he announced an armed
neutrality; in December he seized three hundred English vessels in his
ports, and sequestrated all English goods found in his Empire. The
Danes, who throughout the year had been struggling to evade the British
right of search, at once joined this neutral league, and were followed
by Sweden in their course. It was plain that, as soon as the spring of
1801 opened the Baltic, the fleets of the three Powers would act in
practical union with those of France and Spain. But the command of the
seas which such a union threatened was a matter for England of life and
death, for at this very moment the Peace of Luneville left Buonaparte
without a foe on the Continent, and able to deal as he would with the
whole military resources of France. Once master of the Channel he could
throw a force on the southern coast of England which she had no means of
meeting in the field. But dexterous as the combination was, it was
shattered at a blow. On the first of April 1801 a British fleet of
eighteen men-of-war forced the passage of the Belt, appeared before
Copenhagen, and at once attacked the city and its fleet. In spite of a
brave resistance from the Danish batteries and gunboats six Danish ships
were taken, and the Crown Prince was forced to conclude an armistice
which enabled the English ships to enter the Baltic, where the Russian
fleet was still detained by the ice. But their work was really over. The
seizure of English goods and the declaration of war had bitterly
irritated the Russian nobles, whose sole outlet for the sale of the
produce of their vast estates was thus closed to them; and on the
twenty-fourth of March, nine days before the battle of Copenhagen, Paul
fell in a midnight attack by conspirators in his own palace. With Paul
fell the Confederacy of the North. The policy of his successor, the Czar
Alexander, was far more in unison with the general feeling of his
subjects; in June a Convention between England and Russia settled the
vexed questions of the right of search and contraband of war, and this
Convention was accepted by Sweden and Denmark.

[Sidenote: French lose Egypt.]

The First Consul's disappointment was keen; but he saw clearly that with
this dissolution of the Northern alliance the war came virtually to an
end. He no longer had any means of attacking Britain save by the efforts
of France itself, and even with the aid of Holland and Spain France was
at this moment helpless before the suprema