In 1806 the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ entered into a crucial phase. The great Third Coalition of Great Britain, Austria and Russia against France, mobilised by Pitt, had been crushed by successive French victories at Ulm and Austerlitz. Napoleon now stood astride central Europe. To the south and east the Austrians, cowed, had sued for a separate peace, which they obtained at Pressburg in December 1805. To the east, the shattered Russian armies were in full retreat. In the north of Germany the small body of Anglo-Hanoverian troops, so hastily dispatched to take advantage of the French evacuation of the electorate of Hanover the preceding autumn, awaited their re-embarkation by the Royal Navy. All over Europe, Napoleonic puppets had been installed or were on the verge of being so. French influence stretched from the Channel to the north of Germany, from the Hook of Holland to the heel of the Italian boot. Although the political situation was, territorially speaking, to get a great deal worse yet, there was no doubt among contemporaries that Napoleon's power was at its zenith. But if Prussia's troubles with France had now come to a temporary end, those with Britain were only about to begin. For in the Treaty of Paris Prussia committed herself to the closure of the North Sea ports to ships of the British flag as well as to the permanent annexation of the electorate of Hanover which she had occupied in the previous October. The British reaction was swift. An embargo was placed on Prussian vessels in March.