ced Grenville not only to stand aloof from the new
administration himself, but to do his utmost to prevent others from
giving it their support.[25] The new cabinet was quickly formed. Pitt
received the seals of office on May 10, and took his seat in parliament
after re-election on the 18th, the very day on which Napoleon was
declared emperor by the French senate.

This event, long foreseen, was doubtless hastened by the disclosure of
the plot formed by Moreau, Pichegru, and Georges Cadoudal against the
first consul. There was no proof of Moreau's complicity in designs on
Napoleon's life, and the mysterious death of Pichegru in prison left the
extent of his complicity among the insoluble problems of history, but
there can be no doubt that Cadoudal was justly executed for plotting
assassination. Unfortunately some of the under-secretaries in the
Addington administration had not only shared the plans of the
conspirators so far as they aimed at a rising in France, but had
procured for them material assistance. They appear, however, to have
been innocent of any attempt on Napoleon's life. Drake, the British
envoy at Munich, was, however, deeper in the plot. The evidence of
British complicity naturally received the very worst construction in
Paris.[26] Napoleon himself certainly believed in an Anglo-Bourbon
conspiracy, organised by the Count of Artois and other French royalists,
when he caused the Duke of Enghien to be kidnapped in Baden territory
and hurried off to the castle of Vincennes. He was, however, already
aware of his prisoner's innocence when on March 21 he had him shot there
by torch-light after a mock trial before a military commission. All
Europe was shocked by this atrocious assassination, and though Napoleon
sometimes attempted to shift the guilt of it upon Talleyrand, he
justified it at other times as a measure of self-defence, and left on
record his deliberate approval of it, for the consideration of
posterity. Two months later he became Emperor of the French.

When Pitt resumed office on May 10, 1804, he was no longer the
heaven-born and buoyant young minister of 1783, strong in the confidence
of the king and the anticipated confidence of the nation, with a
minority of followers in the house of commons, but with the brightest
prospects of political success before him. Nor was he the leader of a
devoted majority, as when he resigned in 1801 rather than abandon his
convictions on the catholic question. He ha