Yet he was not being gratuitously perverse and obstinate. He was genuinely alarmed at the tone being adopted, particularly by Russia and Prussia. The one thing he had hated in Napoleon was his refusal to acknowledge any right but that of the strongest, and he was horrified to see the new masters of Europe slipping into the same habit. ‘I recognise in all the cabinets the principles and manner of thought of Bonaparte,’ he confided in a letter to the Duchess of Courland on 4 October.
