Britain’s attempt at maintaining within the Baltic Sea a balance of power that ensured the unimpeded transit of naval stores into British ports was blown apart by Tsar Peter’s acquisition of considerable tranches of the Baltic littoral and his determination to build a large and credible seagoing navy. While not a reliable indicator as to how the future might develop, Peter did not, at any time during the Great Northern War, attempt to close Russian ports to British shipping. It was, nevertheless, a precarious situation, the conditions of trade unregulated, with Peter only prepared to agree to something more definite if Britain would reciprocate through entering into an explicitly stated defensive alliance. That trade, and the money it was bringing into Russia, was of an importance equal to that of the naval stores trade to Britain, the underpinning factor to his non-interruption of trade. For this reason Peter had his resident in London announce in June 1719 and again in April 1720, a time when Great Britain and Russia were most at odds, that Russia would remain open to British merchants, claiming it to result from his benevolence to the English people and tradesmen. In May 1720, Peter, in an instruction issued through the College of Commerce sitting in St Petersburg, further enforced this arrangement, stating that ‘liberty of commerce’ was allowed to British merchants, and that all should be done to facilitate this requirement. In noting that ‘his Britannic Majesty has taken the part of Sweden and sent his fleet into the Baltic’, Peter attributed this action to Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, and not George I, king of Great Britain. In coming to terms with the new situation, one made permanent by the Treaty of Nystad (1721) that saw Swedish Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, Kexholm and the bulk of Karelia ceded to Russia, the British government now gave urgent consideration to the future direction of the naval stores trade and the level of dependency that could be safely placed on Russia.