Napoleon III had made his policy towards England quite clear in his conversation with Lord Malmesbury, the British Foreign Secretary, in February 1853. "He was most anxious to go bras à bras with England on every question, not pour les beaux yeux of one another but for our solid interest...as to Europe, the safety of the West depended on the alliance of France and England...if England were to sink, France must be sacrificed to the Northern Powers...the great difficulty is your form of government, which changes the Queen's ministers so often and so suddenly. It is such a risk to adapt a line of policy with you, as one may be left in the lurch by a new administration."
To be fair to Napoleon, he remained true to these sentiments throughout his period of rule; before any of his foreign policy initiatives, often imaginative, sometimes purely adventurous, he informed Britain. Sometimes he requested cooperation, and was refused, but he never acted without Britain's tacit consent. On the question of who should hold overall command of the land forces in Turkey however, the Emperor was not prepared to accept second place, when his army was larger and more battle hardened than the British. It was this seeming inconsistency which confused the British Ambassador, Lord Cowley. As Wellington's nephew, it would have broken the family mould if he had been capable of any subtlety of diplomacy. He did not enjoy the Emperor's confidence, and was much closer to the disillusioned French aristocracy - the views he fed back to London reflected their anti-Napoleon propaganda. To many British politicians, the mere name Napoleon meant attempted conquest of Britain. This antipathy was to be carried forward to the next decade, when the speed of modernisation of the French Navy surpassed the British and Palmerston wasted tens of millions on the construction of 'Palmerston's Follies'- immensely strong coastal forts around the ports of Southern England, convinced that the French were preparing for an invasion.
