It aimed at a close alliance with the house of Austria, with the double object of drawing Sweden within its orbit and overawing the Porte by the conjunction of the two great Catholic powers of central Europe.
These votes, however, were cancelled later, on the 26th of July, under the pressure of the royalist city mob which invaded the two Houses; but the two speakers, with eight peers and fifty-seven members of the Commons, themselves joined the army, which now advanced to London, overawing all resistance, escorting the fugitive members in triumph to Westminster on the 6th of August, and obliging the parliament on the 10th to cancel the last votes, with the threat of a regiment of cavalry drawn up by Cromwell in Hyde Park.
Napoleon determined that he, like all the Bonapartist rulers, should act merely as a Napoleonic satrap. They were to be to him what the counts of the marches were to Charlemagne, warlike feudatories defending the empire or overawing its prospective foes.
The administration became more and more despotic, and Tangier was abandoned in order to reduce expenses and to increase the forces at home for overawing opposition.
The transfer of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople gave the bishops of Rome a possible rival in the patriarch of Constantinople, but the absence of an overawing court and of meddling statesmen did more than recoup the loss to the head of the Roman Church.