Tsar
Nicholas I then deployed his 4th and 5th Army Corps along the River
Danube, and had
Count Karl Nesselrode, his foreign minister, undertake talks with the Ottomans. Nesselrode confided to Sir
George Hamilton Seymour, the British ambassador in
St. Petersburg:
[The dispute over the holy places] had assumed a new character - that the acts of injustice towards the Greek church which it had been desired to prevent had been perpetrated and consequently that now the object must be to find a remedy for these wrongs. The success of French negotiations at Constantinople was to be ascribed solely to intrigue and violence - violence which had been supposed to be the
ultima ratio of kings, being, it had been seen, the means which the present ruler of France was in the habit of employing in the first instance.