NESSELRODE, Charles Robert (1780-1862), long foreign minister of Russia, was born at Lisbon, where his father was Russian ambassador, in December 1780. Like so many other Russian statesmen and soldiers, he was sprung from German ancestors settled in Livonia. He entered early upon a diplomatic career, and at the age of twenty-five was attached to the Russian embassy in Paris. When the alliance of Tilsit was breaking down, Nesselrode was recalled to St Petersburg, and during the events that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia he rose high in the favour of the czar Alexander. From the time when Romanzoff, the advocate of a peace-policy, was dismissed, Nesselrode was employed in all the great diplomatic transactions of his master. He was present, though not as a plenipotentiary, at the congress of Prague, and signed the treaty of Chaumont, in which the allies pledged themselves to continue the struggle against Napoleon, if necessary, for twenty years. In the negotiations as to the future of France, both in 1814 and 1815, he seems to have encouraged the czar in his policy of moderation. At the congress of Vienna his duties were shared by Capodistrias, and a certain rivalry existed then and afterwards between the two statesmen. In Capodistrias the czar found more sympathy both with his own earlier liberal tendencies and with his religious sentimentality. In the subsequent congresses of Troppau and Laibach, when Metternich, as the champion of European conservatism, set himself to repress any sympathies that the czar might have for constitutional rule in Naples and for Greek independence, it was with Nesselrode that he allied himself; Capodistrias, a Greek and a man of more modern ideas, was now treated as a dangerous person, and ultimately had to retire from office. ...