The conspiracy was regarded by Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, one of its chief instigators, and also by Walsingham, as the most dangerous of recent years; it included, in its general purpose of destroying the government, a large number of Roman Catholics, and had ramifications all over the country.
During the later years of Napoleon's reign he travelled in England and Germany, but in 1814 he had returned to France and was one of the chief instigators of the action that was taken against the empire.
The instigators of the act were never discovered.
The Armagnac administrators who had been driven out of Paris by the duke of Bedford gathered round the young king, nicknamed the "king of Bourges," but he was weak in body and mind, and was under the domination of Jean Louvet and Tanguy du Chastel, the instigators of the murder of John the Fearless, and other discredited partisans.
But he appears to have been unaware of the extent of the feelings of animosity which he had done much to arouse in the people, probably because he was wholly unconnected with the practices of the party of the Mountain as the instigators of actual violence.
