Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 8.djvu/617

 10 s. vm. DEC. 28, 1907.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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prove that the Government were right in believing that there was to be a great naval combination of France, Russia, Den- mark, Portugal, &c., against' England, and he then adds :

" If any more evidence should be thought neces- sary, let them [the Government] be condemned, for nothing should ever extort from them the source whence they had derived their information." See Canning's ' Speeches,' vol. ii. 286-323.

It is not known, and probably never will be known, how Canning got the informa- tion which determined the Government to take possession of the Danish fleet.

Will J. D. give a reference to the passage in Alison which states that Lord Liverpool " fully explained the whole circumstances in Parliament many years afterwards " ? I have looked at two editions of Alison and cannot find the reference, and I certainly am not aware of this explanation. There are various editions of Alison, and so a reference to the volume, chapter, page, and edition is desirable.

J. D. refers to "the secret meeting of the Tsar and the Emperor of Austria." This is a slip in writing, as he of course knows that the meeting was between the Emperor Napoleon and the Emperor of Russia. There is a fine coloured picture of the raft " engraved by George Cruikshank from the original of Swebach published at Paris," in Ireland's ' Life of Napoleon,' vol. iii., p. 61.

I have not been able to trace the career of Mackenzie of Tilsit, but I feel no doubt that he is the same diplomatic agent who negotiated for the exchange of the prisoners in 1810, and that he is not the Colin Alexander Mackenze who died on 2 Nov., 1851. HARRY B. POLAND.

J. D. will not find that " Lord Liverpool fully explained the whole circumstances," for they are not known. One of the highest authorities on the subject in the world, a learned member of the Institut de France, is thought to agree with distinguished ex- officials of our Foreign Office that it is a good guess, supported by much circumstantial evidence, that the Emperor Alexander, with the treachery towards Napoleon recorded by the latter at St. Helena, facilitated the communication of the secret to London, The learned scholar adds that we are behindhand in the publication of private letters likely to throw light upon the history of the second half of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic period of the nine- teenth. .;; For instance, he tells us that the

letters of Sir Horace Mann to Horace Walpole all exist, and have been read, but never printed as a whole for a public which desires to possess them. He also complains that there exist vast stores of unpublished Wellington papers, containing probably most of the letters that the Duke received at a moment of deep interest to French historians. The Historical Manuscripts Commission is doing excellent work upon earlier periods, but has evidently a fine field of operations of a more delicate kind. D.

Colin Alexander Mackenzie, who was sent to Morlaix in 1810, and died in 1851, was the man whose report of the secret clause in the Treaty of Tilsit caused the seizure of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. He was the son of Colin Mackenzie of Dingwall, and his mother was sister to John Mackenzie of Torridon, who was "out" with Prince Charles Edward in 1745. My father, the Right Rev. Henry Mackenzie, Bishop Suffragan of Nottingham, was grandson to John Mackenzie. He was an intimate friend of Colin, and acted as his executor. He also wrote his obituary notice in The Times, but at the request of his surviving sister, Mrs. Wadd, made no mention of the Tilsit incident. So far as I know, the story has never appeared in print. I have heard it from my father, who had it from Colin himself. The arrangement was that the two emperors should meet on a raft on the river Niemen. Each was to be accompanied by a single guard who did not know French. Napoleon's attendant was a German grenadier. Alexander was attended by, as he supposed, a Cossack. This Cossack was Mackenzie, who by means of gold and liquor had got hold of the uniform of the chosen soldier. Having lived in Russia, he could speak Russian, and was of course able to speak French. He thus overheard the bargain by which the Danish fleet was to be annexed by the Franco -Russian combina- tion.

Mackenzie's mission in 1810 gained him the nickname in his family of " the Ambassador." In 1815 he was in France, and on the return of Napoleon from Elba was imprisoned. The Emperor, with that petty spite that marred his character, ordered him to be very harshly treated.

Another incident in Mackenzie's adventur- ous life may be of interest to the readers of ' N. & Q.' Unfortunately, I cannot recall that my father ever gave me the date when it occurred. He went as a volunteer with a Russian army into the Caucasus. After