A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV | Page 8

us with painful
accuracy of the petty annoyances constantly inflicted upon Napoleon,
and of the impatience and fretfulness with which, day after day, he
resented them and complained of them. We seem to live with the great
dethroned Emperor in his hours of homeliest complainings, when every
little grievance that burns in his heart finds repeated expression on his
lips. Few chapters in the history of fallen greatness can be more
touching than these pages.
Not all that Napoleon said about England, however, was mere
complaint and disparagement. The world of London may be interested
in learning from these reminiscences how Napoleon told Dr. Barry
O'Meara that if he, Napoleon, had had any authority over the English
Metropolis, he would have long ago taken measures for constructing an
embankment on both sides of the Thames as it passed between
Middlesex and Surrey. If Dr. O'Meara had embodied this suggestion in
his public volume, Napoleon might unconsciously have become the
projector of the Thames Embankment. Fas est ab hoste--the proverb is
somewhat musty.

{15}
CHAPTER LXIV.
POPULAR ALARMS--ROYAL EXCURSIONS.
[Sidenote: 1820--The Cato Street conspiracy]

The plot which has been already mentioned as one of the unpropitious
events that marked the opening of George the Fourth's reign was the
famous Cato Street conspiracy. The conspiracy was nothing less than a
plot for the assassination, all at once, of the whole of his Majesty's
ministers. The principal conspirator was a man named Thistlewood, a
compound of half-crazy fanaticism and desperate villany--a creature
who believed that he had private vengeance to satisfy, and who had, at
the same time, persuaded himself that no good could come to the
people of England until an example had been made of the King's
official advisers by the avenging hand of the lover of liberty. The
novelty as well as the audacity of the plot created a perfect
consternation all through England, and it became, for a while, the
sincere conviction of a vast number of reasonable Englishmen that the
whole political and social system of the kingdom was undermined by
such plots, and that only the most strenuous exertions made by the
champions of law and order could protect the realm from an outbreak
of horrors far transcending any of those that had convulsed France
during the worst days of the Revolution. It was soon made clear enough
that Thistlewood's plot was a conspiracy which included only a very
small number of men, and it has never been quite certain whether it was
not originally put in motion by the machination of some of the paid
spies and informers whom it was believed, at that time, to be the duty
of the Ministry to keep in its service for the detection and the
frustration of revolutionary conspiracy. It was the common practice of
spies and informers, in those days, to go {16} about secretly in quarters
where revolutionary conspiracy was believed to be in existence, to
represent themselves to some of the suspected plotters as
fellow-revolutionists and brother-conspirators, and thus to get into their
confidence, and even to suggest to them some new form of conspiracy,
in order that their willingness to accept the suggestion might mark them
out as proper subjects for a Government prosecution and obtain for the
informers the credit of the detection.
[Sidenote: 1820--Origin of the conspiracy]
Thistlewood had been engaged in popular agitation for some sort of
reconstitution of political society, and he had been once put on his trial

for some alleged offence arising out of such an agitation. More lucky
than many other of his contemporaries under similar conditions, he was
brought before a jury who found him not guilty of the charge made
against him. Now, if Thistlewood had been a sane member of even an
Anarchist organization, he might have been softened in his feelings
towards the existing order of things by finding that a jury had actually
recognized the possibility of his being formally charged with an
offence against the Crown and yet not being guilty. But Thistlewood
regarded the bare fact that a charge had been made against him as a
crime calling out for vengeance, and in his frenzy he got the idea into
his head that Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was the person on
whom he was bound to take revenge. Accordingly, the unfortunate
creature actually sent a challenge to Lord Sidmouth, inviting and
defying him to mortal combat. Perhaps Lord Sidmouth would have
acted wisely if he had taken no notice whatever of this preposterous
challenge, but, at the same time, it is only fair to remember that Lord
Sidmouth might think it dangerous to the public peace to allow a
person to go unrebuked who had sent a challenge to a Minister of the
Crown. Criminal proceedings were, therefore, taken against
Thistlewood,