For a month or two there was a faint glimmer of hope that the continued war between France and England might cease. Charles James Fox, Foreign Secretary and leading figure in the Grenville administration, was not without admiration for Napoleon, and more or less informal negotiations for peace were opened. There was an exchange of courtesies, Fox sending particulars of a plot to assassinate the Emperor to Talleyrand, Napoleon releasing a few British prisoners from French fortresses. When Napoleon really showed his hand he disclosed a suspicious eagerness to obtain Sicily, the possession of which would be of great importance in his cherished scheme of establishing the supremacy of France in the Mediterranean. The Emperor hungered and thirsted after sea-power; it was the one world left for him to conquer. Hanover was held out as bait to Great Britain, quite regardless of anything Prussia might have to say in the matter. It was this unscrupulous juggling with other folk’s possessions on the part of Napoleon that kept the Continent in so unsettled a state. None knew who next might be bartered or overrun by French troops, irrespective of previous agreements. When Napoleon played cards he cheated; in political matters his morality was no more conspicuous. His sense of right and wrong had long since given way to an egotism which recognised no law, and placed himself above all codes of ordinary conduct. De Tocqueville said of him: “He was as great as a man can be without virtue.” The peace overtures came to nought. The King of Prussia entered into an alliance with Russia, and began to mobilise his army. His soldiers were for up and doing regardless of the consequences, and effected a foolish disdain of their antagonists which is well shown by Varnhagen von Ense, then a student at Halle, in his “Memoirs.”