Political motives were then so powerful with all princes that the Czar was going to declare war against his old friend Augustus, and to help Charles his mortal enemy; while France, for the sake of the English and Germans, was going to declare war against a grandson of Louis XIV, after having so long supported him at great expenditure of blood and treasure against those very enemies. All that the Czar could obtain was that the Regent should interpose for the freeing of Baron Gortz and Gyllemburg. He returned to Russia about the end of June, having shown a rare example of an emperor travelling to improve his mind. But what most of the French people saw of him was a rough, unpolished exterior, the result of his education, while they were blind to the legislator and the genius who had founded a new nation. What he had sought for in Orleans he soon found in Alberoni, who governed all Spain. Alberoni wanted to restore the Pretender: first as the minister of Spain, so ill-used by the English, and secondly because he had a personal quarrel with the Duke of Orleans for his close alliance with England against Spain; besides, he was a priest of that Church for which the Pretender’s father had lost his crown. The Duke of Ormond, as unpopular in England as the Duke of Marlborough was admired, had left the country at the time of George’s accession, and was now in Spain. He went with full powers from the King of Spain to meet the Czar, in Courland, accompanied by a certain D’Irnegan, an Englishman of ability and daring. The business was to ask the Princess Anna, the Czar’s daughter, for marriage with James’s son, in the hopes that such an alliance would bring the Czar over to the King’s side. Baron Gortz, among his other schemes, had intended this lady for the Duke of Holstein, who did marry her later. As soon as he heard of the Duke of Ormond’s plan he grew jealous and did what he could to defeat it. He left prison in August with the Count Gyllemburg, without any apology from the Swedish to the English King. At the same time the English ambassador and his family were released at Stockholm, where their treatment had been a great deal worse than Gyllemburg’s in London.