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preparation, in which this country has been placed . . . We had till the last fortnight at most one ship of the line able to go to sea. We cannot have five ready for a month to come . . . The press [i.e. press gang] has done very little . . . and there is a want of seamen that one does not at present know how to supply. The hasty and total reduction of all our force, as if it were impossible to apprehend anything from France again, seems a sad infatuation.45

But the prospect of fresh French aggression in the Mediterranean loomed so large that Malta was simply no longer negotiable. On this, indeed, depended the survival of the government. As we have seen, many voices had been raised against the peace settlement in the British establishment, while there was considerable hatred of the ‘Jacobinism’ supposedly represented by the First Consul. ‘The government of France, while Bonaparte remains as First Consul,’ wrote Lord Malmesbury, ‘is like that of Persia under Kauli-Khan: it knows no bounds, either moral or civil [and] is ruled by no principles, and to pretend . . . that Bonaparte’s ambition is circumscribed, or that, with the means of doing everything, he will do nothing, is talking criminal nonsense.’46 Much the same view was held by George III, who felt that he had been forced into making peace because ‘I was abandoned by everybody, allies and all’, and, further, that the idea that ‘Jacobinism was at an end’ was ‘a most erroneous and dangerous maxim’, while a conversation between the Duke of York and Lord Malmesbury saw the former speak ‘with great anxiety and alarm on the situation of affairs and [deplore] the deficiency of ability and want of vigour in the present administration to oppose . . . the insolence of France’.47 In favour of peace in 1801, Pitt was also now inclined to a more robust line, as was revealed by a long conversation he had with Malmesbury as early as 8 April 1802:

Rode with Mr Pitt in Hyde Park . . . He owned that he had, when the preliminaries were signed, thought that Bonaparte had satisfied his insatiable ambition and would rest content with the power and reputation he had acquired; that for a moment, therefore, he was disposed to believe he was becoming more moderate [and] more reasonable, and that, having so completely attained every object of his wishes . . . would remain quiet, and consider a restoration of peace . . . as a wise and salutary measure, not only for France, but for the maintenance of his own high situation and . . . popularity. However, all that had passed since went to convince him that he had been in error, and that . . . [Bonaparte] was, and ever would remain, the same rapacious, insatiable plunderer with as little good faith and as little to be relied upon as he formally found him to be . . . In consequence, he (Mr Pitt) was obliged to return to his former opinions, and to declare that no compact . . . made with him could be secure . . . Still, he did not regret having spoken in favour of the peace: it was become a necessary measure, and rest for England, however short, was desirable.48

It should be noted that Pitt was not counselling immediate war and remained opposed to intervention across the Channel or North Sea. As he remarked in the same conversation, ‘The torpid and disgraceful state of public spirit in all the European courts puts it . . . out of our means to prevent Bonaparte’s attempts to . . . aggrandize himself on the Continent, for, unassisted as we probably shall be by the courts he is trampling on, it will not . . . be practicable for us to hinder him.’49 What Pitt suggested, then, was rather the limited policy of standing firm on matters relating to Britain’s own interests, arming for a new conflict, and going to war if absolutely pushed to it by some direct attack. But in view even of this line, inaction was impossible. Nor was it likely: within the Cabinet, too, there was much distrust of Napoleon. For Lord Hawkesbury, ‘Bonaparte was himself a rank Jacobin with a Jacobin mind, Jacobin principles and Jacobin projects . . . who has attained his point,