But besides keeping an idle wintry watch on the plateau before Sebastopol, there was no work in store for the army in the Crimea. The victories won by the sword were now about to be neutralised by the pen, and for Lord Palmerston the supreme moment of humiliation and failure was close at hand. The corner-stone of his foreign policy, it will be remembered, was the French alliance. If that proved to be unstable, the policy itself was _ab initio_ a fatal blunder. And the French alliance broke down at the critical moment when England, full of confidence in her reorganised army, expected that the war would be prosecuted till her disgraceful defeats at the Redan were triumphantly avenged. France, as has been repeatedly said, was sick of the war--a fact which Palmerston never had the moral courage to face. The war had now served the Emperor’s purpose, for the victory of the Malakoff had glorified the dynasty. Napoleon III., therefore, resolved to desert his ally, and in October Palmerston learnt with dismay that 100,000 French troops were to be immediately withdrawn from the Crimea.[259] What was still more serious, as Prince Albert says in a letter to Stockmar, the French were now demanding territorial compensation either in Poland, Italy, or the left bank of the Rhine. This last demand was particularly alarming to the Queen, who, in the spring, had warned Clarendon of its probable consequences. “The first Frenchman,” she says, in her letter of the 15th of April, “who should hostilely approach the Rhine, would set the whole of Germany on fire.” But in November, Palmerston’s policy compelled Englishmen to drink the cup of humiliation to the lees. Napoleon III., ignoring England, secretly negotiated with Austria the terms of peace which were to be offered to Russia, and these were then transmitted to the British Government, by Count Walewski, with an intimation that England must accept them as they stood. Palmerston, angry at being thus duped and slighted, sent a violent remonstrance to France, declaring that England would carry on the war alone rather than accept such terms.[260] The Emperor himself, however, wrote to the Queen advising her to give way, and explaining why he could not consent to extort any further sacrifices from France, for what he contemptuously called “the microscopical advantages” which were the objects of Lord Palmerston’s policy. The Queen in her reply says, “I make, then, full allowance for your Majesty’s personal difficulties, and refuse to listen to any wounded feelings of _amour propre_ which my Government might be supposed to entertain at a complete understanding having been come to with Austria--an understanding which has resulted in an arrangement being placed cut and dry before us, for our mere acceptance, putting us in the disagreeable position of either having to accept what we have not even been allowed fully to understand (and which, so far as Austria is