• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2656 0

to reduce the financial value of the new territory, while it was a further three months before the final terms of the transfer of power were negotiated, and even then Napoleon refused to ratify the so-called ‘Act of Cession’ that resulted. Sent into Hanover anyway, Jerome’s officials found their every action undermined by the French civil and military authorities and the electorate’s revenues seized from under their noses. Before the end of the year the situation had grown still worse. Oldenburg and the Hanseatic states did not in themselves constitute a contiguous block of territory, so when Napoleon seized them in December 1810 he rounded them out by taking the northern half of Hanover too. For Jerome it was a catastrophic blow - the territory involved included some of the richest in the entire kingdom - and one that could not but suggest that the whole of Westphalia might go the way of Holland. Nor was this the end of it: irritated by Bavaria’s inability to suppress the Tyrolean, revolt of 1809, Napoleon handed the Trentino over to the Kingdom of Italy, while the Swiss frontier district of the Valais (since the emperor’s settlement of Switzerland an independent republic) was annexed by France on strategic grounds.

To return to Alexander I, angered though he may have been by Napoleon’s constant flexing of his muscles, the travails of the various Bonaparte brothers were in the end of little account (it might, though, be observed that the annexation of Holland could not but raise eyebrows in St Petersburg: in his eyes, Tilsit had been meant to bring Britain to the negotiating table, whereas by annexing Holland Napoleon was in effect provoking her into greater intransigence). This was not the case, however, with those of the Grand Duke Peter of Oldenburg. Small and hitherto insignificant, Oldenburg was situated on the coast of the North Sea west of Hamburg. As such, it was a prime target for French annexation, but by treating it in this fashion Napoleon was again behaving as if he were ruling in a vacuum. For reasons that are of little consequence here, the ruling Holstein-Eutens had had connections with the Romanov dynasty for many years - Grand Duke Peter, in fact, was Alexander’s uncle - and in the 1809 tsar’s favourite sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine, had married the current Grand Duke’s heir. For Alexander therefore, Oldenburg was very much a Russian dependency. As he had negotiated a specific guarantee of the grand duchy’s independence at Tilsit, it was therefore with great anger that he received Napoleon’s decision to snap it up. With the tsar already upset by the sudden death in July 1810 of Queen Louise of Prussia - which he attributed to the strain imposed on her by a fresh crisis in Franco-Prussian relations that saw the emperor demand the immediate payment of all Prussia’s debts to France and suggest that this should be financed either by reducing the army to a brigade-sized royal guard or surrendering Silesia - his response was predictably violent. Though diplomatic relations were not absolutely broken off, a sharp protest was dispatched to Paris. All this achieved, however, was to add insult to injury, as the only compensation that was offered Grand Duke Peter was a minuscule territory centred on Erfurt that bore no comparison even with tiny Oldenburg.

More important even than Oldenburg was the state of feeling in the Russian court. As Alexander could never forget, Paul I and his grandfather, Peter III, had pushed the bounds of absolute rule too far and been murdered in palace revolutions. This fate now seemingly threatened him too: from 1807 onwards, indeed, there had been stories of plots against his rule, while there were certainly plenty of pretexts for conspiracy. In the Balkans, Russia’s claims to be the protector of the region’s Christians were losing credibility. As the senior Russian commander, Admiral Chichagov, wrote:

The inhabitants of the right bank [of the Danube] - all of them Christians - experienced all the horrors imaginable . . . Wherever the army passed, all their towns and villages