Bernadotte landed at Stralsund with 24,000 men, on May 18th.  But the organization of his troops for the campaign was so slow that he could send no effective help to the Cossacks and patriots at Hamburg.  His seeming lethargy at once aroused the Czar’s suspicions.  This the Swedish Prince Royal speedily detected; and, on hearing of the armistice, he feared that another Tilsit would be the result.  In a passionate letter, of June 10th, he begged Alexander not to accept peace:  “To accept a peace dictated by Napoleon is to rear a sepulchre for Europe:  and if this misfortune happens, only England and Sweden can remain intact.”

This was the real Bernadotte.  Those who called him a disguised friend of Napoleon little knew the depth of his hatred for the Emperor, a hatred which was even then compassing the earth for means of overthrowing him, and saw in the person of a lonely French exile beyond the Atlantic an instrument of vengeance.  Already he had bidden his old comrade in arms, Moreau, to come over and direct the people’s war against the tyrant who had exiled him; and the victor of Hohenlinden was soon to land at Stralsund and spend his last days in serving against the tricolour.

For the present the prospects of the allies seemed gloomy indeed.  In the south-east they had lost all the land up to Breslau and Glogau; and in North Germany Davoust began to turn Hamburg into a great fortress.  This was in obedience to Napoleon’s orders.  “I shall never feel assured,” the Emperor wrote to his Marshal, “until Hamburg can be looked on as a stronghold provisioned for several months and prepared in every way for a long defence.”—­The ruin of commercial interests was nought to him; and when Savary ventured to hint at the discontent caused in French mercantile circles by these steps, he received a sharp rebuke:  “...  The cackling of the Paris bankers matters very little to me.  I am having Hamburg fortified.  I am having a naval arsenal formed there.  Within a few months it will be one of my strongest fortresses.  I intend to keep a standing army of 15,000 men there."[305] His plan was ruthlessly carried out.  The wealth of Hamburg was systematically extorted in order to furnish means for a completer subjection.  Boundless exactions, robbery of the bank, odious oppression of all classes, these were the first steps.  Twenty thousand persons were thereafter driven out, first the young and strong as being dangerous, then the old and weak as being useless; and a once prosperous emporium of trade became Napoleon’s chief northern stronghold, a centre of hope for French and Danes, and a stimulus to revenge for every patriotic Teuton.[306]

Yet the patriots were not cast down by recent events.  Their one desire was for the renewal of war:  their one fear was that the diplomatists would once more barter away German independence.  “Our people,” cried Karl Mueller, “is still too lazy because it is too wealthy.  Let us learn, as the Russians did, to go round and burn, and then find ourselves dagger and poison, as the Spaniards did.  Against those two peoples Napoleon’s troops could effect nothing.”  And while gloom and doubt hung over Germany, a cheering ray shot forth once more from the south-west.  At the close of June came the news that Wellington had utterly routed the French at Vittoria.