The principal object of your journey being the overthrow of the existing Government, one of the means of effecting it is to acquire a knowledge of the enemy’s plans.  For this purpose it is of the highest importance to begin, in the first place, by establishing communications with persons who may be depended upon in the different Government offices in order to obtain exact information of all plans with respect to foreign or internal affairs.  The knowledge of these plans will supply the best means of defeating them; and failure is the way to bring the Government into complete discredit—­the first and most important step towards the end proposed.  Try to gain over trustworthy agents in the different Government departments.  Endeavour, also, to learn what passes in the secret committee, which is supposed to be established at St Cloud, and composed of the friends of the First Consul.  Be careful to furnish information of the various projects which Bonaparte may entertain relative to Turkey and Ireland.  Likewise send intelligence respecting the movements of troops, respecting vessels and ship-building, and all military preparations.

Drake, in his instructions, also recommended that the subversion of Bonaparte’s Government should, for the time, be the only object in view, and that nothing should be said about the King’s intentions until certain information could be obtained respecting his views; but most of his letters and instructions were anterior to 1804.  The whole bearing of the seized documents proved what Bonaparte could not be ignorant of, namely, that England was his constant enemy; but after examining them, I was of opinion that they contained nothing which could justify the belief that the Government of Great Britain authorised any attempt at assassination.

When the First Consul received the report of the Grand Judge relative to Drake’s plots’ against his Government he transmitted a copy of it to the Senate, and it was in reply to this communication that the Senate made those first overtures which Bonaparte thought vague, but which, nevertheless, led to the formation of the Empire.  Notwithstanding this important circumstance, I have not hitherto mentioned Drake, because his intrigues for Bonaparte’s overthrow appeared to me to be more immediately connected with the preliminaries of the trial of Georges and Moreau, which I shall notice in my next chapter.

—­[These were not plots for assassination.  Bonaparte, in the same way, had his secret agents in every country of Europe, without excepting England.  Alison (chap. xxxvii. par. 89) says on this matter of Drake that, though the English agents were certainly attempting a counter-revolution, they had no idea of encouraging the assassination of Napoleon, while “England was no match for the French police agents in a transaction of this description, for the publication of Regular revealed the mortifying fact that the whole correspondence