The short peace between Britain and France in 1802–1803 is usually treated only briefly, and even cavalierly, as a minor episode interrupting a long war. Blame is usually cast on the government of Henry Addington for making the peace, and then also for allowing it to end. Addington gets a poor press from historians, in thrall as they are to the greater esteem of William Pitt and Lord Grenville. Grenville’s obdurately anti- French policy is generally seen to have been the ‘correct’ policy, which eventually, in the hands of Castlereagh and Lord Liverpool, prevailed, even though it had clearly failed by 1801.

I exaggerate and perhaps distort, of course, but not by very much. It is in fact necessary to distinguish between the two wars, as their differing names given them for historians’ covenience – ‘Revolutionary’ and ‘Napoleonic’ – suggest. It is no less necessary to look at the ways in which the British government decided to make peace, and why it came to the decision to declare war again in 1803. For this is an episode above all in Franco-British history, with other European and American and Asian lands and powers only marginally involved in both divisions. Further, it was the British government’s decision in each case – to make peace and to make war. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, necessarily central to all of this, was the object of British attention, and did not control events.

Given that position, it follows that the sources to be used in this book are necessarily mainly British, and above all those from the Foreign Office. The essential bases for this work are partly published, and partly still in the original manuscript. Two sets of documents are published, the collections concerning Lord Cornwallis in the negotiations at Amiens, and the correspondence of Lord Whitworth during his embassy in Paris. In addition to these there are the letters of Lord Hawkesbury preserved in the British Library, of which the most significant are those relating to the negotiations with Louis Guillaume Otto for the Peace Preliminaries, and Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office.

The main result which to me emerges from a study of these documents is the consistency with which the Addington government operated towards Bonaparte.