After these successes Fox could not but be firm.

He refused to budge from the standpoint of _uti possidetis_ which our envoy had stated as the basis of negotiations: and the Earl of Lauderdale, who was sent to support and finally to supersede the Earl of Yarmouth, at once took a firm tone which drew forth a truculent rejoinder.

If that was to be the basis, wrote Clarke, the French plenipotentiary, then France would require Moravia, Styria, the whole of Austria (Proper), and Hanover, and in that case leave England her few colonial conquests.
This reply of August 8th nearly severed the negotiations on the spot: but Talleyrand persistently refused to grant the passports which Lauderdale demanded--evidently in the hope that the Czar's ratification of Oubril's treaty would cause us to give up Sicily.[88] He was in error.

On September 3rd the news reached Paris that Alexander scornfully rejected his envoy's handiwork.

Nevertheless, Napoleon refused to forego his claims to Sicily; and the closing days of Fox were embittered by the thought that this negotiation, the last hope of a career fruitful in disappointments, was doomed to failure.
After using his splendid eloquence for fifteen years in defence of the Revolution and its "heir," he came to the bitter conclusion that liberty had miscarried in France, and that that land had bent beneath the yoke in order the more completely to subjugate the Continent.