France. But the events which had been recently passing on sea and land made France herself less arrogant in her demands. On the 16th December 1800 the Armed Neutrality had been renewed by the Northern Powers against England, chiefly through the machinations of the Emperor Paul. The battle of Copenhagen and the destruction of the Danish fleet was the high-handed answer of the English Government. The murder of the Emperor Paul, who from the enemy had become the devoted adherent of France, still further broke up the Northern alliance, while the complete success of the English expedition to Egypt not only restored the prestige of the English arms, but secured India against French aggression.
It was thus easier than in previous years for England to negotiate, and on the 1st October 1801, preliminary articles of peace were agreed upon. "I am impatient," Lord Lansdowne wrote to Lord Holland, "to drink the French consul's health now that we may do it safely and honourably, and thanks to him for granting us peace, no matter what it is."[1] On the 25th March 1802 the Treaty of Amiens was signed. The French Republic retained all her recent acquisitions in Europe, while Great Britain restored all the conquests she had made, except Ceylon and Trinidad, and was left to calculate at leisure the cost of the war into which she had been hurried by the passion of Burke, and by the ignorance of foreign politics of Pitt.
Not the least advantage which the peace brought to Lord Lansdowne was the opportunity it gave him of renewing his intimacy with his friends in France. "My mind," he wrote to Morellet, "gets every year more philosophized, and I cannot express the satisfaction it gives me to find it enlarging by dint of reflection and observation, or the pleasure it gives me to see things great and small through a just medium, unencumbered with prejudices, and little passions of which I feel I had my full share. I now look down upon them as I would upon a fog in a valley. I am very happy in both my sons. I
- ↑ Lord Lansdowne to Lord Holland, October 1801.
