aid should come through him at the proper moment from
the British government, was Henry's mission. Of this truly Irish plot
Henry was the villain and Craig the fool; but it is hardly possible that
three years afterward Madison and his friends, with all the letters
spread before them, could really have been the dupes.

Henry went to Boston and remained there about three months, living at a
tavern. He found out nothing because there was nothing to be found out.
He knew nobody, and nobody of any note knew him, and all the information
he sent to Craig might have been, and doubtless was, picked up in the
ordinary political gossip of the tavern barroom, or culled from the
columns of the newspapers of both parties. He compromised nobody,
for--as Mr. Monroe, as secretary of state, testified in a report to the
Senate--he named no person or persons in the United States who had, "in
any way or manner whatever, entered into or countenanced the project or
views" of himself and Craig; and all he had to say was pointless and
unimportant, except so far as his opinions might have some interest as
those of a shrewd observer of public events. Indeed, his own conclusion
was that there was no conspiracy in the Eastern States; that the Federal
party was strong enough to keep the peace with England; and that there
was no talk of disunion, nor any likelihood of it unless it should be
brought about by war. The correspondence itself showed, in a letter from
Robert Peel, then secretary to Lord Liverpool, that the letters of Henry
were found, as a matter of course, among Canadian official papers, as
they related to public affairs; but they had either never attracted any
attention or had been entirely forgotten, and Lord Liverpool was quite
ignorant of any "arrangement or agreement" that had been made between
the governor of Canada and his emissary to New England. It was only
because of his failure to get any reward from the British government or
from Craig's successor in Canada, for what he was pleased to call his
services, that the adventurer came to Washington in search of a market
for himself and his papers. He came at an opportune moment.
Notwithstanding the secretary of state frankly declared, that neither by
writing nor by word of mouth did the man implicate by name anybody in
the United States; notwithstanding one of the letters was evidence, the
more conclusive because incidental, that the British secretary of state
had known nothing of thi