It was one of those triumphs, which cost so dear to the victors, and which accelerates their fall. In passing through the crowded streets about Westminster, Lord Mulgrave was threatened by the multitude, who demanded that he should join in the cry: "Long live the queen!" He turned towards the populace and said, "Very well, long live the queen, and all you women that resemble her." Something of this bitter sarcasm began to penetrate slowly into the minds of the people, but lately carried away, without reflection, in the defence of a wife outraged by him who had set her so fatal an example. The resolution shown by the ministers in the conduct of their painful task, and the perils they had braved, led to a sincere reaction in their favor. {449} A diabolical plot that has been called "the Cato street conspiracy"--after the name of the street where its principal author, Arthur Thistlewood, resided, had threatened the lives of all the members of the cabinet; they were to be assassinated _en masse_, in the dining-room of Lord Harrowby, in Grosvenor Square. The plot was discovered, and the conspirators suffered the penalty of their crime on the 1st of May, 1820. Almost at the same moment grave disorders broke out in Scotland and the north of England. The energy of their repression equalled the violence of the attempts. The honest mass of the nation rose as one man against those misguided wretches that threatened to annihilate social order. "Among those who are here," said Sir Walter Scott, in a public meeting at Edinburgh, "there are persons who are able, by uniting their forces, to raise an army of fifty thousand men." Notwithstanding that the government of George IV. had shared in the great unpopularity of the sovereign, it finally regained the favor of the nation. The majority which sustained it in Parliament became each day more decided and more united. "In six months the king will be the most popular man in the realm," said Lord Castlereagh, with a just and disdainful appreciation of the violence of popular reaction.