The effect on Russia of the presence of a major British fleet in control of the Sound and the Great Belt, with patrols out as far as Rügen, and having captured or destroyed the Danish fleet, was immediate. Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, sent as Canning’s envoy to be present at the talks between French and Russians at Tilsit, had been deliberately excluded by Britain’s ally from the event, but now suddenly found he could talk to the Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Budberg once again, and gained useful information about the likely course of events in St Petersburg. This in turn allowed him time to warn the captains of the British ships in Russian ports well in advance that an embargo was likely. They bought goods furiously (helped by their Russian suppliers, who were just as anxious to beat the embargo as the British shippers). In the result very few British ships – four, so it is reported – were actually detained when the embargo was declared, and the quantity of Russian goods exported to Britain in 1807 was well up on that of the year before.

This Russian reaction was interesting, for it tended to fit with British assumptions that the alignment with France was not very welcome in St Petersburg. The delay in declaring war on Britain (it came on 1 December) was in fact written into the secret alliance as negotiated at Tilsit, but the embargo was well signalled in advance, and Leveson-Gower knew in early November that it was coming. And by 1 December the Baltic was icing over, defending Russia’s ports at least until the spring. This allowed Russia to shelter in its winter, and Britain to consider its options. So British perceptions were to a large extent accurate, that Russia’s war with Britain was not going to be pursued with much energy, and that the embargo, hurting Russian merchants and tax revenues more than Britain, would probably be riddled with gaps and loopholes. The British response was therefore to be careful not to build up any serious Russian hostility: the war had to be a phoney one.

The bombardment of Copenhagen was, of course, condemned as loudly in Russia as in France, but with the more cause since too many of Russia’s Baltic cities – including St Petersburg – were clearly vulnerable to the same treatment.