ion of the Danish fleet. Nothing was to stand in
the way of this great adventure, shameless though it might be.

Lord Malmesbury writes in his diary: "Capture of Danish fleet by
surprise on account of most undoubted information received from the
Prince Regent of Portugal of Bonaparte's intention to use the
Portuguese and Danish fleets for invasion of England. First hint of
the plan given by the Prince of Wales to the Duke of Portland. The
Portuguese refused the demand, and told the British Government of it;
the Danes accepted, kept silence, and afterwards denied it." The entry
in Malmesbury's diary has been proved to be a string of pure
inventions, for which he or some other informants are responsible. I
have said no record has been left to show that Napoleon ever had any
intention of occupying the ports of Holstein or of using the Danish
fleet for the invasion of Great Britain and Ireland. Members of
Parliament in the House of Commons and members of the House of Lords
proved beyond question that ministers' statements, taking the dates
into account, were entirely erroneous. Canning defended the sending of
the expedition, which was natural, as he was one of the principal
advocates of it. But the House would stand none of his tricks of
evasion or repudiation. He, like some more modern ministers, ventured
on the hazardous plan of deceiving Parliament, and, as was said at the
time, setting fair dealing at defiance. Canning, like all tricksters,
read extracts from documents, authentic and otherwise, to prove that
Denmark was hostile to Britain, but when a demand was made for their
inspection, he impudently refused to allow the very documents he had
based his case of justification on to be scrutinized, and in
consequence no other conclusion could be arrived at than that he was
unscrupulously misleading the country. In fact, the Government's case
was so bad it would not bear the light of God's day!

I venture to say that Mr. Fox knew more of the character, political
intricacies, and ambitions of the French race than any public man or
writer of history of his own or in subsequent years. He always based
his conclusions on a sound logical point. He was an accurate thinker,
who refused to form his judgments on light, faulty and inaccurate
newspaper paragraphs about what was going on around him. He was
opposed to Pitt and his supporters' policy of carrying on war with
France. He wanted peace, but they wanted the Bourbons, because