He was credited with disrupting radical conspiracies in England but, appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, failed in 1803 to anticipate a republican insurrection in Dublin.

This was at a time when the French Revolution was causing great concern to the British political establishment, and powers were given to magistrates under the Aliens Act 1793.

Despite the apparent failure of his spies to uncover anything incriminating amidst the society's meetings and papers or to entrap the members in sedition, treason, or other crimes, Wickham was made "superintendent of aliens" in 1794 by the then Home Secretary, the Duke of Portland.

By 1795, England was openly combating the French revolutionaries who had usurped and beheaded King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette.

Wickham established a spy network in Switzerland, southern Germany and in France and negotiated with French Royalists and others, supporting amongst other initiatives the disastrous rising in la Vendée.

[8] A good deal of this was spent in a complex plot to bring French revolutionary general Charles Pichegru over to the ranks of Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, who maintained an army on the Rhine.

[5] Wickham resigned, returning to England in 1798, where he resumed, after some internal wrangling, his position as Superintendent of Aliens, and was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department.

Again he negotiated inconclusively with Pichegru, but his expensive intrigues were rendered useless by Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Marengo (June 1800); moreover he was accused in London of misuse of public funds, which brought him close to a nervous breakdown.

[11] William Wickham advocated preventive policing: using networks of informers to uncover and frustrate seditious conspiracies before they reached fruition.

Thus, when peace appeared on the horizon in 1801 he proposed winding back of the wartime intelligence apparatus to a level "which a Free People jealous of its Liberties may be supposed fairly and rightly to entertain.

In July 1803, within days of Wickham having reassured the government in London that, in the wake of the Acts of Union, Ireland was at peace, an accidental explosion at a rebel arms depot in Dublin precipitated a disorderly rising led by Robert Emmet.

Before leaving his prison cell for the last time, Emmet wrote to the Chief Secretary giving an account of motives and thanking him for the fair treatment he had received.