The first land to be sacrificed to this venture was Holland.  For many months the Emperor had been discontented with his brother Louis, who had taken into his head the strange notion that he reigned there by divine right.  As Napoleon pathetically said at St. Helena, when reviewing the conduct of his brothers, “If I made one a king, he imagined that he was King by the grace of God.  He was no longer my lieutenant:  he was one enemy more for me to watch.”  A singular fate for this king-maker, that he should be forgotten and the holy oil alone remembered!  Yet Louis probably used that mediaeval notion as a shield against his brother’s dictation.  The tough Bonaparte nature brooked not the idea of mere lieutenancy.  He declined to obey orders from the brother whom he secretly detested.  He flatly refused to be transferred from the Hague to Madrid, or to put in force the burdensome decrees of the Continental System.

On his side, Napoleon upbraided him with governing too softly, and with seeking popularity where he should seek control.  After the Walcheren expedition, he chid him severely for allowing the English fleet ever to show its face in the Scheldt; for “the fleets of that Power ought to find nothing but rocks of iron” in that river, “which was as important to France as the Thames to England."[226] But the head and front of his offending was that British goods still found their way into Holland.  In vain did the Emperor forbid that American ships which had touched at English ports should be debarred from those of Holland.  In vain did he threaten to close the Scheldt and Rhine to Dutch barges.  Louis held on his way, with kindly patience towards his merchants, and with a Bonapartist obstinacy proof against fraternal advice or threats.  At last, early in 1810, Napoleon sent troops to occupy Walcheren and neighbouring Dutch lands.  It seemed for a time as though this was but a device to extort favourable terms of peace from England in return for an offer that France would not annex Holland.  Negotiations to this effect were set on foot through the medium of Ouvrard and Labouchere, son-in-law of the banker Baring:  Fouche also, without the knowledge of his master, ventured to put forth a diplomatic feeler as to a possible Anglo-French alliance against the United States, an action for which he was soon very properly disgraced.[227]

The negotiation failed, as it deserved to do.  Our objections were, not merely to the absurd proposal that we should give up our maritime code if Napoleon would abstain from annexing Holland and the Hanseatic towns, but still more against the man himself and his whole policy.  We had every reason to distrust the good faith of the man who had betrayed the Turks at Tilsit, Portugal at Fontainebleau, and the Spaniards at Bayonne.  To pause in the strife, to relax our hold on our new colonies, and to desert the Spaniards, in order to preserve the merely titular independence of Holland and the Hanse Towns, would have been an