the reporting through its Press Committee. It found the Teutscher Beobachter and its views on Spain particularly obnoxious. This newspaper was therefore banned and its editor, S.G. Liesching, was not permitted to work as a political newspaper editor for five years.

³⁷ Another congress of the European powers concerning the revolutions that had broken out in southern Europe took place in Verona in 1822. At it, France was charged to intervene in Spain. However, England and its new Foreign Secretary, George Canning, distanced itself from this policy.

³⁸ Joachim Graf von Münch-Bellinghausen.

³⁹ Heinrich Luden.

⁴⁰ August Heinrich Freiherr von Trott auf Solz zu Imshausen.

⁴¹ Karl Theodor Freiherr von Dalberg.

⁴² The 1824 law concerning the equality of Jews as private citizens represented a new legal stage. Although the Jews regarded this law as a success, it still imposed a number of economic restrictions on them. For example, Jews were prevented from entering several branches of industry. Only a certain number of Jews were licensed to trade as merchants. They were also prohibited from taking public office.

⁴³ Enclosure: Verordnung die Feststellung der privatbuergerlichen Rechte der hiesigen Israeliten betreffend.

⁴⁴ George IV.

⁴⁵ Wilhelm II.

⁴⁶ Wilhelm August Heinrich Belgicus.

⁴⁷ Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler.

⁴⁸ After the foundation of the Central German Commercial League [Mitteldeutscher Handelsverein] in 1828, Prussia negotiated with Bavaria and Württemberg about merging the customs unions that had also existed since 1828 between Prussia and Hesse-Darmstadt, and Bavaria and Württemberg. This happened not long after.

⁴⁹ At the Vienna Conferences of 1820 at which the constitution of the Bund was drawn up, navigation had also been a subject of negotiation. In the pre-railway age, shipping was the most important form of goods traffic. Since the Rhine had been under French domination, navigation on the river had been free, and it was in the interests of the Germans as well as of Europe as a whole that when national sovereignty was reasserted over the Rhine and the other large waterways, navigation continued to be free. Legal guarantees for freedom of navigation on the Rhine were the subject of treaty negotiations between the states through which the river flowed (France, Prussia, Baden, Bavaria, Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau, and The Netherlands). They culminated in the Rhine Navigation Act of 31 March 1831.

⁵⁰ Peter Joseph Freiherr von Eichhoff.

⁵¹ Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Stralenheim.

⁵² The central German states met at the Cassel Conference, where the Central German Commercial League [Mitteldeutscher Handelsverein or ‘Mittel-Verein’] was founded on 24 September 1828. It was joined by Saxony, Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse, Brunswick, Nassau, the Thuringian duchies and principalities, and Bremen.