Note 203 — Chapter VIII · GENERAL NAPPER TANDY

The writer mentions his election in Tandy's place as proof of his unsleeping vigilance and increased power to betray. Portland, instead of seeing that the man thus ready to take a false oath would not scruple to say anything, was so struck by the importance of the letter that he sent a copy of it to Dublin for the guidance of Lord Castlereagh. Here was a man, as Curran once said of an approver, 'willing to steep the Evangelists in blood.' Turner, in a previous letter (ante, p. 28), glibly writes: 'I attest the business on oath.'