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346 THE NAVAL MUTINIES OF 1797
and march across to the Clyde, in order to effect a
junction with the insurgent army in Ireland. All the
revolutionaries looked with hope to the French fleet in
the harbour of Brest—the fleet that with fair weather and
support from the inhabitants should achieve the liberation
of Ireland, and perhaps might work a change in the
government of Great Britain as well. These plans were
all considered, but none of them was perfected. There
was little co-operation among the different groups of
conspirators. It was particularly difficult to bring about
a joint action with the French and the Dutch, on whom
the success of the whole movement depended. Rumours
of intended invasions were continually issuing and failing,
but no one, even in France, could tell how soon the
fleets would be ready.
After the Nore mutiny, Graham, the magistrate who
had explored the causes of the rising at Spithead, together
with Williams, who had helped him to collect evidence
against the ringleaders at the Nore, sent to the Home
Office a report on the connexion of the political societies
with the mutineers. 1 Their chief conclusion was that
there was no connexion. They admitted that mischievous
and designing persons had mixed with the seamen and
had encouraged them to prolong the Mutinies. But they
denied that these persons were agents of the secret
societies, and did not consider that they had the least
influence with the mutineers. They believed rightly that
there were men serving in the fleet who were capable of
organizing and carrying out the mutiny without any help
from people on shore. But they were certainly mistaken
in their opinion that the conduct of the mutineers had
been from the beginning "of a wild and extravagant
nature, not reducible to anv sort of form or order."
We
1. The report was discovered by Dr. J. Holland Rose, and published
by him in William Pitt and the Great War (pp. 316-317). The original
is in the Home Office records, George III (Domestic), 41. In the same
bundle there is much interesting intelligence of seditious practices on
shore, — particularly a number of letters about a group of people who
seemed to be spying out the south-west of England to prepare for a
French invasion—but unfortunately nothing which throws fresh light
on this obscure side of the Mutinies.