The war scare of early March 1803 was a diplomatic matter in the main and it faded away, as diplomatic contretemps do, but the sharpness of the exchange between Bonaparte and Whitworth in the public audience of 13 March was soon public knowledge, and the British partial mobilisation made it clear to all that something unusually serious was now involved. Most people outside the diplomatic arena, however, seem to have been confused rather than alarmed. Bertie Greatheed noted in his diary on 24 March that ‘the rumours of war [are] rather abating’, but two days later he thought that they ‘increase every hour’; on 1 April he resignedly noted that there were ‘contradictory opinions’. This, of course, referred to the opinion within the British community in Paris. In London Thomas Graham on 17 March wrote to his brother in Scotland that ‘reports are more pacific’. The British visitors who had travelled on to Italy, however, recorded nothing like these rumours, and it seems that they and the diplomatic crisis were largely confined to the two capitals.

This did not last. The diplomatic temperature began to rise again in April, and this time many more people took notice and took it seriously. The key diplomatic moment was Hawkesbury’s letter to Whitworth of 4 April, in which he had insisted that a conclusion must be reached on the Franco–British disputes soon. Along with the letter he included two other documents. One was a note for Talleyrand, the other was a paper listing the ‘heads of agreement’, which Hawkesbury presented as the basis for a new treaty. The letter was in effect almost an ultimatum: Whitworth was to insist that relations between Britain and France could not go on as they were, and he was instructed that he should leave Paris unless progress was made. The ‘heads of agreement’ were to be presented only when the French showed that they were serious about providing an equivalent in exchange for a British evacuation of Malta.

Whitworth presented the first note to Talleyrand on 7 April. In the meantime the French had been working to try to line up all the treaty preconditions on Malta so as to give the British no excuse for further delay. Had they succeeded in doing this earlier it is likely that the British would have evacuated the islands, but by this time it was obviously unlikely.