France would fight for thirty years rather than pardon her atrocious act of perfidy: the Queen of Naples had ceased to reign: let her go to London and form a committee of sympathetic ink with Drake, Spencer-Smith, Taylor, and Wickham.
This diatribe was not the first occasion on which the conqueror had proved that he was no gentleman.

In his brutal letter of January 2nd, 1805, to Queen Caroline, he told her that, if she was the cause of another war, she and her children would beg their bread all through Europe.

That and similar outbursts afford some excuse for the conduct of the Bourbons in the autumn of 1805.

They infringed the neutrality which their ambassador had engaged to observe: but it is to be remembered that Napoleon's invasion of the Neapolitan States in 1803 was a gross violation of international law, which the French Foreign Office sought to cloak by fabricating two secret articles of the Treaty of Amiens.[66] And though troth should doubtless be kept, even with a law-breaker, yet its violation becomes venial when the latter adopts the tone of a bully.

For the present he triumphed.