Chapter 148: Mr. Hastings’ Pros and Cons at a High Level

Chapter 148: Mr. Hastings’ Tall and Painful Presentation of Pros and Cons
Inside the office of the Prime Minister’s residence, Arthur looked up at the portrait hanging above the Duke of Wellington’s head, the man in the portrait was eight points similar to the old Duke, the difference between the two only lies in the fact that the man in the portrait wearing a black stand-up crimson uniform with a small stubble is much younger.

The Duke of Wellington noticed the look in Arthur’s eyes and joked, “Do you like art too? Young man? This is the work of Sir Thomas Lawrence, you should have heard of him, right? The director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. However, if you want to find him to paint a portrait, it might be a bit unfortunate, because Sir Lawrence has passed away tragically in January this year, and his paintings are naturally extinct.”

Arthur took off his hat and placed his right hand on his chest and spoke apologetically, “I only know a little about art, but I did want to get a few apprentices from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts to assist with police work earlier. But those things can come later, what is most pressing at the moment is that I must report directly to you on the parade that took place in Hyde Park this morning.”

“Another parade? Heh, they only get so worked up when they’re on parade, I didn’t see them so active during the Napoleonic Wars when the War Office was recruiting. These guys are a real pain in the ass!”

The Duke of Wellington rubbed his face helplessly, “Well, what are they this time? The Fox faction? The Huskisson faction? Or the Canning faction? Or maybe it’s Earl Grey’s newly drawn clique?”

Hearing this, Sir Peel on the side couldn’t help but snicker, “Your Excellency the Duke, all of these factions you speak of sit in Parliament, they don’t parade in the streets.”

The Duke of Wellington leaned against the table with one hand on his side and whined, “Heh! Yes! These guys all sit in Parliament. They can make us soldiers go to the front line to get killed by moving their lips, and if you fight well, they will praise you twice, and if you do not fight well, they will send you to the court-martial. Anyway, one mouth, two skins, how to say is they have reason.”

Sir Peel heard this and couldn’t help but remind Arthur, “Arthur, it’s people who have gripes and worries, just listen to it, but don’t tell the news media.”

When Arthur heard this, he pursed his lips in slight embarrassment, but this action of his still let the sensitive and cautious Duke of Wellington catch it.

Wellington frowned: “Wait, did the newspapers say something bad about me again?”

Without waiting for Arthur to speak, he stood up and walked directly to the bookshelf in his office, casually pulling out a newspaper from it.

Sir Peel, seeing him like this, could only smile and spoke at Arthur, “Forget it, you’d better report directly to me. The only people who are willing to march in the streets are those people, the Luddite laborers, the Diggers’ farmers, or the State Church ministers who are jumping around for the Emancipation Act.”

Arthur shook his head gently, “Sir Peel, I regret to report that this time it was neither, they were a group of Robert Owen supporters. Mr. Owen had a speech in Hyde Park today and the audience was apparently a bit emotional, so before the speech was over they had already turned on the Duke of Wellington and started a spontaneous march.”

“Robert Owen?”

Sir Pierre couldn’t help but frown slightly at the name.

Because even in his opinion as the leader of the Tory Liberals, Robert Owen’s claim was still too new and innovative.

And coincidentally, the Whig side basically saw it the same way.

Sir Peel mused, “I know the Whigs have been uniting various union groups in order to push for power. But Owen …… are they sure?”

Hearing this, Arthur was also roughly certain of Sir Peel’s attitude as he spoke, “There is no indication at this time that the marching workers in Hyde Park are connected to the Whigs. I prefer to believe that this may be a chance event. After all, as you know, for the sake of parliamentary reform, the air in London smells tight right now.”

“Which associations were the marchers from, have they been identified so far?”

Arthur immediately drew out the documents in his bag and handed them over, Sir Peel scanned a few times and immediately got up and said, “So these are the ones. Alright, I understand, it just so happens that the Ministry of the Interior has a few informants over there, I’ll immediately ask someone to go to the Ministry of the Interior and bring over the reports they’ve submitted over this period of time.”

Hearing this, Arthur also followed suit and stood up, “Sir, regarding the informants in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, I wonder if I can ask you a question?”

Sir Peel froze for a moment, but then quickly responded as he smiled and said, “I almost forgot, that temporary organization of yours has been doing things in this area recently, right? But Arthur, don’t worry, having other informants in the Internal Affairs Department doesn’t mean that I have doubts about your ability to do your job. It’s because this Internal Affairs informant thing has existed long before you took the lead in getting the LPS.”

“LPS? “Arthur heard the acronym and it took a while before he reacted that Sir Peel was talking about the LPS.

He smiled and returned, “Actually, I wanted to submit the first working report of the LPS to you a long time ago, which coincidentally contains a part of my feelings and reform proposals for police intelligence work. But due to time constraints, why don’t I dictate it to you directly here, what do you think?”

Seeing him in this calm and collected manner, Sir Peel quite naturally downgraded his mental expectations about the serious nature of the parade in his mind.

He put down the paper in his hand and nodded, “Arthur, you really do always surprise me. I thought you couldn’t do anything fruitful in such a short period of time.”

Arthur smiled and shook his head, “It’s not much of a result, at most it can only be considered some experience. As we all know, France was the first country in the world to come up with the concept of the police, so during this period of time, I focused on looking through the records of the French police’s intelligence operations that I was able to collect so far, and then combined it with the police information that Scotland Yard has accumulated so far, and in the end, it surprisingly allowed me to discover a few problems.”

