But Napoleon indignantly declined to avail himself of the means of redress suggested to him, and continued to urge the English Government; who at length made a sort of compromise, by undertaking a prosecution of Peltier, the proprietor of _L'Ambigu_. Mackintosh was his counsel; and in spite of his speech for the defence, which Spencer Perceval characterized as 'one of the most splendid displays of eloquence he ever had occasion to hear,' and Lord Ellenborough as 'eloquence almost unparalleled,' Peltier was found guilty--but, as hostilities soon after broke out again with France, was never sentenced. The best part of the story, however, is, that all the time ministers were paying Peltier in private for writing the very articles for which they prosecuted him in public! This did not come out until some years afterward, when Lord Castlereagh explained the sums thus expended as 'grants for public and not private service, and for conveying instructions to the Continent when no other mode could be found.' The trial of Peltier aroused a strong feeling of indignation in the country; the English nation has always been very jealous of any interference with its laws at the dictation of any foreign potentate, as Lord Palmerston on a recent occasion found to his cost. Cobbett was soon after tried for a libel--not, however, upon Napoleon, but upon the English Government. There must have been an innate tendency in Cobbett's mind to set himself in opposition to everything around him, for whereas he had made America too hot to hold him by his anti-republican views, he now contrived to set the authorities at home against him by his advanced radicalism. He had to stand two trials in 1804, in connection with Robert Emmet's rebellion. On the second of these he was fined £500, and Judge Johnson, one of the Irish judges, who was the author of the libels complained of, retired from his judicial position with a pension. These reflections in question upon the Irish authorities would hardly be called libels now-a-days, consisting as they did chiefly of ridicule and satire, which was, after all, mild and harmless enough. In 1810, Cobbett got into trouble again. Some militia soldiers had been flogged, while a detachment of the German Legion stood by to maintain order. Cobbett immediately published a diatribe against flogging in the army and the employment of foreign mercenaries. He was indicted for a 'libel' upon the German Legion, convicted, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, to pay a fine of £1,000, and to find security in £3,000 for his good behavior during seven years--a sentence which created universal disgust among all classes, and which was not too strongly designated by Sydney Smith as 'atrocious.'