If the United States could wait till spring, their friends were likely to be once more in power, or the Tory influence would be so far shaken that the danger of war might pass. For this possible revolution both Madison and Pinkney twelve months before would have waited with confidence and pleasure; but repeated disappointments had convinced them that their patience was useless. Pinkney had asked and received instructions to require a decision or to quit England. When November arrived, the day on which Napoleon’s Decrees stood revoked according to the Duc de Cadore, Pinkney acted in London on his own responsibility, as Madison acted at Washington, and sent to Lord Wellesley a note, dated November 3, asking for an immediate repeal of the British Orders in Council, on the ground that Napoleon’s revocation had taken effect. “That it has taken effect cannot be doubted,” he said;[2] but he offered no evidence to support his assertion. He also assumed that England was bound to withdraw Fox’s blockade of the French coast from Brest to the Elbe, as well as Spencer Perceval’s subsequent measures which were called into existence by Napoleon’s Continental system, and were to cease with it. Both these demands were made without instructions founded on the knowledge of Cadore’s letter. At that moment Lord Wellesley was full of hope that at last he should remove Spencer Perceval from his path. Every one supposed, and had good ground for believing, that the Prince of Wales would at once form a new Government, with Wellesley and the Whigs for its support. At such a crisis Wellesley could not expect or indeed wish to effect a partial and sudden change of foreign policy. He waited a month before taking official notice of Pinkney’s letter, and when he replied,[3] December 4, said only that “after the most accurate inquiry” he had been unable to obtain any authentic intelligence of the French repeal, and begged the American minister to furnish whatever information he possessed on the subject. The American minister possessed no information on the subject, but he received, December 11, news of the President’s proclamation founded on the French repeal, and was the more decided to insist on his ground. Finding that conversations produced no effect, Pinkney took his pen once more,--and then began another of the diplomatic duels which had occurred so often in the course of the last six years; but for the first time the American champion with weak arguments and indifferent temper used the kind of logic likely to produce conviction in the end.