Few persons in England now cherished any doubts as to the First Consul’s hatred of the nation which stood between him and his oriental designs.  Ministers alone knew the extent of those plans:  but every ploughboy could feel the malice of an act which cooped up innocent travellers on the flimsiest of pretexts.  National ardour, and, alas, national hatred were deeply stirred.[258] The Whigs, who had paraded the clemency of Napoleon, were at once helpless, and found themselves reduced to impotence for wellnigh a generation; and the Tories, who seemed the exponents of a national policy, were left in power until the stream of democracy, dammed up by war in 1793 and again in 1803, asserted its full force in the later movement for reform.

Yet the opinion often expressed by pamphleteers, that the war of 1803 was undertaken to compel France to abandon her republican principles, is devoid of a shred of evidence in its favour.  After 1802 there were no French republican principles to be combated; they had already been jettisoned; and, since Bonaparte had crushed the Jacobins, his personal claims were favourably regarded at Whitehall, Addington even assuring the French envoy that he would welcome the establishment of hereditary succession in the First Consul’s family.[259] But while Bonaparte’s own conduct served to refute the notion that the war of 1803 was a war of principles, his masterful policy in Europe and the Levant convinced every well-informed man that peace was impossible; and the rupture was accompanied by acts and insults to the “nation of shopkeepers” that could be avenged only by torrents of blood.  Diatribes against perfidious Albion filled the French Press and overflowed into splenetic pamphlets, one of which bade odious England tremble under the consciousness of her bad faith and the expectation of swift and condign chastisement.  Such was the spirit in which these nations rushed to arms; and the conflict was scarcely to cease until Napoleon was flung out into the solitudes of the southern Atlantic.

The importance of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens will be realized if we briefly survey Bonaparte’s position after that treaty was signed.  He had regained for his adopted country a colonial empire and had given away not a single French island.  France was raised to a position of assured strength far preferable to the perilous heights attained later on at Tilsit.  In Australia there was a prospect that the tricolour would wave over areas as great and settlements as prosperous as those of New South Wales and the infant town of Sydney.  From the Ile de France and the Cape of Good Hope as convenient bases of operations, British India could easily be assailed; and a Franco-Mahratta alliance promised to yield a victory over the troops of the East India Company.  In Europe the imminent collapse of the Turkish Empire invited a partition, whence France might hope to gain Egypt and the Morea.  The Ionian Isles were ready to accept French annexation; and, if England withdrew her troops from Malta, the fate of the weak Order of St. John could scarcely be a matter of doubt.