The difficulties which beset Frederick William III. in 1805 were not entirely of his own making.  His predecessor of the same ill-omened name, when nearing the close of his inglorious reign, made the Peace of Basel (1795), which began to place the policy of Berlin at the beck and call of the French revolutionists.  But the present ruler had assured Prussia’s subservience to France at the time of the Secularizations, when he gained Erfurt, Eichsfeld, Hildesheim, Paderborn, and a great part of the straggling bishopric of Muenster.  Even at that time of shameless rapacity, there were those who saw that the gain of half a million of subjects to Prussia was a poor return for the loss of self-respect that befell all who shared in the sacrilegious plunder bartered away by Bonaparte and Talleyrand.  Frederick William III. was even suspected of a leaning towards French methods of Government; and a Prussian statesman said to the French ambassador: 

“You have only the nobles against you:  the King and the people are openly for France.  The revolution which you have made from below upwards will be slowly effected in Prussia from above downwards:  the King is a democrat after his fashion:  he is always striving to curtail the privileges of the nobles, but by slow means.  In a few years feudal rights will cease to exist in Prussia."[54]

Could the King have carried out these much-needed reforms, he might perhaps have opposed a solid society to the renewed might of France.  But he failed to set his house in order before the storm burst; and in 1803 he so far gave up his championship of North German affairs as to allow the French to occupy Hanover, a land that he and his Ministers had long coveted.

We saw in the last chapter that Hanover was the bait whereby Napoleon hooked the Prussian envoy, Haugwitz, at Schoenbrunn; and that the very man who had been sent to impose Prussia’s will upon the French Emperor returned to Berlin bringing peace and dishonour.  The surprise and annoyance of Frederick William may be imagined.  On all sides difficulties were thickening around him.  Shortly before the return of Haugwitz to Berlin, the Russian troops campaigning in Hanover had been placed under the protection of Prussia; and the King himself had offered to our Minister, Lord Harrowby, to protect Cathcart’s Anglo-Hanoverian corps which, with the aid of Prussian troops, was restoring the authority of George III. in that Electorate.

Moreover, Frederick William could not complain of any shabby treatment from our Government.  Knowing that he was set on the acquisition of Hanover and could only be drawn into the Coalition by an equally attractive offer, the Pitt Ministry had proposed through Lord Harrowby the cession to Prussia at the general peace of the lands south-west of the Duchy of Cleves, “bounded by a frontier line drawn from Antwerp to Luxemburg,” and connected with the rest of her territories.[55] This plan, which would have planted