How was the British Government to know that Davis would not bend every energy in sending out privateers, and Lincoln to establish a blockade?
The respective declarations of Davis and Lincoln were the _first_ evidences offered of belligerent status.

It was reasonable to assume that here would come the first energetic efforts of the belligerents.

Nor was British governmental intelligence sufficiently informed to be aware that Davis, in fact, controlled few ships that could be fitted out as privateers, or that two-thirds of the Northern navy was at the moment widely scattered in foreign seas, making impossible a prompt blockade.
To the British view the immediate danger to its commercial interests lay in this announced maritime war, and it felt the necessity of defining its neutral position with speed.

The underlying fact of the fixity of Southern determination to maintain secession had in the last few weeks become clearly recognized.
Moreover the latest information sent by British officials in America, some of it received just before the issue of the Proclamation of Neutrality, some just after, was all confirmative of the rapid approach of a great war.

A letter from Bunch, at Charleston, was received on May 10, depicting the united Southern will to resist Northern attack, and asserting that the South had no purpose save to conduct a strictly defensive war.