An attempt accordingly was made, by the negotiation of Lisle, to bring to a period the war, which appeared now to subsist entirely without an object. Lord Malmesbury, on that occasion, gave in, on the part of Britain, an offer to surrender all the conquests she had made from France and her allies; on condition of the cession of Trinidad, on the part of Spain, and of the Cape of Good Hope, Cochin, and Ceylon, on the part of Holland, with some stipulations in favour of the Prince of Orange and his adherents in the Netherlands. The French commissioners, in reply, declared, that their instructions required that the English should make a complete cession of their conquests, without any equivalent whatever; and they insisted, as indispensable preliminaries, that the King of Great Britain should lay aside his titular designation of King of France--that the Toulon fleet should be restored--and that the English should renounce their right to certain mortgages over the Netherlands, for money lent to the Emperor. Lord Malmesbury, of course, rejected a sweeping set of propositions, which decided every question against England even before the negotiation commenced, and solicited the French to offer some modified form of treaty.[337] The 18th Fructidor, however, had in the interim taken place, and the Republican party, being in possession of complete authority, broke off the negotiation, if it could be called such, abruptly, and ordered the English ambassador out of the dominions of the republic with very little ceremony. It was now proclaimed generally, that the existence of the English Carthage in the neighbourhood of the French Rome was altogether inadmissible; that England must be subdued once more, as in the times of William the Conqueror; and the hopes of a complete and final victory over their natural rival and enemy, as the two nations are but overapt to esteem each other, presented so flattering a prospect, that there was scarce a party in France, not even amongst the Royalists, which did not enter on what was expected to prove the decisive contest, with the revival of all those feelings of bitter animosity that had distinguished past ages.