ed an unbending opposition. Weak as
our policy had been on other affairs, it was firm as a rock on all
maritime and Indian questions. In fact, the events to be described in
the next chapter, which led to the consolidation of British power in
Hindostan, would in all probability never have occurred but for the
apprehensions excited by these French demands; and our masterful
proconsul in Bengal, the Marquis Wellesley, could not have pursued his
daring and expensive schemes of conquest, annexation, and forced
alliances, had not the schemes of the First Consul played into the
hands of the soldiers at Calcutta and weakened the protests of the
dividend-hunters of Leadenhall Street.

The persistence of French demands for an increase of influence in
Newfoundland and the West and East Indies, the vastness of her
expedition to Saint Domingo and the thinly-veiled designs of her
Australian expedition (which we shall notice in the next chapter), all
served to awaken the suspicions of the British Government. The
negotiations consequently progressed but slowly. From the outset they
were clogged by the suspicion of bad faith. Spain and Holland, smarting
under the conditions of a peace which gave to France all the glory and
to her allies all the loss, delayed sending their respective envoys to
the conferences at Amiens, and finally avowed their determination to
resist the surrender of Trinidad and Ceylon. In fact, pressure had to
be exerted from Paris and London before they yielded to the inevitable.
This difficulty was only one of several: there then remained the
questions whether Portugal and Turkey should be admitted to share in the
treaty, as England demanded; or whether they should sign a separate
peace with France. The First Consul strenuously insisted on the
exclusion of those States, though their interests were vitally affected
by the present negotiations, He saw that a separate treaty with the
Sublime Porte would enable him, not only to extract valuable trading
concessions in the Black Sea trade, but also to cement a good
understanding with Russia on the Eastern Question, which was now being
adroitly reopened by French diplomacy. Against the exclusion of Turkey
from the negotiations at Amiens, Great Britain firmly but vainly
protested. In fact, Talleyrand had bound the Porte to a separate
agreement which promised everything for France and nothing for Turkey,
and seemed to doom the Sublime Porte to certain humiliation and probabl