Such were the public articles of the peace of Tilsit; but it contained secret articles besides; and of these the English government were, ere long, fortunate enough to ascertain the import.

The British cabinet had undergone a complete change in March, 1807—­the management of affairs passing from the friends and heirs of Mr. Fox into the hands of Mr. Perceval and other statesmen of the school of Pitt.  The unhappy conduct of the war had rendered the preceding government eminently unpopular; and the measures of the new one assumed from the beginning a character of greater energy.  But the orders which had been given must be fulfilled; and the councils of 1806 bequeathed a fatal legacy in the disastrous expeditions of 1807.  Lord Granville Leveson Gower[57] (the minister at St. Petersburg) was ere this time prepared to offer to the Czar such subsidies as he had in vain expected when preparing for the campaign of Poland; but it was too late to retrieve the error of the preceding cabinet; and the English ambassador, being unable to break off the negotiations at Tilsit, was compelled to bestow all his efforts on penetrating the secrets of the compact wherein they ended.

The result of his exertions was the complete assurance of the government of St. James’s, that the Emperor of Russia had adopted the alliance of Napoleon to an extent far beyond what appeared on the face of the treaty of the 7th July; that he had agreed not only to lay English commerce, in case his mediation for a peace should fail, under the same ban with that of the decrees of Berlin, but to place himself at the head of a general confederation of the Northern Maritime Powers against the naval supremacy of England—­in other words, resign his own fleets, with those of Denmark, to the service of Napoleon.  In requital of this obligation the French Emperor unquestionably agreed to permit the Czar to conquer Finland from Sweden—­thereby adding immeasurably to the security of St. Petersburg.  On the other hand it is almost as impossible to doubt that Alexander pledged himself not to interfere with those ambitious designs as to the Spanish Peninsula, which Napoleon was ere long to develop, and which were destined ultimately to work his ruin.

In a word, there seems to be little doubt that Napoleon broached at Tilsit the dazzling scheme of dividing the European world virtually between the two great monarchs of France and Russia:  and that the Czar, provided he were willing to look on, while his Imperial brother of the West subjected Spain, Portugal and England to his yoke, was induced to count on equal forbearance, whatever schemes he might venture on for his own aggrandisement, at the expense of the smaller states of the North of Europe, and, above all, of the Ottoman Porte.

[Footnote 56:  Kosciusko himself subsequently disavowed any knowledge of the production.]

[Footnote 57:  Afterwards first Earl Granville.]

CHAPTER XXII