[Illustration: The Duchess of Portsmouth]
Passing over to Georgian times we find that the employment of spies was common in all departments of life, and there can be little doubt that the Hanoverians brought to England many men and women who had learned the arts of espionage at the best of all possible schools—namely, Berlin. The history of England of those days shows us nothing in the way of pre-eminent exponents of the business, nor can espionage be said, in its political aspects, to have reached to that excellence of organisation which it attained later in the times of Pitt, whom the ever-present activities of Bonaparte compelled in the interests of our security to develop a secret-service system the operations of which were inferior to none in Europe. It remains a matter of record that in the days of the French Revolution certain political leaders in England were in the pay of the Committee of Public Safety presided over by Robespierre. This fact was communicated to Pitt through his own spy, a professedly violent Jacobin, who by means of cipher and anagrammatic correspondence, carried on with a relative in Italy, was transmitting by that roundabout route the most minute and accurate accounts of the Committee's proceedings to the English Premier. The sums paid for such dangerous work, while never, of course, disclosed, were undoubtedly very large, seeing that the all-observant Saint-Just was moving at the time through Revolutionary circles. The failure of the French invasion of Ireland in December 1796 is also set down to an act of paid treachery on the part of the captain of one of the French vessels, the story being that he took advantage of prevailing foul weather to decline approaching the Irish coast for several days, and since the general commanding the expedition was on board, the brave venture became a foregone failure. Charles Lever, who, it will be remembered, acted as British Consul at Spezzia and Trieste, introduces us on more than one occasion to a kind of consular or ambassadorial spy, an individual who in those days was as regular a member of a chancellery as its archivist is in our own.