The Peace of Amiens (March, 1802, to May, 1803) afforded the only breathing space in all these twenty-two years of warfare. Napoleon, now first consul, was soon to change that republican mask for the honest and ambitious title of emperor. The hollowness of the peace soon became evident. Under its cloak French ships were building and French armies mustering in the channel ports for the invasion of England. The character of the strife had now radically changed. At the outset, ten years before, England had joined hands with the continental monarchies to check the spread of the liberal ideas which the French republican armies were carrying on their bayonets in a species of crusade in the name of liberty. But with the accession of Bonaparte to the throne of the Bourbons, England was plunged into a struggle for existence. Napoleon himself said that peace could never prevail in Europe so long as England had the power to disturb it, and all parties in England were resolved to combat to the last the establishment of a vast and menacing military despotism beyond the Straits of Dover. The genius of Admiral Nelson preserved the command of the narrow seas for England, and forced the Emperor to abandon his project of invasion which had aroused the English nation to unprecedented military activity. Pitt's subsidies had again set the continental armaments in motion, but Napoleon's brilliant dash into Germany brought these to naught in the battle of Austerlitz, which destroyed the Third Coalition and brought Austria to terms. It was this news that the great Prime Minister of George III. took so to heart. He survived the disaster but a few weeks. But the ministry of "All the Talents" took up his task with no thought of abandoning the struggle. The death of Fox soon broke up this administration, but those of Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool, which followed, were as dogged in their resolution to spend the last pound, and the last man, if need were, in ridding Europe of the conqueror whose existence England had now come to regard as a threat against her national independence.