This declaration is the key to Great Britain's policy in Spanish America during the century since it was issued. The conspiracy which evoked Governor Picton's plain statement of England's attitude toward the South American colonies, was discovered by the Spanish authorities, and J. M. Espana, one of its leaders, was executed.[1] William Pitt continued to scheme for Spanish-American independence, and succeeded in enlisting the sympathy of Alexander Hamilton and Rufus King, American Minister at London. President John Adams, however, would have nothing to do with the movement, which he regarded as a plot to drive the United States into a British alliance against the French, and possibly this may have been in the mind of Pitt. The American people were not as cold as the President, however, on the subject of South America, and Francisco Miranda, a voluntary exile from Venezuela on account of his republican principles, succeeded in organizing a filibustering force in New York, one of the members of which was a grandson of the President himself. The expedition was defeated and nearly all engaged in it were captured by the Spaniards, among them young William S. Smith, John Adams' grandson. Yrujo, the Spanish Minister at Washington, offered to interpose in behalf of a pardon for the young man, but President Adams declined to use his exalted office to obtain any respite for the youth who had so unfortunately proved his inheritance of the old Adams' devotion to liberty. "My blood should flow upon a Spanish scaffold," wrote America's chief magistrate, "before I would meanly ask or accept a distinction in favor of my grandson." The young man's life was spared, however, and he returned to the United States. [1] Espana was hanged and quartered. A writer in the New York _Sun_, commenting on Espana's death, said that "thus in the eighteenth century Spain repeated the barbarism perpetrated by England on William Wallace in 1305." It is unnecessary to go back to William Wallace or off the American continent for an act of barbarity similar to Espana's execution. In the same decade, one McLean, a former resident, if not a citizen of the United States, was hanged and quartered in Canada, by the sentence of a British court, on a trumped up charge of having been engaged in a treasonable conspiracy.