The three autocratic powers were acting in defiance of Britain and France, justifying their actions with self-serving proclamations. But just as it was beginning to look as though the gulf between them and the two constitutional powers was unbridgeable, two things occurred which completely changed the situation. One was the outbreak, in the spring of 1821, of an uprising in Greece against Turkish domination; the other was the fall, in December of the same year, of Richelieu’s government and its replacement by an ultra royalist administration.
