The abandonment by Ministers of their former claim to Malta is equally strange.  Nelson, though he held Malta to be useless as a base for the British fleet watching Toulon, made the memorable statement:  “I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India.”  But a despatch from St. Petersburg, stating that the new Czar had concluded a formal treaty of alliance with the Order of St. John settled in Russia, may have convinced Addington and his colleagues that it would be better to forego all claim to Malta in order to cement the newly won friendship of Russia.  Whatever may have been their motive, British Ministers consented to cede the island to the Knights of St. John under the protection of some third Power.

The preliminaries of peace were further remarkable for three strange omissions.  They did not provide for the renewal of previous treaties of peace between the late combatants.  War is held to break all previous treaties; and by failing to require the renewal of the treaties of 1713, 1763, and 1783, it was now open to Spain and France to cement, albeit in a new form, that Family Compact which it had long been the aim of British diplomacy to dissolve:  the failure to renew those earlier treaties rendered it possible for the Court of Madrid to alienate any of its colonies to France, as at that very time was being arranged with respect to Louisiana.

The second omission was equally remarkable.  No mention was made of any renewal of commercial intercourse between England and France.  Doubtless a complete settlement of this question would have been difficult.  British merchants would have looked for a renewal of that enlightened treaty of commerce of 1786-7, which had aroused the bitter opposition of French manufacturers.  But the question might have been broached at London, and its omission from the preliminaries served as a reason for shelving it in the definitive treaty—­a piece of folly which at once provoked the severest censure from British manufacturers, who thereby lost the markets of France, and her subject States, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa, and Etruria.

And, finally, the terms of peace provided no compensation either for the French royal House or for the dispossessed House of Orange.  Here again, it would have been very difficult to find a recompense such as the Bourbons could with dignity have accepted; and the suggestion made by one of the royalist exiles to Lord Hawkesbury, that Great Britain should seize Crete and hand it over to them, will show how desperate was their case.[183] Nevertheless, some effort should have been made by a Government which had so often proclaimed its championship of the legitimist cause.  Still more glaring was the omission of any stipulation for an indemnity for the House of Orange, now exiled from the Batavian Republic.  That claim, though urged at the outset, found no place in the preliminaries; and the mingled surprise and contempt felt in the salons of Paris at the conduct of the British Government is shown in a semiofficial report sent thence by one of its secret agents: