ty have accepted; and the suggestion made
by one of the royalist exiles to Lord Hawkesbury, that Great Britain
should seize Crete and hand it over to them, will show how desperate
was their case.[183] Nevertheless, some effort should have been made
by a Government which had so often proclaimed its championship of the
legitimist cause. Still more glaring was the omission of any
stipulation for an indemnity for the House of Orange, now exiled from
the Batavian Republic. That claim, though urged at the outset, found
no place in the preliminaries; and the mingled surprise and contempt
felt in the _salons_ of Paris at the conduct of the British Government
is shown in a semi-official report sent thence by one of its secret
agents:

"I cannot get it into my head that the British Ministry has acted
in good faith in subscribing to preliminaries of peace, which,
considering the respective position of the parties, would be
harmful to the English people.... People are persuaded in France
that the moderation of England is only a snare put in Bonaparte's
way, and it is mainly in order to dispel it that our journals have
received the order to make much of the advantages which must accrue
to England from the conquests retained by her; but the journalists
have convinced nobody, and it is said openly that if our European
conquests are consolidated by a general peace, France will, within
ten years, subjugate all Europe, Great Britain included, despite
all her vast dominions in India. Only within the last few days have
people here believed in the sincerity of the English preliminaries
of peace, and they say everywhere that, after having gloriously
sailed past the rocks that Bonaparte's cunning had placed in its
track, the British Ministry has completely foundered at the mouth
of the harbour. People blame the whole structure of the peace as
betraying marks of feebleness in all that concerns the dignity and
the interests of the King; ... and we cannot excuse its neglect of
the royalists, whose interests are entirely set aside in the
preliminaries. Men are especially astonished at England's
retrocession of Martinique without a single stipulation for the
colonists there, who are at the mercy of a government as rapacious
as it is fickle. All the owners of colonial property are very
uneasy, and do not hide their annoyance