The news that the Porte would not sign the note, except in a modified form, vexed both Austria and England. Count Buol was chagrined, Lord Clarendon was angry. What the Four Powers most interested in preserving Turkish independence regarded as securing that independence, was surely, they said, a form of words which the Sultan might accept. They did not object to the changes made in the note as unreasonable in themselves--M. Drouyn de Lhuys, indeed, thought they were decided improvements--but they objected to them as unnecessary. The Four Powers would have assented to the interpretation put upon the note by the Porte, and Lord Clarendon had no doubt that Russia would have agreed with the Four Powers. But the Porte seemed to desire war, and had certainly made peace more difficult by the course it had pursued. In short, the friends of the Sultan were very angry with him for exercising his undoubted right, and looking sharply after his own independence. But if the Powers were angry, the Czar was enraged. He was beside himself when he thought on the fact that the Porte had refused what he had accepted. He would not at first discuss the modifications themselves. He would not think about them. What he objected to was, "any alteration--to the principle of alteration, to the fact of the Porte having done that which, out of regard to the wishes of the Allied Powers, his Imperial Majesty had refrained from doing." Count Nesselrode expressed his master's views with such asperity as polite diplomatists permit themselves to indulge in. If the Turks, he said, had had "the faintest perception of their own interests, they ought to have clutched at the note with both hands. That which the Emperor received without change or hesitation in the course of twenty-four hours, should unquestionably have been received by the Turks with the same expedition." The Emperor again saw in this defeat the hand of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and felt sure that the Turks had not been "made sufficiently sensible" of the dangers they incurred. The Emperor would concede no more. "Concession had reached its term." Further, a memorandum of Count Nesselrode's to his master was allowed to find its way into a Prussian paper, from which it appeared that the Czar placed an entirely different interpretation on the note to its authors'.