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‘and I’ll have the Captain order you strapped to a grating for six lashes of the “cat”.’ Then he swung on his heel and recommenced pacing the quarter-deck.
    Within a few minutes he had dismissed Giffens from his mind and was thinking of his last conversation with Mr. Pitt.Together they had surveyed the international situation and, for Britain, it could hardly have been worse.
    Between March ’96 and April ’97 Bonaparte’s victorious army had overrun Piedmont, the Duchies of Milan, Parma and Modena, the Republic of Genoa and an area as big as Switzerland in north-east Italy that had for centuries been subject to Venice. He had dethroned their rulers, set up People’s Governments and merged a great part of these territories into a new Cisalpine Republic. He had also invaded the Papal States and had blackmailed both the Pope and the Duke of Tuscany into making huge contributions to the cost of his campaign. As a result, the whole of northern Italy now lay under the heel of France.
    Yet he had fallen short of achieving his great plan, as he had described it to Roger before setting out for Italy. It had been that he should fight his way up to the Tyrol while the French Army of the Rhine marched south to make junction with him there; then with this overwhelming force, he would thrust east and compel the Austrians to sign a peace treaty in Vienna. He had reached the Tyrol, but the Army of the Rhine had failed him; so, to give it further time, he had agreed to an armistice with the Austrians. For six months the plenipotentiaries had wrangled over peace terms at Leoben. By then autumn had come again, and the Army of the Rhine had made little progress. Although the great prize, Vienna, lay less than a hundred miles away, Bonaparte did not dare, with snow already falling in the mountains, resume his advance alone and risk a defeat so far from his base. Reluctantly he had come to terms and signed a peace treaty with the Austrians at Campo Formio on October 17th.
    When making peace Austria had not consulted Britain, thus betraying the ally who had sent her many millions in subsidies to help her defend herself. Still worse, by the terms of the Treaty, she surrendered all claim to her Belgian territories. Her flat refusal to do so previously had been the stumbling block which Mr. Pitt had felt that he could not honourably ignore when he had had the opportunity to agree a general pacification with France some two years earlier.
    Still earlier Prussia, too, had betrayed Britain by making aseparate peace; and although Frederick William II had died in the previous November his successor, Frederick William III, as yet showed no inclination to re-enter the conflict against the Power that threatened every Monarchy in Europe.
    Catherine of Russia had realised belatedly the danger, and had promised to send an Army against France. But she had died just a year before the King of Prussia, and her death had proved another blow to Britain. Her son, who succeeded her as Paul I, had detested his mother so intensely that he senselessly sought to be avenged upon her in her grave by reversing every policy she had favoured and, overnight, he tore up the agreement by which Russia was to join the Anglo-Austrian alliance.
    Holland lay at the mercy of France, Portugal had signed a separate peace and Spain had gone over to the enemy. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies alone, owing to the influence of Queen Caroline, the sister of the martyred Marie Antoinette, pursued a neutrality strongly favourable to Britain, and would have entered the war again if she could have been supported. But she could not. The combination of the French and Spanish Fleets, after Spain had become the ally of France in ’96, gave them such superiority that Britain had been forced to withdraw her Fleet from the Mediterranean; so for the past two years Naples had remained cut off.
    At sea in all other areas Britain had more than held her own. She had