William Pitt the Younger intelligence network of spies and informers to crush the United Irishmen. In April 1797, the Pitt government was badly shaken by the mutiny of the entire fleet at Spithead with the sailors demanding a pay increase to match inflation. The Spithead mutiny occurred at exactly the same moment that the French and their Dutch allies were preparing for an invasion of Great Britain which threw the government into a state of panic. To regain control of the fleet, Pitt agreed to sailors' demands for pay increases and to have George III pardon the mutineers. By contrast, the more political "floating
William Pitt the Younger when spies for the government were lurking everywhere, which captures well the tense, paranoid atmosphere of the 1790s when people were being encouraged to report "radicals" to the authorities. In 1793, Pitt decided to take advantage of a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (modern Haiti) to seize the richest French colony in the world, believing this was would strike a great blow at France while bringing St. Domingue into the British Empire and ensuring the slaves in the British West Indies would not be inspired to likewise revolt. Many of those who owned slave plantations in