The establishment of the Consulate gave France peace from the strife of parties. Peace from foreign warfare was not less desired by the nation; and although the First Consul himself was restlessly planning the next campaign, it belonged to his policy to represent himself as the mediator between France and Europe. Discarding the usual diplomatic forms, Bonaparte addressed letters in his own name to the Emperor Francis and to King George III., deploring the miseries inflicted by war upon nations naturally allied, and declaring his personal anxiety to enter upon negotiations for peace. The reply of Austria which was courteously worded, produced an offer on the part of Bonaparte to treat for peace upon the basis of the Treaty of Campo Formio. Such a proposal was the best evidence of Bonaparte's real intentions. Austria had re-conquered Lombardy, and driven the armies of the Republic from the Adige to within a few miles of Nice. To propose a peace which should merely restore the situation existing at the beginning of the war was pure irony. The Austrian Government accordingly declared itself unable to treat without the concurrence of its allies. The answer of England to the overtures of the First Consul was rough and defiant. It recounted the causes of war and distrust which precluded England from negotiating with a revolutionary Government; and, though not insisting on the restoration of the Bourbons as a condition of peace, it stated that no guarantee for the sincerity and good behaviour of France would be so acceptable to Great Britain as the recall of the ancient family. [85] Few State papers have been distinguished by worse faults of judgment than this English manifesto. It was intended to recommend the Bourbons to France as a means of procuring peace: it enabled Bonaparte to represent England as violently interfering with the rights of the French people, and the Bourbons as seeking their restoration at the hand of the enemy of their country. The answer made to Pitt's Government from Paris was such as one high-spirited nation which had recently expelled its rulers might address to another that had expelled its rulers a century before. France, it was said, had as good a right to dismiss an incapable dynasty as Great Britain. If Talleyrand's reply failed to convince King George that before restoring the Bourbons he ought to surrender his own throne to the Stuarts, it succeeded in transferring attention from the wrongs inflicted by France to the pretensions advanced by England. That it affected the actual course of events there is no reason to believe. The French Government was well acquainted with the real grounds of war possessed by England, in spite of the errors by which the British Cabinet weakened the statement of its cause. What the mass of the French people now thought, or did not think, had become a matter of very little importance. [Situation of the Armies.] [Moreau invades South Germany, April, 1800.]