Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/372

360 THE EUROPEAN CONVULSION publics set up in Italy, Holland, and Switzerland, were brought more directly under French control. This process was alarming, at least to the greater states. But Napoleon had no doubt of his ability to manage all of them, except the persistently hostile Britain, which made no haste to carry out the terms of the treaty of Amiens while it saw France practically ignoring them. Fifteen months after the treaty, the friction between these two powers had reached the point of another open rupture, and war was declared. Napoleon gathered at Boulogne vast armaments which he hoped to create an oppor- tunity for flinging across the Channel, and masses of British Renewal of volunteers were drilling to meet the invader when War « he came. But Napoleon could not strike while the British fleets swept the seas, and the British had no armies fit to attack Napoleon's veterans. Then Napoleon shocked all Europe by kidnapping a Bourbon prince, the Due d'Enghien, on foreign soil, and having him shot 2. Napoleon I. as an accom plice in a royalist plot which had just emperor, been discovered and crushed in Paris ; a plot which 1804, led directly to the assumption of the title of Emperor by Napoleon, since the acknowledgment of his dynasty seemed needed to put an end finally to Bourbon conspiracies. The Tsar Alexander was already sufficiently ill-pleased with the new despotism in France ; his own ideal seems to have been that of popular government ruling by grace of a benevolent— and legitimate — autocrat who could impose" his own will upon the people whenever he thought it would be for their own good. Pitt returned to office in England, having been driven into tem- The Third porary retirement by the king's refusal to grant Coalition, Catholic Emancipation, to which the minister had 1806, pledged himself as a corollary to the incorporation of the Irish parliament into that of the ' United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland' (1800). Pitt and Alexander exerted themselves to create a new coalition against Napoleon, which took shape in the summer of 1805, being joined by Austria, while Prussia stood aloof; the inefficiency of Prussian policy had not been affected by the succession of Frederick William in. on his father's death, We may here note that the Austrian emperor