Peace can rarely be attained unless one of the combatants is overcome or both are exhausted.  But neither Great Britain nor France was in this position.  By sea our successes had been as continuous as those of Napoleon over our allies on land.  In January we captured the Cape from the Dutch:  in February the French force at St. Domingo surrendered to Sir James Duckworth:  Admiral Warren in March closed the career of the adventurous Linois; and early in July a British force seized great treasure at Buenos Ayres, whence, however, it was soon obliged to retire.  After these successes Fox could not but be firm.  He refused to budge from the standpoint of uti possidetis which our envoy had stated as the basis of negotiations:  and the Earl of Lauderdale, who was sent to support and finally to supersede the Earl of Yarmouth, at once took a firm tone which drew forth a truculent rejoinder.  If that was to be the basis, wrote Clarke, the French plenipotentiary, then France would require Moravia, Styria, the whole of Austria (Proper), and Hanover, and in that case leave England her few colonial conquests.

This reply of August 8th nearly severed the negotiations on the spot:  but Talleyrand persistently refused to grant the passports which Lauderdale demanded—­evidently in the hope that the Czar’s ratification of Oubril’s treaty would cause us to give up Sicily.[88] He was in error.  On September 3rd the news reached Paris that Alexander scornfully rejected his envoy’s handiwork.  Nevertheless, Napoleon refused to forego his claims to Sicily; and the closing days of Fox were embittered by the thought that this negotiation, the last hope of a career fruitful in disappointments, was doomed to failure.  After using his splendid eloquence for fifteen years in defence of the Revolution and its “heir,” he came to the bitter conclusion that liberty had miscarried in France, and that that land had bent beneath the yoke in order the more completely to subjugate the Continent.  He died on September 13th.

French historians, following an article in the “Moniteur” of November 26th, have often asserted that the death of Fox and the accession to power of the warlike faction changed the character of the negotiations.[89] Nothing can be further from the truth.  Not long before his end, Fox thus expressed to his nephew his despair of peace: 

“We can in honour do nothing without the full and bona fide consent of the Queen and Court of Naples; but, even exclusive of that consideration and of the great importance of Sicily, it is not so much the value of the point in dispute as the manner in which the French fly from their word that disheartens me.  It is not Sicily, but the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me that they are playing a false game; and in that case it would be very imprudent to make any concessions, which by any possibility could be thought inconsistent with our honour, or could furnish our allies with a plausible pretence