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the complete annexation of Holland would follow unless he agreed to obey Paris’s orders to the letter, and in general treated in a fashion that was as intimidating as it was humiliating. Realizing the only way out was to offer massive concessions, the king sought frantically to save at least something from the wreck, and on 16 March 1810 signed a convention that handed all of the country south of the river Waal to France and agreed that French troops should now be responsible for policing the Blockade. Yet even this was not enough, for by now Napoleon had almost certainly determined on the overthrow of his brother. A little time was bought by Louis offering to broker a peace with Britain: in brief, a Dutch banker with family connections in London was sent to warn the Perceval administration that Holland was on the brink of annexation in the hope that this would elicit an offer of negotiations. Yet Dutch independence was now such a meaningless concept that Perceval and his colleagues remained unmoved and, with their rejection of the Dutch mission, Napoleon finally fell on Louis with a vengeance. Hitherto Amsterdam had remained unoccupied, but after a minor affray in which the coachman of the French ambassador was set upon in the street, on 29 June French troops appeared outside the city demanding entry. Pushed to the limit, Louis wanted to fight, but his generals and ministers were more realistic: the capital, they argued, could not be defended even if the Dutch army had been in a better condition than was actually the case. There being only one other way out, on 2 July Louis abdicated and fled into exile in Bohemia, leaving his adoptive country to be annexed in its entirety.

The story of ‘Lodewijk the Good’, as he became known, reveals the futility of hoping that Napoleon would ever be anything other than a warlord or conqueror. Louis had made genuine efforts to get Holland to accept her place in the French imperium by persuading her that she had a place in the French imperium - that French control did not mean the complete loss of her independence or the complete neglect of her interests. The emperor, however, responded with a mixture of incomprehension and hostility, and, by the end, was openly accusing Louis of treason: according to Napoleon, Holland had become nothing more than an English colony. The fact was that Louis had been naïve and foolish in proceeding as he did. Nobody was more aware of this than his unfortunate queen, Hortense:

I could never understand . . . how the king could figure that he could rule as an independent sovereign and act in accordance with what he understood to be the good of the people he had been called to govern . . . It was assuredly a noble sentiment . . . but how could he set himself apart when all the sovereigns of Europe . . . had been forced to adopt the system of the conqueror? I said one day to one of his ministers who had come to me to complain of the severity of the emperor that . . . I was persuaded that my husband was ill-advised. Had he possessed a force that was capable of resisting the emperor, he could perhaps have separated the interests of Holland from those of France if he thought that was the right thing to do, but otherwise there was no option but to march shoulder to shoulder with her. In this fashion Holland, albeit at the price of a few more sacrifices, would one day find herself enjoying the benefits brought by territorial aggrandizement and the constant support of a powerful ally, whereas the contrary policy would simply irritate the emperor and lead him to annex a country that had not been following his orders.24

This sums up the dilemma of Napoleon’s siblings and the other satellite rulers to perfection. They could either choose the path of resistance or acquiesce in the emperor’s authority and surrender all pretence of representing the interests of their subjects. To put it another way, the emperor’s power recognized no limits.

That this was the case continued to be demonstrated as 1810 wore on. In part, this was the result of a growing crisis in