with reference to Malta must be referred by Great Britain to the Great Powers for their concurrence, and that Holland would be evacuated as soon as the terms of the Treaty of Amiens were complied with.  Another proposal was that Malta should be transferred to Russia—­the very step which was proposed at Amiens and was rejected by the Czar:  on that account Lord Whitworth now refused it as being merely a device to gain time.  The sending of his passports having been delayed, he received one more despatch from Downing Street, which allowed that our retention of Malta for ten years should form a secret article—­a device which would spare the First Consul’s susceptibilities on the point of honour.  Even so, however, Napoleon refused to consider a longer tenure than two or three years.  And in this he was undoubtedly encouraged by the recent despatch from St. Petersburg, wherein the Czar promised his mediation in a sense favourable to France.  This unfortunate occurrence completed the discomfiture of the peace party at the Consular Court, and in a long and heated discussion in a council held at St. Cloud on May 11th all but Joseph Bonaparte and Talleyrand voted for the rejection of the British demands.

On the next day Lord Whitworth left Paris.  During his journey to Calais he received one more proposal, that France should hold the peninsula of Otranto for ten years if Great Britain retained Malta for that period; but if this suggestion was made in good faith, which is doubtful, its effect was destroyed by a rambling diatribe which Talleyrand, at his master’s orders, sent shortly afterwards.[256] In any case it was looked upon by our ambassador as a last attempt to gain time for the concentration of the French naval forces.  He crossed the Straits of Dover on May 17th, the day before the British declaration of war was issued.

On May 22nd, 1803, appeared at Paris the startling order that, as British frigates had captured two French merchantmen on the Breton coast, all Englishmen between eighteen and sixty years of age who were in France should be detained as prisoners of war.  The pretext for this unheard-of action, which condemned some 10,000 Britons to prolonged detention, was that the two French ships were seized prior to the declaration of war.  This is false:  they were seized on May 18th, that is, on the day on which the British Government declared war, three days after an embargo had been laid on British vessels in French ports, and seven days after the First Consul had directed his envoy at Florence to lay an embargo on English ships in the ports of Tuscany.[257] It is therefore obvious that Napoleon’s barbarous decree merely marked his disappointment at the failure of his efforts to gain time and to deal the first stroke.  How sorely his temper was tried by the late events is clear from the recital of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, who relates that her husband, when ordered to seize English residents, found the First Consul in a fury, his eyes flashing fire; and when Junot expressed his reluctance to carry out this decree, Napoleon passionately exclaimed:  “Do not trust too far to my friendship:  as soon as I conceive doubt as to yours, mine is gone.”