In another respect the conduct of the Portugueze regency was more inexcusable. Eight-and-forty persons, of all ranks and professions, and many of them unacquainted with each other, were seized in the night; ten of them were sent to the tower of St. Julian, and the rest to the Limoeiro, the common prison of the city. The most alarming rumours were scattered abroad. A formidable and extensive conspiracy, it was said, had been discovered, which had nothing less for its object than a general massacre of the British, for the purpose of delivering up the country to the French. These reports reached England, and received their first contradiction from the Portugueze government themselves, who found it expedient to declare, that neither Lord Wellington nor Mr. Stuart had any part in their proceedings upon this occasion; that the stories of the conspiracy, and of the arms which had been discovered, were false; and that the individuals who had been arrested had been sent out of the kingdom, only because it was the opinion of the police that their residence in it might be prejudicial to the public tranquillity. Some of these individuals were permitted to come to England, others were sent to the Azores, after they had suffered every kind of inconvenience, privation, and indignity, to the alarm and distress of the families of all, and the ruin of some; ... there was neither proof nor accusation against them; the whole, as a public act, was one of those acts which mark the unheeding and unfeeling folly of an ignorant and obstinate despotism, but of which the secret springs are to be found in private malice or cupidity.