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 Prussia firmly at Antwerp, Liege,
Luxemburg, and Cologne, also aimed at installing the Elector of
Salzburg in the rest of the new Rhenish acquisitions of France; while
the equipoise of the Powers was to be adjusted by the cession of
Salzburg, the Papal Legations, and the line of the Mincio to Austria,
she in her turn giving up part of her Dalmatian lands to Russia.
Prussia was to be