At once the states bordering on France were made to feel their position. Holland agreed to furnish five ships of the line, a hundred gunboats, eleven thousand men, and subsistence for a French army of eighteen thousand. For this France guaranteed her territorial integrity with the return of all her colonies, not even excepting Ceylon. Switzerland was to furnish half of her little army in any case, and nearly the whole of it if France were attacked. The sale of Louisiana spread consternation throughout Spain, which had always hoped to recover it, and with that end in view had included in her treaty with France a clause retaining the right of redemption for herself. Deriding her exasperation, Bonaparte despatched an army to the frontier, and demanded in place of the twenty-five ships and twenty-eight thousand men agreed upon in the treaty of 1796 a subsidy of no less than six million francs a month. Godoy, the "Prince of the Peace," who had been made chief minister of Spain, first thought of war, but his masterful opponent threatened the weak king, Charles IV, with a public exposure of the scandalous relation between his queen and that minister, and before the end of the year the demand was granted. Portugal purchased neutrality by a contribution of one million francs a month, and Genoa agreed to furnish six thousand sailors for the French fleets. In consequence England began to prey on Spanish commerce.
The second preparation for war was the much discussed equipment of an expedition to invade England. It is a commonplace of history that the British empire has ever been fortified in the separation of the kingdom from the continent of Europe by a narrow but stormy estuary. There had been repeated invasions from the days of the Anglo-Saxons themselves down to the expedition of William of Orange; but growing wealth had furnished ever increasing armaments, and made access to England's shores so much more difficult with every year that, finally, successful invasion had come to be regarded by her enemies as impossible. On the other hand, the English remained skeptical, and fell into periodic panics on the question. Even now a clever fiction like the "Battle of Dorking," or a revival of the project for tunneling below the Channel, can awaken such anxiety as to insure the passage of any grant for strengthening the navy. This distrust was well known to the French. For years the project of a descent on England had been the standard pretext of the Convention and of the Directory to extort money from office-holders and patriots. This inheritance was exploited by the First Consul to its full value. In general his preparation was doubtless a feint, but there were probably times when the scheme commended itself as an alternative. He told Whitworth that there was but one chance in a hundred of its success; he never seriously tried to execute it; and in the undiplomatic but apparently sincere effusion of October twenty-third, to Otto, the whole stress of his argument is laid on the chances of continental conquest.