It was by no means in accordance with Napoleon’s purposes, however, that the Hamburg gates should remain ajar to English commerce and correspondence. Closely occupied as he was throughout the year 1805, he found time to advance his great design for striking at England through her commercial supremacy. “Go to Hamburg,” he said to Bourrienne in March, “it is there I will give a mortal blow at England.” And so the power of France grew steadily in Hamburg, while the ancient Syndic of the city saw its independence gradually sapped. Already violent outrages were committed by the French agents upon messengers carrying English letters. A courier on his way from Vienna to England was seized in a forest, robbed of his despatches, and left bound to a tree, where he would certainly have perished, had he not been released by a woman who was accidentally passing through the forest. Such were the risks confronted by the English messengers; but despite all such dangers the Postal Service was maintained, irregularly indeed, and with delays and interruptions which caused wide-spreading losses. The wonder is not that the Service was imperfect, but that it was maintained at all. The difficulties grew as the months went by. The decrees of March, 1806, which Prussia was forced to issue, excluding British ships from all the ports of Prussia and Hanover, added little to the difficulties of the Post-Office, for neither Denmark nor Hamburg was concerned in it. But a darker cloud was rising fast. The French began to menace actively the independence of Hamburg. In October it was notified by the Hamburg Post-Office that the situation of affairs no longer admitted of the receipt of mails for Prussia, Russia, or Germany, and for many days after the receipt of this gloomy notification no news whatever reached London from the Elbe. Late in November a few bags of letters filtered through, giving a more hopeful account of the situation, but even while these letters were being read, the French had entered Hamburg, and the revenues of the Post-Office, the ancient property of the House of Tour and Taxis, had been appropriated by the agent of Murat. Quickly on the heels of the messengers who carried this intelligence followed others bringing the notorious Berlin decrees, of which the paragraph affecting the Post-Office was short and simple. “All trade and correspondence with the British Islands are prohibited. In consequence, all letters and packets addressed to England, or to an Englishman, or written in English, shall not be transmitted by the Post-Office, but shall be seized....” Napoleon had struck his “mortal blow,” and the clang of the Custom-House doors closing against British goods along the whole coast of Europe, north, west, and south simultaneously, save only in Portugal and Denmark, sounded in his eager ears the knell of England’s power.