w it now that the queen was as bitterly incensed against the
new order of things, and as resolutely unfaithful to it, as the most
furious emigrant on the Rhine. Even Burke himself, writing to his son
at Coblenz, was constrained to talk about Marie Antoinette as that
"most unfortunate woman, who was not to be cured of the spirit of
court intrigue even by a prison." The king may have been loyally
resigned to his position, but resignation will not defend a country
from the invader; and the nation distrusted a chief who only a few
months before had been arrested in full flight to join the national
enemy. Power naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction,
energy, passion, and resource. Patriotism and republicanism became
synonymous, and the constitution against which Burke had prophesied
was henceforth a dead letter. The spirit of insurrection that had
slumbered since the fall of the Bastille and the march to Versailles
in 1789, now awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminary
rehearsal of what is known in the revolutionary calendar as the
20th of June (1792), the people of Paris responded to the Duke of
Brunswick's insensate manifesto by the more memorable day of the 10th
of August. Brunswick, accepting the hateful language which the French
emigrants put into his mouth, had declared that every member of the
national guard taken with arms in his hands would be immediately put
to death; that every inhabitant who should dare to defend himself
would be put to death and his house burnt to the ground; and that if
the least insult was offered to the royal family, then their Austrian
and Prussian majesties would deliver Paris to military execution and
total destruction. This is the vindictive ferocity which only civil
war can kindle. To convince men that the manifesto was not an empty
threat, on the day of its publication a force of nearly 140,000
Austrians, Prussians, and Hessians entered France. The sections of
Paris replied by marching to the Tuileries, and after a furious
conflict with the Swiss guards, they stormed the chateau. The king and
his family had fled to the National Assembly. The same evening they
were thrown into prison, whence the king and queen only came out on
their way to the scaffold.

It was the king's execution in January 1793 that finally raised
feeling in England to the intense heat which Burke had for so long
been craving. The evening on which the courier brought the news
was never f