The question of the multiplicity of the proposed defenses was handled in different fashion in a further War Office memorandum on the tunnel, issued by the Duke of Cambridge, the Army Commander-in-Chief and a cousin of Queen Victoria. "Nothing has impressed me more with the magnitude of the danger which the construction of this proposed tunnel would bring with it," the Duke of Cambridge wrote, "than the amount of precautions and their elaborateness [proposed by] this Scientific Committee.... If this danger was small, as some would have the country believe, why should all these complicated precautions be necessary?" The Duke of Cambridge fully endorsed the position taken by Sir Garnet Wolseley. He protested "most emphatically" against the construction of a Channel tunnel and "would most earnestly beg Her Majesty's Government" to consider with the utmost gravity the perils of surprise attack upon the country arising out of even a modified scheme that would take into account the recommendations of the Alison committee. To his memorandum His Royal Highness appended a copy of a report that he had had his intelligence service put together specially in connection with the tunnel question—a long account purporting to show some hundred and seven instances occurring in the history of the previous two hundred years where hostilities between states had been started without any prior declaration of war, or even any decent notification. If anything seemed likely to have been successfully blocked up and finished off under all this bombardment, it was Sir Edward Watkin's Channel-tunnel scheme. Curiously enough, the Board of Trade, which had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in April and had no intention of issuing a working permit for them now, was not altogether convinced of this. In fact, since April the Board had been developing the suspicion that something peculiar might be going on down under the sea at Shakespeare Cliff. Back in the early part of April, the Board of Trade's order to the Submarine Continental Railway Company to stop its tunneling activities was received, as one might expect, with some anguish. The first formal reaction was a letter from the permanent secretary of the company to T. H. Farrer, the secretary of the Board of Trade, saying that the company would of course acquiesce in the orders of the board, but begging, at the same time, to be allowed to continue the present gallery extending from the main, or Number Two, shaft at Shakespeare Cliff a short distance further, so as to be able to complete the first stage of the works—the junction of the main gallery with the new gallery extending from the ventilating, or Number Three, shaft. This letter was followed on April 9 by another from Sir Edward Watkin addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, urgently repeating the request, this time on the ground of safety. Sir Edward wrote Mr. Chamberlain: