In the spring of 1791 he wrote of a French adventurer, named St. Ginier, who had appeared at St. Petersburg with a plan for invading Bengal by way of Kashmir, and in July he communicated to George Grenville a circumstantial account of a plot to burn the British fleet at Portsmouth by means of Irish and other incendiaries in Russian pay.

In the meantime Pitt had become alarmed at the opposition to his Russian policy in parliament, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox both uttering powerful speeches against the restoration of Oczakow to the Porte, and early in April 1791 a messenger was hastily dispatched to St. Petersburg to keep back the ultimatum which Whitworth had on 27 March been ordered to present to the Empress.

Catherine, elated by recent victories of Alexander Suvorov, said to him with an ironical smile: "Sir, since the king your master is determined to drive me out of Petersburg, I hope he will permit me to retire to Constantinople".

[4] Gradually, however, through the influence of Madame Gerepzof, the sister of the favourite, the celebrated Platon Zubov, and in consequence of the alarm excited in the mind of Catherine by the course things were taking in France, Whitworth more than recovered his position.

Great Britain's influence upon the peace finally concluded at the Treaty of Jassy on 9 January 1792 was, it is true, little more than nominal, but Whitworth obtained some credit for the achievement, together with the cross of the Order of the Bath (17 November 1793).

[5] The gradual rapprochement between the views of Russia and Britain was brought about mainly by the common dread of any revolutionary infection from the quarter of France, and in February 1795 Catherine was induced to sign a preliminary treaty, by the terms of which she was to furnish the coalition with at least sixty-five thousand men in return for a large monthly subsidy from the British government.

Paul I, in his desire to adopt an original policy, refused to affix his signature, and it was not until June 1798 that the outrage committed by the French upon the Knights Hospitaller at Malta, who had chosen him for their protector, disposed him to listen to the solicitations of Whitworth.

The latter obtained his adhesion to an alliance with Great Britain offensive and defensive, with the object of putting a stop to the further encroachments of France, in December 1798, and the treaty paved the way for the operations of Suvarov and Alexander Korsakov in Northern Italy and the Alps.

The request was readily complied with, and on 21 March 1800 the ambassador was made Baron Whitworth, of Newport Pratt in the County of Mayo, in the Peerage of Ireland;[6] but before the patent could reach him the Tsar had been reconciled to Napoleon.

Irritated, moreover, by the British seizure and retention of Malta, Paul abruptly dismissed Whitworth, and thereupon commenced that angry correspondence which developed into the combination of northern powers against Great Britain.

As early as 23 December Whitworth mentions in a despatch the rumour that the first consul was meditating a divorce from his wife and the assumption of the imperial title, but during his first two months' sojourn in Paris there seemed a tacit agreement to avoid disagreeable subjects.

Napoleon ignored the attacks of the English press, the retention of Malta, and the protracted evacuation of Ottoman Egypt, while Britain kept silence as to the recent French aggressions in Holland, Piedmont, Elba, Parma, and Switzerland.

Three days later was published a report filling eight pages of Le Moniteur Universel from Colonel Horace François Bastien, baron Sébastiani, who had been sent by Napoleon upon a special mission of inquiry to Egypt.

Any significance that this offer might have had was more than neutralised by the first consul's observation, "Ce sont des bagatelles" (much commented upon in Britain), when, in answer to reproaches about Malta, Whitworth hinted at the augmentation of French power in Piedmont, Switzerland, and elsewhere.

At the close of a violent tirade before a full court, interrupted by asides to foreign diplomatists expressive of the bad faith of the British, Napoleon exclaimed loudly to Whitworth, "Malheur à ceux qui ne respectent pas les traités.

Two hundred people heard this conversation ("if such it can be called"), "and I am persuaded," adds Whitworth, "that there was not a single person who did not feel the extreme impropriety of his conduct and the total want of dignity as well as of decency on the occasion."

Irritated by his failure to stun him by a display of violence (such as that which had so daunted the Venetian plenipotentiaries before the treaty of Campo Formio), Napoleon did not hesitate to suggest in one of his journals that Whitworth had been privy to the murder of Paul I in Russia.