“Wow?” Sir Pierre asked with considerable interest, “What problems?” “First, don’t put too much trust in temporarily hired informants, they are far less reliable than real undercover agents. Because they have to submit reports every day in exchange for payment and affirmation, if there’s nothing to write about, he’ll make it up, and if there’s a discovery, he’ll exaggerate it and use it to justify the importance of his presence.

Secondly, it is in the government’s interest to have a danger fabricated by the government, and keeping a conspiracy that doesn’t pose much of a threat instead gives the government more strength and power.”

Hearing this rather novel conclusion, Sir Pierre couldn’t help but ask, “And from what matter did you get this information?”

Arthur spoke, “Louis XVIII’s successful restoration in France after the Napoleonic wars, he was very successful in utilizing these things I mentioned.

At that time, the humiliated French army wanted revenge, the Bonapartists wished to welcome back Napoleon, the republicans of 1789 wanted to limit the power of the king, the Jacobins thought of extreme measures, the war-torn common citizens dreamed of a return to the republic of 1792, and the exiles who had returned to their homeland, deprived of their estates and fortunes, attempted to revive the old system.

In this context, the Paris Police Department under Louis XVIII fabricated plots and staged disturbances to polarize public opinion. The ultra-royalists took it as evidence of laxity in the police force, believing that the government was encouraging revolutionary activity and the overthrow of the crown. The liberals, on the other hand, accused the ultra-royalists of using instigators to create crises in order to legitimize their autocratic rule.

Louis XVIII himself, however, got a good end in peace with the two factions keeping each other in check. His successor, Charles X, on the other hand, clearly failed to grasp the essence of this balance.

The guy didn’t capitalize on the intelligence strengths of the Paris Police Department, whose greatest credit in his hands may have been to help him follow an informant’s tip and succeed in catching his own wife’s adulterer in a roundup of insurgents.”

Hearing this, Sir Peel could barely hold back a direct laugh as he raised a hand to his mouth and apologized, “Sorry, Arthur, go on.”

Arthur saw him show a smile and kind of understood that today’s matter was considered to be stable.

Having taken care of Sir Peel, the Duke of Wellington’s side had a stabilizer, and as long as he could speak sense next, then the only thing left to consider was how to get those hot-blooded workers to go home.

He smiled and opened his mouth, “Just now I was talking about France, but the situation in Britain is different from France again, we have a fine tradition of parliamentary system, and the people are willing to pursue their rights under the existing framework.

Therefore, I think General John Byrne’s assessment of similar events that took place in Britain in the last century is very apt: most of the radicals in Britain viewed the revolution as a type of mass movement that may have caused minor bloodshed, but the main purpose was to force the government to make concessions, not to overthrow the political system.

We currently have the most remarkable political system in the world, and there is no strong public desire to overthrow it. It is like this Hyde Park riot, where the workers, though they shouted ‘Down with Wellington, overthrow the Tories’, in the final analysis wanted nothing more than the right to vote.

I have always believed that a large part of the blame for the mass workers’ riots and bloody repression of the nine years 1812-1821 must be laid at the door of the then Home Secretary, Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, and the unsophisticated system of Home Office informers.

I am not sure whether it was due to intelligence errors or subjective motives that His Excellency the Viscount exaggerated even many normal marches into atrocious riots with seditious intent, treasonous acts that inspired fear and would shake the foundations of the Government.

This also resulted in a series of bloody incidents and created public distrust and alienation of the Tory cabinet.

A fairly typical example of this was the Taylor Rebellion of 1816, when miners in the Taylor area of Manchester initially protested only peacefully, demanding higher wages and better working conditions.

However, the Manchester authorities did not deal with this unexpected situation in a timely manner, neither coordinating the negotiations between the mine owners and the workers, nor pacifying the workers. Instead, they waited until the situation had intensified and the workers began to burn factories and smash machinery before they hastily reported the situation to the Ministry of the Interior and the Cabinet, requesting that the army be deployed to suppress the operation.

The Peterloo Incident in 1819 was another example of the incompetence and inefficiency of the Manchester City Council. The Peterloo incident, in turn, led directly to the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, and if it had not been discovered in time, the members of the Cabinet of that time would probably have all perished at the hands of the Spensboro Fraternalist Society.

That is why I believe that the main task of the LPS should be set as ‘early detection, early management’, the training of specialized latent undercover talents, and the early mechanism of hired informers must be reformed and gradually outlawed.

The ultimate goal is to establish a one-way intelligence channel between social unrest and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Of course, although this ‘communication channel’, the labor unions may not be willing is all.”

As Arthur said this, he suddenly felt as if there was someone behind him who seemed to be staring at him.

He violently felt his shoulders being pressed as he twisted his head to look, it was the Duke of Wellington who had raised his eyebrows.

Wellington smiled and asked, ”Young man, are you really not considering electing a councilor to serve the Tories? Perhaps I can consider setting aside a spare MP seat for you in my domain.”

When Arthur heard this, he first froze, then smiled and returned, “Your Excellency the Duke, I don’t have that kind of talent. Besides, I’m a police officer, and I don’t preset political positions for myself according to Scotland Yard’s house rules. As you and Sir Peel would expect, I’m just as insignificant a social commons as any other Scotland Yard policeman.”

(End of chapter)