Yet, while convinced of the immense importance of Malta, the Addington Cabinet did not insist on retaining it, if the French Government would “suggest some other equivalent security by which His Majesty’s object in claiming the permanent possession of Malta may be accomplished and the independence of the island secured conformably to the spirit of the 10th Article of the Treaty of Amiens."[251] To the First Consul was therefore left the initiative in proposing some other plan which would safeguard British interests in the Levant; and, with this qualifying explanation, the British ambassador was charged to present to him the following proposals for a new treaty:  Malta to remain in British hands, the Knights to be indemnified for any losses of property which they may thereby sustain:  Holland and Switzerland to be evacuated by French troops:  the island of Elba to be confirmed to France, and the King of Etruria to be acknowledged by Great Britain:  the Italian and Ligurian Republics also to be acknowledged, if “an arrangement is made in Italy for the King of Sardinia, which shall be satisfactory to him.”

Lord Whitworth judged it better not to present these demands point blank, but gradually to reveal their substance.  This course, he judged, would be less damaging to the friends of peace at the Tuileries, and less likely to affront Napoleon.  But it was all one and the same.  The First Consul, in his present state of highly wrought tension, practically ignored the suggestion of an equivalent security, and declaimed against the perfidy of England for daring to infringe the treaty, though he had offered no opposition to the Czar’s proposals respecting Malta, which weakened the stability of the Order and sensibly modified that same treaty.

Talleyrand was more conciliatory; and there is little doubt that, had the First Consul allowed his brother Joseph and his Foreign Minister wider powers, the crisis might have been peaceably passed.  Joseph Bonaparte urgently pressed Whitworth to be satisfied with Corfu or Crete in place of Malta; but he confessed that the suggestion was quite unauthorized, and that the First Consul was so enraged on the Maltese Question that he dared not broach it to him.[252] Indeed, all through these critical weeks Napoleon’s relations to his brothers were very strained, they desiring peace in Europe so that Louisiana might even now be saved to France, while the First Consul persisted in his oriental schemes.  He seems now to have concentrated his energies on the task of postponing the rupture to a convenient date and of casting on his foes the odium of the approaching war.  He made no proposal that could reassure Britain as to the security of the overland routes; and he named no other island which could be considered as an equivalent to Malta.