Cesare Ambrogio San Martino d'Agliè

Cesare Ambrogio San Martino, Count of Agliè (7 December 1770 – 14 January 1847) was an Italian diplomat, considered one of the leading exponents of the foreign policy of the Kingdom of Sardinia during the Restoration period. He was appointed on several occasions to the post of first foreign secretary and represented the Kingdom of Sardinia in England for twenty-five years, from June 1812 to July 1837.

Biography

Cesare Ambrogio San Martino d'Agliè was born in Turin, the son of Giuseppe Gaetano and Luisa Grimaldi di Boglio. He embarked on an ecclesiastical career by becoming a cleric, graduating in theology, and then entering the Theological College of the Royal University of Turin. He was a gentleman of the chamber of Cardinal Vittorio Maria Baldassare Gaetano Costa d'Arignano. Abandoning priestly life he entered as a clerk in the Secretariat of State for Foreign Affairs, then headed by the knight Clemente Damiano di Priocca, where he met and became a friend of the Latinist Carlo Boucheron.

After the fall of Piedmont under French rule he moved to England, where his cousin, Philip St. Martin d'Aigliè Count of Front, was minister plenipotentiary to the King of Sardinia at the court in London. Upon the Count of Front's death in 1813, he replaced him at the head of the legation, signing the Anglo-Sardinian Convention on the Royal Piedmontese Legion on February 3, 1814. Considered a strong Anglophile, on Lord Castlereagh's departure for the Congress of Vienna he gave the latter several memorials that greatly favored the interests of the House of Savoy. Thanks to his interest, contingents of the Sardinian Armada took part in the Seventh Anti-French Coalition, and secured Liguria for the Kingdom of Sardinia.

He belonged to a group of Piedmontese politicians who, not in favor of constitutional ideas, would nevertheless have wanted to replace the Kingdom of Sardinia with the Austrian Empire in the dominance of northern Italy, as they did not consider the justification to foreign rule of the strategic necessity invoked by the Austrians to be sufficient. He showed no enthusiasm about the system established by the Congress of Vienna, which he considered oppressive to smaller states. On the eve of the outbreak of the revolutionary uprisings of 1821, he went so far as to consider the real evil to be foreign domination over Italy rather than the revolutionary agitation brought about by it.

Leaving for the Congress of Laibach in December 1820 he accepted, as representative of the King of Sardinia, the views of Foreign Minister Filippo Antonio Asinari di San Marzano, a man considered distinctly anti-liberal. His role at the congress was entirely secondary, as Tsar Alexander I requested the official presence of San Marzano's Foreign Minister. In 1821 he was sent on an extraordinary mission to Naples, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and then returned to London. On January 17, 1831 King Charles Felix awarded him the Collar of the Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, but in the following years he was uncomfortable with the new directions given, from 1835, to the kingdom's foreign policy desired by King Charles Albert and Count Clemente Solaro della Margarita, his Foreign Minister.

In July 1837, following a diplomatic incident, he was asked to resign his post as ambassador to London and replaced by Count Antonio Nomis di Pollone. His last official dispatch from the British capital was dated September 7, 1837. He was briefly considered for appointment as minister plenipotentiary in Florence, but, because of his demeanor considered unkind to Charles Albert after his return to Piedmont, he was permanently retired and excluded from any other post. He died in Turin on January 14, 1847.

Honors

• Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, Knight (17 January 1831)