It will be remembered that the betrayer whom Mr. Froude dramatically pictures as unbosoming himself to Downshire was the confidant of Reinhard at Hamburg, had access to his house, and used that fact to prove that his services, as an informer, were worth purchase by Pitt. I have elsewhere shown that the letters headed 'Secret Information from Hamburg,' which have crept into the 'Castlereagh Papers' to puzzle the world,[267] can only have been written by 'Lord Downshire's friend'--_i.e._ Turner. One appears at page 306 of the first volume of that work. _There_ the objects vaguely broached by Duckett are revealed as plainly as though Reinhard himself had whispered the word. The spy, having furnished other items of news, writes:-- 'Duckett is at Hamburg; he has denounced Stone at Paris as a traitor.[268] I hear he [Duckett] has got money from the [French] Government for the purpose of renewing the mutiny in the English Fleet.'[269] Obstinately hostile winds, as in 1796, once more saved England. Tone, whose untiring energy had accomplished the organisation of the invading forces, soliloquises in his diary of 1 August, 1797:-- I am, to-day, twenty-five days aboard, and at a time when twenty-five hours are of importance. There seems to be a fate in this business. Five weeks--I believe six weeks--the English Fleet was paralysed by the mutinies at Portsmouth,[270] Plymouth, and the Nore. The sea was open, and nothing to prevent both the Dutch and French fleets to put to sea. Well, nothing was ready; that precious opportunity, which we can never expect to return, was lost; and now that at last we are ready here the wind is against us, the mutiny is quelled, and we are sure to be attacked by a superior force. At Brest it is, I fancy, still worse. Had we been in Ireland at the moment of the insurrection at the Nore, we should beyond a doubt have had at least that fleet, and God only knows the influence which such an event might have had on the whole British Navy. Much that Tone privately penned is found confirmed by a secret committee which sat while Parker's[271] corpse hung in chains at Sheppey. It appeared that the crews were largely sworn to espouse the Irish cause; 'to be faithful to their brethren who were fighting against tyranny;' to carry a portion of the fleet into Irish ports, hoisting, instead of the Union Jack, a green flag emblazoned with _Erin-go-bragh_.[272] Dr. Madden's suggestion that Duckett was a spy of Pitt's is reiterated with cruel consistency. Part of the grounds of his suspicion was Duckett's intimate relations with Reinhard, also suspected by Madden, but who is now shown conclusively to have been true. Madden frequently quotes from the 'Castlereagh Papers,' but overlooks the following letter from Sir J. Crawford to Lord Grenville, one wholly inconsistent with his hypothesis that Duckett, like Turner, was a spy for Pitt. Crawford was, of course, the British representative at Hamburg.