British merchants would have looked for a renewal of that enlightened treaty of commerce of 1786-7, which had aroused the bitter opposition of French manufacturers.

But the question might have been broached at London, and its omission from the preliminaries served as a reason for shelving it in the definitive treaty--a piece of folly which at once provoked the severest censure from British manufacturers, who thereby lost the markets of France, and her subject States, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa, and Etruria.
And, finally, the terms of peace provided no compensation either for the French royal House or for the dispossessed House of Orange.

Here again, it would have been very difficult to find a recompense such as the Bourbons could with dignity have accepted; and the suggestion made by one of the royalist exiles to Lord Hawkesbury, that Great Britain should seize Crete and hand it over to them, will show how desperate was their case.[183] Nevertheless, some effort should have been made by a Government which had so often proclaimed its championship of the legitimist cause.

Still more glaring was the omission of any stipulation for an indemnity for the House of Orange, now exiled from the Batavian Republic.

That claim, though urged at the outset, found no place in the preliminaries; and the mingled surprise and contempt felt in the _salons_ of Paris at the conduct of the British Government is shown in a semi-official report sent thence by one of its secret agents: "I cannot get it into my head that the British Ministry has acted in good faith in subscribing to preliminaries of peace, which, considering the respective position of the parties, would be harmful to the English people....