Lord Aberdeen, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Sir Robert Peel's Cabinet, had held the same office in the government of the Duke of Wellington. He had had to deal, as will be remembered, with the question of the recognition of Louis Philippe and with the attitude which England was to observe towards the revolution in Belgium. His first experience of diplomacy had been gained in the days of the great war. In 1813, as quite a young man, he had been sent upon a special mission to Vienna, and had been concerned in the negotiations which had resulted in the entry of Austria into the coalition. During the campaign in Germany he had accompanied the headquarters of the allied armies and had been profoundly impressed by the scenes of which he had been a witness. Whether justified or not, the belief prevailed widely that, should complications arise, the spectacle of Leipsic after "the battle of the nations" would be ever present before the eyes of England's Foreign Secretary.[713] With regard to the more important questions which the Foreign Office had in hand, or with which it had recently been called upon to deal, Aberdeen was in substantial agreement with Palmerston. He approved of his policy in the Egyptian affair and endorsed his views as to the necessity of encouraging Spain to shake off the influence of France. But he was at the same time intensely desirous of replacing Franco-British relations upon their former intimate footing, and of allaying the irritation which the Treaty of July had aroused. To attain this end he was prepared to make far greater concessions than any to which Palmerston would have consented. No one was so convinced as he of the truth of the saying, ascribed to the Duke of Wellington, that the peace of Europe would remain unbroken, so long as France and England were united. It was not in their policies, but in their personal characters, that lay the real difference between Aberdeen and Palmerston. Aberdeen was by nature conciliatory. Palmerston was instinctively combative, and would rarely deny himself the pleasure of relentlessly exposing the fallacies of an opponent's arguments. Aberdeen, although in some respects more of a Liberal than his predecessor, had a scholar's abhorrence, which had been intensified by his former relations with Metternich and other continental statesmen, of all movements of a revolutionary character. Palmerston was a man of coarser fibre, but of wider sympathies, than his grave and studious successor.