In the spring of 1803 the treaty of Amiens, which a year before had ended the long war with England, was broken. Both countries had many reasons for complaint. Napoleon was angry at the failure to evacuate Malta. The perfect freedom allowed the press in England gave the pamphleteers and caricaturists of the country an opportunity to criticize and ridicule him. He complained bitterly to the English ambassadors of this free press, an institution in his eyes impractical and idealistic. He complained, too, of the hostile _émigrés_ allowed to collect in Jersey; of the presence in England of such a notorious enemy of his as Georges Cadoudal; and of the sympathy and money the Bourbon princes and many nobles of the old _régime_ received in London society. Then, too, he regarded the country as his natural and inevitable enemy. England to Napoleon was only a little island which, like Corsica and Elba, naturally belonged to France, and he considered it part of his business to get possession of her. England, on the other hand, looked with distrust at the extension of Napoleon’s influence on the Continent. Northern Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Parma, Elba, were under his protectorate. She had been deeply offended by a report published in Paris, on the condition of the Orient, in which the author declared that with six thousand men the French could reconquer Egypt; she resented the violent articles in the official press of Paris in answer to those of the free press of England; her aristocratic spirit was irritated by Napoleon’s success; she despised this _parvenu_, this “Corsican scoundrel,” as Nelson called him, who had had the hardihood to rise so high by other than the conventional methods for getting on in the world which she sanctioned. Real and fancied aggressions continued throughout the year of the peace; and when the break finally came, though both nations persisted in declaring that they did not want war, both were in a thoroughly warlike mood. Napoleon’s preparations against England form one of the most picturesque military movements in his career. Unable to cope with his enemy at sea, he conceived the audacious notion of invading the island, and laying siege to London itself. The plan briefly was this—to gather a great army on the north shore of France, and in some port a flotilla sufficient to transport it to Great Britain. In order to prevent interference with this expedition, he would keep the enemy’s fleet occupied in the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic, until the critical moment. Then, leading the English naval commander by stratagem in the wrong direction, he would call his own fleet to the Channel to protect his passage. He counted to be in London, and to have compelled the English to peace, before Nelson could return from the chase he would have led him.