able chiefs, but by young and
hot-headed officials. Even in the summer of 1803 that Cabinet was
already tottering under the attacks of the Whigs and the followers of
Pitt. The blandly respectable Addington and Hawkesbury with his
"vacant grin"[289] were evidently no match for Napoleon; and
Arbuthnot himself dubs Addington "a poor wretch universally despised
and laught at," and pronounces the Cabinet "the most inefficient that
ever curst a country." I judge, therefore, that our official aid to
the conspirators was limited to the Under-Secretaries of the Foreign,
War, and Admiralty Offices. Moreover, the royalist plans, _as revealed
to our officials_, mainly concerned a rising in Normandy and Brittany.
Our Government would not have paid the salaries of fifty-four royalist
officers--many of them of good old French families--if it had been
only a question of stabbing Napoleon. The lists of those officers were
drawn up here in November, 1803, that is, three months after Georges
Cadoudal had set out for Normandy and Paris to collect his
desperadoes; and it seems most probable that the officers of the
"royal army" were expected merely to clinch Cadoudal's enterprise by
rekindling the flame of revolt in the north and west. French agents
were trying to do the same in Ireland, and a plot for the murder of
George III. was thought to have been connived at by the French
authorities. But, when all is said, the British Government must stand
accused of one of the most heinous of crimes. The whole truth was not
known at Paris; but it was surmised; and the surmise was sufficient to
envenom the whole course of the struggle between England and Napoleon.

Having now established the responsibility of British officials in
this, the most famous plot of the century, we return to describe the
progress of the conspiracy and the arts employed by Napoleon to defeat
it. His tool, Mehee de la Touche, after entrapping French royalists
and some of our own officials in London, proceeded to the Continent in
order to inveigle some of our envoys. He achieved a brilliant success.
He called at Munich, in order, as he speciously alleged, to arrange
with our ambassador there the preparations for the royalist plot. The
British envoy, who bore the honoured name of Francis Drake, was a
zealous intriguer closely in touch with the _emigres_: he was
completely won over by the arts of Mehee: he gave the spy money,
supplied him with a code of false names, and even int