of Ireland, "is in a very strange and, I must
acknowledge, in a precarious state."--Lord Sidmouth to Earl
Talbot, Pellew's "Life of Lord Sidmouth," vol. iii. p. 310.

DR. PHILLIMORE TO THE MARQUIS OF BUCKINGHAM.

Whitehall, Feb. 15, 1820.

MY DEAR LORD,

As your Lordship desired me to write if there was any news of any
description in circulation, I take up my pen merely to inform you
that there is a report most generally disseminated both throughout
the West-end of the town and the City, that the Ministers have
resigned. Sir W. Scott [Lord Stowell] yesterday, in expressing his
apprehension (to an acquaintance of mine) that such an event was in
contemplation, said it would not be a partial change, "but a
general sweep." Excuse haste.

Ever your obliged and faithful servant,

JOSEPH PHILLIMORE.

P.S.--The Cabinet sat thirteen hours on Sunday.

The sweeping change so confidently anticipated did not take place; and
probably when it became evident to some of the most daring of the
political speculators of the time, that this was not so imminent as
they desired, they resolved to expedite it in a fashion that should
leave no necessity for a second experiment of the kind.

On the 23rd of February, the loyal citizens of the metropolis were
startled by the intelligence of the timely discovery of a plot to
assassinate his Majesty's Ministers while they were at dinner in the
house of the Earl of Harrowby, Grosvenor Square, and of a sanguinary
conflict of the police and military with the conspirators, when
attempting to seize the latter at their place of rendezvous, in an
obscure thoroughfare near Paddington, called Cato Street. The history
of the Thistlewood Conspiracy,[5] as related in the criminal annals of
the period, illustrates in a remarkable manner the diseased state of
political feeling then existing in England. It was a small copy of the
Irish rebellion,--marked by the same cut-throat policy,--having in view
a similar overwhelming revolution, with the same absurdly inadequate
means. Fortunately for the United Kingdom, the chief actors in both
succeeded only in bringing upon themselves the destruction with which
they had menaced a powerful Government.

[5] A good account of it may be found in Pellew's "Life of Lord
Sidmouth," vol. iii. p. 312.

Thistlewood proposed to slaughter the entire Cabinet at once, when
assembled at Lord