After eight years of experience of Bonaparte as an ally, the rulers of Spain ought to have known that his silence during the campaigns of Eylau and Friedland boded them no good. But his present intentions escaped them, and they hastened to atone for the proclamation of Oct. 5 by a servile obedience to all the orders which he sent them. The most important of these was the command to mobilize and send to the Baltic 15,000 of their best troops [March, 1807]. This was promptly done, the depleted battalions and squadrons being raised to war-strength, by drafts of men and horses which disorganized dozens of the corps that remained at home[10]. The reason alleged, the fear of Swedish and English descents on the rear of the Grand Army, was plausible, but there can be no doubt that the real purpose was to deprive Spain of a considerable part, and that the most efficient, of her disposable forces. If Godoy could have listened to the interviews of Napoleon and Alexander of Russia at Tilsit, he would have been terrified at the offhand way in which the Emperor suggested to the Czar that the Balearic Isles should be taken from Spain and given to Ferdinand of Naples, if the latter would consent to cede Sicily to Joseph Napoleon[11]. To despoil his allies was quite in the usual style of Bonaparte--Godoy cannot have forgotten the lot of Trinidad and Ceylon--but he had not before proposed to tear from Spain, not a distant colony, but an ancient province of the Aragonese crown. The project was enshrined in the ‘secret and supplementary’ clauses of the Treaty of Tilsit, which Napoleon wished to conceal till the times were ripe. [10] The demand was made in the most peremptory fashion, and in almost threatening language. Napoleon writes to Talleyrand that the Spanish division in Tuscany, which was to form part of the expeditionary corps, must march in twenty-four hours after receiving its orders. ‘If they refuse, everything is at an end,’ a most sinister phrase (Napoleon to Talleyrand, March 25, 1807). [11] This was Article IV of the Seven ‘Secret Articles’ of the Treaty of Tilsit. See for this proposal the notes in Vandal’s _Napoléon et Alexandre Ier_, vol. i.